Monthly Archives: February 2022

Smelly cat

Yesterday morning our cat was covered in sawdust from our renovation, his eyes were streaming and he smelled like chemicals. We were extremely concerned that he poisoned himself, and gave him a bath to get the chemicals off. It wasn’t fun! At one point I had a claw stuck in me and no matter what I tried our struggling cat just stuck the claw in deeper. This is from a cat that never scratches us.

It was only after the bath was done and the vet was called for an appointment did we go outside and smell the same smell outside. Turns out that in his early morning wanderings our cat was sprayed by a skunk. Our retired neighbour was kind enough to take our cat to the vet while we went to work.

When we got home last night we gave him another bath, this time with tomato juice, and some baking soda. He’s going to need another one of these baths tonight. Now that he is curled up under my chin as I write this, I can unmistakably smell skunk. However, when it happened yesterday it was very much a chemical smell that didn’t make me think of this very familiar smell.

The good news, he isn’t poisoned. The bad news, we have a smelly cat.

Eye Spy

I bet everyone has a story about how they almost lost an eye. A projectile of some sort just missed their eye; the corner of a car door; something in their hand that just missed their eye when they fell. There’s always a harrowing close call where someone could have lost an eye but didn’t. It’s amazing that there aren’t more people walking around our planet with an eye patch or glass eye.

There are however, a lot of people that wear glasses to improve the sight they do have. I’m just getting to that point now. When my eyes are tired I struggle to read on my phone and I depend on some 1.25 magnifiers to help me keep things in focus. It’s amazing how we’ve been able to improve the vision of people who would otherwise live in a blurry world.

A little luck, and a little science keeps us seeing the world clearly, with perspective, out of two eyes. And our world is filled with wonderful things to see. Beautiful people, food, sunsets, and all sorts of amazing things from the smallest of creatures to the vastness of distant stars in the night sky.

Sight is a gift, and it’s amazing to think of how lucky we are to see the world in all of its splendour. I don’t think we spend enough time appreciating how lucky we are to see. .

Sunny disposition

Maybe it’s from growing up in Barbados. Maybe it’s just human nature. When I wake up and know I’m going to see clear skies and a sunny day, my whole day ahead brightens.

No matter how much I want to be internally motivated, the outside world affects my mood. And so, while I can’t control the weather, I can control the people I choose to surround myself with… and I choose people who have a sunny disposition and/or people who bring the sunny disposition out of me.

There’s a reason why I call my kids ‘My Sunshines’. There’s a reason I call delightful students in my school Sunshine. It’s my nickname for people who brighten my day.

I hope you surround yourself with sunshine too… no matter what the weather.

Message from the past

When we moved into our house we did a renovation upstairs, converting from 4 bedrooms to 3. The front bedrooms were 9’x9′, 8’x9′, and 10’x9′. The smallest, middle room had a tiny closet and wasn’t really functional as a bedroom, and so we created 2 larger rooms out of the three. We were also able to add more room to the master bedroom, creating a second closet and an alcove for a large chest of drawers.

In the process, we tore up the ugly carpet in the hallway. We cut the carpet at the top of the stairs, and just had the plywood floor between bedrooms. When the rooms were done, we painted upstairs, and while doing so I painted a message to my wife. Her nickname is Bean, shortened from Ann-E-Bean, and so I wrote ‘Hi Bean’ halfway out of the hall closet, knowing that we were going to carpet over it in a few days.

The only thing is, we didn’t put carpet back in for about 5 years. We had a carpet runner down the hallway, and my little message was there long enough for my oldest daughter, who Ann was pregnant with when we moved in, to be able to read on her own. There was always something we were spending our money on that kept us from spending some on this final part of the upstairs renovation.

When we moved in, we knew we couldn’t afford to renovate the kitchen as well as upstairs, but after moving into a house with purple countertops and pink tiles with a pink motif behind the stove, and pink wallpaper… we realized that the house would never feel like ours if we didn’t change this. Then we updated the back yard, replaced the hot water tank, and replaced the furnace.

Instead of replacing the carpet upstairs, we’d buy new living room furniture, bedroom furniture to replace the Ikea pieces we moved in with, replace all of our windows. There was always something we were working on, and since it’s only our family that lived upstairs, we just tolerated the plywood underfloor and runner down the hallway until finally a close friend of ours essentially told us, “Either you buy carpet for upstairs or I’ll do int for you… it’s ridiculous that you’ve been living ‘under construction’ for your kids’ entire lives.”

She was right and we finally put carpet in.

Now, as we are remodelling our main floor, another 17 years later, and we decided to extend the main floor flooring up the stairs and into the upstairs hallway. Last night we came home from work and the hallway carpet was pulled up. For me it was a complete blast from the past to see my little message to my wife painted on the plywood. It brought back some fond memories. It was something that was part of our lives for years, and it was fun to see it uncovered again. It will probably be covered up today, never to be seen by us again, but I did take a photo and it really was a treat to see it again.

I also added this to our first’s bedroom, but it was covered so we didn’t see it often.

Retail sale

It doesn’t matter what store you go into today, there are items on sale. Walk into a mall and it won’t surprise you to see discounts on certain items between 50-70%. The item you came for probably won’t be that cheap, but an item or two you leave with might.

I wonder about the future of retail malls and stores. I’m sure there are specific name brands that will survive, and people will always want to try certain things on before buying them. But how does a small store in a mall survive when the once hard-to-get items they sell are actually easy to get online? And how does a company compete with online prices when they have to pay exorbitant rental/retail space fees?

They do so by drawing you in with a hard-to-resist sale. Buy one, get one free. 75% off. Clearance sale, everything must go. Hardly anything goes for regular retail cost anymore. Everyone expects a deal. Only a few places, like the Apple store, don’t play by these rules. Everywhere else is about the sale. We have entered the era of the discount, and most places won’t survive unless they offer you a deal you can’t refuse.

Retail now means sale. And stores need to provide you with amazing deals that leave you happy to buy, and happy to return for more deals in the future. And if they don’t do this, they won’t be around in a few years. The choices are to specialize or to discount… the niche or the sale.

The Great One

I went to the game for a single purpose… to prove to myself that Wayne Gretzky was the most overrated player. I left thinking he was a hockey god.

I lived in Toronto and was a fan of the Maple Leafs. I was a diehard fan, believing that one day I’d see them win the Stanley Cup, despite the fact that they haven’t won one since my birth year, 1967. But every hear I expected them to win. They didn’t.

As a huge Maple Leaf fan back then, I wasn’t a fan of Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers. And in fact, I was sure that the hype around Gretzky was just that, hype. He was surrounded by a great team and they helped him shine. I was sure of this, until I saw him play. I paid the most I’d ever paid for hockey tickets and sat 2 rows behind the Leaf bench. After years of sitting in the nosebleed level ‘Grey’ seats, I felt I was right in on the action.

If I remember the game correctly, the Oilers beat the Leafs 9-6, and Gretzky got 6 points. But the reality is that he should have gotten 12. He was amazing. Every time he was on the ice it felt like something exciting was going to happen. Here are three examples I can remember:

1. Behind the Leaf net: Before Gretzky, behind the net was where defenders took the puck, no office ever chose to intentionally take the puck back there, but Gretzky did. And when he did he controlled both teams. He froze the defence, unsure of where he was going or where he was passing next. Watching him control the game from behind the net was a sight to see.

2. The boards: Gretzky wasn’t a big guy compared to many other players, but when he went against the boards, he owned the puck. I can remember two specific times he went into the boards with other players fighting for the puck, then the puck would come flying out and land on an Oiler teammate’s stick. I was close enough to see the surprise on their faces. I watched as they shot on half empty nets, the goalie equally as shocked to see the puck shoot across to the other side of the ice. When this happened a second time I realized, if there was another Gretzky on the team, that would have been a goal… he wasn’t rising to the level of play of his team, he fully surpassed them.

3. Defence: He disrupted so many plays on defence. When the puck was dumped into the blue line he got to the puck on the boards first, knowing where to be, and then there would be a pass and the play was going the other way. In one amazing move a favourite defender of mine, Leaf’s number 9, Stuart Gavin, was taking the puck out of the Leaf’s zone and he skated towards the Leaf’s blue line. I was watching Gretzky on the other side of the ice, also near the blue line. For no apparent reason he skated in a circle, spinning tightly. Then he sped in behind Stuart, lifted his stick, and went in for a breakaway goal. I felt close enough to say, ‘look out’ but I was too surprised to do so.

It took me a while to realize what Gretzky’s little spin did. First of all, if he skated directly to Stuart without the spin, he would have been in Stuart’s line of sight and would not have surprised him from behind. Secondly, if he had paused rather than spun, he would not have had the momentum to catch him. An absolutely brilliant little move on the opposite side of the blue line away from the play, that led to a breakaway goal.

I went into the game thinking I was there to debunk an overrated player and I left with the conviction that he truly was The Great One, and I felt honoured to have watched him play live.

Walking in one vs two worlds

I have shared that I’ve been blind to my own privilege. In the post I described how, “Despite my 1/2 Chinese father and my predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish roots, I have a look that Italians mistake for Greek, and Greeks mistake for Italian. I am neither. I’m used to not fitting into any box. In fact, whenever I have to fill out a survey that asked my race, I never check ‘white’. I always choose ‘Other’.“

But I am privileged. I pass as a white person even if I don’t identify as one. I am an immigrant, but that’s not something anyone assumes of me… meanwhile there are many second, third, fourth generation Canadians that might be thought of or assumed to be immigrants because of their appearance. I don’t have to live in 2 worlds. I don’t have to think about how others will perceive me. I don’t have to think about biases that people will judge me on based on my appearance.

This is why privileged people don’t notice their own privilege. When you live in just one world, you don’t know that you are missing another world that others have to deal with. The absence of something you’ve never had to deal with is not something that you know you are missing.

If you have never been hungry because you can’t afford food, you don’t really understand hunger. If your whole life you’ve seen a full spectrum of colours, you don’t know what it’s like to be colourblind. If you don’t have a learning disability, it’s hard to understand why someone with one can’t learn the same way as you.

Now flip it around, if you have gone really hungry, actually starving, and you’ve also seen people not ever face this, you understand there are two worlds. If you are colourblind and you are around people identifying things by colours you can’t see, you know that you are missing out, and likely always will. If you have a learning disability you get to watch others not struggle learning a relatively simple concept, while you do.

When you live in two worlds and you are disadvantaged in some way, it’s easy to see the privilege of not having to live in both worlds. When you live in just one, it’s harder to see the absence of the second world as being privileged. But it is.

Good kid, bad choices

Sometimes good kids make bad choices. They do things they shouldn’t, and when they are caught they have to face some consequences. But when they do, it’s a lot easier to work with them, to come to an agreement about how behaviours need to change, when dealing with a good kid. It’s easier to work on what wrongs have to be righted, when you know they are good kids. It’s not hard to deal with good kids when they make bad choices, the bad choices don’t make them a bad kid.

The thing is… all kids are good kids. When you start with the premise that every kid is inherently good, then the important thing becomes dealing with the issue. The focus becomes restitution and not punishment. The discipline becomes logical consequences. The issues and circumstances that led the good kid to make bad choices becomes the thing being dealt with.

Making things right might include the student doing something they don’t want to do. It might include challenging consequences, this isn’t about giving a good kid a break. It’s about seeing the good in someone and asking ‘how can I help this kid see that they are good and help them realize they made a bad choice?’ It’s about making the situation better, then laying the groundwork for the student to make better choices the next time.

Good kid, bad choices. If that’s where the conversation begins, if that’s what you see, then the work done to make things better feels authentic, and is more likely to foster better behaviour in the future… Because you expect good things from good kids, and good kids learn to do good things when they believe they are good.

6 weeks later

I said this in a post, ‘If or When?‘ six weeks and 2 days ago, with respect to Omicron and coronavirus:

I’m afraid my crystal ball gazing conjures no clear images of what’s to come in the short term. What’s my best guess? Businesses and maybe even schools closing from staffing shortages; Tougher restrictions in public (indoor) spaces; and a lot of people self-or-family isolating.

What’s my hope? Less and less hospitalization with more and more mild cases that look like a ‘regular’ flu.

We didn’t have any full school closures in our district but 2 weeks after this post we had a 3-day period where many schools were short staffed and support teachers, and vice principals, were reallocated to help fill the needs. Tighter restrictions didn’t happen. And many people did get mild versions of Omicron although so few of them were tested, because of shortages of tests and long lineups, that I think the number of cases reported was probably underreported by a factor greater than 10.

Now, there are no issues with staffing, and there is an abundance of rapid tests available, and I think things are much better. The only big news here in Canada is a protest against mandates and vaccines that is being held in Ottawa, with smaller versions showing up in other major cities. I’m not going to link to any of the reports because I don’t believe they deserve the attention.

I find it sad how many people are misguided by these protests, and think they are somehow fighting for freedom by blockading people and making others less free? It’s sad how messages of hate and ignorance are part of this convoy. It’s ironic that when we are on the brink of restrictions being lifted, thanks to a vast majority of Canadians doing their part in slowing the pandemic by following the mandates and getting vaccinated, these unvaccinated, anti-mask protesters feel like they are somehow doing something to better the world they live in.

6 weeks after my original post I still haven’t had covid, but I’d say this has been as much about luck as any other reason. Many people around me have been equally as cautious as me and have contracted it. All these people have had versions that are mild, or at least not bad enough to go to the hospital. And I still wonder if for me it’s a question of if or when? But in this 6 weeks I’ve seen things getting much better. I wonder if mask restrictions will continue in schools after March Break? I wonder if there will be crowd restrictions at theatres and sports events, or if restaurants will still require vaccine passports?

Unless another contagious and more deadly strain start spreading, I think we might see a lot less restrictions in the coming months… But it won’t be because of this ‘freedom rally’ that’s happening. On the contrary, it will literally be despite them and their anti-community stance, not doing their part to help reduce the concerns and spread of coronavirus.

Sometimes it will suck

I’m going to have to rush my morning routine because I’ve been writing ideas for my blog and each one of them will require more time than I have this morning to write them. So, I give them a title and shove them into my drafts for another day when I will be up earlier. And then I stared at the blank page, stuck.

On days like this I think of Seth Godin, who has written over 7,000 posts in his daily blog. Something that he wrote sticks with me… no matter how much you write, 50% of your work will be the worst 50%. You can’t escape this fact. So don’t worry about what you write, just write… and so today I’ll accept this post as the bottom half, but I am metaphorically putting pen to paper and I’ll hit ‘Publish’ soon. And maybe tomorrow I’ll put something in the top 50%… or at least the top 50% for now… because after another few thousand posts, who knows where it will rank?

Letting go of the worry of how good my writing is allows me to feel freer, and more open to sharing ideas. There is a time and place to think of just the right words, crafting an idea or even a sentence just the right way. And there are times to start writing and letting the words flow with little thought of how good the writing is. Sometimes suck is far better than stuck.