POS here is for point of sale, not another, ruder expansion.
I don’t know why the POS device — that thing you tap your credit card on — was not in its holder, but I’m glad it wasn’t.
Buddy looks a bit surprised — almost alarmed — to see me, but I’m trying not to take it personally. I guess I might look surprised, too, if I could suddenly see more than a fraction of a millimetre in front of me.
I know you’ll be surprised to discover this, but I am not a back-country skier, snowboarder, snowshoe-er, or snowmobile-er. Indeed, I do not do any of these things even in the front country, so I’m not sure what caused me to click on the link, but click I did. Maybe it was the promise of a three-minute read.
How to Survive an Avalanche
Boy, some folks can pack a lot into three minutes. Here are the key points, lightly paraphrased/editorialized/digressed-upon:
ad•vent (noun)
the arrival of a notable person, thing, or event
Similar: arrival, appearance, emergence
the first season of the Christian church year, leading up to Christmas and including the four preceding Sundays: Advent
Today is the first day of Advent 2022. Two unrelated things reminded me: the arrival on my doorstep this week of a friend with a Christmas cactus (Already in bloom! Doesn’t it know it’s not Christmas yet?), and the arrival in my inbox this morning of the first of my daily Advent emails from the G.K. Chesterton Society.
Even from an early age I think I understood Lent as being some sort of preparation for Easter. By contrast, I don’t remember Advent being presented/explained/promoted as a season of preparation for Christmas. Christmas just came. Didn’t it?
Maybe I missed that lesson, because for sure we followed the church liturgical calendar. On the first Sunday of Advent we started singing Christmas hymns (In November! Weird!), and the church sanctuary added some Christmas ornamentation. (Not too much!) Unlike the soaring and elaborate Roman Catholic cathedrals of Europe, our United Church buildings on the Prairies were more in the visually austere Lutheran tradition, minus the genius architecture.
From the next room, I hear the kettle click off: quietly, unobtrusively, even modestly, unlike the stovetop models that shriek bloody murder when they’re ready. As my hearing gradually morphs into a state of less than full reliability, I’ve considered changing things up for the impossible-to-miss version, but so far so good.
Heading back to the kitchen to make my morning tea — not a mere beverage but rather the very stuff of consciousness — I wonder whether I already put the teabags in the pot. On one or two occasions recently I have found clear hot water in my teapot after the required three minutes of steeping. Sigh. This is the latest sign that my mental acuity, like the auditory, is also morphing into a state of less-than-full reliability.
Or is it?
To every thing, swish, swish, swish
There is a season, clang, clang, clang
And a time to every purpose under Heaven.
As even the memory of the sweet swish of spring street-sweepers fades, the all-too-present clang of a truck-mounted blade hitting the driveway filters through the windows, closed and double-glazed against the cold as they are. Oh, hurray, it’s winter. Again.
A recession is coming.
We just don’t know when,
or how bad it will be,
or how long it will last.
But we know it’s coming.
Ah. Well, it’s good to understand the limits of his (and pretty much everyone’s) ability to predict the economy (much less the markets), and I value the honesty. (Not that our financial advisor isn’t usually honest, it’s more a shot at the industry.) (Or maybe a shot at human nature: In our respective spheres of expertise, don’t we all hope to be more certain and definite than we can legitimately be in the face of life’s uncertainties?)
Sometime the universe sends stuff in bunches, linking to current bemusements. For instance, this week I received a follow-up on last week’s question of how to cook eggs. This embroidery artiste ADDS CHIVES. Don’t tell Paul.
Lithuanian artist Severija Incirauskaite-Kriauneviciene, known for her embroidery on various, often metal, objects #WomensArt pic.twitter.com/wVk2xo65SG
— #WOMENSART (@womensart1) November 6, 2022
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.
– Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
I’m always a step behind. I was well into middle age before I learned of the fashion diktat against combining black and navy, and only because a niece informed me that this hitherto-unknown-to-me order had been rescinded by the Colour/Color Combination Commission. I was a senior before I learned that our bodies contain ten times more bacteria cells than human cells, only to have to relearn this rule of thumb as the currently accepted ratio of roughly one:one, with the rough edge going to the bacteria.
It’s enough to make me stop picking up new things. I mean, what’s the point? I’ll just have to put them down again.
As the last bits of local colour do their thing before the white stuff starts and the calendar year ends, this mystery shrub takes up the slack from the Pinky-Winky hydrangea, which gave us its all.
It’s another reminder to #justbreathe. All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
Posted: 2025 May 24
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
This space is available for other submissions.
