In lieu of regular posting

I am having a hard time keeping up this blog these days. Called my brother on his birthday yesterday and he commented on how not up to date the blog was. I explained that I frequently thought about posting to it, mentally wrote the blog post in my head, but failed to actually post it because the photos for it were still on the camera. I didn't really want to post without some pictures, but I needed to download them and edit them for posting which would take hours, and that was the end of that. The photos are still on the camera, the mentally written blog posts gone wherever it is that such things go. Not anywhere retrievable.

So here's a synopsis of stuff I have not posted about. Some of the links are to photos or blog posts with photos in lieu of actually posting them here.

I did a three-day tutorial in weaving with Pia. She bought the yarn for me in Halifax (blue, green, purple and yellow cotton) and over three days we warped my loom with 6 yards of it. I started a sampler and will eventually weave placemats and a runner. The original plan was for tea towels, but the colours just seemed better suited to placemats. We had a good time and it was very satisfying to get the loom set up. Coincidentally it was during the rare conjunction of three sunny days in a row.

Yes there are photos on the camera.

I've been working on both the Acadia Community Farm (and my own little plot there) and my own garden in the back yard. On the Farm we've been digging and composting beds and planting and mulching seedlings. Because the spring here was so soggy we did not get to start until very late in May and the soil is a very heavy wet clay. While my own plot is only 10' x 10' and very quickly dug and planted, the community field is very large---I'm sure it is well over an acre---and there is no rototiller so it is all being done by hand. Very slow, backwrenching work. Most of the Farmers are young students who are up to the task, but for some of us older types this is not pleasant work at all. I put in onions, garlic, squash and beans. I was going to plant potatoes, but decided against it.

In the backyard garden I put in four garden frames and a long narrow bed against the playset. I am thinking of turning the swingset portion of the playset into a greenhouse, and thought I would plant pole beans against the south-facing A-frame of the swingset. The pole beans are not doing well. I got two garden frames set up with horse manure, topsoil and ash from the woodstove and planted a bunch of things (peas, beans, tomatoes, carrots, onions, broccoli, herbs, a variety of fresh greens). I filled two more garden frames with manure intending to leave them to rot until next year, but changed my mind and decided to plant them this year. Which meant taking out some of the manure and replacing it with topsoil and wood ash. I'm about halfway through planting those frames now.

In the meantime the people who own the field behind my house mowed the field and left the mowings in windrows. I thought they were going to turn it into hay. But after a couple of days they pushed all the dried windrows into the bushes surrounding the field. So I went out with my wheelbarrow and collected a bunch of it from the bushes nearest my backyard. I've piled all that in the swingset area. Not sure yet what I will do with that, you can't really use hay for mulch because of all the grass seed in it, but at the very least it will mean I don't have to mow the grass under the swingset anymore.

My good friend Johanna came to visit for 12 days from out west. She had not been this far east since she was a teenager (she hitchhiked from Montreal to PEI at age 16 because someone told her she could get work on a farm there, that turned out to be a bit of a stretch). We spent the time visiting some of my favourite places and friends. Photos on the camera.

The weather was little better than when Sam was here in May, mostly wet and cold. Johanna packed for the trip better than Sam did so she did not have to borrow clothing as Sam did, however a lot of shorts and tanktops never got used.

The weatherman here has become totally unreliable. They change the forecast drastically on almost an hourly basis. In the morning it says it will clear and be sunny by noon, that never happens until maybe suppertime. If you're lucky. They say rainy and cold today but sunny the rest of the week, and then the next day the forecast is the same: rainy and cold today but sunny the rest of the week, WE PROMISE! We've had more actual rain and more forecasted sunniness than I can tell you.

A local friend was diagnosed with metastasized breast cancer, a bunch of people got together to provide meals for her and her family over the past few weeks. I managed one meal and one visit but then I had company and couldn't seem to spare the time. Her cancer progressed rapidly and she died last week at home surrounded by family. I felt badly that I did not get in to see her in the last couple of weeks, especially after I promised that I would. There will be a Celebration of Life for her later this week, she planned it before her death and requested that everyone wear bright colours and be in a celebratory mood.

The last few weeks at the film co-op they were asking for someone to volunteer to put movie trailers of upcoming films into Powerpoint to show before the feature film. I thought someone else would volunteer but no one did so finally I did, thinking how hard can it be? Well, not so easy as it turns out, but interesting. I get to spend time in the projection room fiddling with the equipment. Who knows, maybe one day I can even help select the films that are shown. In the meantime I have to get up to speed on Powerpoint; I was never that proficient with it and now, several software versions later, I am quite out of touch. But hey, how hard can it be? Don't answer that.

Skype-called Kim and got to see Eva trucking around like nobody's business. Ten months old and already standing on her own, albeit for only a few seconds at a time. She pushes a wheeled toy affair around the living room and "furniture-walks" everywhere. She and Brewster the Shih-tsu have become good buddies. Brewster has to be reminded occasionally that just because Eva is mobile does not mean he can now jump up on her, but it won't be long.

Sam liked Nova Scotia a lot (so did Johanna). So much so that he got himself a temporary job in Halifax and is coming back at the end of July. He plans to bring his two giant malamutes with him. Isaac and Gretel are also planning to visit at the end of July, and they are bringing Dobby, the giant boxer. Three giant dogs, two of whom do not play well with others. So I am scrambling to fence my yard.

Around here, fenced yards are uncommon, one could in theory walk the entire street through backyards on either side of the road. I am trying to strike some kind of balance between sturdy, not too unattractive, and cheap. Ha ha.

It is Sam's plan to leave one of his dogs with me when he returns west, as he has moved into town (Windsong) and two giant dogs are just too much to handle in his new digs. We discussed various options and solutions with their various pros and cons and this is what we have settled on. Not perfect but maybe the lesser of a bunch of evils. For some.

Isaac was telling me that he and Gretel were thinking that their life has become so stressed that they needed a break from Dobby and were hoping I would take him for a few months, however Sam got to me first and I just can't see my way to taking on two giant dogs, one of whom does not play well with others. You never know though, if Hapi and Dobby hit it off in July, I might consider it. But hard to imagine that. With Hiro around Hapi will have eyes only for him and she doesn't know they are about to be permanently separated. It's a dog's life.

Sam will be moving into my basement for three months while he works in Halifax. He will commute, hopefully by some sort of van pool. The job is minimum wage, but working on something he cares about. All told I think he will lose money on the project but there will be intangible benefits. He has thought this all through and it is after all his life.

I do fear for my garden though. Three giant dogs...

Two books I've read

I found this draft posting from a couple of months ago and thought it was still kind of interesting so I upgraded it from Draft to Published. These are books I read in February that I really enjoyed.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand (2010).

This is the story of Louie Zamperini, who lived quite the amazing life as he moved from being a juvenile delinquent to Olympic runner to warplane crash survivor in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to Japanese POW. The story is absolutely rivetting, I lost a night's sleep because I couldn't put it down at bedtime.

This guy, born in 1917 and still alive, lived through the most harrowing life-threatening experiences, first floating over 2,000 miles in a life raft during wartime and then surviving a Japanese prisoner of war camp where they thought the Geneva Convention was for sissies. He returned home to the United States at the end of the war, an emotionally scarred man who scared the heck out of his beautiful new wife with his terrible nightmares and heavy drinking. Fortuitously he went to a Billy Graham revival and turned his life over to God, which apparently saved him, allowing him to forgive his worst POW camp tormenter and move on in life without terrorizing the people who loved him.

As an enthralling true-life adventure story, this book takes the cake. The author, Laura Hillenbrand, previously wrote Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001), so she is no stranger to best seller lists. Once I picked it up I couldn't put it down until I finished it, losing a night's sleep in the process. The librarian also couldn't resist it either when it arrived at the library as the result of my interlibrary loan request. She borrowed it after I returned it.

Occupied Canada: A Young White Man Discovers His Unsuspected Past, by Robert Hunter and Robert Calihoo (1991)

This is the amazing story of Robert Calihoo, as told to Robert Hunter. Hunter was (he died in 2005) a journalist and one of the founders and the first president of Greenpeace; Calihoo is a First Nations man who for the first ten years of his life was raised by his white grandmother and did not know of his Indian heritage. On the death of his grandmother he was quickly returned to his birth mother, a woman he never knew until then. She also was white but had had three children by an Indian man on the Calihoo Reserve.

Life with his birth mother and her current partner (a white man) was a rough shock for the young boy and things quickly deteriorated for him. Eventually, as a teenager he sought out his birth father. He called 411 from a public phone booth and asked for him by name, but he didn't know his location so the directory assistance woman spent a good long time searching for the name in the listings for the entire province. Several hours later his father drove up to the public phone booth where Robert made that fateful call. For the first time in his life Robert realized his father was an Indian.

For a brief period Robert lived on the reserve with his new found father. It was an extremely rough life in the dire poverty typical of such reserves, but the highlight for Robert was going hunting and fishing in the bush with his Dad. Hunting and fishing in the bush was a wonderful life, and doing it with his father was icing on the cake. A far cry from his middle class upbringing in his grandmother's suburban house.

Through a bizarre turn of events Robert and all of the other Calihoos lost the reserve and ended up on the streets of Edmonton. Robert soon found that the only way to survive was through a life of crime, and the next dozen years or so were spent in and out of prison. However, during that time Robert pursued an education, eventually graduating with a university degree.

One life project Robert took on was to regain the old Calihoo Reserve that had been lost. By the end of the book we still don't know if he was successful in that project, but in the process he found out a lot about his ancestry and how exactly the reserve was lost. In essence it was stolen from them illegally.

The history of the Calihoos was fascinating, they were actually descended from Iroquois who migrated to Alberta in search of land. Two brothers, Louis and Bernard Karhiio, travelled all the way from what is now Quebec to the Rockies in search of unclaimed land, that is, land that no one, not even the native First Nations, had ever laid claim to. They actually managed to find a large parcel of land that fit the bill, in the Rocky Mountain foothills of modern day Alberta. So far as anyone knows this is the only piece of land on the entire continent that had never been claimed by any nation or tribe as part of their territory up until that time (the 1790s). The brothers returned to their village of Kahnawake just outside of present-day Montreal and convinced some family members to return with them to settle that piece of land.

The Karhiios (their name eventually changed to Calihoo) settled there, built log homes and proceeded to hunt, trap and raise crops and livestock. Unlike the Plains Indians, the Iroquois were ancient farmers. They were very successful in their new setting. Unfortunately they got caught up in the troubles that Plains Indians and Metis faced at the hands of the Canadians seeking to expand westward to the Pacific. When the Canadians made treaties with the Indians, it was assumed that the Calihoos were local Crees. To the Calihoos there was no advantage at the time to setting the Canadians straight on their identity. They took their treaty settlement and returned to farming.

But then the bison were hunted out and plague came to the Prairies. The Iroquois Calihoos were not dependent on the bison and had acquired some immunity to European diseases, but not enough. In the end they were just as ravaged and destitute as the rest of the Plains tribes, vastly reduced in population and ability to support themselves.

The duplicity of the Canadians who negotiated and enforced the treaties, who changed the terms of the treaties without notice and who created the Indian Act to further oppress native First Nations is described and documented in this book, as well as the racial discrimination and abuse heaped on the lazy drunken Indian. It is not an easy book to read, but Robert Calihoo's struggle to rise above all that is inspiring.

With a little research on the web, I found the website for the Calihoo Band, now called the Michel Band (after their first chief Michel, son of Louie Karhiio). Reading on this website, it would appear that the fight to regain government recognition as a bona fide Indian band is still in litigation.

What struck me about this book was both the personal struggle of the author and the peek into an aspect of history I would never have been aware of otherwise. When we think about the history of exploration of North America, we automatically assume the explorers were white Europeans, it never occurs to us that there might have been aboriginal explorers and settlers too. The Karhiio brothers knew a lot more about the lay of the land than the white explorers they guided, but they had the same curiosity and sense of adventure in exploring new territory. Their superior knowledge of the aboriginal peoples already occupying the land they explored helped them find what they were looking for, a bit of land to claim for their own.

Kathleen, the dancing crossing guard

Kathleen lives in my old Toronto neighbourhood. She's the crossing guard for my grandson Tristan's school. She's also his little brother Phelan's favourite babysitter. Can't imagine why.

Oh what fun...