This is the first of what I hope will be a series of videos to help you learn to play guitar, for absolute beginners or those of you who haven’t played in a long time. You can find a link to the songs/sheets we’ll use on my website:
https://irenejackson.com/guitar/beginner-guitar-videos/
Hope you have fun with it!
Take care of yourselves 😊
Irene
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| Almost 9:45am Saturday, March 21st, 2020 |
I felt just a little verklempt yesterday morning when I looked at the clock and realized that my massage would have been happening just about then. Sigh.
But what could I do? I began to feel sorry for myself.
I know, I know. People are experiencing far, far worse than having to cancel a massage these days.
This apocalypse has wreaked havoc, and then some. I mean, when have we experienced anything like this in our lifetimes? It’s unprecedented.
But I digress. The spa.
Every year for the past 15 years, my friends and I have traveled up island to a little town named Parksville here on Vancouver Island to spend a weekend together. We bring food and wine (lots of wine) and we laugh and go to the outdoor hot tub, and then we have our spa appointments on the Saturday, and then we eat more food and drink more wine…
You get the picture. We’ve never missed a year until this year.
2020. The year of the rat.
Rats.
As I allowed myself to soak in self pity, I suddenly had an idea. Instead of self pitying, what about self spa’ing? There’s an idea!! I bounded out of my chair (okay, bounding isn’t something I do anymore) and began to think about how I could replace each element of the weekend without actually going anywhere.
First, there’s the wine. And wine. And wine.
Usually, we all take turns posing with the wine. But since my friends would likely be horrified to be seen posing with so much alcohol, I’ve only posted a pic of me and the wine. It’s a lot of wine, no? To be honest, we often bring a bottle or two home at the end of it all. Or one.
Well, at least the liquor stores were still open when I went looking for something! Small blessings.
Then there’s the food. We will often go to a restaurant on one evening and then just bring our own food to the condo for the rest of the weekend. This year, we were going to make it all ourselves.
One of my favourite times, as far as the food goes, was our 10th anniversary at the spa, when we hired a chef. Yep. He came with the food, and the dishes and everything he/we needed, and cooked up a fabulous meal. He even took the dirty dishes away. All we had to do was eat and drink.
The complex we stay in has a couple of outdoor hot tubs. It is our tradition, on each night (and usually after a certain amount of wine) to throw on our bathing suits and robes, and head off into the night out the hot tub. Sometimes there are other people there. They don’t last long. Five giddy, soused women is usually enough to drive them away. Here’s a pic from a long time ago. I don’t know who took it, probably someone we cajoled into doing so before they ran away:
I feel that we are hidden well enough by the steam to keep us anonymous. But the smiling Thrifty’s bag in the back is a bit creepy.
So what was I to do? I don’t have a hot tub.
But I have a tub! And it has hot water!
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| Uncle Bob the Boy Scout |
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| The Jackson Clan, little Uncle Bob in the middle. |
He was the lucky one. Certainly lucky that he had been born at the end of the Great Depression instead of during it. Lucky that he survived that fire cracker exploding in his pocket, but not without a lot of scars as a result. And especially lucky that he walked away from that plane crash on Vancouver Island as a pilot in the Air Force, with barely a scratch.
He was also lucky that he found a wonderful, supportive partner in my Aunt Margie, who urged him to go on to higher education. I was a 4-year-old flower girl at their wedding. Aunt Margie’s persistence and Uncle Bob’s smarts eventually lead him to become an associate professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia and later at Boston University.
They lived in Nairobi, Kenya for a couple of years while he was getting his PhD, and where, in 1969, they had their only child, my cousin Jennifer. Then there were the adventures. Or misadventures, depending on your point of view.
The house they lived in outside of Nairobi was up on stilts for good reason, especially if you didn’t enjoy spiders and snakes. Aunt Margie told the story of one day, upon hearing Jennifer crying upstairs, she got up and walked over to the staircase, when out of the corner of her eye she noticed a dark spot on the wall. As she turned to look at it, she realized she was face to face with a tarantula.
Although she was scared out of her wits and definitely not fond of spiders, Aunt Margie was first and foremost a mother, and realized she was going to have to kill the thing. But how do you kill a tarantula? Her first, albeit instinctual move, was to throw some of my Uncle Bob’s books at it. Every book missed, and as each one hit the wall, she swore that a leg of the tarantula would kick out at her in self defense.
Ultimately, it was a kettle full of boiling water that did the creature in. My Uncle Bob came home later that day to find a bunch of his water-soaked books strewn up and down the stairs, a dead tarantula, and my Aunt Margie sitting with little Jennifer, emotionally exhausted. Lucky HE didn’t have to fight the tarantula.
They came back to Canada with a boatload of stories, and gave me a lion made out of banana leaves, telling me to look out for bugs that might still be inside of it. I think they referred to them as “do do’s”. I kept my eye on it.
Africa seemed to set the tone for their lives, and they had many more memorable experiences, seeing the world whenever they could find the time, and finally settling down to retire in the U.K. in 2013.
In the late spring of 2017, my husband and I made the trip to Europe, our first one, where we visited London, Paris and Copenhagen. On our second-to-last day in London, we met up with Uncle Bob and Aunt Margie for lunch. The lunch lasted about three hours while we did a lot of laughing and sharing of stories, finding out what life was like for them living in the UK. It was a wonderful time and one I’ll never forget.
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| A visit in London. |
The next morning, June the 3rd, we woke up to scores of messages and texts on our phones and found out that there had been an attack by a “lorry” on London Bridge. The three occupants crashed the van into scores of people, and then they ran into Borough Market where they proceeded to stab whoever they came into contact with. In the end, 8 people died and 48 were injured. Uncle Bob also sent us a message, hoping that we wouldn’t let that incident spoil the rest of our trip. We decided to Keep Calm and Carry On in the British tradition.
Early last year, Uncle Bob became ill, which many months later lead to a diagnosis of a particularly rare and deadly form of cancer. But he and Aunt Margie were still able to celebrate their 58th wedding anniversary, Jennifer’s birthday, Bob’s birthday and his grandson Ben’s birthday, all in the last couple of months. I think he would have considered that pretty lucky.
We were all hoping there would be more time, but isn’t that always the way? I find myself with tears saying goodbye to the luckiest, and the last, of the Jackson clan.
Skol, Uncle Bob,
Love, Irene
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| Robert H. Jackson Feb.23 1938 – Mar 10 2020 |
Last week, the BC Parks’ website and their phone lines were swamped with people trying to make reservations for campsites all around the province for the spring and summer. Some friends of ours have a fifth wheel, and they spent three hours just trying to make one reservation. Eventually, they managed to book a few campsites on Vancouver Island, with dates spread out over the summer and into the fall. Camping is their joy.
Well, it’s not really “camping” in a fifth wheel…it’s what they call “glamping”.
(Article continues below)
I am not a camper. I can't afford one of those big rigs so I'd be the one with the tiny, poor excuse for a tent, the moth-infested sleeping bag and the rusted propane stove. Nuh uh.
I understand the back-to-nature thing. I love my walks, even when they're not in the forest or by the ocean. But I find the most peace and joy in my own yard. My own garden. On a spring or summer weekend evening, you will find me wandering around it with a glass of wine in hand, inspecting and admiring my work. That's my glamping.
Just as I am not a camper, I was not born a gardener. My Dad, however, had a knack for it and was known around our neighbourhood for his beautiful landscaping and neatly trimmed lawn.
I started out more like his father, my grandfather, who bought an apple orchard from a guy in Peachland in the late 1920s without knowing the difference between "dormant" and "dead" trees. As it turned out, half of them were dead and he'd been swindled. Yeah, I was more like that.
When my husband and I bought our first house, I didn't know the difference between a weed and a...well, pretty much anything else. I'm sure I killed numerous legitimate plants for no good reason other than I didn't know what they were. Whenever my Dad would visit us, he would help me out by weeding and cleaning the yard up. But I was pretty useless.
By the time we moved to our second house five years later, Dad made the decision that we were on our own with the yard work. Our new house was on a corner lot and had SO many more flower beds and a lot more lawn. I don't blame him for bowing out.
Everything in the yard was a mess for years as our daughters grew up. Finally, one day we decided that we would focus on fixing it up, and we hired some garden pros to give us some tips and advice. I remember the couple well. They were British, probably in their 60s at the time. But mostly I remember the look on their faces as they took a look around. "Holy crap. Amateurs." is the expression I saw.
They wrote down some names of things, bushes and plants, and gave us some advice on our fence and how we might re-think our lawns, and then left it to us to figure the rest out. I kind of took the position of head gardener, while my husband took over care of the lawns.
I could not propagate for the life of me. I spent gobs money on all kinds of plants, and promptly put them in the wrong spots, and then forgot about them, thinking they would take care of themselves. Dead, dead, dead. I didn't know a perennial from a pollinator. But I persisted. I dug up the dead stuff and started again. I tried different plants in better places. And I weeded. And weeded. And weeded. And then, slowly, my gardens started to blossom.
Over time, I've not only come to terms with my garden, I've come to love it. Mostly, I've become much better at taking care of it. And now my next door neighbour has garden envy. Just the other week, she was outside chatting with me while I was working in one of the flower beds. She said "I wouldn't know what a weed was if it hit me in the face! How do you tell?"
I thought about it.
"Well, I think of a weed as pretty much anything that I don't want," I said with a smart ass smirk.
"That's good! That's good! I'll remember that!" she laughed.
She's an amateur. But I have finally taken root.
There was a news story recently about a book that was finally returned to the Vancouver Public Library, 50 years overdue. What surprised m...
