Category: Daily life

The Cancer Diaries, part 5

Daily life / Health & Medicine / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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The resilience of the human body is truly amazing. Here I am, three weeks after major surgery, and much of my daily life is back to normal. I can drive, walk the dog, unpack the dishwasher, cook meals, pour the wine, feed the cats, walk upright… a far cry from my crabbed old-man style of a week or two ago. Not that I am fully recovered. I have several weeks or even months ahead of me for that. My incisions are still tender, in particular the spot where the Hemo-vac tube had been inserted. The main incision from my navel ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 4

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A home is not a sterile environment. Not mine, anyway. With two cats, a dog, numerous houseplants,  rooms full of books, and my sometimes lackadaisical attitude toward cleaning, our home will never be sterile. Not to mention the microbiome we all carry around with us: 100 trillion microbes live on or in each one of us: only 10% of the cells we carry around are our own. Most of these colonists are benign, but a few species are opportunistic and will invade our territories when they can. Plus there are viruses around and on us, too. Coming home after surgery ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 3

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The operating room was cold. Not merely cool: winter cold. In my thin hospital gown, I felt the chill and shivered a bit. The nurse told me it’s kept cold to help discourage bacteria from thriving. I wanted to ask her about this, to chat about bacteria and their lives. I’d been reading about microbiology and the microbiome a lot of late, so I’m curious. But this was not the place or time. I was helped onto the table, and a warm blanket wrapped over me. Very comforting. My arms were splayed out from my body on small side panels. ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries, Part 2

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There was an episode in the original Star Trek series called The Deadly Years in which Captain Kirk and some of his companions aged rapidly. At one point, the ship’s computer pegs Kirk’s age at between 60 and 72: he stumbles around clumsily, bent, shuffling, is forgetful, has anger issues on the edge of senility. He’s a caricature old man. Watching it recently, we laughed at the cartoonish portrayal of someone who could be a decade younger than we, yet behaved like he was much, much older. But there I was, a few days after surgery, bent and shuffling like ……… click below for more ↓

The Cancer Diaries Part 1

Daily life / Family history / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Stoicism & classical philosophyLeave a comment

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I should have started this a while ago. Perhaps when I received the first news something as wrong. But it took a while to really sink in. And then it was upon me. Although this is personal, I wanted to share it, in the hope others might find it useful. There’s a psychological process called the Kübler-Ross model, or the Five Stages of Grief, which is often applied to cancer and other diseases, but at least for me, it didn’t work that way. Her stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. But for me, the first thing was ……… click below for more ↓

Shaving notes, again

Daily life / Personal Reminiscences3 Comments

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It’s been a while since I wrote about shaving, so I thought it was time to bring that story up to date. If you wish to read my previous posts on shaving, blades, and razors, you can do so here. Suffice to say, I gleefully returned to the art of shaving with a double-edged (DE) safety razor a couple of years back and spent some time (and money) trying different brands and styles of razor and blade. I can’t believe all those years I wasted using those plastic razors with their environmentally-hostile throw-away blades. And don’t get me started on ……… click below for more ↓

I’m Reading as Fast as I Can

Books & Reviews / Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / Reading & Literacy / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

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I don’t recall just when I started putting books aside to read, or perhaps just finish, when I retired. I had this naive, romantic idea that upon retirement, at the age of 65 or thereabouts, I would be able to spend my time puttering around the house and garden, carting a bag of books from place to place, to living out my final years in the warm glow of reading and cups of tea. Books have long lives in my library. Putting one aside to reach for another, and then consigning it to an imagined peaceful future where I would ……… click below for more ↓

Dictionary vs Dictionary.com

Books & Reviews / Daily life / Internet & Social Media / Literature / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Reading & Literacy / Style & usage / TV / What I'm Reading Now / Words & etymologyLeave a comment

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Did you know that doxastic is a philosophical adjective relating to an individual’s beliefs? Or that doxorubicin was an antibiotic used in treating leukemia? Or that doxy is a 16th century word for mistress and prostitute? That drack is Australian slang for unattractive or dreary? Drabble means to make wet and dirty in muddy water? A downwarp is a broad depression in the earth’s surface? Drail is a weighted fish hook? Dragonnade means quartering troops on a population while dragonet is a small fish but a dragoman is an interpreter? That a dramaturge is a literary editor on a theatre ……… click below for more ↓

Imperialism and razors

Daily life / International politics / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

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I’m looking at my recently-acquired, matte black, Weishi adjustable, TTO (Twist To Open, aka butterfly-head) razor. Quite attractive, smart even, and a solid heft in the hand. Chinese-made, Amazon-sold. I am still bemused by my ability to buy products – especially household items, things I use daily – from half a world away with a simple click. Especially when I can’t find any of those items locally (and, yes, I’ve looked…). Convenient, yes, but also a symbol of the new imperialism: the transnational corporate empires. Most (all?) of the safety razors I’ve purchased in the past six months since I ……… click below for more ↓

The sharp edge: razors and rituals

Daily life / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / PhilosophyLeave a comment

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Since I switched to using a safety razor, as I wrote about last spring, I’ve continued to pursue my explorations into razors, blades, technologies and techniques about shaving. I’ve learned much, but still want more hands-on experience. Nothing teaches like hands-on. I followed up that post with another one on shaving, a month later, about what I’d learned since that first piece. Now, four months later, I come back to the topic with new discoveries to relate. And some new razors to describe. But let me interject a comment on why this matters. Shaving is something I do if not ……… click below for more ↓

The arts of politics and baking

Bread & Baking / Collingwood / Daily life / Election 2018 / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

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In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Prisig wrote about how dealing with the small things of daily life  – like fixing his wayward motorcycle – could teach us about the world at large. A sort of microcosm-becomes-macrocosm perspective, with the vagarities of motorcycle repair to colour the learning. What we learn in one we can apply to the other. * Baking bread, too, offers a meta-window into other arts and crafts, in particular (for me), politics. Bakers and thinkers have oft cited bread as a metaphor for life (listen to master baker Peter Reinhart’s comments on ……… click below for more ↓

Abby the heartbreaker

Daily life / Personal Reminiscences / PetsLeave a comment

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She was a small cat. At first we thought she might be not much older than six or eight months, but no, we were assured, she was fully grown. Just petite. Two kilos, maybe a hair more. Black with a little white patch on her chest. Big, expressive eyes. This was a dozen years ago, back when the humane society was in its infancy, and didn’t yet have a permanent shelter. Cats and dogs that couldn’t find homes or foster care were kenneled with willing veterinarians around the region. Susan and I had agreed to adopt one more cat, and ……… click below for more ↓

Shaving redux

Daily life / Musings / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

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In mid-May, 2018, I published a post about my change in shaving technologies and techniques. I described why I thought it was a more environmentally friendly method, and somewhat of a homage to family tradition. Now I want to bring you up to date on my progress to date. Before I took the step back to the double-edged safety razors like my father used, I did (as is my wont) a lot of reading and research on websites and forums. Thankfully, there’s a lot of content about everything online, albeit that quantity doesn’t guarantee quality, or truthfulness. One of the ……… click below for more ↓

The greening of shaving

Daily life / Environment / Family history / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Social Order & Disorder4 Comments

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But my brother Esau is an hairy man, but I am a smooth man. I recall those lines from a Beyond the Fringe sketch first released in 1964 (see below).* And so it was in my family: my brother was the hirsute Esau to my near-hairless Jacob. I didn’t need to shave until my late teens and even then it was iffy. That was in the late 1960s when sideburns and moustaches were the rage. By the time I could grow enough, everyone had gone back to being clean shaven. Eternally unfashionable, I was, even back then. In another era, ……… click below for more ↓

The House on the Borderland

Books & Reviews / Daily life / Family history / Musings / Personal Reminiscences / Scifi and fantasyLeave a comment

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“But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality [it] would be a classic of the first water.” So said H. P. Lovecraft of the 1908 novel, The House on the Borderland, by William Hope Hodgson. But, Lovecraft admitted, the book was also a major influence on his own, later work. And for good reason: it created the ‘unknown horror’ effect that Lovecraft (and later writers) exploited so well. House on the Borderland is a seminal work in its genre and, despite its age, deserves not to be forgotten by modern readers. Here’s a passage from the book: And then, as ……… click below for more ↓

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