Category Archives: Health

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If I Had $55 Million

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Who remembers the hit song “If I Had A Million Dollars” by the Barenaked Ladies? When that song was released back in 1988, a million bucks was a lot of dough. One line says “If I had a million dollars, I’d buy you a house.”

Yep, not these days. You’d be lucky to get a 5th wheel for that now.

I seriously think the only way my children will ever be able to buy a house is if I win the lottery. Or if I die soon so they can have MY house. I do play the B.C. Lottery every now and then just for fun, but my pension will only stretch so far.

A lot of us dream of winning the lottery, like local Scott Gurney did recently. We think about what we’d buy, where we’d travel, who else we’d share it with. But I think reality might not quite live up to the dream. (Although I wouldn’t be adverse to testing that theory…just to be sure.)

I did win $90 once. And my husband won $900. But when you add up what we must have spent on tickets up to that point…well, I think the lottery corporation came out ahead.

I knew someone many years ago who won the lottery at the tender age of 19. $100,000 was a lot of money back then and he was pretty excited. Needless to say, he learned a lot from that experience.

All kinds of new “friends” came out of the word work. He was buying everyone dinner and drinks all the time, blowing all kinds of money on whatever came to mind. And he eventually ended up bankrupt.

Nineteen is too young an age to really understand what money is or does. It’s one thing to grow up financially privileged, another to suddenly become the richest kid on the block.

But age doesn’t even matter.

The fact is that a LOT of people who win the lottery end up in dire straits. In the U.S., for instance, one third of people who win lotteries end up bankrupt after 3 to 5 years. And many lottery winners struggle with depression and suicide, or end up divorced.

We just don’t know how to deal with a big stack of cash.

I’m convinced that coming into a lot of money all of a sudden does something to the brain. Not just yours, but everyone else you know too. Some of the people around you become needy or greedy. You have to learn to say “no”, and that’s not easy.

Not only that, but when you win the lottery, your face gets splashed all over the place, complete with the giant cheque and the confetti. Everyone finds out who you are, so there’s no way you can just take your winnings and quietly slip away somewhere.

So, out come the scammers. There have already been a number of fake Facebook accounts set up pretending to be Scott Gurney, trying to swindle people out of their money one way or another. It’s disgusting.

I do wish him well and hope that, for the most part, he’s able to enjoy his winnings.

I’ve decided that I don’t really need to win the lottery. It seems like a lot more trouble than it’s worth, and I’m doing just fine, thank you very much.

What’s money anyway? There are some things you really can’t put a price on, like family, good health, great friends. A sunny day. What more could a person possibly need?

I’m already a winner!

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Do You Still Wear A Mask?

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On the first day that the mask mandate was lifted here in B.C., I had an appointment at the optometrist in the mall. I was curious to see how many people would be without masks.

I was asked to wear a mask for my appointment, so it was hanging beneath my chin as I walked toward the mall entrance. Approaching the door, I placed it securely over my face, out of habit, or maybe just because I wasn’t ready to be without one yet.

How many people would show their faces?

When I opened the door, I was immediately surprised to see three ladies about my age, without masks. They were giving the thumbs up to each other. I assumed it was because they were happy to be mask-less, but I don’t know for sure.

I had half expected all of the mask-less minions to be young and male. Maybe that came from watching and reading too many stories lately about the so-called Freedom Convoy.

My guess was that about 90% of the people in the mall that day had masks on. They were all ages, although the majority were middle-aged and older.

Since then I think that number has gone down to maybe 50-60% or less.

The truth is that, for many of us, it feels strange not wearing a mask. Two years of heightened awareness, of strict protocols and news about upticks in COVID cases, deaths, and virulent variants, have made us extremely cautious. So not wearing one just feels wrong, somehow.

It took awhile to get used to donning masks in the first place, but in the beginning we used our creativity and embraced the notion of mask wearing in public. Well, some of us did. But it was a novelty, and as usual, the novelty wore off and the reality sunk in.

They were sometimes a pain to get on or off, especially with glasses or hats or hearing aids. They made it difficult to converse with people or to understand instructions. They made your glasses fog up. Sometimes it was just that much more difficult to breathe.

You’d think we’d all be happy to be rid of them.

I have a collection of masks from many different sources over the past two years. I have Christmas masks, funny masks, N95 and KN95 masks. I have mask extenders, ties and clips. I always have one in my purse, in my car, and in my coat pocket. Just like Kleenex.

But like many people, I’m not quite ready to be without them yet. “We need to support that. We need to recognize that we all have our own risks and our own vulnerabilities,” Bonnie Henry said at the news conference announcing the end of mandate.

I would add “anxieties”.

At this point, I find myself staring at people indoors without masks. Maybe I’m just not used to seeing naked faces. I have to keep reminding myself that masks are no longer required, at least for now, and people should do what they’re comfortable doing.

As long as the mask-less offer me the same respect.

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Spring Is Coming!

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Sometimes on a dark, damp day in the middle of winter, I think about how wonderful it would be to live on a tropical island where you’d never have to face the doom and gloom of a west coast winter.

Even in other, colder Canadian cities, they seem to get more sunshine than we do. We just get a lot of grey and rain. And more grey. And more rain. This is why many of us refer to it as the “wetcoast”.

For people who move here from other parts of the world, the hardest thing to adjust to is the grey. And the rain. It’s depressing.

That’s why I like to imagine waking up to summer every morning, and living in shorts and t-shirts all year in a perpetual paradise.

But then again, if we didn’t have winter, I’d miss one of my favourite seasons: spring.

Spring means so many wonderful things: new life, new hope, a fresh start. It gets just a little warmer every day as spring approaches. The bees start to wake up, the birds begin to nest, and the air is fresh with new scents and warm feelings. It’s literally like coming alive.

When I was little, my mother used to note the date of the first crocus on our wall calendar every year. “Oh! It’s a day earlier this year!” She’d smile. And then she’d note the first daffodil and the first tulip.

On one of my walks the other day, I was so happy to see a bunch of little yellow crocuses blooming that I took a picture of it. A block or so later I bumped into someone I knew who said she had just sent a series of spring flower pictures to her relatives back east.

We “wet-coasters” love to do that, don’t we? Torture our friends and family back east with flower pictures, boasting of our early spring. We even have an official flower count here on the island, and we love to let the rest of the country know every daffodil-ic detail. Just to rub it in. This year the Greater Victoria Flower Count runs from March 9th to March 16th.

Most of us on the island know about it, but if you’ve never heard of or participated in the flower count, well, it’s exactly what it sounds like. You go outside and count flowers and then you send your numbers in. There were 65+ billion blooms counted last year. On their website, they even have a count down to the flower count.

It feels like a count down to spring, really. When I last looked, there were 29 days, 22 hours, 7 minutes and 53 seconds to go. Sigh.

Of course, real spring starts on March 20th, but sometimes it does show up a little early just to tease us. It can even show up for a few days in February sometimes. Our last couple of weeks have shown us a few lovely sunsets and sunnier days.

But then, all of a sudden, snow can rear its chilly head too…

I don’t know about you, but I need spring really badly this year. Like many out there, my family have experienced some great losses over the past few months, on top of all of the negative news that’s happening in the world right now.

And what with more and more people coming down with COVID, it has been like living in a bad dream. I now know many people who’ve been infected with COVID since the Omicron variant has taken over. Sadly, I even know one person who has died from it. It’s been another very cruel winter.

So how about it spring? Why not show up a little earlier this year just to perk us up a bit? Bring on the daffodils and tulips, the nests full of tiny chirpers, the sun and the new buds. Let’s get back to golf and picnics and…spring cleaning?

Okay, wait…