I live under a flight path. Installing Flightradar 24 has interested me in seeing which planes make the most outrageous noises overhead (Airbus 300s and Embraer e195s) but I also learned something else.

Flightradar 24 has shown me that, in general, most planes passing over before noon are landing, followed by a relative lull after noon, then mostly takeoffs in late afternoon and evening.

What always puzzled me before was that the overall sound always goes down the scale as a plane passes over. But now I know it’s irrelevant to whether the plane is going or coming. Going down the scale strongly suggests that the plane is landing, but no. It’s dopplering, coming or going.

I also need a word for the uncanny moment when a plane briefly casts you into shadow – it happens here quite often. Aeroclipse?

I haven't been to New York City for a long time, but last night I dreamed I was standing outside the fabled public library building, trying to figure out how to get from there to some other notable landmark.

My phone worked, but the responses were all deliberately obscure and jokey. I tried several times to work it out, but the answers became more and more enigmatic, after which the dream faded out. I wish I could remember what the other location was.

I posted last week about my longtime client losing his wife, and so he has. I will have to go to the funeral and now I have a new challenge, because I read her death notice and discovered they have a son called Gandalf.

They have two daughters with unremarkable names, nothing literary or fanciful... and they have a son called Gandalf. 

Nobody warned me about this – well, maybe nobody else knew either. I didn't know his wife's name till she died. I never met her.

In case I have to be introduced to Gandalf I suppose it's best I've been warned. My mother had a tendency to laugh inappropriately at funerals and I don't want to follow in her footsteps.

Samuel Macey alias Banstone was born in Fonthill Gifford, Wiltshire, in 1790 and married Charlotte Whitaker in 1809. His alias was not due to shady dealings, because his family had been using Banstone as an alternate name for generations.

Samuel was an agricultural worker. In 1830, he got caught up in the Swing Riots, which were an attempt to destroy new forms of agricultural machinery that were putting people out of work. He was convicted and sentenced to transportation, and arrived in Tasmania in May 1831, leaving behind Charlotte and their nine children.

Samuel received a pardon in 1836, but I find no documentary trail until the 1871 UK census, which shows him back in Fonthill Gifford, aged 82, living with his brother John, aged 78. Despite their age, they were both described as labourers.  Samuel's daughter Charlotte and his son Henry were still living in the village too, but his wife had died in 1851.

It was apparently unusual for transportees to go home, but Samuel managed it.

I feel there’s room for a graphic novel in here somewhere, but haven’t quite got it sussed out yet.

Samuel Macey was my great-great-grandfather’s brother. 

Next, Louisa Ryan, the first white woman in the Cariboo.

I've never figured out why, but I'm hard on keyboards. The present one is on its last legs, the letters worn off and the caps cratered. Luckily I ordered a new one a few weeks ago, and will shortly replace it with a fresh one.

I live in one of those 1920s Montreal apartments with a built-in corner cabinet – these are pervasive, with glassed doors on the top, a drawer in the middle, and a closed cupboard on the bottom. (Anyone who lives here will have seen dozens of these - they were put into every damn apartment of this vintage.)

I've been girding myself to shift out all the dead junk that has arrived in the bottom cupboard. Most of it is either old computer hardware or peripherals, or cables that are no longer useful. And conveniently, someone left two perfectly good large Rubbermaid trash bins under our staircase, ages ago. Nobody ever uses them. So I've commandeered one and am filling it with electro junk. I may need to commandeer both eventually.

Now the thing is: do I spend good money on a taxi to the Eco Centre like a good citizen, and waste an afternoon dealing with sorting this junk into bins while being shouted at by bad-tempered city employees, or do I give in to my weaker impulses and put it out with the regular garbage pickup on Friday?

There are, by the way, now 11 badly eroded keyboards in the bin. I'm about to add a 12th.

And as a footnote, not to worry. Döstädning is Swedish death cleaning, but there's nothing wrong with me. It's more a question of taking the attitude of “would anyone want this stuff if I were dead?” and then chucking out all the stuff you know they wouldn’t.

I haven't had my hair cut since Covid. 

It's a big mass of not-quite-straight but not-really-curly coarse reddish mop. I admit, it's inappropriate for a woman my age to have her hair long below her shoulderblades, but there it is. Around the house, and often when I'm outside, I twist it up into what would be a man bun, if I happened to be a man. 

I've always brushed it out every day, but somehow, over the last month or so, it has developed a massive mat in the back which I cannot deal with. I've known I'm going to have to get help with it, and I was given the name and number of a woman who makes house calls to do hair. I can't abide salons.

So I call her up, and she's coping with her father’s death, which is ongoing. She didn't actually sound devastated – he's 97, he's got to go sometime, she said. The doctor said he would die this morning, but he's hanging on!

I told her it wasn't an emergency. What else could I say?

I walked through Little Italy today, lots of people inside and out watching the Canada-Morocco match, but the vibe wasn’t like it is when the Azzurri are on the field. 

Now I’m back to doing a book cover for a collection of Marxist writings on which I’ve been asked not to put a portrait of Karl. So maybe Harpo?

One of my two main clients has been going through hell lately because his wife has cancer and has not been getting better. He called me yesterday to tell me that she has elected to have MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) next Monday.

He was crying.

I said some things, but have been thinking, one grew up with certain formulaic things to say if someone’s relative was seriously ill or had died, but no appropriate responses when told that person had scheduled their death.

I mean, you can’t say “I hope it goes well.”