Of late, family health problems have left me concerned and thus disinterested in contributing to my blog. I am missing quite a few.

Health problems and a pandemic combined seem to point into the direction of the big wait. I tell my wife, “Will we be alive by the time we can travel again?” or I say almost every day, "Yesterday was five minutes ago and tomorrow will be in three.”

Patience has its rewards. This is the reward of having the time to think. But at the same time there are those small things that annoy me simply because I have the time to notice them.

1. I hate the expression “happy belated birthday”.

2. I despise social media games or favourite-film challenge. They help to make people think they are part of some social family. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin would be appalled at noting how his concept of Nous enveloping the world has deteriorated to something no better than “Sherwin Williams Paints Cover the World”.

3. When news was provided in bits with lots of time lapses in between, deaths were not seen as what they are now. Scores of individual ambulance chasers sing praises on how the dead person’s life affected their individual lives in the choice of films, songs or how they might have picked up a cigarette butt dropped on the street by a celebrity unknown to most of us (me who are close to 80).

4. Nobody seems to understand that the Quantum Theory is about extremely tiny things, not waves, or particles but tiny bits of gelatine. A quantum leap is a very tiny one. And of course there is that other one about the decimation of an army, which is not a bad thing as it is one in ten.

I could go on with “nice pic” and how Covid19 has affected the price of kitchen sinks. But I will not.

I will simply use that hated word, belated to explain that today, July 3, 2020, coming home from dining on Chicken McNuggets (and a very good latte) with my Rosemary I spotted, on the sidewalk, almost in front of our house, this maple leaf with no nearby maple tree around. Is this a long-preserved leaf from last fall?

Whatever it might be I know it is a sign from fate to wish me a happy belated Canada Day.