Still Grateful

Thirteen years and two days ago I wrote my first Blog here at this site.  My first thoughts concerned how grateful I was to be fortunate enough to be safe in a country like Canada and to be financially secure to live comfortably.  Nothing in the past 13 years has occurred to diminish those feelings.  I understand that this is not the case for all of us Canadians and we have problems.  We are not perfect and there are those of us not well served by our governments or social services.  However, unlike some other prosperous nations, all our political organizations/parties for the most part attempt to deal with these problems for the national good.  This is a good country.

I still am totally fascinated by the political soap opera south of the border.  In earlier blogs I worried that George Bush would destroy their nation and then thought that Barack Obama would right all its wrongs . . . neither occurred.  In retrospect, Bush was not the complete boogie man I saw nor Obama the complete saint.  Despite the many alarms I responded to, America survived.  So it is with some degree of caution that I now try to digest the great proliferation of media and Internet information that is now so readily available about American politics and all of which is totally overwhelming.  So much information and much of it is false and overly alarmist.  In particular, it is very hard now to discern fact-based rational reporting of political happenings.  I am now learning to try and look outside my self-created liberal bubble and appreciate that there must be rational conservative views that are totally valid.  The current president of the United States does not make this endeavour easy, indeed, I do believe it is his desire to create chaos.  He is an individual who has managed to so clearly divide their country into factions that are so intolerant of each other.  And from all this it is hard to hear the rational voices (republican or democrat). With this very confusing noise, I am having difficulty understanding what the hell is going on.  But one thing is very clear to me . . . the current president is a despicable, narcissistic, misogynist and shallow low life who is a disgrace to the human race.


Sigh . . . it is going to be hard to escape my liberal-leaning bubble.

On a more positive note, as I approach my 71st year I am still healthy enough to keep up my winter walking routine.  With the help of technology in the form of a Fitbit and more recently a Garmin GPS fitness tracker on my wrist, I have been keeping a daily record of my endeavors for the last two years. With these fitness trackers, I have been able to determine how many steps I have taken and distance walked in the time that I have had them.  For 2016 I walked 4.8 million steps and a distance of 2549 miles and for 2017 it was 4.9 million steps and a distance of 2425 miles (not sure why the miles in 2017 are less than 2016 while the steps are greater). So far this winter we have had weather which has been very favorable for walking so I have been getting lots of outdoor walks logged in.  This picture was taken a few days ago after a 10K walk on a day that was warm enough for me to remove my jacket.  This year I hope to do better in both steps and distance.  I should mention that this walking also includes all that done on the golf courses that I trek over when they open in the spring and close in the fall.  And that walking adds considerably to my numbers.  Last year at Hartlen Point I was the member with the highest number of recorded rounds - 161.

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