Turn on the Light, It’s Good for You

Since I moved to Victoria, I have become convinced that more than anything, Christmas is about the lights.  Take away the religious observances, take away the gift giving, strip away the artifice, and what remains is light.

Light plays such a central role at this time of year, when there are precious few hours of it.  And the impact of light is obvious when you live in a northern place with no snow – a place like Victoria.  I remember when I first moved here, a friend advised me that November was a more depressing month than December, when the hours of light were even more reduced.  The reason?  Everyone has their Christmas lights on in December and it raises your spirits.

It turned out she was right – November seemed much more depressing than December.  But both months seemed pretty murky – much more than when I lived on the prairies where there is lots of sky to see, and quite often there is snow on the ground to increase the ambient light level.  In Victoria, the grey sky closed in, the rain came down and it just seemed dark all the time.

My response to this was predictable.  I was mildly depressed.  It was hard to get up in the morning, and I just couldn’t find a bright spot in my day.  The months of November and December seemed to stretch on forever.

That first Christmas I drove into the interior, and found my mood lifted while I was there.  It just seemed brighter even though the tight dark valleys of the West Kootenay should have been much darker.   But in the long twilight that started around 4:00 pm and seemed to last forever, the snow seemed to glow.

There are dozens of cultures which celebrate the winter solstice – it is the time which reminds us the darkest hour is just before dawn. To primitive people the light of the fire brought warmth and life.  To the ancients light was also a symbol of hope, that this wouldn’t last forever, that spring would come.  Victoria has a similar climate to Britain where so many of our cultural roots reside and it’s this climate that brings the symbolism home.  You can just imagine how keeping the fire burning kept the hope of warmth and light alive.

So decorate the house, put on a big show and waste a bit of electricity.   It’s good for you – better than getting gifts, and maybe even better than the food and family.  In the end, it’s all about the lights.  It’s all about hope.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Miserable Labour

When I was a kid we had ditches and culverts in our neighbourhood.  Culverts always seem to clog with ice and sticks and rocks so I would spend hours in March up to the tops of my boots (and sometimes higher) clearing the culvert under our driveway.  I didn’t have to do this, I did it out of interest.  In fact my mother would always get after me about my wet clothes, and my dad would warn me sternly about how quickly I could get sucked into that 18 inch culvert.  But no matter how much they talked, no matter how cold and wet I would get I would break up the chunks of ice, watch the whirlpools develop as the water started to move and get a rush from watching the water swirl out the other side of the culvert.

Today, I was on the flat roof of our garage, draining a big pool of water.  I got out the step ladder, the broom, and the rake.  Then I got up on the roof and took out the leaf screen that clogged the northeast  drain – a whirlpool of suction began instantly and the pool slowly began to go down.  Then I stuffed the handle of a broom down the southeast drain – breaking up a clog that started a smaller whirlpool.  The southeast drain never works properly because the middle of the roof is lower than the east side where the drains are located.  The northeast drain is a bit closer to the elevation of the middle, but the southeast one is often high and dry.  Over the years the standing water has created soft spots on the roof – my landlord will have to put a new roof on here soon.

In the meantime I did my best to drain as much water as I could.  Once I got the drains cleared I began to carefully rake up the leaves and moss which had accumulated.  But I had to be careful because the raking shifts the gravel that protects the roof membrane and keeps the sheeting from going soft.  But if you leave the moss and leaves up there, the roof just never seems to dry out.

As I lightly raked up piles of leaves and moss I occasionally went back and cleared the drains of more leaves.  Once the pool was reduced to smaller puddles, I started sweeping water towards the drains using the broom.  The sweeping brought little waves of water toward the drains – it made me think of tsunamis and wave theory – frequency vs amplitude – what would that wavelength be?

I had gone through the same routine earlier this week when I cleared the roof as the sunset broke through the clouds and a southwest wind reminded me that a low front had just passed through.  But it wasn’t nearly as nice this morning.  It was raining a lot with heavy, cold drops.  I was soaked in minutes and the drain clearing and sweeping seemed a little more urgent, much less satisfying.

As I labored I thought about my brother Bill.  He and his wife decided more than 30 years ago to build a house with their own labour, plant their own gardens, and use hard work to get what they couldn’t pay for.  In other words my brother Bill is an expert on miserable labour.  He says whenever he’s working in the garden he remembers that as a kid he used to love playing in the dirt – and now as an adult, here he is – playing in the dirt.

I came inside and took off my boots and wet clothes.  I got in the shower and turned it on hot.  The cold and the dirt washed off and down the drain, forming a whirlpool on the way down.

The Thin Veil of Civilization?

Ultimately this is a good news story; we’re going to get a new furnace.  The current furnace in this house was installed 1961, the year the house was built.  It’s inefficient, and it’s loud, and it burns heating oil, not natural gas.

Last summer my landlord, who grew up in this house, decided to get a new natural gas fired furnace.  I am happy about this because it costs $1,000 to fill up our oil tank.  That puts a real pinch on the household finances when you have to fill two or three times a year.  Much better to pay for natural gas usage every month – it’s just a bit more manageable.  And of course the efficiency of a new natural gas furnace will save us a few dollars every year.

So a big shoutout to Stu our landlord.  He’s been good to us.

But here’s where it gets funky.  There is no natural gas service to the house.  So Stu contacted Terasen Gas last summer, and they told him they could install a new line – in October.  After that the furnace company comes in to take out the old furnace and put in a new one – a process that will take an estimated four days.

Meanwhile, the weather has been so cool and we have had the old oil furnace coming on so regularly lately that the tank is almost empty.  So I called a heating oil company this week to see if I could get $100 worth of heating oil to tide us over.  It turns out, the minimum they will deliver is $450.

Oh.

So now we are going to Plan B.  I put the shrink wrap plastic on our single pane picture windows a month early, collected our electric heaters and bought an oil filled space heater to see us through the next month.  The oil tank reads less than empty and we are trying to ration our use to twice a day – once in the morning and once in the evening.

We’ll see how we do without the thin veil of central heating this month.

I Walk

There’s a little more to it than the title suggests.  First, I power walk – meaning I walk fast enough that I would have trouble carrying on a conversation. Second I do it in the morning – the early morning.  Like at about 5:45.  And I do it four to five days a week.

It’s good for me on many levels – it keeps my heart working and my weight down, it keeps me in touch with the outside and it gives me a daily opportunity to challenge myself.  It’s the challenge that I’m thinking about this morning.

It’s a common thing at the beginning of my walk to get that feeling that I have a long way to go and this is going to be hard.  That’s the time when I have to remind myself to refocus.  Yes, if I look down the road it seems like a long way to go.  But if I focus on what I’m doing right now, it seems much more manageable;  how’s my stride, point my toes, focus on my technique.  Once I get my mind on that stuff, the walk goes by in no time.

I think about this a lot at this time of year.   Many teachers I know fall into a bit of a depression in August and September because they are focused on getting through the next school year.  And when that happens to me I try to go through a re-focusing routine.  What am I doing today?  How can I set up the term a bit better?  How am I going to present that class tomorrow?

Once I start with those immediate details, it seems the term goes better, and in the end it helps me at the end of the term to look back and say “where did that time go?”