It’s not every blogger who divulges an upcoming colonoscopy, I’m sure. But you, faithful bloggees, know how much this one means to me: it’s the beginning of a solution to my appendix problem. They can’t decide how to fix me before they know what’s going on, and in early June, on the scheduled date of a colonoscopy, I’d landed back in hospital. I can feel the infection is still there, am still shaky, just hoping nothing erupts before next Thursday. 

There. Now you know.

Also, I can report with the greatest relief that the family crisis has abated for now. Not crisis, crisES. It’s been a hell of a few weeks. All that stress did not help my poor quivering gut. 

How glorious that the city empties on the weekend. I know, it’s heaven to have a cottage on a lake, swimming, canoeing, listening to the loons. But you have to get there, packing up and driving for hours in heavy traffic. Whereas I sit here with no lake or loons but blessed miraculous silence and cardinals. Hard to believe, right now, that I’m at the centre of a metropolis. 

Today, perhaps I’ll try to get back to my desk for the first time in what feels like months. More reading: two library books, Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, and my CNFC colleague Susan Olding’s new collection of essays, Big Reader. Enjoying both. 

Ben learned from somewhere to ask people, at the end of the day, “What was your rose and what was your thorn?” The best and the worst. My thorn, when my grandsons were here, was hearing myself saying, NO, not now. Be careful! Not so much noise! Only one cookie! Like an old grump. Which, on occasion — impossible to believe, for sure — I am.

In an animated film we watched, Luca, about sea monsters in Italy – hard to explain but it’s a sweet story – they eat pasta with pesto, and both kids wanted to make some. We harvested basil, made pesto, coated some rigatoni. It was GREEN, so I assumed they wouldn’t touch it, they don’t eat much green. But they devoured it. “I’m eating the heck out of this!” said Ben. 

That was my rose.