- Many of the "annoying things and small pleasures" described in past posts about family visits -- including this one, this one, this one -- still apply. ;)
- Also annoying: the weather there. We alternated between extreme heat/humidity and cold/rain, with some forest fire smoke thrown in for good measure (air quality health index of 10+ -- out of 10, i.e., dangerous, on several days). "Sunny Manitoba" is one of the province's mottos/marketing slogans, but (sadly) it was decidedly not that this time around...! :(
- The weekend I landed at my parents' house was the 40th anniversary of LiveAid. I didn't know until later that they were showing the entire concert again on YouTube -- I was pretty busy that day anyway, but I was sorry I'd missed it.
- LiveAid happened exactly one week after our wedding. I remember watching parts of the concert on & off that day from our hotel room in Calgary, where we were just wrapping up our honeymoon in Banff & Jasper (as well as a day at the Calgary Stampede, lol), before flying to Toronto to start married life together.
- I've enjoyed watching the four-part LiveAid documentary series that CNN has been showing on past few Sundays. (Fourth & final episode coming up this weekend!) Lots of great memories (but yikes -- some of those people have aged!). (But then again, so have I...! lol)
- A recent post from Grumpy Rumblings included a link to an article about "cinema's greatest scene" -- the singing of "La Marseillaise" from "Casablanca," my all-time favourite movie. The article is 10 years old, but it's a brilliant and thorough analysis and worth a read, especially if you're a fan!
- I recently learned that our former family doctor of 28 years, who retired 11 years ago, died a few weeks ago. Too late for us to attend the visitation or funeral :( but I would have loved to be there and tell his wife (who was his nurse) -- again -- how much we appreciated their care.
- Doc appeared in several of my posts over the initial years of this blog, including my "1998 memories" and "The Treatment Diaries" series, and this post from 2014, where I wrote about saying goodbye to him before he retired.
- As you will read here (gift link), not only was he a heck of a good doctor, he was a Major League Baseball player and had four World Series rings!! -- two from his time as a relief pitcher (1964 St. Louis Cardinals and 1969 New York "Miracle" Mets), and two in his role as the Toronto Blue Jays team doctor. (His nickname was "Dr. Baseball," and his two sons made a documentary short film about him by that name! -- you can find it online.) He also had an engineering degree, pre-medicine!
- Since I wrote about the passing of my high school English teacher in late June, my classmates & I learned about the deaths of not just one but TWO classmates (less than two weeks apart from each other) -- both from forms of cancer. :( Both were my classmates in junior high as well as high school (at that time, there were four K-9 schools in our town, as well as a couple of K-6 schools and two high schools). They're not the first to go, and they certainly won't be the last (cough!) -- but seriously, aren't we too young for this to be happening??
You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.
Welcome back from vacation, although I'm sorry the weather was wonky. We haven't gotten too much of the wildfire smoke here, but other places are definitely under air quality alerts. I think this is the summer of no middle ground; it's either all one thing or all another. :( I'm sorry for the loss of your doctor and fellow students. It's always a jolt to see that people from your year or time in high school have passed too young. (Also my definition of "too young" keeps changing as I age, haha.) Oh, LiveAid. Such a fascinating thing, but birthed the WORST Christmas song ever. I can't stand "Do They Know It's Christmas?" -- it is sooooo cringey under the light of day decades later. The epitome of colonialist single stories, in my opinion. Blech. But it was Freddie Mercury's last performance, right? (I defer to you as the Rock Queen, given all the biographies and memoirs and extensive knowledge you hold!)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link!
ReplyDeleteIt's hard losing people. I think I learnt early on that I'm never too young for it to be happening! (People our age dying.) I had friends who had brushes with death. My uncle died at 42 (and I thought that was old at the time). And at university, a vibrant young PhD student in the Pol Sci department contracted the flu, a virus got into her heart, and she died before she could get a heart transplant. (They were still rare at the time.) It made me very aware of how you can be healthy one day, and terminal or dying the next. Of course, I'm very aware of that now. But even if I wasn't, my Dr cheerfully told me once that "once we get to 45, all bets are off!"
ReplyDeleteI remember Live Aid, Phil Collins flying from UK to US on the Concord, etc!
And I'm not a great fan of old movies, but I LOVE Casablanca! Off to read the article now.