I was going to write a thoughtful piece on merging behaviour under different traffic conditions–a subject I’ve had ample exposure to over the last few weeks–and I still might, sometime. This week, though, what life allowed was the discovery of two more accidental faces in hospital bathrooms:
A few days ago, the magnificent magnolia tree a few blocks from the hospital was already faded and sparse. Today’s cloudbursts will have stripped off any remaining flowers.
The squirrel-beleaguered magnolia in my backyard bloomed almost without me noticing it this year, but I did catch its final moments yesterday. They were magnificent, too.
In my third week of parking in an under-repair and, hence, under-resourced parking system, I know what’s what. As Mary Tyler Moore said, “I’ve been around. Well, maybe not around, but I’ve been nearby.”
If I arrive during daytime visiting hours at the hospital, I wait for at least 30 minutes as cars enter the parkade on a one-out, one-in basis. Waiting in a line of indefinite duration is something I lack the bandwidth for at the moment. OK, then – early it is. But how early?
About four blocks west of the Ottawa Heart Institute, just across an intersection with no traffic controls that pedestrians can use, is an exceedingly old magnolia tree that fills the small front yard of its house. Thirty feet tall? Possibly. Branches down to the ground? Definitely.
I’ve been keeping an eye on it for about 10 days. Here’s how it’s changed in that time, looking left to right.
There comes a time in a hospital stay when the patient is invited to choose their food for the next day. If you come into the hospital conscious, you’re good to go immediately. If you come into the hospital unconscious, you must first become conscious and then show that you can swallow without choking or aspirating solids/liquids into your lungs.
After a few days in the Intensive Care Unit, the Big Guy met these criteria and I was helping to fill in a meal form. Right away there was trouble. For breakfast, did he want apple juice or peaches no ice? I can’t remember the last time I served canned peaches so maybe I’m out of touch, but it seemed like an odd thing to specify. Yeah, we have peaches, but you can’t have them with ice. Why did they feel the need to temper expectations in that way?
And since they did seem to feel this need, why stop there? Why wasn’t it crackers-no-ice? Meatloaf-no-ice? Chocolate-chip-cookie-no-ice?
This sucks.
As the Big Guy wanders in the mental fog that attends the aftermath of cardiac arrest–If you’re lucky!–this is his phrase-of-the-day.
This sucks.
He can’t articulate the pain, confusion, and anxiety that I imagine he feels, but this phrase captures it nicely, I think.
This sucks.
From his perspective it’s hard to argue the point and yet, for those of us who have not been sedated for two days, *this* does not suck. The day before yesterday sucked. Yesterday sucked. *Today* is a damned good day because the Big Guy is awake and alert.
As I wander the Ottawa Heart Institute’s parking lot, halls, and adjacent neighbourhood, I find more signs that today is a good day. The truth is, the signs were there before I was of any mind to see them. Waiting for me to find my perspective, maybe.
For the next few weeks, I expect to be busy with this latest turn of the road, and not so busy with this blog. If I’m not here, I’ll be somewhere else. Wherever I am, I hope I can remember that even a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day doesn’t totally suck. And even if it does, maybe tomorrow won’t.
If only there were a network of computers
hosting all of mankind’s knowledge.
Oh, wait, there is such a network, now. We even have access to it with convenient handheld devices, an innovation that has permanently ruined the sport of bar bets.
If only those computers didn’t also host
so much nonsense.
Wait, what? You mean that you can’t count on the accuracy of what you find online? Say it isn’t so.
At about the 15-minute mark, the sensible thing would have been to go home and try again later, but by then perverse curiosity was calling the shots.
Can this
get any stupider?
In this case, *this* was us trying to cast a vote in the first hour of the first day of the Advance Poll in our local community centre. You know, before they got busy. As it turned out, a few others in our neighbourhood had the same idea: There were unexpectedly high numbers of Advance voters, especially for one polling station among the 5 or 6 that our centre was serving. Our polling station, as it turned out.
Was *this* a finely tuned system being overwhelmed by too many pesky voters? Not so much. Let’s look at the things that went wrong.
If you were at all inclined to think about it, you might think that highway rest stops would have long since settled on the optimal design for metal doors on toilet stalls, considering durability, cost, ease of installation, and ease of maintenance. Likewise and even more so for the hinges on metal bathroom doors, yeah? Who wants to prematurely/frequently replace hinges with moving parts, subject as they are to being mishandled by people who don’t directly pay for their replacement? Moreover, especially in the context of a public toilet, who wants to clean any extraneous edges? The benefits of standardization would seem to be high, and yet it has not happened.
Posted: 2025 May 17
Thanks to John Whitman for this slightly dismayed face from downtown Ottawa.
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