It was hot and sunny yesterday but cloud overcast in the evening made it so I couldn't see the Strawberry Moon. Today it's overcast but warm.
I miss the glorious summers of Winnipeg. They were hot and dry but not Mexico hot where the roads got soft. I walked barefoot everyday in Winnipeg as a kid but it was hot. Real hot. Dry hot. Shorts and t shirts and sunburn then tan, dark tans. The skies were endless. In the evening you could watch the thunder lightening rain storms coming for miles, passing over and leaving, I bicycled everywhere.
Here the summer is a kind of spring fall hiccup with the heavy humidity and lots of in between rain. Some hot days for sure but not the weeks on end of prairie summer. Here it's a rain forest and we gets weeks on end of rain but the sun comes and goes. I'm still wearing a jacket and carrying an umbrella in the boot of the car.
The flowers and green here are beautiful. How the plants love this weather. I was attracted to Burnaby when I first came by the emeral wealth of the plants, so luscious. Even here in downtown , round the corner from Strathcona Church, the plants are alive. None of the brown of summer San Francisco. We really are fortunate. I feel blessed in Canada's summers whereever. Even the close downtown Toronto summers I remember when I lived there were glorious. Mostly thanks to the indoor winters and the nasty bugs of spring in so much of Canada. The contrast makes one appreciate what I suspect LA folk feel entitled too. They don't know what they have. That's why they're complaining so much about paying more for air conditioning and demanding a carbon tax when no one in the south was willing to equalize the horrendous costs of heating we have burdened for hundreds of years.
Now I'm at work for the last day for a week or so. I've arranged for a friend to live in my home. I've taken all my valuables to storage and am taking Gilbert with me for a little sailing. It's been too long. Months without being on the boat. I haven't sailed since last summer. Tom and I had the fast little boat out in the fall but I've not had sails up for what seems like eternity. For years and years now I was out every other weekend, any free time I had, I was in a sailboat, motoring or sailing, living in the movement of the ocean. I miss anchoring so much, especially sleeping at anchor. Maybe I'll catch fish too. I love catching fish and barbecuing them immediately after. Aluminum foil and lots of butter, some garlic too.
I'm trading my Yamaha 450 in for a Honda 500 cc side by side. Gilbert can't jump up on the Yamaha and I worry about him behind me. With the side by side it's like a little car and he can sit beside me. Also Tom who I hunt with didn't like riding on the back of the Yamaha when we were hunting.And Laura likes the side by side better because both her and gilbert can ride together. I like the roll bars and the windshield and roof to keep out rain and wind. I missed the windshield on my Polaris. I'll be able to use this backwoods more of the year in worse conditions . I'm really looking forward to having this for the fall hunt. Bowhunting begins end of August. Mustn't lose the now.
I really have been enjoying motorcycling with the harley on the dry days. Rode over to see Laura who was dog and house sitting on Mayne Island. Nice dinner at Max's. She's loving my old AC now that I have a larger one at my office.
I was getting into a routine. I like the efficiency of it but a part of me has been increasingly wanting to do the "run in the halls of the high school' routine. My self imposed workaholism and dutifulness, meeting all the incredible demands thrown on me these last months has been really difficult. Being an adult. All the while I've been pushing down the desire to hop on a plane and back pack in a foreign country visitting churche and monasteres. I really want to go to Ethiopia and Egypt. The Coptic Church is the last main stream division of the early church I've yet to study. My travels in the last few years have included Bethelehem, Jerusalem, the birthplace and place of death of Jesus. Then Greece and Istanbul and Cappadoeca and Rome and finally Moscow and St. Petersburg and Baku, Azerbaijan, all the major sites of the spread of Catholocism, the early fathers, Constantine, the Orthodox and Orthodox Greek church , the Armenians and the spread east. The Coptic Church represents the spread south of Christianity and I still hope to go.
My friend is doing missionary work in South Sudan despite the threat of war.
I watched BlackHawk Down about the tribal uncivilization of the African nation. This week I learned of the new president of South Africa buying the most expensive luxury plane for himself in keeping with the corruption problem that plagues the African continent and the politics of the United Nations. Then I watched a documentary on Saudi Monarchy with all the beheadings the medieval Wahabi religious police.
In my work I've seen too many torture victims from other countries around the world to be able to really appreciate the complaining of so many Canadians ignorant of how good we have it.
I'm disgusted by the stupidity of Justin Trudeau and his Tyrant Napoleonic behaviour because I have been so appreciative of the freedom and fortune Canadians have had especially these last 10 years.
While all over the world poverty and economic collapse has condemned nation upon nation Albertans and the Conservative Government with the wisdom of Mr. Stephen Harpers economic policy protected Canadians from what is now happening to socialist Venezuela. The liberals are trying to centralize, control and communize our society like that except they want the United Nations to be Big Brother. It's nuts.They haven't an original idea but just keep finding ways to tax and destroy the work of the marjority of Canadians for the benefit of their henchmen, especially those in Quebec.
Meanwhile the Americans are sending two carriers to the Phillipines to protect against the expansionism of China.
I don't know if I'm just more sensitive and my anxiety is pereption or if it is as it seems, rumors of war. The European Union vote is going on. Everywhere there has been division and near saves. The Gotthard Tunnel opening celebration satanic pagan rite with Merkel and the other leaders of Europe seemed utterly bizarre.
Now there's the election with Hillary and Trump. Hillary makes Justin Trudeau look good with her Benghazi history of throwing the Ambassador and miliary under the bus. Don't know how many people in foreign service were killed as a result of her email leaks . Now this Saudi girl friend with the husband who selfies his dick around is as bizarre as Bill and Monica.
I almost miss the day when we didn't know our leaders were perverts and stupid or twisted but believed in lies put out by the PR. Now I keep thinking of Freud, so disillusioned when the british came to rescue him from Hitler, his comment, "Maybe the paranoids are right".
It's hard not to be paranoid.
But anxiety is a measure of one's distance from God. There is always hope and faith.
I've been thinking of death alot too and after life. I really do believe this just carries on. I don't have a sense of finality. Friends do come and go. I miss my parents. I miss the dogs I've known but I feel so deeply I'll see them again. I really look forward to hugging my aunt. I imagine her 'in some tea room' in heaven 'debriefing' me. If anyone knows who killed Kennedy it would be her and she'll tell me. CS Lewis's book on afterlife and Mark Twains story of the sea captain in the aflterlife are my favourites. I really would like a pig farm. But my missing the coutnry makes me think I've been too long in this concrete jungle.
I see such a tough skew of reality. I talked to my criminal lawyer friend Karen about this slice of reality we are so daily exposed to. Insaniety, addicts, perverts, psychotics, psychopaths, pedophils, murderers. All these people I know personally are the scourge of society and yet I talk with them daily, understand the reasons their lives went awry and think there but for the grace of God. But I can't talk with people who live 'sheltered lives'. The mainstream world seems a place of the mental ill and child like, sheltered from the harshness and reality of life. I have known so much death and disease. I don't see people at their best. I don't get to live in denial and spout polly anna nonsense.
A priviledged black friend goes on about Islam, 'religion of peace' and I can only think of the torture victims I've seen from her religious 'paradise' country. The police beat the feet of women with hammers so they wouldn't go out to protest again in Desert spring. They have permanent traumatic athritis and they walk like 100 year old cripples.
I'm worn out. I've seen so much misery. I've heard such horrid tales of woe. I've listened to such tragedy. Daily people tell me of the abuse of man for his fellow man. The woman cries as she tells me of the religous man who shot her child in front of her to teach the village a lesson. Another swaggers with his story of being in charge where he came from but now isn't elevated to what he believes his due , because he killed people.
I'm tired. I feel like showers don't wash me any more. I can't seem to shake off the office. I hear the stories in my sleep waking up and I've been dreaming of being at work. That was what it was like when I was working in the emergency taking care of Myocardial Infarctions and calling orders for a delivery and then doing huge stitches to hold a severed quad together, all arriving at once, the triage, the deluge, the nights and days of never leaving the work and pain. I have this now. And every day I'm fighting now for my patients, to get medications and tests and services and beds. There's layers and layers of administration all paid to tell you no and increase the 'rationing' while all the money goes up to the new Trudeau dynasty. Every week there's less and less and work gets tougher and tougher. And everyone is angry. Every day doctors are begging me to see their patients, telling me no one is willing to see the mentally ill, how there are no resources. I'm always late. I'm working 12 hour days and not getting paid for so much I do while knowing I work for people who wouldn't lift a finger for a dying child if their wasn't some money in it for them.
"It's just a job", she told me. Remembering her saying this haunts me. Or the Auditor who said, "no one doesn't anything without getting paid money" and my thinking how this narrow ignorant tax man actually is a prisoner of his insaniety.
My friend borrowed my truck. He's dropping off my ATV at Honda. Maybe I should charge him to borrow the truck and maybe he should charge me for dropping off the ATV. I'm just not thinking about money enough. I always think I should be like the "clever' ones above who wouldn't do anything for free.
My colleague only sees the rich, selects them, and that way he gets paid for all the services that are now uninsured but which the patients demand and need.
My patietn was discharged home without nursing care, lay in his bed,curled in a ball in pain, no one able to get his medication, no one coming to see him. It's becoming terrible to be alone in Canada.
The Trudeau government is trying to steal the pensions, which we put into the fund matched by the employer, our money, invested on our behalf but now the Liberal government says it's their money.
I'm fearful of the future. I see so many of the elderly and vets being trashed these days. I fear this because I'm aging and don't believe Justin Trudeau cares for the older Canadians. He's taking selfies and dancing and showing off promising marijuana and spending tax payer money like it was her own personal limitless trust fund.
I must have Faith. God is good. I'm blessed. All shall be well. All Shall be Well. Our father.
This too will pass.
Thank you for this day and all the wonders of summer.
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