Erin's Journals

Just a thought… I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. [Robert Louis Stevenson]

You can watch a video version of this journal on my Facebook page, or here on YouTube.

Welcome back – to you and I guess to me – as we wrap up November together!

So I told you I’d give you a better picture of where Rob and I have been the last two weeks. And I’ve been really struggling with how to explain it, because I feel it needs justifying. Here we go.

Picture yourself reading a story online today about someone who died, or got sick, and your reaction is “Serves them right” or “Well, what did they expect?” That’s exactly what I have been trying to avoid the last two weeks because Rob and I chose to do something that has gotten some very bad press over the past nearly two years and, in some cases, with good reason.

You see, when we had two weeks we could clear, I went online and looked at different scenarios.

Well, we chose a cruise – a transatlantic crossing. And I know ships have been described as floating petri dishes, but a lot of stringent precautions and guidelines were followed diligently by staff and passengers alike.

The Azamara Quest is a relatively small ship, and was booked at half its normal 700-passenger capacity. We sailed across the Atlantic for 12 days with one stop, St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, where we didn’t even get off the ship for the day.

Our trip began in Portugal, a gorgeous country that I cannot wait to return to and explore some more, and which clamped down due to Covid about a week after we left. Luckily for us, we were able to squeeze in a one-day tour of castles and mansions around Lisbon (you can see photos on my video journal).

And then we boarded a small ship, our first time with the Azamara line, and began a very quiet journey, much of it of our own choosing. We went to just one evening show, kept it to two meals a day. There were no self-serve buffets or anything where germs could be spread; I can only imagine the money a ship saves when people have to ask to be served portions rather than taking that extra one themselves. I know I chose differently!

We took everything very slowly. And despite writing for podcasts, including seven new Drift with Erin Davis sleep stories (!) this was what we needed. Being rocked to sleep every night on the ocean is my idea of paradise.

What did not rock was the number of times we were tested for Covid. I’m grateful for every swab and brain tickle that made my eyes water, but we were tested at Vancouver airport, and again before we got on our ship. Then we were tested halfway through the cruise…and that’s when things got a little curious, as there was one positive outcome on board. We were told that person had been quarantined in a special section of the ship – but HOW someone tested positive after seven days aboard was a mystery to Rob and me.

The captain announced that they’d gone through closed circuit camera footage of that person, where they’d been and with whom they’d spent time, and none of their circle tested positive. Thank goodness. Maybe it was a false positive after all?

On Friday we disembarked, flew out of Miami, and stayed the night in Toronto, where we got together with friends. I’ll you that and more about the homecoming next time. Oh, and a huge thanks to Brooke for keeping things up and running on Facebook and Instagram, and to you for coming back. It’s great to get away, despite all of our concerns, but better to come home to a welcome and so much love. And of course rain, so much more rain. Take care and we’ll talk soon.

Just a thought… Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. [Mark Twain]

As always, you can watch a video version of this journal on my Facebook page, or here on YouTube.

So, thanks for coming by – and I have a few things to share with you. None of them is life altering, but in our house, they’ll be life-improving.

Rob and I are going away for two weeks starting today. Our daughter-in-law Brooke will be keeping a steady hand on my Facebook page, and I’ll have posts planned in advance to go for you daily. (If anything world-shattering happens between now and when I get back, you’ll understand why I haven’t reflected or commented on it on social media.) Just no journal until the 29th. I plan to shoot something when I’m away and tell you about our escape then.

For now, it’s just this: I felt myself starting to really crack and when that happens, it’s time for some self-care. Picture lying in a hammock and you’re doing just fine keeping comfortable and balanced, and then, say…a hippopotamus…jumps in on top of you. You end up with your butt dragging on the ground.

Since I first started working at age 17, Novembers have always been busier than almost every month for me, but this year, so was October, and I was doing it all with one hand tied behind my back because of my ridiculous computer troubles.

My social media accounts are all just like a ball of wool after a cat’s gotten to it, and I was hitting walls all over the place. Hard. So when we saw that there were two weeks that had only hockey on the calendar, we decided to keep those weeks free, not offering any options for meetings or rehearsals or writing or posting or recording, and to take some time away together.

You’ll still get new stories on Drift with Erin Davis every Tuesday, and free ones moved over to listen to for the first time. I’ll be honest: Drift has been a much bigger project than I thought, as I’m responsible for promoting it, getting new subscribers (both free and paid) and, of course, writing, recording, editing, mixing and posting. It’s a LOT. A labour of love, for sure, but a lot.

So, with everything all ready for you for the next two weeks, Rob and I are taking that time to reconnect. To breathe. To sleep and to relax. As I say, Brooke will be online to make sure everything’s okay and when I come back in a couple of weeks, I’ll have plenty of stories and experiences – positive but not in a “test” kind of way (we hope). So take care of yourself. Take it easy if you can, enjoy the daily posts at Facebook and Instagram if you follow and please find a way to breathe, to sleep, yes, to Drift and I’ll be back on the 29th.

And thanks for understanding as you always seem to do. You amaze me.

Just a thought… Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people. [Helen Keller]

You can watch a video version of this journal on my Facebook page, or here on YouTube.

So, last week Rob and I were watching Law & Order: Organized Crime – you know, the one where Elliot is bald and bearded and undercover. Oh, and he’s totally ripped (Chris Meloni’s body at 60 is a thing to behold) and mad. Like maybe the Hulk body has brought an equally short temper. But I digress.

During the show, an ad aired and before I could hit the fast forward on our remote, I saw a guy who caught my eye. Silver-haired and handsome, he was checking himself in the mirror, booking a ride and making reservations on his smart phone. A very short time into the ad, it dawned on me: it was for hearing aids.

Yes, Bose, the high-quality-high-price sound people, are making hearing aids now. They’re not here in Canada yet; I know this because we looked them up to check the prices strictly out of curiosity. They’re about one quarter what Rob pays for his, but do about one quarter of the things his do. This Bose thing is adjustable on your iPhone but doesn’t link up to it; that’s the trick Rob loves best about his hearing aids. Oh, that, and the fact they also hook up to an amplifier on the TV.

So why am I talking about these devices that we are not going to buy? Because it was a SEXY HEARING AID COMMERCIAL! This guy was hot – at least in my books – I mean, not Elliot hot, but my Rob hot. And I shouted that out as I watched it, loud enough for my husband to hear even with his devices playing the TV feed in them: “They’ve made hearing aids sexy!”

Finally! The stigma attached to helping your hearing has been one that’s been around forever, and of course with the largest demographic moving into its fine wine stage, hearing loss is a huge part of life. Rob damaged his while deejaying and producing radio (way too loud in his headphones) and has now been wearing hearing aids since he was in his 40s.

They’ve gotten increasingly smaller as the years have passed, with more capabilities. I can’t stress highly enough how you want to do this through an audiologist and not just order something off the TV, no matter how sexy Bose is or makes it look.

But anything that takes a little bit of the stigma away from aging, from needing help from hearing aids, is a HUGE positive for us all. We all know somebody who needs help hearing and just won’t do anything about it, for whatever reason; it’s a very real problem for those of us who live with them and for the folks in the apartment next door who have to listen to someone else’s TV shows at the decibel level of a jetliner.

There is no shame, no age attachment to losing your hearing – no more than if you were ashamed to wear glasses. Now those Bose ones seemed big to me; they don’t have to be. If you want to keep them a little hidden, it’s totally possible: Rob’s are virtually invisible to me. Unless, of course, he’s not wearing them which, because he’s married to me, you could probably understand.

But hearing matters. For relationships. For life. There’s no stigma and thank you to a top-notch sound company for making an ad to help people see that. I may not care for their version of the product, but I sure do like their message. Thanks for reading and I’ll be back with a journal, not on Thursday this week – which, of course, is Remembrance Day – but on Friday. Talk to you then.

Just a thought… When disaster strikes, the time to prepare has passed. [Steven Cyros]

As always, you can watch a video version of this journal on my Facebook page, or here on YouTube.

It was the talk of the hockey rink this week: the story of the senior men’s hockey league in Newmarket, Ontario that was struck by Covid, causing the death of an otherwise-healthy 75-year-old Garry Weston. I read the descriptions of this much-loved and appreciated man and my heart goes out to his family, community and his teammates.

I could also relate to the words being said about him; but for the age difference, they could have been writing about my Rob. Also double-vaxxed, he plays with different men’s and mixed leagues. Breakthrough Covid is something we try hard not to think about as we go on with our lives – carefully, of course – but it shook his fellow players down to their skate guards.

Something else happened in Rob’s hockey community a few weeks back that could easily have also ended in an obituary. But thanks to this brush, some changes have been made, all for the better.

Rob plays now four mornings a week (he was offered a fifth and may take it when our work schedules settle a bit). Thank goodness that in these leagues – and many others – goalies, who are much in demand, play for free, or we’d be selling something. Like, I don’t know, GOALIE EQUIPMENT? (Kidding, Rob. Sort of….)

So Rob’s in his net and notices a commotion on the bench. What was it? A man, who’s 61, was sitting chatting with a fellow player when he stopped talking mid-sentence and just slumped over. I don’t know what kind of horseshoes this man, who was joining them for the first time, had tucked in his pads, but the guy he was talking to is a doctor. Of sports medicine. Wow. (The only way he could have been luckier is if his fellow player was a cardiologist – and there’s probably one of them that plays too!)

This doctor knew what to do, and fortunately, so did the staff at Panorama Rec Centre, just down the hill from us here in North Saanich. There are four defibrillators at the rink, and one of them was put to use to bring this man back to life, after manual efforts were proving fruitless. His heart had stopped. Yeah, it was that serious.

In ten to fifteen minutes, the ambulance took the player to the hospital where he was operated on and is recovering with a new stent in his heart. And it looks like he’s going to be okay.

We’re not sure how they contacted his wife, but they found his cell phone and found her, hopefully in his ICE contacts. In this case, that doesn’t mean ice of the skating variety; it was actually In Case of Emergency.

The fact she was able to tell those caring for him about his family medical history and such helped them to get him what he needed which, in this case, was breathing again.

But it raised a few concerns and some excellent recommendations. Because of this man’s emergency, players recognized that they didn’t have contacts for their spouses or people to call if something happened. And stuff does happen: with their median age around 65, things can go wrong in the health of the men and women who play with Rob. Now fellow players know whom to call and notify; I mean, no one would have known to call me, had that been Rob needing life-saving measures.

Oh, and a side note: Colin was off school that day and we were thinking of going to watch Grandude play. Fortunately we did not, for had we pulled up and seen those emergency vehicles, I think I would have needed a defibrillator.

So here’s the point: if they’re out and about, please make sure your loved one has your name and contact information readily available. Be able to reached, just in case. I mean, none of us thinks this is ever going to happen, but it just does. And no one wants the line “He died doing what he loved” in their obit. No thanks. Let’s all go into overtime, shall we?

Thanks for coming by and we’ll be back with you on Monday.

Just a thought… Remember: every good citizen adds to the strength of a nation. [Gordon B. Hinckley]

You can watch a video version of this journal on my Facebook page, or here on YouTube.

Welcome to November! Hope your Hallowe’en was fun/uneventful or whatever you wanted it to be. We went out with Colin and Jane and you may have seen photos on Facebook or Instagram (whichever program is cooperating on any given day) if you’re interested. Anyway, we’re so grateful to be able to take out our little police officer and his Emma Wiggle sister.

On Friday, Colin went to school in last year’s costume – as a firefighter. Afterwards, we had him pose in front of the MINI, looking fierce and fiery. (Perhaps a Ford Pinto would have been more appropriate?)

Yeah, we all know he wasn’t fueled by bravery – but sugar. He saved this year’s costume for trick or treating last night, when he dressed as a police officer. We were his official “police escorts,” once again as bananas; you don’t think we’re going to retire these outfits, do you?

Saturday we went to a movie and then to his folks’ place to carve some pumpkins.

We never take for granted the fact that we’re so lucky, being able to see our grandkids this often. In fact, rarely does a sleepover night go by that I don’t say to Rob, “There’s a little boy in that bedroom!” I mean, it’s more than we ever could have dreamed of.

See, that’s the thing about life. You just don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Sometimes it’s not what you had planned, but you know that it’s the best it can be. And it’s up to us to choose to let go of what we thought the future would hold, and try hard to embrace what positive wonders can come of opening our hearts and minds to the future.

Speaking of opening minds, it’s pretty amazing how, as grandparents, we get the opportunity to introduce the little ones in our lives to experiences. Take this past Saturday, when my friend Nancy and I met up to take our grandsons to the tiny theatre in nearby Sidney for Addams Family 2.

Before we went, Rob and I got our flu shots as part of our volunteering for the local community. We took Colin along so that if he has any fears of vaccinations, as – face it – most kids and some adults do, he’d see us get ours and that it wasn’t scary at all.

At first, he said he didn’t want to watch, but as soon as Grandude got set for his, Colin was right in there like an investigative reporter. So, yay! We told him we didn’t even feel it (the truth) and they gave him a Shoppers Drug Mart Band-aid and he got to take a few lollypops from the waiting room. We were really happy to get a chance to do that with and for him.

Nancy, meantime, took her grandson to a quiet protest happening in Sidney against the possible demolition of the fishers’ wharf there. She wanted him to see what it looked and felt like, being part of a neighbourhood and letting your voice be heard.

Two different experiences, but both pieces of being part of a bigger community: trying to make an impact on the people around us, instead of just living our own insular lives. Colin’s been with us on meal deliveries, he’s met recipient and now friend, Mira. He’s learning, as his parents will also teach him, the importance of giving and thinking of others. What a joy, a gift to be able to help shape this little person into a solid citizen. I mean, if he’s already a firefighter and a cop, he’s on his way, right? (That, or he’s preparing for a Village People tribute band.)

Enjoy these early days of November and I’ll talk to you Thursday about a scary moment at Rob’s hockey. We’re grateful it wasn’t Covid-related, but it was a matter of life and death. Thanks for coming by.