#MicroblogMondays: A few odds & ends

• 
  Something happened today that most Canadians generally don't have to deal with or think about, most of the time:  I got a medical-related bill, via my MyChart app (where you can sign up to receive your medical test results, etc., online) related to my recent emergency trip to the hospital. 
• It was a bill for the ambulance:  $45.  Not bad, eh?  (Same as the bill I got after my first ambulance trip, two years ago.)  
• I paid it (online, with my credit card). And I can probably get some if not all of that back via the supplementary medical insurance dh & I have as pensioners through our previous employer. 
• Glad to be Canadian (not for the first nor the last time, I am sure...!).  
• I saw my first back to school post on social media recently -- last week, on August 5th (!). (Someone's grandkids from the American South.)  Here in Ontario, first day generally isn't until the day after Labour Day (and some kindergarten classes and college programs start a week or so later than that). Which means I have at least six or seven weeks of photos and posts trickling (and then gushing) into my social media to (not??) look forward to. Sigh... 
• As a Canadian, I don't get a vote in the upcoming U.S. presidential election -- but I was tickled to see Kamala Harris chose the governor of Minnesota (my mom's home state, and still home to many of my relatives), Tim Walz, as her running mate. (I'm old enough to remember seeing former MN governor/former VP Hubert Humphrey speaking at the county fair in the early 1970s -- during the 1972 election, possibly? -- when I was a pre-teen -- but, I digress...!) 
• The best part, though, was Walz's frank declaration that he became a dad only after several years of IVF treatments -- and named his daughter Hope because of that. I think this guy gets it (certainly more so than a certain former president and his own VP pick...).   
• There's been some great coverage about that, and I will try to round up a few links to include in a future post...  
• Despite the alarmist/doom-laden headline (eyeroll), I appreciated the thoughtful overall tone of this article from the Guardian by Gaby Hinsliff:  "The shrunken state expects families to fill the voids in health and social care. Woe betide those without children." (Subheading: "As fewer Britons have children, more will be left to navigate our threadbare social care system and overstretched hospitals alone." -- it focuses on the British health care and social services system, but I don't think North America is any better...!)  Key paragraph (boldfaced emphasis mine): 

The last thing I want to do in raising this is add to a mean-spirited moral panic about what Donald Trump’s new right-hand man, JD Vance, so dismissively called “childless cat ladies”. Making people feel guilty – or worse still, frightened – about not having had the children some of them desperately wanted to have but couldn’t, is cruel and futile, since for the average older person finding themselves in need of care it’s about 30 years too late for regrets. Instead, what we need are services shaped for the way families are now, not the way that proponents of a smaller state would like them to be.

• I loved this Substack post from Jennifer Louden at "It's Not Too Late:"  "your yet to be lived lives are calling." Sample passage (boldfaced emphasis hers):  

To live is to whittle away possibilities. To choose one fork in the road over another. And to never know what you might have experienced, who you might have become, if you chose the other way.

Learning to make some kind of peace with your unlived life is part of growing down into the life you did choose. Of course, many of us didn’t get to choose — a host of factors outside our control choose for us, sometimes brutally. This too we have to metabolize if we are to continue to live more than a shadow existence.

We all possess unlived unexpressed potential. Missed opportunities. Stolen opportunities. Parts of ourselves we didn’t develop, roads we could not or did not venture down.

Yes, it is too late for those avenues, those options, those opportunities.

But there are lives ahead of you that are yearning to be explored. It is not too late for that.

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.