On a spectacular day such as this – an absolutely clear blue sky with a faint breeze and 25°C, I cannot resist the need to record my buoyancy. Nor is the sprightliness the product of anything other than life’s natural ebullience. Granted, nothing has gone wrong; and I did score well on my Vita Mahjong game with Level 10 success.
Vita Mahjong is an Exclusive Puzzle Game of Tile Matching. We (Google Play) are thrilled to present the mahjong solitaire game that combines innovation with classic gameplay. It offers large tiles and a user-friendly interface compatible with pads and phones. Our goal is to provide a relaxing yet mentally engaging gaming experience, particularly focused on older adults.
I only wish I had learned of this novel game in time to have shared it with my late mother, whose natural impediments I now share – increasingly as each day advances. Being overall redundant – that is, unable to practice one’s lifetime preoccupations (whether cooking or practicing law) – this simple game affords possibly endless hours of amusement and collateral enforcement of focus and memory.
However before I succumbed to what as yet I dignify as little more than an idle game (notwithstanding its many attributes), I rode my electric tricycle 6.03 Kms about the neighbourhood this morning after breakfast. It was an exceedingly pleasant outing – warm and dry. Oddly there seemed to be a dearth of traffic on a Monday morning. Perhaps it is testament to the changing face of employment when more and more people are working from home instead of having to endure the horror of early morning traffic into the bowels of the city.
As I pedalled about the neighbourhood I suddenly heard the voice of a gentleman who was sitting on his front veranda. He beaconed me. We had met many years before in connection with a real estate deal in town. He’s a former estate agent. When I turned my direction and approached him as he walked towards me, he brought up a matter that is one of the most esoteric of real property law; namely, the easement. In this instance it was complicated by its significance to two separate properties with competing interests.
An easement is a nonpossessory right to use or enter onto the real property of another without possessing it. It is “best typified in the right of way which one landowner, A, may enjoy over the land of another, B”. Easements are helpful for providing a ‘limited right to use another person’s land for a stated purpose. For example, an easement may allow someone to use a road on their neighbor’s land to get to their own.’
As you might expect, I quickly descended to my limitation regarding legal advice; namely, a blanket prohibition, being as I am retired from the Law Society of Upper Canada and without the benefit of Errors & Omissions Insurance. But in the interest of providing at least some assistance, I suggested that he consider speaking to the Land Registrar at the local Land Registry office to enquire about the inscrutable dilemma which had arisen. As I further remarked, in the end it is the ambition of every real estate lawyer to align with the preference of the Land Registrar as to the sufficiency and clarity of every document registered within the now entirely electronic system accessible on demand from anywhere in the world. The Province of Ontario was a world leader in the creation of this magnificent system; and – without a word of a lie – Lanark County (because of our relatively small population and predominantly rural area) was one of the first beta test sights for the technology. We far outdistanced the City of Toronto for example. They would not come within the system until two years later. My membership number was, if I recall, in the low 200s for the entire province. I hasten to add however that the allegiance to the Land Registrar was not tempered by the violation of any historic or logical deduction from the ancient playbook. Lawyers, though subject to the Land Registrar’s mandate, were never expected to side-step what their own training demanded. I have for example more than once contradicted the Land Registrar because of some detail he or she had overlooked. The bureaucratic and legal duties do not always align; but never have I encountered intransigence.
The word beta – as a curious aside – is related to the Vita Mahjong game I mentioned at the outset. It is a correspondence I shan’t explore further other than to relate the quotation below. My absorption of serendipity is I confess boundless.
Beta (uppercase Β, lowercase β, or cursive ϐ; Ancient Greek: βῆτα, romanized: bē̂ta or Greek: βήτα, romanized: víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet.
At this time of year it is not uncommon to witness not only the flourishing growth of plants and flowers but also the return to the pavement of those fanciful vehicles hidden from the snow during winter. I speak of the Corvette, the Mustang, the Camaro and the Porsche, among others. In my opinion many of the vehicles are either superfluous or beyond their prime. All of them though appear to enjoy the demonstration of noise and speed. When I conducted my usual delivery to the car wash and back along the Appleton Side Road, I lapsed into my curmudgeonly behaviour by preserving the speed limit. Much to the annoyance of those springtime drivers who, after tailing me inordinately close to my rear bumper, they then shot like a bolt out of a canon to pass – resulting of course within seconds to find themselves obstructed by a Cavanagh cement truck on a curve. It took all my thought and application to restrain any resemblance of rage – but it is now typical of the contrast between youth and the old fogey on the highway. Plus ça change!
Accustomed as I am to this annoyance on the roads, I qualify the disturbance by recalling that not everyone has my life of indolence (a shard of existence which may be more or less limited than I can possibly know). Yet keeping one’s devotions alive, notwithstanding the surrounding variables, is the only way to fulfill one’s destiny. I’ve had my Mustangs and convertibles; I’ve toyed with speed limits; I’ve hurried from here to there and back again. Today however was perfectly conjoined with my more ambulant prospectives.
Upon returning home from Stittsville I immediately perched in a comfortable chair on the balcony, directly facing the blazing afternoon sun. I fell asleep and awoke only when some tiny insect reminded me where I was – and that I was becoming uncomfortably warm in the sunshine.