a bit of everything

I should really have posted a photo of my dear departed Koko here but I'm still working on the emptiness without her. So instead, with a Canadian winter on the horizon, however hazily, I will post one of my favourites - a sunset in Retiro Park in Madrid, surely one of the most beautiful parks anywhere, in the 'old world' traditional sense with statuary, fountains, a lake to row on, ancient trees and broad walkways.

I am still wheel-less and not accepting the constraints very well atall. I do not share my daughter's and granddaughter's happy reliance on city buses. I will explain: yesterday, leaving the Seniors' Centre, I caught the only bus that had appeared over the space of an hour. Wrong destination but - hey - it would have to end up at the Town Centre transfer point at some time. An hour and a half later I knew Kingston intimately and I swear was seeing the same streets for the third time. After baking at the bus-stop in 33-degree heat, then freezing in a bus with an air-conditioning unit on steroids, I was still there, a captive to kids' screaming amplified 80% with my hearing aids, and wondering where I went wrong. I asked the driver plaintively "Don't you EVER go to the Town Centre?" "Oh sure" he replied breezily, "when I finish my downtown route". With what I thought was remarkable restraint, I told him that to get from the Seniors' Centre to my home takes 15 minutes by car and what would he suggest. Already my transfer was no good. "Well, why didn't you say when you got on that that's where you wanted to go? I could have dropped you near the Bus Station and you could have caught a 'C' bus to the Town Centre, then your #3 to Queen Mary Rd".

Logistics to take a bus???

I'm a car person. I love driving. I love the freedom, the independence, the wide-open spaces. Being able to come and go when I want. Half of me, the sensible part, knows that another car is not economically feasible. I just have to convince the other half, my pig-headed half. It'll be easier in the winter, when I can hop onto a heated bus in the middle of a blizzard. It says here.