My mental health has been taking a beating lately.

Maybe it’s the simple act of turning 55 this week. Wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility, lots of people do feel crappy about another trip around the sun. The slow feeling that as I turn 55, I’m one step closer to a dirt nap, and as I become increasingly aware of the limits of my body, I’m not entirely sure I want to fight to the end. MAID, perhaps. Something more accidental looking before that. It weighs on me more this year as I figure maybe another 25 years if I’m lucky.

Maybe it’s the realization that instead of being able to retire in about 2 years, it’ll be closer to 4. I’m already tired. Some stupid ass crap keeps happening at work, and it bothers me more than it used to. Things that would roll off me before are making me downright irate. I’ve even started managing things different so that it won’t get to me. Let it go, Disney style, perhaps. I haven’t had to do that in a long while but if I could drop my papers tomorrow, I would. I don’t even mind being back in the office, it’s just a loss of control perhaps or a reduction in my span of control. What seemed like a decent job with good support from above and a solid foundation for the future seems reduced to toeing the line, ideas be damned from anyone else. Not overly a great environment, but you do the job you have, not necessarily the one you thought you had.

Maybe it’s an increasing feeling of isolation and aloneness. I’ve always been somewhat of a loner, I like doing a lot of things that are not really “group activities”. Writing. Reviewing. Reading. But after the pandemic, and what I tend to think of as a Facebook divorce for Andrea and I, I don’t have many friends left on Facebook, I mostly just follow groups now, or a few memes shared by friends. There’s no real connection there for me anymore, although perhaps there never was, perhaps it was just the illusion of connection seeing some stuff people I knew posted as opposed to real friendships. Andrea asked me if I wanted to have anyone come with us for dinner for my birthday and it’s a bit embarrassing to admit there really isn’t anyone. Which isn’t exactly fair, there ARE people I COULD invite, some of which would probably come. But it’s also a risk management technique to NOT invite people. If I do something small, it looks like my choice, even enough to fool myself perhaps. On the other hand, if I invite a bunch of people, and nobody shows? My mental health would take a hit that I can’t really afford right now.

I often feel that in times of crisis or stress, the only way out is through. Just keep pushing through. Except I’m not sure I’m strong enough to keep pushing through right now. One foot in front of the other is about all I can manage. And it isn’t even necessarily huge things the universe is smacking me with. Some of it is small.

We just spent tens of thousands of dollars to redo three bathrooms — one upstairs for an ensuite that is mostly for Andrea; one that is for Jacob (my old main bathroom); and a basement one with a shower that is now functional enough to use. Truth? I don’t really like any of them. The ensuite looks nice, really they all do, but one thing that I hate was the placement of the toilet next to the wall and a vent, and we didn’t end up fixing that because it was too much work. Most of the stuff in the bathroom area is taken up with Andrea’s stuff, so not a great solution for me for things like water for my BIPAP machine. I’ll figure out some option over time I guess, but not great. J’s bathroom looks great, but the water pressure for the shower is almost non-existent. It used to be good with the old showerhead, but I’m the only one who likes that one, and Jacob deserves his own bathroom to look after his lens stuff and everything. So I’m using the basement. Toilet is good, sink is okay, shower is smaller than it should be for a person of my size (which is nicer than saying I’m just too fat for a small shower), but I also can’t really get the shower head angled the way I want it to consistently. I’ll eventually fix it with something from a 3D printer, but it’s annoying. We spent all that money and I feel like I have less “functionality” than I started with. It’s telling that we did 3 bathroom renos consecutively, the people were here for weeks, and I never really blogged about any of it.

Tonight, we had to call 911 for a fire in our kitchen. Yeah, sure, I buried the lede, as they say. It wasn’t super serious. We had housecleaners in today, and because we didn’t quite have all the dishes and extra stuff clean to go back in cupboards, we temporarily stored some stuff in the oven. Lots of people do it, we do it often too. Except of course that practice doesn’t work well if you forget and later ask Jacob to turn the oven on to preheat only to find out later that a plastic cutting board eventually catches fire. I used the fire extinguisher to put it out, Andrea called 911, we sat outside waiting for fire department who arrived within a few minutes. They checked, yes indeed all out, yes indeed we were right to call, etc., etc., etc.. We rolled with it, joked a bit, nothing too precious lost, no damage other than to the oven we want to replace, a relatively minimalist intrusion of the malevolent universe into our life.

Except the whole bottom floor of our house now has a thin layer of white crap all over it. Which isn’t a big deal until you go to make a lunch, clean the counter for a second time, and it is STILL not clean. I gave up. I’ll buy Jacob a lunch for tomorrow. We have some electrical inspectors coming for something else tomorrow (related to the reno work), and house cleaners who will come clean EVERYTHING tomorrow afternoon to get rid of the white coating. But it is EVERYWHERE and it’s going to be showing up / annoying us for a long time.

Sure, I can tick the box about how minor it was or how lucky we were, blah blah blah. But I felt that only right afterwards. Now I’m more like, “Really? I can’t even make a lunch right now?”. Crapola on steroids.

And it doesn’t feel like I’m pushing through. It feels at best like I’m crawling out or squirming out from under crap that is piling up a little more rapidly than I would normally like. If age brings wisdom, I really hope it arrives soon, I could use some insight about now.

In my previous post, I noted that “my” spring, what I call PolySpring, takes place on April 24th. You know, dun dun dun…today!

It’s the day by which I feel all the snow is guaranteed to be gone from my front-yard, and I’m ready for real spring. Normally, I would have already used the BBQ quite a few times…so far this year? Thrice. Pretty basic stuff so far.

But I wouldn’t say I’m feeling like Spring. My body hates me right now, really feeling bloated and slow and tired.

We are also doing a home reno right now, three bathrooms (which started as two bathrooms and grew), so things are a bit chaotic. Electricians are coming today so a bit of cleanup to get things ready for them.

And I have about 8 active files at work, with three taking nose dives on Friday. They just didn’t go as planned, after I was feeling things were working pretty well with my team. There’s a national strike but it doesn’t really affect my team.

I have some stuff to do in the basement that I thought I would get done this weekend, and I don’t feel like I accomplished hardly ANYTHING. I moved a desk. Woohoo! Sigh.

So I am sooo not feeling great about anything right now. I’m not even feeling like faking it, you know? I have to, for work, for the team, but it’ll be a struggle this week. Maybe I can fake trying to fake it?

It’s a long way to summer vacation.

Ottawa was part of a big storm that swept through the area yesterday. Lots of property damage and five people died. One was killed in a trailer when a tree fell on it, two more were killed while out walking and got hit by trees, and then there were two that people are claiming were obvious morons and hence worthy of a Darwin Award. I’m not so sure I would cast a vote for them for such an award.

The logic seems almost unassailable at first blush. The risk of thunderstorms was forecast, and then in late afternoon, an emergency alert went out to all phones. Severe storm watch with risks of funnel clouds. So if you were out in it and died doing something stupid to do in a storm, you must have been a moron.

The two supposed nominees were on a golf course (man) and on the river in a boat (woman).

I’m far from being a strong knowledgeable boater, but I spent the first 20 years of my life around lakes and boats. And I didn’t have that same reaction to the boater death at all. And not just because I don’t like the idea of mocking someone who died and suggesting they deserved it.

Rapid onset

I was out shopping, saw the alert, but I never once thought, “Oh, I should seek shelter immediately”. I was in my car, which conveys a false sense of security to many of us. Literally, thousands of other people were out in their cars and got the same warnings. Most would do what I did. Assume that there will be a graduated ramp-up, some darker clouds, some early rain, distant thunder and lightning.

I’m 54 years old, I’ve lived through a few bad storms in my life, many of them in far less urban surroundings and shelter. But I confess I have never seen a storm hit so hard or so fast in my life.

I was at Greenbank plaza, with no real signs of rain or storm other than some darker skies off to the NW. I went into a store, picked up my shopping in about 10 minutes, came out, got in the car, and there was still nothing to say the storm was about to start. I moved my car about 200m to park beside a grocery store to wait for Andrea and Jacob to come out. And then everything changed.

It went from “yeah, it looks like it will rain before we get home” to “holy crap, I feel like I am in a car wash that is out of control” in less than 90 seconds. It was super intense and lasted about 2 minutes.

I’ve never experienced anything like it, not at the lake, not at the house, not in other countries, nada.

Boater safety

When I heard about the boater, my thought was the complete opposite of most people. If it had been a normal storm, sure, I probably would have thought, “What kind of idiot stays on the water during a THUNDERSTORM?”.

But, as I said, I saw how fast it hit. From nothing to chaos with no ramp-up. I bet a lot of experienced boaters got the crap scared out of them too.

As I mentioned, I grew up around water, with lots of time with small boats. At the lake, we would normally have a good 30-45 minute warning that a storm was coming just from reading the water or the white line on opposite shores. We’d wander around tents or trailers shutting windows, moving loose stuff inside, etc. Once in a while, we would have to rush to shut windows, but usually just because we procrastinated, not because we didn’t see it coming. If you were on the lake, and lots of people would be as fish confuse the darker skies for early night and start feeding, you headed in when the darker clouds started appearing on the horizon. With small runabouts, that could still be a 15-30 minute run home, depending on distance and the size of your motor. On the way, you would be watching the horizon, often hugging the shoreline. But your primary worry would be lightning, or getting soaked, not that your boat was going to capsize and you might drown. Which is what happened to the woman who died.

That literally never happened on our lake unless you were in a sailboat, and then you didn’t even really need a big storm. The tall mast was likely enough. Sure, if you’re on an ocean or the Great Lakes, you’re always at risk of capsizing, but very hard to do in simple lakes and rivers unless you’re in a kayak or canoe. Most small pleasure craft have flatter bottoms and low profiles for wind, and the waves themselves don’t get so high compared with the sides of the boat…a lower centre of mass generally keeps them righted. If you were driving like a bat out of hell in big waves, you could flip a boat, but it wouldn’t be “expected” just from a storm.

I have no trouble believing that a lot of experienced boaters got caught off-guard by the atypical rate of onset. I was in a CAR and felt like it came out of nowhere.

Alerts

Some people are pointing out, “Well, yeah, sure, but there were ALERTS on phones.”

Uh-huh. And an alert on your phone doesn’t do you much good if it comes 10 minutes before the storm hits and your 30 minutes from base. Or, more likely, if you follow all the pop advice out there about disconnecting from the digital life and turning your devices off while you embrace nature. Which a lot of experienced boaters do. Many deliberately don’t take their phones out on the lake. That’s the reason they’re out there. They’re not partying and needing a selfie every two minutes or Instagramming their flip flops, they’re disconnecting.

But I saw the alert. And if I had been on a boat? I would have headed into shore, heading back to our campsite. Yet with the speed of onset from normal “we’re going to get wet” to “we’re actually in serious danger” chaos, even being along the shore? I doubt I would have had time to pull all the way in, find a place to tie-off, and get under better shelter. I’ve seen nothing in any of the articles talking about how far she was out in the river or how far from her base, or if she was headed back. I am betting there will be several articles this summer in boating magazines about what to do if you do get caught in a sudden storm that comes up too rapidly to get to shore. Maybe she was within five feet of shore, maybe the capsizing caused her to hit her head, maybe she was trapped in the boat. I don’t know, but I’m not willing to write her off as a moron.

The other evidence we do see

My reaction to the golfer isn’t too far off that. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they were too far out from the clubhouse when it hit to get all the way back. I’m betting literally dozens across Ottawa alone were in the same situation, but you didn’t hear about them, cuz they didn’t die. If they were walking and far enough out, even if they started back with the alert, they may not have made it to the clubhouse in time.

But while people want to nominate either of them, it is the evidence of the two who died while walking that seems the most compelling to me. They were both seemingly walking in their own neighbourhoods. Before the storm hit, or even when it first started, they were likely within 100-200 feet of a house. They could easily have stepped up on someone’s porch and said, “Hey, let me in, I need help, I’m caught in a storm.” But before either could actually do that, before they felt they were unsafe and needed to get out of the storm RIGHT now, the storm intensified enough to knock two trees over on them.

If two people out walking in their own neighbourhood couldn’t get to shelter in time, likely because of the rapid onset of the storm from dark skies to Holy Hannah, I doubt a golfer or a boater would have been able to either.

Of course, if someone finds their phones and sees him or her taking selfies in the middle of the lake or golf course while the storm raged around them, I’m willing to vote. Until then, it’s just sad.