Connections

I'm preparing dinner in that snow covered bus. The insulation is better than I thought it was judging by all the snow on the roof. Ottawa was supposed to get 30 cm of snow overnight - that seems like a bit of a stretch but there's a lot of the miserable white stuff around this morning. The guy that owns this campground has a more or less full time job pushing snow and he seems to enjoy it. He says they got 18 feet here last winter. Apparently they keep all the trails open so people can access their park model trailers and they host weekend events through the winter.

Anyway we're connected thanks to the colander that I adapted to be a wifi booster. Its one of those fold up stainless steel jobs and it seems to give the wifi enough of a boost to get connected here. I thought it was pure bullshit but I built it anyway while we were still in Nipawin and today it seems to be helping to keep us connected.

We're also connected in another, possibly more important way. This post was prompted when I picked up mother's porcelain salt shaker out of the little red metal basket that it has lived in as long as I can remember. For a lot of its life it sat on top of the stove, sometimes in a cupboard near the stove but now it lives over the sink above our stove. It lives across the way from grandma's little yellow china bowl with the handle. The same one she and I used to microwave vegetables when I lived with her what seems like a lifetime ago. Down below me some of grandpa's tools that came to me through father wait an opportunity to be useful. We may be wandering around North America but we are still connected electronically to the present and spiritually to our past.

Meanwhile Jorgito has discovered that he likes soft cat food from a can. This shouldn't be a big discovery for a cat - in fact every cat I have known actually PREFERED soft cat food from a can to dry food from a bag. But not this one - at least not until about 2 weeks ago. He had to go on a regime of medicated cat food for reasons too unpleasant to relate here. That food came in a can, smelled as foul as canned cat food usually does and was distressing in the extreme for his little cat brain. He licked it dry when we first put it out and then held out for a whole 24 hours, firm in his little cat belief that we would break down and feed him some of his favorite crunchy stuff. We didn't. Eventually we figured out that he really didn't know how to eat soft food. It is too big to take whole pieces into his mouth and his little mind couldn't comprehend tearing off chunks the way every other cat on the globe seems to instinctively understand eating. So we would periodically stir up the little mound of moist food that he had licked into submission and he would commence to licking at it again. Sometime in the last 48 hours he has figured out how to eat soft food and now he would actually prefer that we stop wasting his time with that old fashioned dry stuff.