Mzodell's Page

A different kind of winter

2012-01-19T11:56:00.001-04:00

Today it is sunny, bright and freezing. No snow on the ground here, not even residual snowbanks from previous snowfalls. Yesterday it was sunny and warm, whatever snow was laying around yesterday morning was long gone by evening. And that is pretty much the weather pattern for the past month. We've had a couple of substantial snowfalls, followed almost immediately by substantial rain, warm sunny days and then into the deepfreeze.

Ice is a big problem, I have put cleats on my rubber boots. Rubber for the melting days, cleats for the freezing days.

If it weren't for the non-stop succession of colds (I am into the third this month alone) I would be happy about not having to shovel snow from the driveway. Looking at photos from this time last year I know that bare ground was nowhere to be seen, shovelling was the major physical activity of the month. However I was not sick.

Hapi still needs her daily walks but we are down to one a day, I no longer have the energy for anything more than that. The back yard is filling up with her poop. Good thing it is frozen today.

A couple of days ago I went out for lunch with a couple of friends at the local Big Stop (Irving gas station restaurant). Lin and I had Haddie Bits, Val had turkey soup. The Haddie Bits were good (deep fried bits of haddock sitting atop a pile of fries, coleslaw on the side). But by the time I got home I had no energy left at all, could not even put leftovers in the microwave for supper. Went to bed and slept 12 hours and still felt exhausted. I am marginally better now, but still a ways to go, and I am giving up hope that this will be the end of it. I am quite certain my immune system is shot and when I start feeling a bit better I will be felled by whatever cold virus is lying in wait for yet another round of this miserable business.

A fellow I met while walking Hapi in the Kentville Ravine says he is sick for the first time in years (he called in sick at work but would rather be out in the ravine with the dogs than home in bed, I don't blame him) and his wife is in the same boat as me, her third or fourth cold of the season. He blames the weather, the up and down of it all. I am becoming a believer.

I got a Kindle for Christmas (a late Christmas gift), what marvelous timing! Reading is my principle activity besides sleep.

I am torn between the handiness of the Kindle and the familiarity of real books. It will take me a while I think to find free ebooks on line that I want to read, and the fact that I can't use the Kindle to read library books is a bit of a drawback. Apparently Amazon allows US library books to be read on the Kindle, but not Canadian. Amazon seems very reluctant to move beyond the American market, unlike Apple.

But still, it is extremely user-friendly once you get used to the limitations. And the usage paradigm is quite different from the iPhone/iPad/home computer paradigm. But once you get used to that it is fine.

I've shown the Kindle to a couple of friends and they immediately try to navigate by touching the screen. Since this model is the most primitive of the Kindles, touching the screen gets you nothing but fingerprints. And there is no keyboard either so initially it is a little mystifying as to how exactly one uses the thing. It has a soft keyboard of course, displayed onscreen by pressing the keyboard button, but the characters are not arranged in the familiar QWERTY style. Another learning step. Amazon seems to go out of their way to get you to understand that their product is totally, TOTALLY, different. The screen is not backlit, so you cannot read it in dim light any more than you could read a real book.

So far I have not taken the Kindle out of the house because I am scared of its fragility. I went to Staples to get a protective case for it but they were sold out; apparently a lot of us got Kindles for Christmas. So I am waiting for them to be in stock again. And for me to have the energy to go out and buy one.

Sucks to be sick.

Janus, looking backward and forward

2012-01-06T22:44:00.002-04:00

Apparently my brain goes to sleep shortly after supper. The longer I can postpone supper, the longer I can keep it awake, but I think there might be a limit to that.

I was supposed to go to a birthday party tonight, a friend's 50th, but I could not get up the energy. I feel bad about that, but I don't think it would have been much use to force myself out the door. I'd like to think this is the tail-end of the 'flu but I am pretty sure it is not, I think I am pretty much over that.

Today was one of those crisp bright January days with a light dusting of snow on the ground, just enough to be blindingly bright. Hapi and I went for a brief walk along the Gaspereau canal, a kind of short elevated canal along one side of the Gaspereau Valley. It's about halfway up the side of the valley so you get quite a view from there, and you're mostly looking down on treetops on the lower side of the canal. The canal is not frozen.

Most of the electric energy produced in Nova Scotia is from coal, but there are a few small hydroelectric dams scattered through the province. The Gaspereau canal connects two small power dams. No boats use the canal, it is only about one kilometer long and there is no place to put a boat in, the sides are too steep. In the summer kids jump into the water from the one bridge that crosses the canal, but that is the only use the canal gets other than power production.

Sometimes it seems like the year has two beginning months, January and September. September always seems like a beginning, being the start of school after the summer I guess. And January is the official start of the year. You'd think the first month of spring ought to be the start, not a month into winter. Anyway, winter here doesn't really start until January. Might have a couple of good snowstorms in November or December, but January is the real start. In January there is nothing to look forward to except winter, at least two or three months of it. Sure, the days do get longer, and that is definitely a blessing, but it's still winter.

I've been trying to think about what I have accomplished in the past year and what I hope to do in the year coming. It's hard to think about accomplishments, I had a fairly aggressive list of things I wanted to do and hardly any of them got done. I was going to do so many things around the house that need work. A lot of painting, a couple of building projects, a few repairs...

The fence got built. Sam replaced the kitchen faucet. I got my loom set up and took a weaving workshop. I joined a choir and then unjoined. I got a dog. I stacked 4 cord of firewood, a cord and a half of it had to be stacked twice because I had to move it from inside the woodshed to out behind in the lean-to.

I built 4 raised garden beds and grew some vegetables, I planted 6 berry bushes (raspberry, blueberry and gooseberry), bunches of chives, strawberry plants and asparagus. I froze some of the vegetables and a whack of strawberries and blueberries (not my own), I made quince jam from 6 quinces I got off a bush in front of the house. There would have been more than 6 if I had not done an overzealous pruning job before I knew that it was a quince bush.

I also have a plum tree that does not produce plums, I thought it was because it is a type of plum that requires two trees to pollinate each other. But apparently it did produce one plum that a young man visiting next door managed to snag and eat before I realized what it was.

I got into artisanal bread baking and have developed a sourdough recipe that works pretty well. I bake about one loaf a week. I don't eat a lot of bread.

I volunteered at the foodbank and at the film society. At the foodbank I help bag up food for distribution every couple of weeks or so with 5 or 6 other women. There are over 90 families in our town that use this foodbank, up from around 60 during the summer.

At the film society I help put together a short presentation of movie trailers as previews of upcoming shows. It's a complicated process, but sort of interesting. I now have my own key to the projection room. The projectionist, also a volunteer, is a quiet but multi-talented fellow who is among other things a playwright, a director, a dancer, and a fiddler. We kid him about his hidden talents, that the next thing we know he's going to reveal that he is also a NASA space engineer or something. He says not.

I had a bunch of visitors, friends and family, who came to see my new-old place. I took care of my son's two dogs for a couple of months. I visited PEI twice for a couple of days each time. I went kayak camping once.

I think that pretty much sums up the past year. Mostly it seemed to me that it was about getting settled here.

The to-do list from last year is still around, I still need to paint and repair and so forth. I would like to expand the garden, from 4 beds to 8. I would like to get out more often with the kayak, although how exactly I am going to do that with this dog I don't know. She really does not like being left alone. I would like to go to Cape Breton. This winter I hope to get out skiing and snowshoeing.

I think I would like to be a little more focussed in the coming year, but what exactly that means I don't know.

I was in the Kentville Ravine the other day with Hapi, we ran into a woman I have met there before with her Great Dane puppy, Bodhi. This "puppy" weighs 137 lbs. Last time we met Bodhi kept trying to get Hapi to play with him and Hapi just growled at him. This went on for almost half an hour before Hapi finally caved and played chase with Bodhi. This second time Bodhi again tried to get Hapi to play and Hapi again growled at him. Only this time Bodhi appeared kind of upset by that, he started barking at her and leaning up against me. He leaned so hard that I had to step back a couple of paces.

His owner was watching this and said, I think he is trying to push you away from Hapi. We wondered what Bodhi was up to, but it really did seem like he was pushing me away from Hapi. Almost as if he thought Hapi was dangerous and he was trying to protect me from her. Or else maybe he thought Hapi would play with him if he could just separate us.

Last time we met Bodhi's owner asked me what my passion was. Kind of an odd question and I couldn't answer it. I said I was too much of a dilettante to have a passion for one thing in particular. She said her passion was for gardening and creatures, she likes plants and animals. I think it would be nice to have a passion for one thing, I just have too many interests and not enough time or focus.

I am just too scattered, too much of a dilettante.

Christmas with the 'flu

2011-12-28T17:57:00.001-04:00

Christmas Day at the town reservoir.

Nova Scotia was one of the few places in southern Canada that had a White Christmas. We had a snow storm just before Christmas and then it turned cold so the snow stayed. Christmas Eve was a lovely starry night and Christmas Day was sunny and white. I unfortunately was down with the 'flu. Got the 'flu shot the week before and then got the 'flu. So much for the shot. It is supposed to take a couple of weeks to kick in, so I guess I should have gotten it sooner.

Thanks to the 'flu I missed out on a dinner party, a dance, and the Christmas Eve carolling service in the Harbour. Christmas Day I was damned if I was going to miss out on turkey dinner too, so I dragged myself out to the Community Dinner. The dinner was great, but previously when I was still healthy I had volunteered for the after-dinner clean-up crew and that did me in.

As it turned out, there were plumbing issues that resulted in no hot water and a malfunctioning dish sterilizer, so I don't know how good a job we did. Even though we knew it was kind of useless we ran everything through the sterilizer anyway, and that was a major bottleneck; we spent a lot of time standing around waiting while it sterilized each batch of dishes in cold water. Cleaning cooking pots with cold water is not fun either.

There was a lot of leftover vegetables. We joked about having a community mashed potato dinner in January.

One of the organizers, George, offered me a leftover jug of cider and I wanted that cider badly but it meant I would need a ride home because I didn't have the energy to walk home with a half-gallon of cider. And at that point the only rides on offer were from people who were staying to the bitter end of the clean-up.

I really should have abandoned the cider and just gone home. But I didn't. So Boxing Day I paid for my folly with yet more sickness, and added a Boxing Day open house to the list of Missed Events Due to 'Flu. On the other hand, I have had a nice pot of mulled cider on the wood stove for the last week and I am grateful for that. I also got a second turkey dinner as take-away after the Christmas Dinner, and I had made several pots of soup before I got sick (potato-leek, split-pea, and red-pepper-and-kefir), so I did pretty well in the food department. One friend gave me a nut cake for Christmas, I bought a fruitcake and made some chocolate macaroons, and my neighbour gave me shortbread cookies.

Last night the rain storm started and was still going strong this afternoon. All our Christmas snow is gone. And I am still sick. The nice thing about the rain though is that I don't have to walk the dog. She has no desire to press the issue. She has abandoned her doghouse and is sprawled across the livingroom floor on her back.

I've taken an interest in the history of the "Dark Ages", I got a couple of books and a video on the topic from the library. The video was kind of fun, it was called Medieval Lives and is a BBC series hosted by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. There's a good description of the series in Wikipedia.

The content is serious but the presentation is as funny as one might expect of a Monty Python alumnus. I kind of like Jones' reason for doing this series, that he wanted to get his own back at the Renaissance. He deals with the smug assumption that the Renaissance was so much better than what preceded it. He also says that a lot of what we think we know about the Middle Ages is actually 19th century propaganda. I guess with the Industrial Revolution creating so much misery for so many people, it was a way to convince people that things were so much better than they were back in the Dark Ages.

The books I got are histories by Thomas Cahill, one of them being How the Irish Saved Civilization. It focuses in particular on the period immediately following the collapse of the Roman Empire, which is the period I am most interested in right now. It's hard to find books on that time period through the local library system. And apparently, according to some reading I've been doing on the internet, there is a lack of english-language books on the topic in general. Apparently European historians are more interested than English historians in that time period.

Some photos of my dog...

After three months of visiting this pond in the Acadia woods, Hapi has finally spotted the goldfish that live there.

Hapi strolling in the Kentville Ravine.

Hapi in her doghouse.

Excuses: Hapi and the comfy chair

2011-12-17T23:13:00.006-04:00

I am not doing well keeping up a blog. I am thinking about dropping it.

On the one hand I think of interesting things to write about here, but invariably at times when writing is not an option---in the bath, walking the dog---anywhere but in front of a keyboard and monitor. I have had two people in my family recently comment on the lack of blog posting, so the pressure is certainly starting to mount, but that seems only to make matters worse, what the heck would I write about?

So for anyone who cares about such things, I am fine, the lack of posting is not due to any unpleasantness other than an inability to think of what to write about.

There was a period of time in the fall when I was busy getting ready for winter, then there was another period when I was getting ready for Christmas. That one is still going on. Christmas to me is kind of like American presidential elections, it goes on far too long. By the time the actual event rolls around I am thoroughly bored by the whole thing and can't wait for it to be over and done with.

January, January, let's here it for January!

I have had my dog Hapi without Hiro for just over a month, it is working out fine as long as I don't think too far into the future. People ask me how will I do such-and-such now that I have this dog and I don't know. Maybe I won't.

Hapi is very much an outdoor dog, she is very reluctant to come indoors. But I have to force her indoors when I go out without her, because when I leave her alone outdoors she howls. She doesn't howl indoors. So if I want her to come indoors just because I want her company, she won't come because she thinks it is preparatory to leaving without her. Can't win.

Sam says Hiro is doing fine, he likes being indoors and Sam is not yet working so he can spend lots of time with him. He does want to know when I plan to bring Hapi for a visit though.

I have to laugh.

Sam, you gave me a dog that pretty much precludes travel and you want to know when I will be travelling? Uh, not anytime soon I think.

I don't know if I mentioned this in a previous post, but a couple of months ago I used a Groupon coupon to purchase a kind of lazyboy armchair. It is incredibly comfortable. I have it in the living room in front of the wood stove and I have to say I spend way too much time in it. Once it is tilted back I have no desire to go anywhere or do anything else. Just getting up to throw another log on the fire is such a bother! At least I do have to take Hapi for a daily walk.

We have two main places to walk, the Acadia Woods and the Kentville Ravine. There are several other places to walk as alternatives, and I also take her along shopping or going to the library or post office. There are several stores where they keep dog treats for visiting dogs, and Hapi now knows all the places that will give her treats.

Recently we were in a long line-up at the post office and everyone wanted to pet her. The postal lady came out and gave her a treat, and then a customer in the line-up said, Where's my treat? So the postal guy came out and gave him a cookie.

Well, didn't that create an uproar, we all wanted our treats! No one else got a cookie though, but Hapi did get another treat. The post office isn't fair.

The Acadia Woods are part of Acadia University lands, there are several trails and it is only a 5 minute walk from my house so access is really easy. We rarely run into other dogs or walkers there. There is a small pond, it used to be the main source of water for the college in the 19th century, and currently it is occupied by four goldfish. I understand that they have been there for at least a couple of years. I like to go there to check on them. The pond is at the far south end of the Acadia lands and surrounded by fairly muddy woodland, so not a lot of people go there. A good thing from the perspective of the goldfish I think.

In general, a walk through the Acadia Woods involves about an hour of up and down and across several brooks. Hapi likes brooks. She's not into swimming but she does like wading in and drinking from ponds and brooks.

The Kentville Ravine is an absolutely marvelous place, I am quite in love with it. I would go more often but it is a 15-20 minute drive on the highway to get there. The ravine is part of the Kentville Agricultural Research Station lands and is probably one of the very few stands of old growth forest in the province. Big trees. A brook winds through the ravine and the trail crosses it several times. There are some small waterfalls on the brook and the ravine is steep-sided. There is little or no undergrowth in the forest there so you can see a long distance and wander off the trail to explore if you like. It is very popular with dog owners so invariably we run into at least one other dog when we go, and often there are whole packs of dogs there.

If you want to see what it is like, go to Youtube and search for "kentville doggie heaven".

I started taking Hapi there after Hiro left in order to socialize her. As long as the two dogs were together they had little use for other dogs and after Hiro was gone Hapi really didn't know how to get along with other dogs. She learned fast in the Kentville Ravine. She now really enjoys meeting other dogs and I have stopped worrying about how she might behave when she does. She is a large dominant dog who won't back down if another dog wants to pick a fight, but she is not interested in starting anything. In the ravine, dogs just want to have fun, Hapi has lots of opportunity to play.

When we don't encounter other dogs we explore some of the side trails, or simply go off-trail and wander. I've met a few people there and had some interesting conversations as well. So far, nothing but very positive experiences for both of us. And of course walking in a forest of big trees is in itself a nice thing to do.

Including travel time, a walk in the Kentville Ravine usually involves a couple of hours or more. If I add a shopping trip to the expedition, then it is in effect the whole day (keeping in mind that at this time of year a "day" doesn't last very long).

Between Hapi and my comfy chair, not a lot else is going on in my life, and I am quite content with that. Maybe too content. Just not a heckuva lot to write about.

An evening of trains

2011-11-07T20:54:00.001-04:00

Last weekend there was a great show at the local theatre about the history of the local trains. The Mud Creek Boys sang railway songs and Gary Ness showed slides of his personal collection of local trains. Gary told the story of trains here in the Annapolis Valley.

The DAR (Dominion Atlantic Railway) was formed to run trains on tracks built in Nova Scotia in the mid 1800s, before Confederation. The railway between Halifax and Yarmouth via the Valley was started in 1857 and completed in 1869, two years after Confederation, with the exception of The Missing Link. The tracks were started at both ends and should have met in the Valley, but just outside of Digby quicksand was discovered and there did not seem to be a way around it. So a small section was left unbuilt until some time later. It became known as The Missing Link.

DAR workers were very proud of their work. They built their own locomotives in Kentville, and every locomotive was painted in DAR colours (gold and maroon) with the DAR Land of Evangeline emblem on the coal car. Every locomotive was given a name which it bore on a big brass plate on its side.

Canadian Pacific wanted an Atlantic port and tried to force Canadian National to sell its tracks to them, they even tried to get the federal government to force the sale, but it didn't happen. So instead, CP bought out the DAR which leased the CN tracks to Halifax, thus giving CP access to Halifax. CP told DAR workers that they had to make their locomotives conform to CP standards, which meant no DAR emblem, no DAR colours and no brass plates and locomotive names. The DAR workers were unwilling to conform and I guess Nova Scotia was just too far away for CP to enforce their rules. Every time the DAR got a new CP locomotive they painted it gold and maroon, gave it a name and affixed a brass plate with that name.

Gary explained how steam engines worked, and the complications of freight and passenger hauling, whether in separate trains or in mixed trains. The pictures were fascinating, all these old trains in our Valley. He could often name the engineers in the pictures.

The audience was packed. At the intermission many of us turned to each other to share our own stories of the trains. In 1994 the last train ran through the Valley. The tracks are still there but they have been left to rust and weed over. In some parts of the rail system there are trees growing between the tracks now. It is a shame.

When I lived here before we had the Dayliner, a train that ran twice a day between Yarmouth and Halifax. You could board it in the morning and head to Halifax, and return home on the evening train. It was not suitable for commuting to work but you could definitely go for a day of shopping and just hanging out in The Big City. I used to take the kids; travel on the train with kids was so much easier than on a bus because you could let the kids run around, you didn't have to try to keep them in their seats for two hours.

It turns out that CP's lease on the tracks was only for 99 years, and that lease expires next year. Who knows what will happen then?

After the show several people headed out to a Hallowe'en dance at the Old O, and a few of us went next door to the pub. This pub is very busy on Monday nights (standing room only!) but pretty quiet on a Saturday. I had a glass of local Muscat wine and someone else ordered a Beer Sampler. For less than the price of my Muscat, he got six little glasses of house-brewed beer, all different. I tried the AVA and the Raven. My favourite is still the Gaspereau Pilsner, but the Raven isn't bad. The stout does not compare well with Guinness, so best not to bother. They also brew seasonal beers, so there should have been a Pumpkin beer in the Sampler, but they were all out.

After the storm...

2011-10-31T21:07:00.003-03:00

A doggy reunion and Lebanese brain food

2011-10-31T10:04:00.002-03:00

On Saturday Hapi and I went to Ingramport on the South Shore where Sam and Hiro have been living for the past month. The weather forecast for Sunday was wet and stormy and Saturday was cold but sunny, and since Sam is leaving Ingramport on Hallowe'en I thought it might be my last chance to visit there. Sam told me about the Rails to Trails trail he has been walking Hiro on and I thought I'd like to see it. Not to mention Sam's delightful cottage on the sea there.

We separated Hapi and Hiro at the end of September, to see how it would go while Sam was still in the province. Hiro and Sam moved to Ingramport and has only been back to visit once, at Thanksgiving.

Hapi and Hiro had as excited and happy a dog reunion as you can imagine when we walked into Sam's cottage. They leaped on each other, an orgy of licking and biting and jumping on each other. Then Hapi did the same for Sam. Hiro's a bit more reserved with humans, he rubbed against my legs and leaned heavily against me, almost toppling me with his weight.

Sam and I left the dogs to their reunion and went out for a late lunch at a local Lebanese restaurant. I don't know what its name is, a kind of ramshackle stop on the highway that sells groceries and ice cream cones and advertises its Lebanese restaurant that does not appear much used. The entrance to the restaurant was locked, and only led into the kitchen in any case. We went around to the grocery store and entered through there.

The woman who runs the place unlocked the door to the kitchen to let us in, but we were already in. She gave us menus and directed us to the dining room.

The menu said, "Lots of Lebanese Food!" and that was it. No prices, no hints as to what exactly they served.

I asked her what kind of Lebanese food she made, and she listed off Hummus, Tabouleh, and a bunch of other things I did not recognize. So then she offered to make a Combination Plate for us.

Sam and I sat down and chatted a bit, then the woman's husband, a large mustachioed fellow with a rather grim look arrived at our table.

He laid his load on our table and said, "Empty plates."

I said, "Oh." and he responded, "What, you no want?" and made to take the empty plates away again.

"No no! We want!" I said.

Then he laid down another plate and said, "Bread."

It was broken strips of pita bread, which we nibbled on until he arrived again with a large platter of food. I recognized hummus, tabouleh, stuffed grape leaves, and some kind of rice and noodle mix. There was also something I don't remember the name of, little footballs of deep-fried ground meat and grain.

The man came back with two little plates, each one with a sombrero-shaped piece of bread. He put them down and said, "Eat this. Make you smart."

A little later he came back with two tiny bowls of soup with a ball of something floating in it. He said, "You eat this and live to 110. My grandmother's recipe, she live to 104."

It was all great food, and there was so much of it that it took us a long time to eat as much as we could handle.

The man came back and Sam told him he really liked the bread, he felt smarter already. The man said, "You smart now? You rich yet?" Well, maybe not so much.

After lunch we went back to the cottage and put the two dogs in the back of my truck to go to the trail. It really is nice to see them trotting along together, side by side with tails floating like plumes above them. We walked for around an hour and a half, first one way and then the other. Nice views of the ocean, a couple of bridges over brooks and a short side trail to a picnic spot beside a "lake", more like a widening of a swift-flowing river.

We came back to the cottage and the dogs wrestled with each other while we chatted over coffee. I wanted to be back home before it got dark so pretty soon I had to leave, I was worried that the dogs would be upset about that. But no, they seemed very matter-of-fact about Hapi jumping into the truck while Hiro stood by and watched us leave.

They seem to understand the shape of their new lives apart; they are delighted to see each other but not heart-broken to part. Watching them together though, they seem like perfect buddies. I can't say how Hiro is doing, but I think that Hapi is pleased to have me to herself, she doesn't have to compete with Hiro for attention.

Sam is in Wolfville for Hallowe'en and is not sure how long he will stay, but then he is headed back home to BC with Hiro. The dogs will not see each other again for a long time. We wonder if they will remember each other, I kind of think they will. Sam hopes Hapi will remember him, in a good way. He sometimes wonders if she feels that he abandoned her, but I don't think she does.

Compared to Hapi, Hiro seems much more like an oversized playful puppy. I miss that, and I miss his big fuzzy head. He is the fuzzier of the two, he looks more like a giant stuffed dog than a real dog. I imagine them to be the bossy older sister and the mischievous little brother, even though he is quite a bit bigger than her.

Girls night out

2011-10-30T21:24:00.003-03:00

I got a Groupon coupon for a night at Milford Lodge last spring and it was about to expire so I booked a night last weekend and invited a couple of women friends along. I brought Hapi too. Our cabin had a big stone fireplace and three bedrooms, and the bare minimum in walls (you could see daylight through the cracks between the wall boards). We set a fire in the fireplace first thing and kept it going the entire time we were there as it was our only source of heat. The fireplace was so inefficient and the cabin so cold that I swear we went through in less than a day enough firewood to keep my house in town warm for more than a week. And still we froze.

Lin brought a bottle of her homemade wine which she and I valiantly tried to polish off. It was great wine, very smooth and easy to drink, but nevertheless she had to take some of that wine home with her. As a result of all that drinking we were up frequently during the night for trips to the washroom, which was a good thing as the fire needed to be tended to frequently as well. We piled all the spare blankets on the beds and it was not enough. I'd have taken Hapi to bed with me but she is not into sharing sleeping quarters.

The afternoon of the first day we walked some of the trails at the Lodge, it was a gorgeous fall day and we all enjoyed walking in the woods. Dinner at the Lodge was huge and delicious. The next morning, after another large and delicious breakfast, we took a canoe out on the lake. There had been a lot of rain a couple of days before so the lake was very full, and it was actually even fuller the second day we were there because of water draining down from other lakes. Val was going to go for a walk instead of paddling, but the trail we walked the day before was now under water.

The morning was very foggy, we set out in the canoe in the fog and it was marvelously quiet and eerie. As we paddled the fog gradually lifted and the water was like glass, reflecting the fall colours in a way to take your breath away.

Lin kept bugging me to take photos, but I was steering the canoe and every time I attempted to focus the camera on a particularly beautiful view, the canoe would veer away and I would be left trying to take the photo over my shoulder, or else trying to click the camera and simultaneously fend us off a submerged rock.

There was this one view of the remains of the foggy mist rolling off a raft in the lake, but because you could only see the mist while facing into the sun my photos of it did not turn out at all. And another view that I thought was one of the most amazing I have ever seen I didn't even try to capture, I knew I'd fail and just wanted to enjoy it.

What it was was a rock emerging from the water and perfectly reflected in the glassy surface. Together with its reflection the rock appeared to be a giant arrowhead on its side, about eight feet long. What made it particularly amazing though was the fact that it appeared to be a giant rock arrowhead suspended in mid-air. The water surface was that smooth and reflective.

Lin and I drove home the long way, we stopped in Annapolis Royal for lunch and then took Highway 1 back to our end of the Valley. The highway meanders down the Valley past many farms and through a lot of small towns. Very picturesque. En route Lin got a call from a friend inviting her for dinner, and her friend kindly extended the invation to me. So I dropped Hapi off at home after a walk at the reservoir and then headed off for another great dinner at Lin's friend's place.

After dinner we played Bananagram, a great game that is kind of a freeform Scrabble. I think it is great because I won, repeatedly. I suspect that I won't be allowed to play again though. Oh well, fun while it lasted.

Occupy

2011-10-16T09:54:00.005-03:00

I was in Halifax yesterday for Occupy Nova Scotia, down on the Grande Parade. Surrounded by "tall" (for Halifax) bank buildings, probably a few hundred people and a handful of cops. My friend Val and I arrived a little late, it was supposed to start at 11am and we got there around 11.30am, but in time for some of the formal speeches and then some informal speeches. We recognized one guy, Ernie, from Wolfville who got up to speak. Later I talked to another guy from Wolfville, Marke, who was taking photos.

There were Union people there, lots of CUPE flags. One kid with a purple ribbon that we spoke to said his parents work for Air Canada and they were legislated back to work, they weren't allowed to go on strike and he didn't think that was right.

They were using the Human Mic, and that worked fairly well, but sometimes I couldn't make out what they were saying. It helped to stand next to some young person with a good clear voice repeating what was being said.

Val said that today was 40 years to the day of the time she took part in an anti-war protest in Washington DC, 1971, and she felt heartened that after all this time real protest was finally, finally! happening. Worldwide!!

Marke said, This is the passing of the torch, and I agreed with him. The young people at Occupy NS were so great, and all the greyheads there were so happy to be seeing this.

At the Medical Station there was singing and dancing, there was a guy strolling with a ukelele, and another guy sitting at a spinning wheel spinning out a very fine wool thread while chatting with whoever stopped to watch. A group strung up a "high wire" (only 3 feet off the ground) and were doing acrobatics on it, to the amusement of the cops at that part of the Grande Parade. Must be kind of boring to have to watch a few hundred people milling around, a little diversion is a good thing. There was a Food Station with free food, a Comfort Station with an air mattress and lots of pillows and rugs, and maybe a dozen tents set up on the grass.

We wandered around a bit, spoke to a few folks with interesting signs and it was all just so heartening. There was this one big black cop wandering around too, chatting with folks. Two little kids were holding hands, the smaller kid, a boy, was trying to make his big sister let go of his hand and the cop came up to him and said, Hold her hand, that's The Right Thing To Do! The little boy looked way up at the big cop's face in utter awe and stopped fighting his big sister.

My friend Val made a sign that said Affordable DAYCARE, NOT Super Prisons. The cop was reading it and nodding his head. Val said, You agree? and he said, Well I'm sure not in the 1%. I asked, So what do you think of all this? He laughed and said, I'm not paid to have an opinion! Ask me another time, maybe over a cup of coffee. Then in a low voice he said, I agree with a lot of what these folks are saying.

I would have liked to have stayed for the General Assembly at 7pm but Val was tired so we went home around 5pm. It was all very cool, exciting, heartening. That's my word for the day, heartening.

I was in Paris in May 1968, and when that fell apart it was so disheartening, my first real taste of cynicism and despair. And now, 43 years later, I feel like things are finally, finally! happening. We crossed some threshold, some tipping point, and the future looks possible.

Up until yesterday I was watching Occupy Wall Street livestreaming. I got to see and hear Naomi Klein address the occupiers, live. I got to see participatory democracy in action.

Now I am watching Occupy Toronto livestreaming and that is so cool. Right now it's early morning there and some media person came and asked the guys at the livestream camera for an interview; after she left they debated the issue of giving interviews, who should do it, what they should say, and why. All the while there was a live chat going on the right side of the screen and the guys on camera were responding to suggestions and comments there. It was really interesting to see them work it through. All wearing classic Canadian revolutionary garb: toques and "Thunderbay Tuxedos" (plaid flannel shirts).

What Occupy means to me is taking back what is ours, this world, our government, our economy, our culture. "They" say it is ours but "They" don't really mean it, We do. We speak for ourselves, we occupy what is ours. It is no longer any one issue, any one political party or any one class of people. Everything is connected, social justice and the environment and the economy is all connected and we don't have to work for one at the expense of the other. Naomi Klein talked about the myth of scarcity, there is no scarcity just really bad distribution. There is enough for all and enough to make it all work, not just for humanity but for the whole planet.

My friend Val brought along some reading material for the trip into the city, and one of the articles was one about Canadian billionaires. Among other things, they are rich enough that they could easily have paid off the 2010 Canadian federal government deficit with only 20% of their wealth. And their much touted charitable giving---in the millions of dollars---is actually a pittance; that a single mom buying a $2 chocolate bar as part of her kid's school fundraiser is contributing more of her wealth to education than any of those wealthy givers lauded in sycophantic business magazines.

You can go on the internet anywhere now and find those horrific statistics about just how rich the rich really are so I'll shut up about that. And as Harper says, folks in Canada are by and large better off than those in the USA. But that's not good enough. The USA is so far off the bottom of the chart that comparing ourselves favourably to that country now is silly. And our government would very much like to follow the USA off the bottom of that chart, so, 'nuf said.

One of Val and mine's favourite signs at Occupy NS yesterday was We Can Do Better Than This. On the ground someone chalked, This Is Where We Start.

The photo is from the Halifax Media Co-op, someone there took our photo at Occupy Nova Scotia on the Grande Parade.

Summer of Irene

2011-09-08T10:53:00.003-03:00

Hurricane Irene did no damage here, there was some wind and a little bit of rain but nothing special. The day Irene passed closest to my part of the world was a gorgeous sunny bright clear day with a fair bit of wind, it was quite nice. I picked up my house guest at the airport with no problem, although she said there had been a bit of turbulence in her flight. I guess when you fly over a big storm that might be expected.

My guest stayed for a week and we fit in three winery tours, Hall's Harbour, Peggy's Cove, Chester, Halifax, open mic at The Port Bistro (we crashed a birthday party there), Night Kitchen at the Al Whittle, the Wolfville Farmers' Market and numerous seafood dinners. My guest bought bottles of wine from two of the vineyards we visited and they were really quite good, one was a cranberry apple wine and the other was a rose.

(Hall's Harbour at low tide)

(open mic at The Port)

(some musicians at Saturday Night Kitchen)

I learned a lot about grape growing and winemaking which I will put to good use with my own grapevines. Not the winemaking part, I think I will stick to buying wine rather than attempting to make it, but I did hack off a lot of the grape vine foliage after the advice of two of the tour guides.

Gaspereau Vineyard was the best, our guide was lively, funny and informative. She plied us with wine. At the end I had to refuse a tasting because I was starting to get concerned about how much I had had to drink. The one I refused was the maple wine which I am told is really good and excellent over ice cream. And, it was all for free!

We also visited Luckett Vineyard and Muir Murray. Luckett's is on a high north facing slope with a fabulous view of the Gaspereau and Annapolis valleys, the Minas Basin and Cape Blomidon. They have this one vineyard there with an old London phonebox in the middle. Apparently you can make free phone calls from it to anywhere in North America. You can also (according to a friend who tried it) get quite an electric shock from that phone. Whups.

Muir Murray is new and big, they also have a great view of Blomidon. We got the most detailed view of the winemaking operation there. They have an old apple tree with a grape vine growing over it. Apparently they grow well together and in fact in some places that's how they used to grow grapes, in an apple orchard.

We toured all three vineyards for free and got unlimited tastings at Gaspereau, three wines for free at Muir Murray and one free at Luckett's. The rest of the vineyards around have a charge. Nevertheless I am interested to visit them, there are four more nearby that sound very interesting.

Of all the vineyards we visited I liked the wine at Gaspereau best, and other people I have told about our tours concur. But I am also told that for the best of the best I have to visit Benjamin Bridge.

All of the wineries here got together to develop a new label, a wine called Tidal Bay. But each vineyard uses different grapes in their blend of this wine, so each Tidal Bay is different. What a great idea! You could go around and try all the Tidal Bays available. This is very new, only a couple of wineries have Tidal Bays for sale yet, the rest are still working on it.

Here is what I learned about winemaking here. The first vineyard in Nova Scotia was started about 30 years ago on the North Shore, so winemaking is quite new here. The vineyards around my home are even newer. Two that we visited opened their doors in the last year or so.

White wine is easier than red wine, so most vineyards start with that, expanding to red wines as they get better. White wine does not keep as well so many bottlers just put screw tops on them rather than the increasingly rare cork, because once opened a white wine should be drunk fairly quickly anyway.

The traditional wines that we are most familiar with require a warmer climate than what is available here, so the wines here are made from grapes adapted to colder climates and have less familiar names: Jean Milot, Lucie Kuhlmann, Marechal Foch, Baco Noir. We have one grape that is unique to Nova Scotia, it grows nowhere else, the l'Acadie Blanc. It was first tried in Ontario but no one had success with it there. Someone tried it here and it took off, so they gave it an appropriate name for Nova Scotia and all the vineyards here grow it now. It makes a very nice dry white table wine.

You can make both red and white wines from the same grape variety, red wines simply include the skins and seeds whereas white wines do not.

If you have a sensitivity to wheat or have celiac disease, stay away from wines fermented in oak casks. There is some wheat involved in the fermentation process in an oak cask. Around here both oak and stainless steel casks are used, one vineyard that we visited uses no oak all.

The flavour of a wine is affected by the soil and even the underlying bedrock of the particular spot that a vine grows in. Vines from one part of a vineyard can produce wine of a different flavour from vines in another part. South facing slopes are great because the grapevines love the sun, but a gentle north facing slope is fine too. Hurricanes are not good for grapes, everyone was relieved that Irene was as mild as it was here.

Vines are cut back severely after the grapes are harvested, and their foliage is trimmed regularly through the season. Grape vines are trained to grow on wires and the grapes appear at about thigh-height, with foliage above.

Too much foliage blocks the sun so they trim it back, but that also exposes the grapes to birds so various methods must be used to discourage the birds. One vineyard used disco balls, another used recordings of birds in distress, still another used the sounds of multiple bird species, which communicates that this vineyard is already overcrowded with birds.

When we weren't wine touring we were touristing.

We visited the restaurant in Peggy's Cove that Kim and Josh and Eva and I had visited last April. The food was not particularly good and it was expensive. Oh well. Peggy's Cove was much more lively than it was on that stormy day in April. It is essentially a tourist site, there are maybe 35 permanent residents there. Everyone else is either a tourist or someone making a living from the tourist trade. It has a tiny well-protected harbour and a coastline of big rocks on which the ocean waves crash.

Chester is similar, it is a beautiful small seaside town of lovely old homes, but the residents are virtually all summer people. I'd have liked to have taken my guest to Lunenburg which is a little more authentic, but it is also further away. In one week you can only scrape the surface of what this province has to offer.

In Halifax we got to Point Pleasant Park but not to the Public Gardens. We ate at one of the best pizza places ever, in an area called Hydrostone. After the Halifax Explosion this was a housing development to house the people who lost their homes in the explosion. Buildings were faced with an interesting form of cinder block with a kind of granite coating to make them look a bit like natural stone.

We also walked part of Spring Garden Road and the harbourfront boardwalk. We did not visit the Citadel.

My guest had a great week, Irene brought us some of the best summer weather we've had all season. Finally in September we get the summer we missed out on in July and August. You might call it Indian Summer, but I call it Irene Summer.

Sam moved next door. My neighbour rents rooms to students and she had a room available when my guest was here, so Sam moved out of my guest room and over to the neighbour's. He paid for the whole month of September but I don't know what will happen after that. The dogs are at my place. Today it is raining so they are indoors, but normally they live outdoors. They don't mind the rain but they get soaked and muddy so I would just as soon keep them in the dry.

Yesterday I took them to the town reservoir and they met several other dogs and were relatively well behaved, I was impressed. Hapi approached another female dog rather aggressively but she picked the wrong dog to threaten. This other dog was a meek former street dog from Taiwan with plenty of experience in dealing with more aggressive dogs, she nipped Hapi's nose and that was the end of that.

Hiro does the usual alpha male dance, he is entirely predictable and all bluff. I think it all went rather well.

All my friends complain about their smell, they think I am crazy. I can't smell the dogs unless I bury my nose in their fur and breathe deep, and I appreciate their affection. Hapi is more demonstrative but Hiro enjoys sharing the attention. They are strong but they respond well to voice commands. They have a strong desire to please.

(old pic of the dogs in D'Arcy)

I would rather have just one, but watching them play together it is hard to contemplate separating them. They do love each other

In other news...

2011-08-28T18:55:00.002-03:00

Waiting to see how bad it will be, so far nothing special.

Hurricane Irene that is.

Although really, we won't know till tomorrow how bad it will be.

A friend is coming to visit for a week, she was scheduled to fly in this afternoon but last night I sent her an email suggesting that Sunday afternoon would be right in the middle of the hurricane and if it was bad it would be very bad. It's a good hour's drive to the airport, another back and they were forecasting 40-60 kph winds and heavy rain, increasing to up to 100 kph in the evening. So if her flight was delayed, well, I just didn't feel safe on the highway in that kind of weather.

So, she cancelled her flight in favour of coming Monday afternoon. The airlines are being forgiving about people cancelling flights in hurricanes.

Now it turns out that Sunday afternoon was a bit gusty but nothing really bad, and the major winds will come tonight and tomorrow. Great. I am not telling her to cancel again, I'll just suck it up. Maybe the airline will cancel, or maybe it'll be fine.

My neatly stacked firewood will probably get blown over during the night. The smaller stack behind the shed has already tipped over, I don't know how long the bigger stack will last. It is broadside to the wind direction. I've got it stacked in hopes of drying out a bit before I stick it into the shed, where there is very little air circulation. Somehow I don't think I'm going to get much traction on this.

Sam invited some friends over and we spent the afternoon eating junk food and playing Settlers of Catan: Knights and Cities. By 5.30pm two of the friends had to leave so we counted our points and declared two winners; one of them declared the other one the King since he held the capital city.

A couple of weeks ago Sam and I had supper at Rosie's restaurant, I had a Spicy Bean Wrap which was really good. The beans were mixed with mashed potato and coated with sour cream. I have become quite addicted to that odd mix: potatoes and beans. I had a potato and bean burrito last night and I think I will have another one tonight. Really must get a little variety into my diet!

Two of Sam's friends are new to the province having moved here at the beginning of the summer from the Okanagan in BC, and they played tourist for the first month that they were here. I got some advice from them as to tourist-y things I might do with my visiting friend. They recommended a couple of wineries to visit and a zoo.

There are a lot of wineries around here, one could spend a whole week just doing the wine tour and still not hitting them all. Good to have recommendations for particularly interesting ones. One that was recommended by another friend they panned, said it was not bad for scenery and tasting but so new that there were no actual vines to see. They thought that one ought to be able to see the vines as well as taste the wines.

One of them grew up in Florida and Maryland, had a bit of experience of hurricanes. He said the word from New York and Philadelphia was that this one was a dud. He didn't expect much here. The other one grew up in the Okanagan and all her family are there; she is getting frantic calls from parents worried about her in a hurricane. They don't get hurricanes there.

Yes and this isn't really a hurricane, by the time it passed through New York state it was a tropical storm and is soon to be downgraded to a post-tropical storm. Whatever that means.

A hurricane (or whatever) headed for Nova Scotia or thereabouts is always a crapshoot, you never know what you're going to get until it arrives.

Well, we'll see what tomorrow brings...

Oh Jack

2011-08-23T08:17:00.003-03:00

It was shocking to hear that Jack Layton died yesterday. He was younger than me.

Jack really turned the NDP around and had a real shot at the top, being taken out by cancer like that seems so unfair. He fought the last election hard and the party won big thanks to him, but he had to have been battling his own illness at the same time and he couldn't do both.

I hope the NDP is able to build on what Jack did, I hope that his efforts were not in vain.

"My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic.

And we'll change the world.

All my very best,
Jack Layton"

Cottages

2011-08-21T21:15:00.003-03:00

Just back from a day and a night at a lakeside cottage, before that two nights at a seaside cottage.

The seaside cottage was the more primitive, but quite comfy and in a lovely setting. Its only downside was the terrible infestation of mosquitoes.

During the daytime with sun and a brisk breeze it was OK, but as soon as the sun dipped and the wind died, the bugs rose. We stayed indoors in the evenings, but there was no escape, they plastered themselves to every screen and when anyone went in or out, they scooted right in.

The owner of the cottage--Jean--is immune to mosquitoes, their bites cause no discomfort to her. She is mildly irritated by their buzzing around her, but that's it. Her sons seem to have inherited her immunity, but the rest of us suffered.

Anyway, it was a good time. We swam and paddled and sailed, and sat around gazing out to sea in the sun. In the evening we ate and drank ourselves silly.

Jean is 80 and still paddles her kayak regularly. She used to go to the cottage for 5-6 months every year, but now she is down to 3 months, the cold weather bothers her more. She has a paddling buddy and they regularly paddle back and forth between their cottages on opposite sides of the island. Her cottage is on a small island linked to the mainland by a causeway.

The outing to the lakeside cottage was a get-together of seven women, and the 13-year-old daughter of one of them and her friend, for nine in total. But the cottage was large and spacious with beds for all.

We noticed that all of our vehicles were red.

The lake was blessedly free of biting insects. Not entirely but a great deal better than the seaside location. There was a thunderstorm in the middle of the afternoon that we watched from indoors, but it passed and the sun came out again.

More paddling and more swimming. I love swimming in a lake. Nova Scotia lakes are very tannic which makes the water very dark. You can't see a thing when you go underwater.

I wanted to get the kayak into the lake to wash off the salt from the ocean. Three women paddled one canoe, and the two girls took the other canoe. We went down to the end of the lake and back, not very far.

We had a potluck supper the evening of the day we all arrived, and seven women can produce enough food to feed an army.

Our host was in a mood for mixed drinks, so we sampled her pina coladas, crantinis and watermelon-vodka slushes. Drums appeared and several women drummed away for an hour or so. I am not a huge fan of drums but whatever, to each his own.

There were loons calling in the evening.

Breakfast was interesting. Our host provided little 4-inch pastry shells and bowls. We each got two eggs and there were trays of chopped veggies and bacon. You mixed up your eggs and whichever chopped veggies you wanted, added a little cream and then poured it into your pastry shell. The little pies were collected on baking sheets and baked in the oven to produce individual breakfast quiches. With unlimited coffee and jugs of fruit juice, we ate our quiches and sliced cantaloupe on the screened deck.

As the sun warmed up we washed our dishes and moved to beach chairs by the lake. Chatted and swam and took group photos.

Eventually we all tore ourselves away to return to civilization. We were only a half hour drive out of town.

Isn't summer grand?

Free trip to wherever

2011-08-17T10:13:00.000-03:00

[Dobby and the grandsons on a beach in PEI, last month]

The next best thing---or maybe even a better thing---to owning a summer cottage is having friends and family who invite you to theirs. I am off to a friend's cottage today and another friend's cottage in a few days. One on the ocean and t'other on a lake.

Having grown up with a cottage on a lake I prefer a lake for swimming in, but oceans have their special charms too. And invites to summer cottages are like winning a free trip to wherever. Yay!

Sunglasses, swimsuit, booze, hamburgler buns... check!

It's a dog life

2011-08-08T09:23:00.005-03:00

Busy busy busy! That's my excuse here. Since the last post I have had family visitors, finished the fence, gone to PEI twice, and now have Sam and his two dogs Hapi and Hiro in residence.

The dogs are huge, hairy, smelly and do not play well with others. While Dobby the boxer and the Toronto branch of the family were here we had three major dog fights where Hapi and Hiro ganged up on Dobby and had him yelping in distress. Dobby is a big dog, 80 lbs big, but Hapi and Hiro dwarf him.

I was really happy to have Dobby here, he was glad to see me and I enjoy his affectionate nature. He is not hairy and not smelly. Seeing him take a beating from Hapi and Hiro did not sit well. I am sure he was very glad to leave here and get back home to his less aggressive dogpark buddies. He had war scars to show off.

Sam thinks that given time the three dogs would have worked things out and grown to be more friendly with each other. I think he may be right but Dobby was being seriously traumatized by the process. He did have a very good vacation in PEI though.

Taking Hapi and Hiro for walks is difficult, I cannot control the two of them alone and they are aggressive toward other dogs. I would like to be able to let them off the leash but there are no places around here that I can be assured that we will not encounter other dogs. I got haltis for them but as fast as I get them on the dogs the first dog has its halti off. I tried walking them separately but Hiro howls continuously when he is alone.

My current strategy is to get them used to short separate walks wearing the halti. Sam says he notices that after a couple of days of that he already notices that Hiro is more controllable on the leash. But I don't really know what to do about their aggression toward other dogs. I wonder if they were permanently separated whether they would be less confident and less aggressive, but Sam doesn't think it will make a difference.

Wilfred delivered two cords of wood to me and we shared a bit of Harbour gossip and chatted about the dogs. He suggested electronic collars for them. That might help, but I wonder if it would make any difference through their thick fur. Also I hate the idea of electric shocks. I suppose though that it might be better than the alternatives.

Sam and I are used to living alone, sharing this house is not easy. Not only are we trying to adjust to shared living accommodations but he is adjusting to a new job that he doesn't particularly like so far. He thought it would be better than it is turning out to be.

I went to Prince Edward Island the first time to visit Isaac and Gretel at the cottage they had the use of while on vacation. Gretel's parents live in PEI and her aunt purchased the cottage a couple of summers ago for the use of all of the family. Her Dad made some extensions on the cottage, three added bedrooms and a screened in deck. He operates a wood mill and was able to use mostly wood that he had milled himself.

The cottage is set in the woods a short walk from a sandy beach, you can't see the ocean but you can hear it. Mornings we would walk with Dobby and the kids along the beach, later in the day we would go swimming there. Gretel's stepmom organized a paddle trip down a local river one sunny afternoon, I brought my kayak along for that.

We all returned to Nova Scotia after a couple of days, meeting Sam and his dogs in Truro as he drove from his home in BC. Thanks to the wonders of cell phone texting, we were able to connect at a gas station and drive the rest of the way to my house together. It was a hectic short family visit with four adults, three giant dogs and two kids.

Unbeknownst to me Sam was expecting me to dogsit for three days while he went to a wedding in Cape Breton. I had previously agreed with Isaac and Gretel to take their oldest son Tristan back to PEI to spend a couple of weeks on his grandparents farm there, so the dogsitting job was not a welcome kink in my plans. We settled on my dogsitting for one day and putting the dogs in a kennel for the remainder of the time at Sam's expense.

The dogsitting day turned out to be a rainday in which we all stayed indoors. Isaac gave me access to his Netflix account so Tristan and I watched movies all day while the dogs moped.

My second trip to PEI was fun, this time I took my bike with the intention of doing some cycling on the Confederation Trail (aka Tip-to-Tip Trail). When the trains were retired on the island the provincial government turned the train tracks into a hiking and biking trail from one end of the island to the other, hundreds of kilometers of flat, gravelled trails through farms, woodlands, marshes, bogs, barrens and small towns. Lots of little B&Bs and cafes have sprung up along the trail, along with bike and canoe rental places, information rest stops, craft and gift shops and so forth. Really quite delightful.

The towns are close enough by that you can easily bike from one to the next in an hour or so, depending on speed. I planned only to bike the part of the trail in the vicinity of the cottage and the farm, but I saw lots of bikes loaded up with gear for longer trips. People from all over, I chatted with a man from Minnesota and a couple from the UK.

My first day of biking I planned to do a bit of grocery shopping and stop at the river we had previously paddled for a swim. The second day was cooler and windier, I biked another section of the trail that bordered the Gulf shore (Gulf of St. Laurence).

On the one rainy day of my PEI stay, Gretel's stepmom came over with Tristan and three neighbour boys to play a board game with me. On my last day there Fiona the boxer (Dobby's sister, living at the farm) had nine puppies to the great delight of the four boys. One of them described how one of the pups was born in a 'plastic bag' which Fiona licked off. They wondered about the logistics of eight nipples and nine pups.

Just before leaving the island I dropped by to see Fiona and her litter, she looked kind of shocked. Perhaps I am just projecting, but that's how I would feel in her place.

Now I am playing catch-up, taking care of all the stuff that was neglected while visiting PEI and with family. Two days spent weeding, harvesting and replanting my garden, some time working with the dogs, and catching up with neglected friends.

I stopped by the hardware store to pick up a new composter I had ordered, the fellow at the customer service desk asked me what I was up to now: every time I came in I was working on some project or another. I told him I had a list, I was making my way through it. He carried the composter out to the truck and I had to let the two dogs out of the back in order to get the composter in. I managed to shove the dogs back in after the composter. Hapi likes getting into vehicles, Hiro does not so he takes some coaxing and shoving.

I am thinking that I will probably keep one of the dogs, Hapi, and send the other one home with Sam. However Sam is now talking about going to college here, meaning that he might end up staying for several years. As things stand at the moment, I do not think having him live in my basement is realistic for either of us but I do not know where he can rent an affordable place for him and Hiro. Until we work that one out I am focussing on halti-training Hiro and somehow getting the two of them to either adjust to separation or be less aggressive with other dogs, or both.

My home is full of dog hair and dog smell. As luck would have it my own sense of smell has deteriorated with age so the smell is not so irksome as it might be, but I know that visitors react to it. The dogs have recently been groomed but you'd never know it, their fur is so thick!

The dogs poop in the back yard which attracts flies, I try to clean up the messes as quickly as possible but the dogs prefer to spend the night sleeping outdoors which means that in the morning the yard is full of flies. Sam says if I got into a regular dogwalking routine they wouldn't poop in the yard, but with all the problems of walking two giant aggressive dogs, that's not going to happen anytime soon.

The list of stuff to be done before winter is full. The firewood has been delivered and needs to be stacked. Places for stacking need to be cleared of other things which in turn need to be stored somewhere yet to be determined. The dogs need rain shelter other than my tiny living room. The kitchen faucet needs to be replaced. The decks need painting or something. The usual lawn mowing and gardening tasks. Several trees need pruning. I need to build four new garden frames for next year. The basement is a mess...

I got to two plays, Beowulf and Driving Miss Daisy, and hope to get to The Vigil and Shakespeare in the Park (Halifax). I managed to get to the Kempt Shore Music Festival and I have a ticket for the Deep Roots Festival, but I missed Stanfest and will (have already?) miss the Lunenburg Folk. Next year. One weekend planned this month at a friend's cottage with a bunch of women friends, the Labour Day weekend planned with a visit from an old Ottawa friend, a weaving workshop in September and hopefully a kayak camping trip in October and somehow a weekend at Milford Lakes Lodge (I have a Groupon I need to use there).

My life has just become a busy round of projects, culture and socializing, I kind of miss the old days of reading and knitting and long walks alone. The fact that my posting here has become so sporadic and that I am not getting near as many photos in is kind of indicative. No doubt this shall pass, but I do wonder when.

Bread and fences

2011-07-09T23:13:00.012-03:00

Didn't sleep too well last night, no doubt the change in the weather. Drop in barometric pressure, low pressure passing through don't you know. I think the other term for it is depression. Anyway, not a lot of sleep.

Lying there awake and wishing I wasn't, thinking the kind of thoughts you end up thinking at times like that. What passed through my mind was an incident that happened a very long time ago, and some of the stuff that happened as a result of that incident. It occurred to me that my whole life was about that one incident. Not a pleasant thought.

I thought about how it affected other people, and how that affected me, the ripples kept moving out and out and it was getting very unpleasant. I think though that the thing that got to me the most was that it was a damn stupid thing to have your whole life be about. I hate when that happens. Can I have a do-over?

It started raining this morning. We had a week of hot humid weather and the rain seemed like a relief. The garden sure needed it. And the greyness of it all suited my mood. Last night the hardware store called to tell me my order was in so I was going to go pick it up, but I didn't want to do it in the rain. Checked the radar on the internet and it looked like the rain was going to end in the afternoon, I hoped it would end before the hardware store closed.

I made bread in the meantime. I waited all week for today to make bread, I sure didn't want to be running the oven in the heat.

Bread has become an obsession lately. I read My Bread by Jim Lahey and that got me started. Not that I haven't made bread before, I have. In fact I really started when I was pregnant with my first kid, so that would be over 40 years ago. [you know you're old when you're kid celebrates his fortieth!] But Jim Lahey's book turned me on to 'artisanal' bread.

Lahey's breadmaking method is virtually foolproof. I've made more mistakes with it and still ended up with great bread. From there I read a couple more books on breadmaking, including Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day. As the result of a comment I made on her blog, A little red hen directed me to a TED talk that Reinhart did on breadmaking, in which he talked about a technique he uses to bring out the flavour of whole grain flours in bread and today I thought I'd try it. I already have a sourdough starter I made a couple of months ago based on his recipe, and his technique is essentially to start two doughs, one with the starter and one without. After letting them set for however long you mix them together, form a loaf and let it rise. Then I follow Jim Lahey's method for baking the loaf in a Dutch oven. I've been meaning to try Reinhart's baking method, but I like the Lahey method so much that so far I haven't tried any other.

Anyway, the bread turned out great, I had some for supper. Split pea soup (with free-range locally cured ham), homebaked bread and a salad of fresh local greens and locally made feta. Oh yes and the rain stopped before the hardware store closed so I whipped down to pick up my order.

In preparation for the impending arrival of up to three giant dogs I am building a fence. Most of it is wooden but part of it is going to be metal fence (at the hardware store they call it corn crib fence) because the area it has to go through is just too difficult to install the wooden fence in. The hardware order was the corn crib fence, a hundred feet of it. If all goes well, we will install it on Monday.

The twenty-something son of a friend is helping me with the work that requires big young muscles (pounding spikes and T-rail posts into the ground). He's also painting his mother's house, so he likes to spend the best part of the day doing that, which is fine by me because I am happy to spend only a few hours a day on this project. It is going much faster than I expected though, I thought all this spike and post pounding was going to take much longer than it has.

This fence will have one major drawback, not being able to walk off the property anywhere I want. I am putting three gates in it but that still doesn't seem like enough. The dogs better appreciate what I do for them.

The photo at the top of this post is of the flowering dogwood in front of my house.

WWMD and why I'm here

2011-07-01T09:11:00.004-03:00

I first came to Nova Scotia in early September or late August, 1973. My husband and I drove here from Toronto with our two kids in a red Dodge van. A bit of a long story as to why, but basically we were following friends from Vancouver who had moved here the previous year. I remember though, as we crossed the border from New Brunswick into Nova Scotia, the distinct feeling of having come home. I had never been to Nova Scotia before, knew next to nothing about it.

In 2005 I was living in New Westminster BC, just outside of Vancouver. I was out walking along the Quay one day, thinking about this that and t'other thing while enjoying the scenery along the Fraser River there, and the question popped into my mind, Where did I want to die?

I know, odd thing to be thinking of for no good reason. My excuse is that one of the people I hung out with in New West was a geriatric social worker and she was constantly reminding us that we should be thinking about and planning for our old age. So perhaps that question was her fault.

In any case, the answer was immediate: Nova Scotia. And the next thought was, Well, I guess I'd better get on it because you just never know when things might happen, and New Westminster is about as far away from Nova Scotia as you can get and still be in the same country.

It took a bit of doing, I had a condo to sell and also wanted to spend some time living in Toronto, my birthplace and now home to one of my sons. So five years later, I bought my old home in Nova Scotia back. What brought me back is probably the same thing that brought me here the first time, old friends.

There's something about that time in your life, the first years of adulthood. The connections you make, the things you do, the places you go, the music you listen to. A certain vividness that outlasts all else. Those first years in Nova Scotia were hardly idyllic, involving as it did the breakdown of my brief marriage and the loss of a son. But they were formative. And like it or not I was part of a community of heads/freaks/hippies/back-to-the-landers going through similarly intense experiences. A lot happened.

I left Nova Scotia in 1985 kind of burned out on the whole thing and more than ready to start over anywhere but here. Arriving in the Big City of Ottawa I was delighted to be in a place where I knew no one and nobody knew me. I can't say that delight lasted, but it was certainly refreshing at the time.

I don't know when Midge arrived in Nova Scotia, it was certainly before I left because when I met her in 2008? 2009? she remembered me from those days. I really only knew her a short time but she was someone I would have liked to have spent more time with, an interesting and fun person to be around. On June 20 she died of cancer at age 57, at home surrounded by family. Last night was her Celebration of Life.

In the last weeks of Midge's life her many many friends came together to support her family with whatever was needed. She helped plan her Celebration, suggesting music and general conduct (wine, beer, catered food and bright clothing) and stipulating no g-words. I'm guessing over 200 people came. Local musicians played some of her favourite tunes, including Loreena McKennit's Beltaine Fire. There were a couple of community songs for all of us to sing along. Family members and a couple of close friends spoke a few words describing her impact in their lives. In particular Midge's strong common sensical ethics were referenced, and WWMD (What Would Midge Do) repeated several times.

For the first part of the Celebration were seated in a half-moon facing a small table with three small boxes, Midge's ashes, on it. One for Dorset, her birth home and still the homeplace of her birth family, one for Blomidon so that all of her Nova Scotia family can look out on Cape Blomidon and know that she is there, and one for her daughter to take to Black Rock where they lived as a family and grew up there.

The second part of the Celebration was the mingling with food and drinks to remember and reconnect. I looked out and saw many many faces of friends and acquaintances, some of whom I could not remember names for, but all part of that community I grew up in. This is what I came home for, this is where I belong, like it or not.

A few days before Lin and I were out shopping and we picked up Sympathy cards at one store we were in. Lin said she always bought them in threes, one for now and two to save because we are at that stage in life now when Sympathy cards may come in handy. As we left the Celebration Lin's husband waved at someone else that was leaving and hollered out, See you at the next funeral! Lin made noises to hush him, Don't say that!

But I guess it's true. We're almost through the weddings of our kids, we're into the births of our grandkids and the deaths of our parents and friends. It's all downhill from here. It's good not to go alone.

In lieu of regular posting

2011-06-27T10:21:00.012-03:00

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

2011-06-11T22:45:00.000-03:00

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

2011-06-09T07:51:00.005-03:00

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...

2011-06-04T08:47:00.001-03:00

Graduating

2011-05-31T08:12:00.003-03:00

Just read an excellent Op-Ed by David Brooks in the New York Times (It's Not About You). Brooks is writing about college commencement addresses. Graduating classes in colleges across North America are listening at this time of year to speeches delivered mostly by successful Baby Boomers, telling them how to succeed in life, and as Brooks says, these speeches pretty much sum up the whole baby boomer theology:

"Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture."

What Brooks says about that message just rings so true to me. He points out that for a 20/22-year-old the sequence is wrong, one doesn't form a sense of one's self and then go out and create a life around that self-image. For most people one's sense of oneself grows out of life experience not the other way around. There are a few folks who emerge from their education with a fully formed idea of what they want to do in life, but for most they emerge like prisoners from jail: just happy to be out and wondering what to do next.

There are all sorts of messages out there on how to be happy by living in the moment, meditating to find a peaceful centre to alleviate stress and find a solid happy core from which to operate in life. One is exhorted to stop worrying and planning and doing and just Be Here Now. Laudable, but I think misguided.

I think that Being Here Now is something that happens naturally as one ages, one gets to that point through life experience and aging anyway. I don't think it is something that one ought to pursue deliberately right from the get-go. Perhaps the business of young life is to be out there doing stuff and experiencing life, not blissing out. One lesson one learns from experience is that finding inner peace is not really something that can be taught, you have to get there from inner turmoil. Inner turmoil comes pretty naturally, usually from outer turmoil.

David Brooks appears to be saying something similar. You get to wisdom through experience, and experience is usually hard-won dealing with life's tasks and problems as they come up. How one copes with a crappy dead-end job and a mean stupid boss might just be a source of great wisdom later in life; the perfect job in the chosen field of one's dreams isn't necessarily the best outcome in life, nor the one where one makes the greatest contribution to one's community, family or society.

In addition he suggests that what our culture needs most now is not a whole lot of young people out there finding themselves, but losing themselves. That self-centredness is pretty much a core value that has run its course, maybe we need a little less of it. How to suppress one's self might be a greater life skill than how to express one's self.

Of course, most college grads are going to learn that anyway, life has a tendency to do that to a person. I think that self-fulfillment often comes up from behind, you don't get there by pursuing it directly.

The down side of to-do lists

2011-05-25T10:27:00.001-03:00

As noted in my previous post, I started another to-do list last week. It is getting out of hand.

I have only managed to cross off a couple of items on the list, but have added close to a dozen more items to the list. The list is way longer than it was originally, and it is starting to resemble that amorphous black cloud I was talking about. And now I remember this about to-do lists, they get longer not shorter.

Every item I cross off invariably adds a couple more items to the list stemming from that one accomplished task, either that or it triggers a memory of some other item I previously forgot to put on the list. And eventually the list gets so long I have to abandon it.

Yesterday I got a call from a lady who is going to give me a tutorial in setting up my loom for weaving tea towels, we settled on dates and things I needed to do in preparation.

After I got off the phone I thought, This is one more thing for the to-do list.

And then I thought, Oh no! It's too long already!

I did not add it to the list. The beginning of the end.

Three things and a beer

2011-05-22T10:07:00.000-03:00

Yesterday I got two things accomplished, well three actually.

1. Went to the new Market.

Our local farmer's market has its own building now, yesterday was the official opening. Up until yesterday the Market was held in a parking lot in the summer and at the university student union building (the old Sub) in the winter. On the one hand it is great they have their own digs now, and appropriately in an old apple storage warehouse. On the other hand it is dark and echo-ey. It was packed and the crowds and noise were quite overwhelming. Several regular vendors were notably not present, for a variety of reasons.

2. Assembled my new lawnmower.

Jeesh!! Took almost the whole afternoon! These days, everything comes in a box, unassembled. And to read the instructions you'd think every purchaser has a fully-equiped workshop to hand.

It was cold and rainy and I was trying to assemble the darn thing in an unlit shed with a collection of scrounged tools. Five different sizes of wrenches required!! I have the most mismatched collection of wrenches imaginable, it was painful just putting the required tool list together, never mind actually assembling the darn thing. Instructions called for securely blocking the chassis while working, I balanced it precariously on an assortment of firewood logs.

There were two sets of instructions, one for putting together all the bits and pieces and one for preparing the gas engine for use, each published independently of the other. Having once made a living writing instructions for a variety of machines, processes and procedures, I will restrain myself from huffing and puffing over the inadequacies of these two sets of instructions, but I am offended that after centuries of work on improving such things, abominable instructions are still the norm.

3. Made a to-do list.

I make these things when I am overwhelmed by how much there is to do, somehow putting it in writing makes it feel like I have some control over it. Unwritten if feels like an amorphous weighty black cloud hovering somewhere above and behind me; I know it's there but I can't really see the extent or urgency of it. Once written it looks sort of manageable. I blithely attach "By When" dates (knowing full well it will never happen, but hey, we can dream) and feel like I have A Plan.

The list goes in my List Book, a notebook dedicated to this activity alone. It contains to-do lists dating back several years and over several home locations. Kind of funny reading all the things I thought I would do, but a lot of it actually got done. The big things anyway.

Sell condo.
Move.
Build kayak.
Buy house.
Pack my stuff, over and over and over.
Fix the truck, again and again and again.

On my current list I thought that after I got the lawnmower assembled I would then bake some cookies. However, it turned out I didn't have one key ingredient for the chosen recipe and had no desire to pick another recipe, so I have left that to-do undone and added "Go Shopping" to the list. Maybe tomorrow.

As my reward for accomplishing two---maybe three---things, I went to a play in the evening, a local production of Oliver!

In spite of some of the characters in that story being familiar to me, I did not know the story itself. I have avoided all things Dickensian (with the possible exception of the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol) since my first encounter with David Copperfield in high school. Anyway, I quite enjoyed the production even though it was incredibly schmaltzy. It did nothing to convince me to rethink my attitude toward Dickens, but the players were good and community theatre is A Good Thing. They even managed to recruit some three-year-olds to participate in the production and they were quite hilarious.

After the show the entire cast quickly moves from the stage to the theatre lobby so they are there to greet the audience as we emerge from the theatre. It's quite nice to be able to see and talk to all the players, congratulate them while they wave at and greet the audience they could not see while performing.

My friend and I checked the time when we were outside in the parking lot, the night was still young, so we went to the pub for some music and beer. Thugs@Bay were playing, we got seats at the bar in view of the band and spent the remains of the evening listening, drinking and chatting with friends. There is no dance floor in this pub but some young folks were dancing in the narrow floor space between tables and booths, even one waitress danced around with beers and bills. We were so close to the band that between sets we chatted with them as well. They commented on the music scene in this town, how it was such a great place for a young band to get started, and how much musical talent there was in the area.

Next on the list is "Mow the lawn". If it warms up, maybe later today...

The sun appears, full-on summer has arrived

2011-05-21T09:32:00.001-03:00

This post would enormously benefit from photos, alas, I have not taken any. It's been a bittersweet few days, on the one hand recovering emotionally from Sam's departure and on the other hand wallowing in the pleasure of sunshine after a month of rain. Please excuse the rambling nature of this post.

~~~~~~~~

Within minutes of Sam's flight taking off to return him to the west coast, the sun broke through. The rest of the day and all of the next was sunny and blue-skied. Just about every lawn in the entire province got mowed in those two days. It was the background hum everywhere you went. Fields of yellow dandelions, orchards full of dandelions, all were mowed from brilliant yellow back to vibrant green. Actually I kind of miss the dandelions.

Well no I don't. I didn't mow my lawn and it is full of dandelions so I still have lots of yellow. I spent the last three days weeding, pruning and seeding but not mowing as my lawn is still soaking wet. Today was supposed to be rainy---stormy even---but I think someone must have slapped the Weatherman around a bit because all we got was one very light shower.

Two of my four garden frames are now planted. The other two have no soil in them yet so instead I have piled them high with all the weeds I pulled; I am hoping to kill them and use them in my compost. Or maybe as mulch. Anyway, a couple more sunny days should do them in and dry them out nicely.

I pruned several bushes and the lowest branches on a blue spruce so the lawn mower can get around them easier. Two shrubs are in flower right now, a forsythia and something I don't know the name of, I will wait until they have finished flowering before I prune them. Three lilacs got pruned and a bush that has no leaves yet so I have no idea what it is. I pulled up a tonne of very tall grass that has invaded the large garden area on the north side of the back yard, and deadheaded all the tulips that are finished blooming.

I wanted to prune the grape vine, but I am unsure what I can do with it. I look at the vineyards around here (this is great wine country) and it looks like they prune the vines back to almost nothing, but I just can't tell what is dead and what is alive on mine. So I will wait and see, maybe next year I'll get it right.

My neighbour has chives and lily-of-the-valley to give away, I'd like to ask her for a cutting or two of her periwinkle too. I've got some lawn patches I'd like to convert to periwinkle so I don't have to mow it (slopes, and the area under the pines). She told me that the previous owner of my place went a little nuts buying plants and sticking them in the ground.

He'd plant them and forget about them. So the place is full of stuff that has never really been taken care of, and some stuff is planted in odd places. Like the line of tulips in the grassy strip between our two driveways. It makes mowing difficult. And the plum tree on the north side of the house between two big pines, it gets hardly any sun.

There are hosta, solomon's seal, forget-me-nots, lilies and irises coming up. There's one, possibly two, peonies. Some strange flowers by the deck that I have never seen before. When they first came up I thought they were grasses, I almost pulled them out but there was something just a little odd about them.

I am watching the cedar out front closely, it does not look healthy. It was just a little bush when I lived here before, now it is tree-sized but not particularly healthy. Maybe it needs fertilizer? I don't know what its problem is. It'd be a shame to lose it, the birds like it. On stormy winter days it gives them shelter from the wind.

The horse chestnut in the back is about to flower and I believe there's a dogwood in the front. In the field beyond my yard are two trees that might be maples, but they have not leafed out yet. Which is good, I still have a view of the Minas Basin and Cape Blomidon which will disappear when the two trees are fully greened up.

While I was away kayaking last week a friend picked up a lawn mower for me that was on sale. It is still in the box so I have to assemble it before I can mow. I am planning to do that Sunday or Monday. Also get more horse manure for the two empty garden frames. And supposedly I can take possession of my own plot on the Acadia Community Farm this Sunday, although I am not holding my breath on that. Everything has been delayed by all the rain.

I haven't decided yet what I will plant at the Farm plot, but I have a lot of seed packets to try. Squash for sure, probably beans, maybe brussels sprouts. Potatoes? I want to start a herb garden but not sure yet where. I also have some asparagus and strawberries to plant, I think they will go into the big garden on the north side but first I have to take out all the grass and weeds there. I am about one-third done with that.

Thursday was such a gorgeous day! Everybody around here was in such a good mood, the first full day without any rain. It was even hot! I think we all could hardly believe our good luck, it was starting to look like the rain had moved in for good. In between weeding and seeding and pruning I also got two loads of laundry out on the line, I believe this is the first time in a month I've been able to get even one load out there.

Today I put up screens on the windows to keep the black fly out, and I am grateful that the maple in front of my west window has leafed out because it blocks the sun there. It is now hot enough to actually prefer not to get sun coming in the windows. I don't remember there being black fly in town when I lived here before, but they are certainly here now.

Can't work in the garden without a bugshirt and bugpants, but I have to take frequent breaks because it is so hot. I also have to wear rain boots because the lawn is so wet. When I was planting one of my garden frames I could hear the water running under the grass!

There is so much birdsong now too. I never used to like starlings but they are quite musical here. And of course the robins. Yesterday I heard a red winged blackbird in the field behind my back yard, that was great to hear. I love them. I don't see much of the cardinals these days but I do hear them a lot.

I watched a pair of blue jays getting it on in my maple a few days ago. They are cute together. One of them goes into the birdfeeder and gets seeds which he (she?) puts in the other one's beak. Ah, spring.

The Weatherman is still forecasting rain for the next week or so, this may only be a brief respite, we shall see. It sure has been nice though.

Sam brings on the rain

2011-05-16T10:59:00.007-03:00

It is Noah's ark time just about across the country now. Flooding in Manitoba and Quebec, rain everywhere. Here folks complain they will go crazy if it rains again tomorrow, which of course it does. Shades of the west coast!!! Thanks to major flooding along the Mississippi, Red and Assiniboine rivers a friend of mine says we can look forward to skyrocketing food, building material and insurance costs this summer.

I finally mowed my lawn on Saturday, I kept waiting for a dry day to do it and consulting the weather forecast for the best dry day available. But the weatherman kept moving the dry day out: first it was Thursday, then Saturday, then the following Wednesday, then the next Saturday. So I gave up and mowed in the wet. Got most of the lawn done except for one corner where I would have lost the borrowed mower in the deep water. The rest of the lawn looks quite ugly now, with deep muddy furrows where the mower wheels sank in. But it was either that or wait till the grass was well beyond knee high.

The plum tree outside my bedroom window is in blossom.

Sam is here till Wednesday. He sleeps till noon and presumably is up well past midnight; I wouldn't know, I collapse well before that. This visit is slower-paced than with Josh and Kim since Sam has less interest in sightseeing. We did go to the Harbour and to the town reservoir, but beyond that, not a lot of driving around.

Sam reconnected with an old elementary school friend (we moved away when he was in grade 3) who gave him a midnight walking tour of the town. The last time those boys saw each other was 18 years ago when they were both teenagers, it was kind of cute seeing them reconnect, they were both a little shy and wondering if they still had anything in common. But of course they did.

I will miss him when he leaves.

12 hours to stop Uganda’s anti-gay bill!

2011-05-11T15:52:00.002-03:00

May 13 - From Avaaz.org:

Great news -- the bill has has been shelved! Together, we've won a major fight for equality and justice. Over 1.6 million of us signed the petition opposing the anti-gay bill, tens of thousands of us called our heads of state, and we helped make the attack on gay rights in Uganda a major international news story -- and it worked.

Today, under intense global pressure, the Speaker of the Ugandan Parliament blocked the anti-gay bill from coming to a vote in the emergency session. Now Parliament has closed and the bill has been wiped from the books. It's not necessarily gone for good, but to be considered again, it would have to be reintroduced as a new bill and go through the whole Parliamentary process -- which took 18 months last time.

May 11 - From Avaaz.org:

We have 12 hours to save thousands of gay Ugandans from possible execution. On Wednesday, Parliament could pass a law that imposes the death penalty for homosexuality. An international outcry shelved this bill last year — if we can ramp up the pressure again and keep the gay death penalty law from reaching a vote this week, it will die when Parliament closes in 12 hours.

Click below to sign the petition:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/uganda_stop_homophobia_petition

Slutwalk, and camping in the rain

2011-05-11T11:27:00.008-03:00

I heard about this on CBC Radio yesterday, Jian Ghomeshi hosted a pretty heated debate between two feminists about the value of the Slutwalk phenomenon.

The first Slutwalk was held in Toronto on Sunday, April 3, as a response to a cop advising some women that to avoid sexual assault they should not dress like sluts. So a group of friends decided they had had it up to here with that kind of talk and ended up organizing a 3,000-strong protest march (more info here). Wow.

The debate is, some feminists feel that it can't be done, you can't rehabilitate the word "slut". It demeans and shames women, particularly young women. But some others feel, yes you can. It's been done for "queer", why not for "slut"? A young woman should not be shamed for wanting strut her stuff, what is so awful about that?

You know, I agree. They're right.

Sometimes, as a woman of a certain age, I am rather shocked by how some young women and girls dress. I could never do that. And sometimes I have that cop's thought, they are asking for trouble dressing like that.

But on the other hand I am fed up to here with a world and a society that thinks how you dress is a reflection of your character, and if your character doesn't measure up then you deserve whatever ill treatment someone else chooses to dish out. It's OK to assault a woman because she looks like a whore.

My god! It is not even OK if she is a whore! And just because she dresses in a way that makes some guy think of whores, is no excuse for anything. First of all, it is that guy who makes himself think that way, not the woman or her clothes. Second of all, even if he makes himself think that way still does not give him any excuse to think he can jump her without her consent. Even a whore. She does it for money, a guy has to pay for that, he can't just take it.

A woman has the right to dress however nicely or badly as she wants. You can disapprove, you can criticize, you can be shocked and appalled, you can even bar her entrance into your home or dress-code space. But you can't assault her. And as long as there are people who think that you can connect the dots between lust or disgust and assault then we have a big problem.

The language we use shapes our thinking. When we use words like "slut" or "whore" we conjure up certain images and we respond viscerally. Our visceral responses are our own responsibility, no one else's. We can change the meaning of words, we can change how we respond to those words. Language is alive, we can change it, we do not have to be prisoners to words.

So when they say they want to take back the word "slut", I agree with them. It's time.

~~~~

Don't complain, camp in the rain

I've been away on a great kayak camping trip in the rain the past 5 days, with 3 women friends in a wilderness area of this small province. We camped at water-access-only word-of-mouth-locations in the Milford Lakes area and had a great, if rather soggy, time. We each were responsible for 3 meals and the food was great. We brought along books for whiling away the time when it was too wet and windy to do anything else, and shared a crossword puzzle book for entertainment.

On Mother's Day my iPhone rang a couple of times with calls from farflung offspring, it was so bizarre to hear a phone ring in the wilderness!!

The black fly were out in hordes, but this is the very beginning of their season and they're young, they don't quite know the ropes yet. So they hang around your face and hands in buzzing clouds, but they seemed to bite almost by accident. We of course had bug shirts and bug dope for protection nevertheless. At night our tents were filled with the little buggers, but they seemed not to be aware of us, more concerned with finding a way out than finding a free meal.

But the paddling was sublime...

~~~~

Another hiatus

Tonight I go to the airport to pick up my youngest son who is visiting for a week, so I may or may not find time to post more about the kayak trip.

Lumber? Check.

2011-04-27T10:16:00.005-03:00

Yesterday I attempted to get a bunch of things on my to-do list off. Filed my income tax, paid some bills, made some phone calls seeking information. Like, where can I get a kitchen compost bin for free/cheap? Where can I get topsoil cheap? When is the local sawmill open and what do they charge for the lumber I want? Can I borrow a gardening book from a neighbour today? Unlike many, I want to get on the flyer list, not off, and for the second time I phoned in a request to get on. I guess that is so unusual that they didn't believe me the first time.

Largely the info calls were unsuccessful, although after a fourth try I did get someone at the sawmill who told me to just drop by and pick up the lumber I wanted. I forgot to ask if they took credit cards (most likely they do but I just wanted to make sure) so I thought I'd drop by the bank for some cash in case they didn't. And since the post office was next door to the bank, I'd check my mail while I was at it. Here, we don't get door-to-door delivery, but have mailboxes at the post office.

Anyway, I was successful getting cash at the bank, but there was no mail for me. And when I got to the sawmill, the owner's wife told me "the boys" were in the woods and due back any time so I could wait if I wanted. After a few minutes of chatting and looking at various dusty knick-knacks around the office (handmade by customers) I said I was going down the road for tea at a friend's and could she call me when the boys showed up.

When I arrived at my friend's place she called a neighbour who whisked over and we all sat down to tea and biscuits with my friend's fine china given to her by her husband's grandmother. After a half hour or so of chatter about this that and t'other thing, I got the call from the sawmill lady, the boys were back and whenever I was finished at tea I could come on by.

Another half hour of chat and tea and I drove back to the sawmill. The owner met me on the driveway in and directed me to follow him and his giant black dog down a very muddy road behind the mill, across a creek and up the hill into a field. He pointed to a muddy wet pile of 2'x8's under a blackberry bush and told me I could take whatever I needed from that. The planks were all about 7' long, perfect for my needs, except I wanted some of them cut in half. He told me to pick out what I wanted and take the planks needing cutting to "the young feller" at the mill and he'd cut them up for me.

I wasn't sure but I gathered that he was giving me the planks, they were scrap to him, but I thought asking his young feller to cut them up was probably pushing the limits of free. Anyway, I picked out twelve planks and drove back to the mill and asked the not-so-young feller to cut four of them in half for me, which he did.

I then drove back to the sawmill office to offer payment for the job. The giant black dog bounded out from the sawmill and stood in the road in front of me, I couldn't pass him and he showed no inclination to move. Finally he spotted his master walking toward the office and slowly turned to follow him, allowing me to do the same.

When I went into the office the sawmill owner charged me $2.00 "nuisance fee". I only had $1.75 so he took that. I want to build four garden bed frames and these planks are enough to do that, $1.75 plus gas is a not-bad price.

I have an abundant source of free horse manure, some of which I have already shovelled into garbage bins awaiting the frames. I will lay down some of the cardboard from my moving boxes, put the frames on top and the manure inside. I will also need straw and topsoil, I don't expect to get a deal on the topsoil so that will be the expensive item. But I am hoping that I will only need to get topsoil once, the manure should be rotted enough by next year to not need any more store-bought topsoil. I will not use all of the garden frames this year, some of them I am starting for use next year.

On our trip down The Valley when Josh and Kim and Eva were here I noticed a small shop that sold old wooden windows; I was thinking I'd go back and pick up a few for use as cold frames, maybe my garden frames could do double duty.

I have also joined the Acadia Community Farm to get a small allotment out on the dykes and hopefully some experience and advice from fellow gardeners. The Farm has a small field divided in half, one half for personal allotments and one half for a community garden producing food for the local food bank and the university dining hall (the field is on university land). Every member is required to put in time in the community garden in addition to work on their own allotment garden. I look forward to the allotment as a great learning experience and a decent-sized garden space ready-made. In the meantime I can start a few things at home in one of the garden frames and have the rest of the frames developing for next year.

Josh and I were looking at the playset in the back yard while he was here and he suggested turning it into a greenhouse. It faces the wrong way for a greenhouse, but it could work. I am debating whether I really need a playset for grandchildren who live thousands of kilometres away, or would I be better served with a greenhouse. I'm leaning toward greenhouse.

It's A-frame shaped, so a few planks and some heavy-duty plastic thrown over the whole thing will turn it into a decent greenhouse I think. Maybe some strawbales around the base. The straw will help insulate and will generate heat as it rots, or so the theory goes.

And that will be one less plot of back yard that doesn't need mowing. My real goal in all this is to greatly reduce the amount of lawn mowing I need to do.

The to-do list

2011-04-24T12:20:00.005-03:00

I have spent several days already poking around in my backyard to see what's there and what I want to do with it. The previous owner did a lot of planting and then left it for a few years before I came along. So some stuff has probably disappeared, other things are outrageously overgrown, and still more has survived and spread amazingly. There are some mysterious bits as well, odd placement of rocks that weren't there before.

There are tonnes and tonnes of tulips and various other spring bulb-type flowers. Some of which I can identify---crocuses and hyacinth---and others I recognize but don't know the names of. Lots of hosta too. I am not much of a flower gardener, I don't have an easy familiarity with the flower world. And not much of a vegetable gardener either, I have not had access to a good-sized bit of land in a very long time. In fact not since I last lived here 25 years ago.

A friend has been helping me poke around, she is a frustrated gardener living in an apartment in the next town. She keeps gardening tools in her car trunk, in case she happens upon a gardening opportunity. Right now I am one of her gardening opportunities. She has identified some of the plants and tried to tackle pruning various shrubs.

Another friend has offered me a sustainable source of free horse manure and a book on Lasagna Gardening. She suggests that rather than dig up my backyard that I simply lay down cardboard and spread some of her horse manure on top with various other things to create a garden without digging. The avoidance of digging sounds good to me.

But to start a garden I have to build some frames to hold all this manure and figure out best locations for these frames that will get the most sunlight. I have too many trees strategically placed to block the sunshine and don't care to cut them down. The local sawmill is closed this weekend so I have to wait until after the Easter holiday to get the lumber to build the frames.

Then I have to get containers to hold the horse manure in my truck. My friend suggests plastic tubs from Home Depot, but another friend insists that I should not buy tubs but rather get ahold of free plastic pails with lids. However she cannot suggest a good source for free plastic pails. Then she suggests feed bags from the farm where I buy eggs. She is all about free stuff. Meanwhile I am thinking that tracking down all this free stuff will take so much time, I just want to get the garden started.

While my son was visiting here the other week he pointed out that the basement toilet seal needs replacing. He said it was a fairly simple job but messy. I dutifully went off to the hardware store and bought the stuff I'd need to do the job but have put off doing it because of aforesaid messiness.

A couple of months ago I bought a new faucet for the kitchen sink, and initially had it sitting in a prominent location as a reminder to actually install it, but after a month I finally moved it to a shelf behind the furnace in the basement because I obviously was ignoring it anyway. One of these days the existing faucet will give out altogether and then maybe I'll be motivated to install the new one.

My free-stuff friend told me when I first moved in that I needed a gate on the basement stairs so that she wouldn't fall down them (she's blind). I have designed a gate and bought the lumber and cut it up but not yet assembled or installed it. Not being blind I don't fall down the stairs, and I stand in the way when my friend is visiting.

I visited a local weaver and she showed me around her studio and introduced me to her sheep, she proposed a deal to get me started weaving on my loom which I am very interested in but so far I have not acted on it.

I have a banjo under my bed that I want to learn to play and yet another friend pointed out that a very able banjo teacher lives just across the street from me. I have not contacted him.

Are you starting to get the picture? I have all these things I need or want to do and none of them are getting done! For no good reason other than laziness, procrastination and not knowing where to start.

The list above is just the tip of the iceberg, the most blatant unstarted projects. I can list off at least a half-dozen other projects without thinking, and probably a dozen more if you give me a little time to think about it. I try to list things but my lists are always incomplete, and often I only remember the stuff that I need to do when I can least do them, or even round up pen and paper to write them down.

People ask me how it feels to be back in the house that I sold so many years ago. I shrug my shoulders and say it doesn't feel like anything. I guess this house is so familiar to me that I don't have any unusual feelings about being here so what can I say? It doesn't feel odd or right or anything at all.

I think the closest I can come to identifying what it feels like is that I lived here, I went away and travelled a bit, and then I came back. I'd like to think I am here for good now, but I have learned never to say never. I might never leave again, or not.

But I must say that this is the first spring in a very long time that I have not felt a sustained deep and irresistable urge to be on the road. I get flashes of it occasionally, but nothing to get me planning for it.

I almost feel like writing emails of apology to farflung friends that I won't be visiting any time soon, except that this is one more thing to add to the list above and is being treated in much the same way.

I remember that when I left this place I was lonely and frustrated, I couldn't wait to go someplace different and start over. Loneliness continued to be a constant issue, it was always hard to create a social life for myself. I lived in several different cities over the years and came up with a rule of thumb that it generally took two years to create a social life that worked for me.

Returning here has been quite shocking in that my rule of thumb has been trashed, it is as if my social life hit the ground running. I can't keep up with it. Half the reason I don't do all the things I talk about doing is because I am wallowing in movies and concerts and dinners out and trips to the city with friends, not to mention choir and yoga. I crave downtime, and when I get it I feel guilty that I am not taking care of all the things I should be taking care of.

I started this blog living in Toronto and ironically one of my first postings was "So, having no social life I read" (also, "My so-called social life" and "January blues"). I did quite a bit of writing then. Ah those were the days...

Now I am lucky if I get to it every couple of weeks. Faced with the choice of writing a blog post or writing the damn list of things that I should be doing, the list wins. Not that it does me any good. Too many friends, too much music, too much fun.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Things I have accomplished this week: hung some pictures on the walls, assembled and setup a composter and transferred winter's accumulation of compost into it, got the computer fixed (thanks Kurt!!!).

Family visit: Days One and Two

2011-04-17T11:51:00.001-03:00

The next few posts are photos from my family's visit in Nova Scotia last week. We did a bit of sightseeing, well actually, quite a lot of sightseeing. For one short week I think Josh, Kim and Eva saw a heck of a lot of this little province. But not nearly enough of course. We didn't even get into The City! [Nova Scotia has a couple of cities, but "The City" refers to Halifax.] Or Cape Breton!

We took a lot of photos but somehow missed photographing The Valley (Annapolis, that is). We managed to drive down a good part of it, all the way from Wolfville to Middleton. Stopped at a wonderful antique store where Kim picked up a couple of lovely large old kids' story books.

We visited Halls Harbour and took some photos there, but I am not including them here. I am sure if you google Halls Harbour you will see some good pics. Also, google the Halls Harbour webcam for really great views of the giant Fundy tides (up to 30 ft here I think).

OK, here we go with the first day.

Hanging out at home:

We walked down the hill to see the town on a cold but sunny day:

We stopped at a local farm for eggs, and the farmer gave us a tour of the barnyard and showed off his biggest lamb:

Unfortunately, Kim was ill on the second day here so we let her sleep and took a short walk to the town reservoir for the view:

This is Eva doing her incognito film star act:

Family visit: Days Three and Four

2011-04-17T11:48:00.003-03:00

On Day Three we went to Baxter's Harbour for the fundraising Coffeehouse and Concert.

You can see more photos of the concert here.

The following day we returned to Baxter's Harbour to look around in the daylight.

We went down to the harbour itself to look around. I love the fish houses hanging off the edge here, I guess it's just a matter of time before they fall off altogether:

Josh on the rocks:

We drove into the woods to see the Garden House, the first building we put up on the land in 1975:

Josh liked the creative wiring inside:

This is Josh and me standing on the spot where my house used to stand. I built it in 1975 and it burned down in 1993:

Then we went in further into the woods to visit Mike and Ruth's place:

And of course we went to see my outhouse, built in 2009:

Family visit: Day Five, part one

2011-04-17T11:27:00.006-03:00

On the fifth day we did a marathon trip from Wolfville down The Valley to Middleton, then across the province to Bridgewater and Lunenburg on the South Shore, along the South Shore to Peggy's Cove just outside of Halifax, and then back across the province to Wolfville. It was a very long day in lousy weather.

We walked the streets of Lunenburg in the wind and rain:

This is an old and famous church in Lunenburg, it had a fire a few years ago but has been largely restored to its former glory:

The green house on the left in this photo is the oldest house in Lunenburg, built in 1760. It is a good example of an architectural feature known as the "Lunenburg Bump". That's the gable-like feature sticking out over the front door:

Here's another example of a Lunenburg Bump:

Kim spotted this store front:

I think the reflection in the window is yet another Lunenburg Bump.

Well, by this time we were all tired and grumpy. The initial plan called for a leisurely drive along the South Shore soaking up the sights of quaint old fishing villages and white sand beaches, but at this point we were faced with the choice of returning home, or a fast highway drive to Peggy's Cove and then home.

We decided to chance the Peggy's Cove trip, hoping that our tempers and patience, not to mention Eva's temper and patience, would hold out. We got lucky.

Family visit: Day Five, part two

2011-04-17T11:17:00.015-03:00

Peggy's Cove is a major tourist attraction in Nova Scotia. Hard to visit the province and not visit Peggy's Cove. In a way, visiting it during stormy weather is kind of neat, you get to see the big waves on the rocks, even if the wind is too strong to really spend much time outside of the car looking around.

Very fortunately for us there's a lovely restaurant and gift shop, the Sou'wester, right by the Peggy's Cove lighthouse. I'm sure that in the high season it would have been very crowded and busy, but on a stormy April Monday, the only other customers were a couple of brave bikers. There were more staff than customers!

So we got a great table and could spread out and let Eva explore:

She got to see the aquarium and the tank of live lobster. We each picked out a lobster and our waitress took our choices to the kitchen for the inevitable fate of all lobsters unlucky enough to end up in a restaurant tank:

Do I look a little skeptical? It did taste good though:

The view and the tubs of cracked lobster shell:

We left there a bit lighter in the wallet, satisfied and tired. The staff were wonderful and we very much enjoyed the experience.

Family visit: Sixth and last day

2011-04-17T11:11:00.000-03:00

The weather was much better on my family's last day in town, I suppose it would have been nicer to do our South Shore tour in the good weather, but we were all glad to have a relaxing day at home.

We did a nice stroll around town, had dessert at the Front Street Cafe. We had been told that the Bread Pudding there was a treat and we were not disappointed.

For supper we went to Rosie's and had seafood and of course their own micro-brewed beer (I think we had the Annapolis Cream Ale, I don't remember for sure). Josh had lobster mac 'n' cheese, I had codfish cakes, and Kim had haddock fish and sweet potato chips. All good!

We also stopped at the Old Burying Grounds.

Many of the gravestones are so old and eroded you can't read the inscriptions, but some are clear.

In the old days gravestones were often marble, and unfortunately marble is very susceptible to damage from acid rain. Thankfully the acid rain is somewhat reduced now, but it has done a heck of a lot of damage.

Sadly, Josh, Kim and Eva headed home early on their seventh day here. I had a wonderful time with them and loved the time I got to spend with baby Eva. She's such a mellow and beautiful little girl!

Hiatus

2011-04-04T09:31:00.003-03:00

Family arrive on Wednesday (my birthday, Happy Birthday to Me!) and I am kinda busy today and tomorrow so I probably won't be posting for awhile.

My granddaughter here.... I think the photo is just tooooo cute!

My desktop computer has a serious virus or something, it is unusable for now. Fortunately I have the laptop, as yet uninfected.

The virus my computer caught is nasty. It masquerades as a Microsoft anti-virus program so at first I didn't realize what was going on. By the time I did I had already made a couple of unfortunate mistakes. But apparently the point of this particular nasty bit of malware (I am not sure if it is exactly a virus, "malware" seems to cover all kinds of computer nastiness) is to get me to go to their website and give them my credit card info. Which I was at least alert enough not to do. Anyway, I wasted a bunch of time researching what it was and how to fix it, and managed one sleepless night worrying about it. I figure I either have to reformat the hard drive or get a professional to fix it.

Ironically, I had just done a backup, so reformatting the hard drive is not as catastrophic as it might sound. However the bad news is that the portable hard drive I had backed up to was still connected to the computer when the malware took effect, so I don't know if it is affected too or not. But various people I have asked seem to think that disinfecting the portable hard drive is a little easier than disinfecting the computer. So I may be OK in that regard. If not, well, I am a great believer in redundancy and the most critical bits of data are backed up elsewhere as well. I will lose stuff that I am not happy about, but nothing catastrophic.

It's just extremely annoying and unexpectedly upsetting. One doesn't realize how attached one is to one's computer until it goes down.

We had a sort of a snowstorm over the weekend. Forecast was way worse than the storm itself, the snow---such as it was---pretty much melted away by the end of the weekend. I went to a dance at The Barn in the midst of the storm, and saw a really excellent movie last night: L'affaire "Farewell". It was a subtitled French film about Cold War spies, based on a true story. Very intense, very well done.

The thing that I most enjoyed about this film was kind of quirky, I didn't need the subtitles.

When the film started I was reading the subtitles, I didn't understand what the actors were saying in French. And then quite suddenly some switch in my brain flipped, my ancient French kicked in and it was the subtitles that were gibberish, not the spoken words. I could understand perfectly! One of the spies, a Russian, had a passion for all things French, so at one point he makes a request for tapes of the French singer Leo Ferre, and as soon as I heard that name I knew I knew him. The music took me back to my year in France, and simultaneous to seeing the images on screen I was seeing images from that time in my past running behind my eyeballs.

It was amazing. Things I have not thought about in many decades were right there, so real I could almost touch them. I fully related to the Russian and his passion for the French. So walking out of the theatre after the film had a strange dreamlike feeling, having just lived through this story of Cold War spies so well done that it felt real, and also having just lived through a year in my life so many decades ago.

It snowed last night...

2011-03-28T22:11:00.001-03:00

So, apparently there's radioactive iodine in the rain in Boston. That's just down the way from here. It hasn't rained in a while here, but it has snowed. I guess we have radioactive iodine in the snow. It's a very small world, isn't it?

They say it's safe, and I won't argue the point. Nothing I can do about it anyway. I feel like the tragedy of Japan is the tragedy of all of us, we're all in it now. Well, I still have my home, a lot of Japanese don't, so I don't mean to belittle their losses. My family are all still alive and accounted for. But I have, we all have, radioactive snow/rain.

For humanity to survive the next century or so, we need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions. We are not doing that. Nuclear energy might have been a stopgap measure, we might have switched to nuclear energy to tide us over until we got our insane energy needs under control. But that's not looking too good right now. I mean, even if we learn something from this event, and figure out how to build nuclear reactors that won't be vulnerable to tsunamis or major earthquakes or human error or terrorists or whatever, and we figure out what to do with the radioactive waste, and we figure out how to pay for it all, well, the appetite for nuclear energy has kind of taken a bit of a hit. So we're in a bind, Plan B isn't really there for us.

You can forget about wind and solar. No one has figured out how that can possibly replace fossil fuels for quantity and steady reliability. It just can't. And we're not all going to just sign on for non-stop Earth Hour. Feels good to do your bit for the survival of the Earth for one lousy hour, but all day every day? I don't think so. So, no Plan B, no Plan C.

I don't fear for the world, it will carry on. Nature has dealt with far worse than us, and will again. Even if it means starting over from scratch. I take heart from Snowball Earth, the time way back when that this planet was just one gigantic ball of ice with no sign of life on it at all. And yet there was, and the Earth carried on. But I don't have a lot of hope for us, I don't think we are going to make it now.

I've been putting off posting anything here, every time I go to my blog I see my granddaughter's laughing face at the top of the page and I don't want to disturb that. Well, all good things come to an end sometime, I'll just have to scroll down a bit now.

Some photos

2011-03-22T22:08:00.001-03:00

Here's some old photos from the last month or so, the male cardinal, a crow, and a before/after of my back yard.

This is the cardinal:

Uh-oh, he sees me:

The crow. I couldn't raise the blinds to get a better photo, he'd have flown away:

My backyard under snow:

My backyard after the snow has melted. See the swings? Go back to the previous photo and look for them:

Disaster, tulips and baby Eva

2011-03-16T10:40:00.007-03:00

Rain came and went, so did the water in the basement. All the reading and asking around I've done seems to indicate that there are several expensive ways to keep water out of the basement, but none that are 100% guaranteed.

My neighbour the mason, carpenter, chimney sweep and handyman says, Best strategy is to provide an exit route. My basement has a water exit route. The dehumidifier and towels help.

In spite of sworn attestations otherwise, I am quite sure this has been on ongoing issue dating back well before my purchase and so far there is no sign of damage. And we have had some good drying weather since the weekend so I am officially not worrying about it. I have done what's possible and so far so good.

I have been following developments in Libya, Bahrain and Japan; what 'interesting times' we live in! In a bad way.

I am so thoroughly impressed by the Japanese, they suffer the most awful devastation and soldier on nevertheless. If ever there was a model for how to deal with Worst Case Scenario, they have it. But the toll, OMG the toll.

As for Ghaddafi, I cannot find words to respond to such terrible madness. I've listened to arguments about why a No Fly Zone is unworkable and I accept that they are probably right, but I sure wish it were not so. I wish for once the CIA would successfully target someone for assassination, but what a terrible thing to wish for. I take it back.

I hear Aristide is working on returning to Haiti. If Duvalier can, why not Aristide. I wish him well.

My tulips are emerging. Not really mine, I didn't plant them, but they're there. This is my first spring here and it will be an ongoing surprise to see what has been planted here, what emerges from the ground as spring progresses.

And finally, thanks to a series of Westjet seat sales (BTW, seatsale on now until end of Mar. 17), I am expecting visitors from the west coast in April, May and June. I am thoroughly looking forward to that. My guest room is almost completed, I just need pictures on the wall and a baby gate on the basement stairs.

My 7-month old granddaughter Eva is coming! Yes that's her at the top of this post. She eats solid food, she sits up and she is working hard on crawling. She has an infectious and hearty laugh (thanks Facebook), what more could I ask for.

Water spring time

2011-03-11T10:52:00.002-04:00

Last weekend we had double-digit temperatures (i.e., above +10C/+50F) and some rain for a couple of days, which hugely reduced the snow cover here. You could actually watch the level of the snow fall. It was an amazing transformation, almost overnight we went from the dead of winter to what looks like maybe spring.

The driveway is now almost completely clear of snow, the front lawn is all clear and the back yard half clear.

In the morning I go out and sniff the air, I can smell spring.

I've been out walking the perimeter, planning where my garden is going to be.

But the bad news is now I have water in my basement.

Around here water is an issue for everyone, no matter whether you are on the Mountain or in the Valley, it just is. And here on the Ridge the hillside is full of underground springs. Last fall it rained so much the water table rose to its highest level, and then all winter we had major snowfalls. So the spring is looking good for flooding. It doesn't matter whether you are by the banks of an overflowing river or up on a hillside, the water will find you.

When I used to live here in the '80s that would not have been a big deal, the basement was unfinished and there was a drain hole in the middle of the floor. As long as I kept my stuff out of the way of the water flow, the water came in and the water went out and nobody got hurt.

But now...

The fellow who owned this place in between did major renovations, including a completely finished basement. He patched a major crack in the east wall of the basement and I guess that cleared up most of the water problem. I remember when I owned this place before that the east wall was the major source of the leakage. I tried fixing that with better gutters, but that only reduced the flow. I knew when I bought the house back that water in the basement was going to be the biggest potential issue, even though the previous owner swore the problem was licked.

All of the original concrete basement is hidden by gyproc walls and laminate flooring, except for a small area around the furnace. Behind the furnace is where I first saw water seeping out from under the finished floor, and it appeared to be coming from the south wall. I put down towels and cranked up the dehumidifier.

For a couple of days I was running towels between the drier and the furnace room every hour or so, but the flow seems to have subsided now. Good news, except that the weatherman has issued a Rain Warning for this weekend, so I expect I will be dealing with yet more water.

I don't know what kind of damage is being done under the finished floor. I've asked around what other folks think about it, and the consensus seems to be that I am doing all the right things and it is a just a matter of wait and see now.

I could spend a lot of money trying to waterproof the basement, but do I want to?

When I bought this house back I figured that the finished basement was a bonus, but I could go back to the way it was before if I had to. So I will probably wait and see until there are signs of rot and then tear all that stuff out and be done with it. Repairing it just means having to worry every time it rains.

In the meantime the dehumidifier hums along. Maybe I should go to Frenchy's for more towels.

Women are heroes

2011-03-08T08:14:00.004-04:00

Today is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.

I read recently about an interesting street artist who has just released a new film called Women Are Heroes. JR does huge photographic murals in public places, the film is about a recent series of photo murals he did of women from poor and war-torn parts of the world.

JR's premise in this film is that in peacetime women are discriminated against, in wartime they are targets. He does not call them victims, he calls them heroes. Because no matter what, they continue to raise the young, keep communities together and point fiercely to the evil of atrocity.

I watched the trailer* for this film and it is moving. In one scene a Congolese woman describes being raped and watching her daughter be raped and her young son murdered. In another, a woman walks up to and screams at soldiers in the street, You are killing the people!

* - This trailer has been flagged on Youtube for containing adult material, I found another site for it but now you are warned: it contains adult material.

I like that JR calls these women heroes, and celebrates their heroism. In the biggest way he can. He plasters gigantic photos of their eyes everywhere, on walls, rooftops, the sides of trucks and buses, and at the bottom of swimming pools. Heroism can be life-threatening acts of courage in moments of great danger, it can also be just keeping on keeping on in the face of unrelenting adversity.

Today is International Women's Day. Celebrate the heroism of women, and keep on keeping on.

The F-word

2011-03-07T10:08:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, March 8, is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.

CBC TV's Doc Zone recently showed the documentary The F-word: Who Wants to be a Feminist?, about the current state of feminism and the status of women in Canada. Apparently both are going nowhere fast, except maybe south (metaphorically).

The title of the film is a reflection of the fact that many women do not like to identify as feminists because the word has taken on a negative connotation. The epithet implies women who still loudly fight against a now-vanquished enemy, making fools of themselves raging against long gone inequities. Women who do not like to call themselves feminists still believe in equality and rights for women, but they believe that these are already a done deal and that we should all just move on in life.

One of the things I learned is that the status of women in Canada used to be among the best in the world, we occupied seventh place in an international ranking in 2005 (the USA ranked 17th), and before that we were in fifth place. But in the past few years the situation has deteriorated so that now we rank lower (horrors!) than the USA, somewhere around twentieth place in 2010. Latvia and Sri Lanka rank higher. I applaud Latvia and Sri Lanka, but still, you'd think a long established western industrialized democracy could do better.

The film discusses possible causes of that deterioration. One major and obvious cause is our current Harper government, which has systematically undermined legal protections and financial support for women and women's advocacy organizations.

The Harper government professes strong support for "family values", meaning the withdrawal of supports for working women and reduced access to childcare among other things. Newly arrived immigrant women isolated by language and old country attitudes are left to fend for themselves, the poverty of women and children is ignored, legal protections for women in the workplace are quietly withdrawn.

Certainly the general movement toward right wing politics in North America has been detrimental to gender equality, but the film also offers another potential cause for the lack of feminist action on this issue.

In the film the history of feminism is sketched in broad terms as a movement in three waves: the suffragettes of the early twentieth century, the feminist movement of the '60s and '70s, and a more recent wave of feminist action in the late '90s and early twenty-first century. Each wave seems separated by a period of self-satisfaction, wherein many women assume that the major battles have been fought and won, we can rest on our laurels and get on with reaping the rewards. This film suggests that it is as if feminism has to skip a generation or two before it can reawaken. Feminists do a lousy job of raising the next generation of feminists.

I am not sure if I entirely agree with that last sentence, I don't think feminists are particularly at fault there. I think it is true that such movements do tend to skip generations but I don't think this is a problem specific to feminists. Maintaining a steady state of outrage over many decades for steadily (albeit microscopic) decreasing levels of injustice is just hard to do. For any cause. And it is easy to quietly eat away at recently won justice when public attention has moved on to another issue.

If you live in Canada you can watch the film online by going to the CBC Doc Zone website. There are a lot of other interesting documentaries there as well.

Cat chaser

2011-03-06T13:32:00.004-04:00

There's a cat up the street who tours my back deck every day, perching briefly on the deck railing. If I don't actually see the cat, I do see its tracks in the snow, and the little cleared space on the deck railing where it sits. Sometimes I see it staring in the window at me, but it takes off if I open the door.

Actually it may be two cats, I saw the pair sitting in their own yard up the street the other day, and I can't tell them apart. Two long-haired grey cats.

One time I came out the back door and the cat took off from my back deck onto the driveway, looking over its shoulder to see if I was following. As it happened I was going to drive somewhere, so when I got into my truck and started out the driveway after the cat, it got really scared. It streaked down the driveway and then turned left up the street.

That was the direction I was headed in too. It just flew up the street. Snowbanks were so high the cat couldn't get off the road until it got to its driveway, so I think it was pretty freaked.

The cat gives me a pretty wide berth now: Lady Who Chases Cats With a Truck.

Probably just as well, a lot of birds visit my birdfeeders and that cat is overly interested in them.

Today we are in the middle of a major spring tease, the temperature is warmer now than it has been since I arrived here last November: +13C. It's even supposed to stay above zero at night for a couple of days. Lots of melting going on.

Yesterday four of us went cross-country skiing in the Harbour before the melting really took hold, it was beautiful.

Following the wild credit card

2011-03-02T21:54:00.000-04:00

I just spent two whole days in New Minas, the big box store capital of the Valley. I have guests coming and a guest room with no furniture, and what with the bedbug epidemic I am afraid of buying second hand. But I cannot afford new. So I held my nose and spent two whole days going from big box store to big box store looking for bedding and furniture.

The first day I think I spent just under $1,000. I am not sure because I haven't looked at the receipts yet, I am afraid to. The second day I spent a few hundred more. Again, not sure, haven't looked at the receipts yet. At a certain point, I just gave up trying to stem the flow. It seems like once you let a credit card loose, it takes on a life of its own. All I could do was follow it around and carry the bags.

I found this carpet at Canadian Tire, a big 5' by 8' indoor-outdoor carpet, nothing special but it was on sale for $19.99. The guest room is 8' by 10', so the carpet covers half the room. The sales guy mentioned that they had two of them, he just couldn't find the other one. When I got home I thought, Gee, if I bought the other one too, then the whole floor would be carpeted. Which would be good because it's a basement room with a linoleum floor.

So I called the store back. Talked to Josh in Hardware. He said he'd see if he could find it and he'd call me back. Or, if I didn't hear from him I should call him after a couple of hours or so. I didn't hear from him so I called. He told me he'd looked but he couldn't find it. He even got another guy to go out to the warehouse with him and they took inventory of all the carpets, but no luck. According to the computer they have that carpet, he said he'd keep looking and I should call him back on Monday. So we'll see. Half I want that carpet, half I want to stop spending money, so either way it'll be good. Or bad.

I've been working through some new bread recipes. Got a couple of books on artisanal bread baking and have been trying them out. One recipe calls for baking the bread in a Dutch oven pot. They cost an arm and a leg these days, I remember I used to have one that cost me next to nothing but now, well, you pay a lot for a Dutch oven. However, I was talking about that in the local used book store and someone said she had one in the barn that I could have. She cleaned it up and oiled it and gave it to me. For nothing! Just to know that it would be put to good use.

So this recipe seems foolproof. No matter how many mistakes I make, the bread still turns out great. I've stopped putting jam on my toast, it tastes too good for that. However. The second rising is supposed to happen with the dough wrapped in a towel. Then you are supposed to preheat the Dutch oven pot in the stove oven and then tip the dough from the towel into the pot. Every time I do that it plops into the pot hard enough to deflate it. Sometimes off centre, halfway up one side of the pot. My aim is terrible. The Dutch oven is so hot I am afraid I might burn myself so I hold the towel away from it, well, it's scary and messy.

Last night I had this brainstorm. I was thinking about the tipping problem and was wondering if there was some way to lower the dough into the oven nicely. I had this idea that if I had one of those silicon baking sheets I could cut out a circle to fit in the bottom of the oven, and then leave two strips on opposite sides to act as handles for lowering the dough into the oven. I could let the dough rise on the pad and then just lower it into the oven. Canadian Tire had this great sale on a set of silicon baking forms, including the baking sheet, so I bought that as well as the carpet (and a bunch of other stuff, it was a pretty good sale. I now have a year's supply of toilet paper). But the forms all look so useful as is, I hate to cut one of them up for my little experiment. Oh well, courage, gotta do it.

If Josh finds the carpet I have to go back for it. And there's a blanket I saw at Winners, and I still have to figure out what to do for curtains...

Where is it all going to end?

Zooborn lions

2011-02-25T10:24:00.005-04:00

I am a sucker for baby animals, hence my link on the right side of this page to the Zooborns website. I looked at one of today's links this morning, a couple of cute lion cubs.

According to the description, these are seriously endangered animals, which is my reason for being in favour of zoos, that in too many cases there are more members of an endangered species in a zoo than in the wild. Not because we have captured too many and plopped them in prison, but because we have either hunted down or---more likely---have ruined the habitat for the survival of the wild animals. Because there are seven billion of us, and we take up too much space.

Another thing the description says is that these animals were once widespread throughout the Middle East, Pakistan and northern India. Now there are maybe 400 individuals left in the wild, another 100 in captivity. The town I live in has a population of 5,000 (people, not lions), so I guess if we devoted a couple of streets to Asiatic Lions, the entire world population of them could live there. Is that sad or what?

Anyway, getting back to the lion cubs. The description says the cubs are shy. A couple of the photos show the cubs snarling at the camera, I don't think shy is the right word here. Maybe pissed off and wanting nothing to do with us?

"Two thousand years ago they once roamed the whole of the Middle East..."

There are seven billion of us, we take up a lot of space and we need every inch we can get just to feed all of us. I read somewhere that the carrying capacity of the Earth for humans is around one million. We have so overshot. There's not a lot we can do about that now, getting back to one million is kind of unthinkable without talking major catastrophe. But it is terribly sad.

Brave Libyans

2011-02-22T11:49:00.004-04:00

Muammar Gaddafi brought in mercenaries to slaughter his own people. Now Libyan consular staff and Libyan ambassadors around the world are resigning, citing genocide and War on the People as their reasons.

The protestors carry on. They are joined in their fight for freedom by members of Gaddafi's government and high ranking Libyan civil servants.

Gaddafi thought that Mubarek's problem was that he was not tough enough on the crazies shouting in the street. He sure showed Mubarek.

We in the West will pay a price at the pump for all this freedom fighting, but it is time.

I read one report in which a Libyan ambassador compared Gaddafi to Hitler. When you think of it, if only Hitler's people had seen what was coming and fought back the way Libyans are doing now, world history would be a whole lot different. I'm not criticizing Germans for not rising up en masse against Hitler, I don't think they could have known how bad it was going to be. But Libyans (and others) have the benefit of history, and they are good students.

I think sometimes that we in the industrialized West think that our way is the only way and developing nations around the world have no choice but to follow in our footsteps, or at least in the prescribed way our governments have set out for them.

But it isn't and they do have a choice and they are choosing now.

Two films I saw this week

2011-02-19T22:51:00.000-04:00

I've seen a couple of extraordinary films this week, both of them made by Canadians. I am so impressed by the high quality of Canadian film-making these days, and these films are terrific examples.

The first film was Incendies, I saw it last Sunday afternoon. What can I say: shocking and powerful, the mix of emotions this film evoked was so complex it left me speechless.

Basically the plotline is that a Middle Eastern woman living in Canada dies suddenly, leaving her adult twin children with a mysterious legacy, two letters that they are asked to deliver to their brother and their father, respectively.

Until the reading of the will the twins did not know who their father was and did not know that they had a brother.

Delivering these letters required the twins to return to the land of their birth, which they had not seen since they were infants. The film bounces back and forth between scenes from their mother's life in that nameless Middle Eastern country and the twins' efforts to find out what really happened and how to deliver those fateful letters.

The details are vague as to what country this story actually takes place in, but I read on Wikipedia afterward that it is most likely modelled on events in Lebanon in the 1970s. Place names are not real and the specific historical events are probably not real either. But they could be.

The story is so well told that it is spellbinding. The bouncing around in time actually works, although I had a bit of difficulty telling the daughter and the mother apart at times, so at first it was a little confusing for me when and where a scene was taking place. However I quickly figured out that the key feature (for me) for telling them apart was their mouths, the mother has a distinctive mouth, so I always checked that to be sure.

How the personal story of the central characters unfolds is both shocking and satisfying. This is another one of those films with a wrenching twist at the end, but it works. Although one does suspect that the mother was just a tad manipulative.

I guess this film brings home how horrible the political mess and violence of the Middle East is for the ordinary people living in the midst of it. I've also been reading a little of the history of the Middle East, in particular about how modern Middle Eastern political boundaries were created in the early 1900s by the European empires of the time (destroying the Ottoman empire and divvying up the pieces amongst themselves). Their motives were a mixed bag but the results were a mess. Just a mess. Incendies brings home the human cost of that mess.

~~~~~~~~~~~

The second film I saw was Last Train Home, on Wednesday night. This film is a documentary about the largest human migration ever, occurring annually on the Chinese New Year. More than 130 million Chinese workers in major Chinese industrial cities return home for the New Year's celebrations in thousands of small rural villages.

The film focuses on one particular family and the stresses in their lives that come up in this annual event. While the grandmother remains in the small rural village raising their two children, the parents work at a garment factory in a large industrial city. They only return "home" once a year. They are estranged from their children but deeply committed to their welfare and futures.

In this film you see the grim realities of Chinese sweatshops in huge grey polluted cities, and then the stunning scenery of the rural areas. The grandmother's home seems positively idyllic to someone like myself, yet the teenage daughter chafes at the restrictions of living so far from the excitement of city life. In the garment factory you see small children napping on tables or chasing each other through narrow aisles between the rows of whirring sewing machines. Their parents and other adults are bent over the machines guiding endless reams of fabric through them, fabric that is turned into jeans that are baled, boxed and shipped overseas to unseen customers far away.

One particular scene that I liked was a view of a train travelling through snow-covered mountains. At first it reminded me of the Canadian Rockies in winter, then I realized that those mountains were covered not in trees but in thousands of tiny farmed terraces.

Another humourous scene (to me) was the grandmother and two children having supper and the daughter complains about the mosquitoes, asking why they never bite the grandmother. Ah the ubiquitous mosquito! The grandmother says they never bite her because she is an old hardworking woman. You bet, grandma!

The crowd scenes around train stations immediately before the Chinese New Year are mind blowing. The long crowded train trip home---a trip of several days---is exhausting just to watch. What should be a happy family reunion at the end degenerates quickly as the parents attempt to deal with fairly ordinary family conflict in a tense 2-3 day visit that magnifies and intensifies what most people deal with over much longer periods of time. And then the parents go back to the city to deal with long work hours and a tiny primitive living space (not much more than a small bed, table, bucket, bare lightbulb and a curtain). It's quite horrendous.

What is most heartbreaking about this film is that the parents make major sacrifices, living most of their lives away from their children in awful circumstances in order to support them through school so that they can have better lives, only to have their eldest quit school amid accusations that her parents didn't care about her as evidenced by the fact that they are never around. The pain of the daughter who is intensely angry at her parents for their absence, and the pain of the mother and father who cannot be there and cannot defend themselves against her accusations, comes to a peak in one terrible scene in which the daughter screams at the camera, "You want to see the real me? This is the real me!"

The film strongly implies that this is by no means an isolated situation, this is what happens to millions of Chinese every year. This is the huge human cost of the "miracle" of Chinese economic development.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I guess my own reaction to this last film might appear a little strange, but I identified very personally with the parents. I felt like my own life as a single parent of twenty years was being played out on the screen, albeit in a kind of over-the-top way. Trying to simultaneously be the sole parent and sole support of two children, who as teenagers are intensely angry at you for being so restrictive of their freedoms and apparently so uncaring of them. Under these circumstances one does not act or feel anything like what one would like, one is so far off from the ideal parent image promoted in our society that it is cringe-making.

In the name of The Economy we sacrifice our lives and our children.

This film filled me with despair and compassion.

Six Metres of Pavement

2011-02-17T09:20:00.013-04:00

I thought this was kind of cool, what a great way to market a book!

This little video is set in my old neighbourhood in Toronto, the author of the book being "trailed" lives a few doors down from my old place.

Doesn't it make you curious to read it?

Six Metres of Pavement, by Farzana Doctor (2011).

Very early secret birthday

2011-02-14T21:45:00.001-04:00

My son Josh's birthday is one week after mine, in the spring. Josh and Kim and Eva are going to fly to Nova Scotia on my birthday and return home to BC on his birthday. But it has to be a secret because the airline that they are booked on does very embarrassing things to people who fly with them on their birthdays.

Right now my guest room is a storage room with no furniture, I guess I have to get on that. I was going to wait until the end of the university academic year so I could pick up some cheap furniture when the students leave, but looks like I will need stuff before then.

But I can hardly wait. Eva is almost sitting up and almost crawling. Kim has never been this far east, and Josh hasn't been back here in almost 18 years. Happy Birthday to us!

Revolution

2011-02-11T17:02:00.004-04:00

In 1967-68 I was a student at l'Universite de Rouen, about an hour's drive west of Paris on the Seine. A wonderful place, a wonderful year. Rouen is in the heart of Normandy, a part of the world that Nova Scotia reminds me strongly of. Perhaps one of the reasons I felt so at home here when I first arrived in the early '70s.

Anyway, I was there for les evenements de Mai, the student uprising in France, and because my French student friends were heavily involved, I became involved too. At first it was exciting and exhilarating, we felt we had a real shot at bringing about change. The professors were with the students, and so were the workers, there was a general strike in the country. Paris was amazing. I and some student friends would hitchhike into the city to take part in it all. You couldn't get into la Sorbonne unless you had student ID, and I did so I could. Revolutionary lectures in the classrooms, huge revolutionary banners strung up everywhere, one in particular was the instructions for making Molotov cocktails. The streets surrounding la Sorbonne, le quartier latin, were dug up so that students could use the paving stones as missiles (there was a slogan, "sous les paves, c'est la plage", meaning that if you dug up the paving stones you could be on the beach because the stones were set in a bed of sand).

During the daytime it was OK to walk around, les flics gathered at certain intersections but left you alone, but at dusk if you were still there then you did so at your own risk. There were no buses and le metro was stopped because of all the tear gas in the lines and also because of the strike and the gasoline shortages. So everyone hitchhiked to get around, and the army brought in big trucks to move people around. If you needed to go somewhere, you waved at one of the trucks, it would pull over and two armed soldiers, with guns slung over their shoulders would get out of the canvas-covered back and wave you in with their guns. You climbed in and sat on a bench there with all the other people. The only way to see out was to lift the canvas on the side a bit to peek under it. When you thought you were near where you wanted to be then you shouted at one of the soldiers, who shouted at the driver, and then the truck pulled over and they let you out.

When it all started President de Gaulle was out of the country. But when he returned the tide turned and the whole thing was quickly ended. It was demoralizing. I remember going away to England for a week, and when I returned, someone had carved a huge croix de Lorraine in the sandstone bluff above Rouen. This was de Gaulle's symbol, and it was chilling to see it. It felt like as if someone had carved a swastika over the town.

I guess that experience made me cynical about revolution at way too early of an age. I stopped believing that change was possible in that way. And certainly my experience since then has seemed to confirm that belief, that you can't expect anything good to come out of a popular uprising. But I have been following what is going on in Tunisia and Egypt, and especially in Cairo, with growing admiration and hope. Watching the protestors in Tahrir Square, listening to them speak about why they are there, and reading as much as I can about what it is all about, I am excited for them. I really do hope that this time it is different.

This morning I was listening to Q on CBC and there was a debate about the Egyptian situation, one person for and one against. The one against was all about how revolutions end badly (look at Iran, look at Iran, LOOK AT IRAN) and the people should be happy with the devil they know rather than the devil they don't. I almost felt like reaching into the radio and shaking the fellow, So What About Iran?!? Iran is Iran, Egypt is Egypt!

Anyway hardly had the debate ended and the news came on announcing Mubarak has resigned and left the country in the hands of the military. The Egyptian military has comported itself very well with the people in Tahrir Square. I wish them well from the bottom of my heart.

This time maybe this time the revolution is here.

It is pretty though

2011-02-10T12:25:00.003-04:00

Fed up

2011-02-09T22:20:00.001-04:00

I swear He's out to get me. This Storm a Week thing is killing me, I think it's getting personal. There is no place left to shovel snow to. Next week's storm I'm not shovelling, there's no point.

There's way too much snow on the roof, people are starting to worry about roof collapses. And I have a headache which I think is actually a dental problem, but earliest I can get a dental appointment is next week. He's definitely out to get me.

I hate snow.

It's unanimous

2011-02-02T15:44:00.002-04:00

Going to be an early spring in the East, no question. Every groundhog in eastern Canada and the USA is in agreement, not a one saw its shadow, thanks to the latest Storm a Week. This one is a biggie. All told we are supposed to get 50 cm (20") over roughly 24 hours here in Kings County. Crazy.

Those groundhogs better be right, can't come too soon for me. Shovelling has lost its novelty, and I can think of a lot better ways to get a little exercise.

Storm a week

2011-01-27T12:46:00.003-04:00

Yet another storm. I heard someone refer to it as The Storm A Week, it certainly seems like they're coming that regularly. This one has it all: snow, ice pellets, freezing rain, rain, more snow, high winds. I still have power but who knows how long it will last. Yesterday I did a big shopping, including bags of sand for the ice and weight in the back of the truck, and last night I charged up all batteries and made sure I had enough firewood in. Bird feeders are full, I am good to go.

Last night's Community Chorus practice was great, I am really enjoying this. At one point our director made a funny but disparaging remark about bagpipes, eliciting many hisses and disappointed Ohhhhs. In Nova Scotia? Definitely the wrong crowd for that particular joke. Afterward, a few Altos discussed bringing a piper in to the next practice to surprise her.

I've been invited to the next Alto practice, half an hour before the Chorus practice. The Altos in my church choir are not a strong group but in this choir they are. I am kind of a borderline Soprano-Alto, but I think the social life of an Alto is better, so I'll stick with that. LOL.

Some of the Altos secretly sing along with the Baritones because they are borderline Alto-Baritones, and because our Baritones are not strong. They need all the support they can get. Baritones are usually all men, and men don't come out much for this kind of thing, so the few that do need lots of encouragement to stay. These guys lap it up I think, maybe they fluff their notes deliberately.

I'm one to talk though, staying in tune is not my forte either. I'm hoping practice helps, that's why I am in two choirs.

The director of the Community Chorus is a serious singer and singing teacher, so every practice is also a lesson. I learn a lot and it's fun. She explains how we are supposed to pronounce things differently when singing than when speaking normally ("diction"), what the various cryptic notations in the music sheets mean, how to make timing work to embellish the music, and how to breathe. I think the fact that the choir director is focussed on performing well in music competitions makes her more motivated to get us to do it right. She knows how choirs are scored in competitions, so she knows what things are important to develop. It reflects on her ability to teach and direct when her chorus does well.

The church choirmaster is good too, but she doesn't explain things quite as much so I have to rely on the people around me more. They have been there a long time and understand the music and her direction much better than I. We do the same warm-up exercises, but I wasn't doing them right because I didn't understand them until the director of the other choir explained their purpose and how to do them correctly. In the church choir we are not focussed on competition, so I think having us all understand the techniques of choir singing are not quite as important. Plus, the church choir has the advantage of four university music students with excellent voices who can carry the choir through the tough bits.

They're saying we may have 30 cm of snow today and then rain on top of that so I am debating the best strategic time to go out and shovel the stuff. The rain makes the snow heavy, plus it freezes into an icy crust making things even more difficult. The trick is to shovel before that happens but after the bulk of the snow has fallen. I just don't know when that is.

Bird visitors

2011-01-26T07:43:00.000-04:00

Over the past couple of weeks I've tried to photograph some of my bird visitors. I can only photograph them through the window so these photos vary in quality from poor to OK-but-not -great. And so far I have not been able to get one of the flicker.

The ubiquitous blue jays. They come in a gang, usually in the morning, spend a few minutes and then they're gone till the next day.

The female cardinal. She comes fairly often, I hardly ever see the male at this feeder although he is around as much as she is.

Lots of chickadees...

And nuthatches...

And goldfinches. They are a dusky yellow in the winter.

Occasionally a hairy woodpecker comes by, I put this suet cake out in hopes of attracting this fellow.

I have not been able to get a good photo of any of the juncoes, these photos make it look black but it is slate grey-blue in colour.

The fox sparrow. He has an incredibly cute face, but again, I've had a hard time getting a good photo of him.

Just behind the left side of the feeder roof is a junco waiting his turn, he won't go into the feeder until the sparrow has left.

The sparrow knows that and is taking his time.

Another goldfinch, perched a few feet from my window calmly peering in at me. As I moved around her eyes followed me.

Crows hang around most of the day, but rarely come close. The other day I watched one investigating one of the feeders but I think he found it a little precarious for him. The crows keep the hawks away.

The male cardinal. Just before he went into the box he was perched on a nearby post and would have made a stunning photo, unfortunately my camera was in another room and by the time I retrieved it he had moved into the box.

The other day I was driving out the old highway toward the Avon River, I saw at least a half a dozen bald eagles gliding above me. Half of them were adults with the white heads, the others were juveniles who did not yet have the white head feathers. They were gorgeous, a wonderful sight.

Friends of Jane

2011-01-24T17:56:00.004-04:00

It is bitterly cold out today, with low temperatures and high winds the chill factor is supposed to be -30C. Along with about 100 others I spent over an hour this morning standing in front of the local RCMP office bearing witness and hopefully providing some moral support in a tragic event. A young woman, a student at the local university is being deported.

Jane came to Canada from Bangladesh a few years ago to study computer science. She met another Bangladeshi student, fell in love, got pregnant and had a baby. At 7 weeks old that baby was rushed to hospital in distress, and very shortly after Jane and her boyfriend were arrested as suspects. While Jane was in custody her baby died. She never saw her baby again, she wasn't even allowed to see it before the baby was buried in an unmarked grave. She was held in prison for almost a year. This past year she was released but required to stay in the country to testify in an upcoming court case related to her baby's death. All her belongings and documents and money had disappeared while she was in prison.

The prison chaplain put Jane in touch with a local pastor who has taken Jane under her wing and tried to provide some support to her in desolated state. Jane has been trying to pick up the pieces of her life, re-registering for courses she needs to complete her degree, volunteering locally, and awaiting the trial. Meanwhile Canadian Border Services has determined that she should be deported, but this is at odds with the court's requirement that she stay in the country to testify in the upcoming trial.

So today, we were at the RCMP office awaiting the Border Services arrival to formally speak with Jane and determine her fate. We bore signs, "Friends of Jane" and "We Support Jane" while we waited. A local coffee shop invited us to drop by for free coffee and tea while we waited in that very bitter bitter cold. We were so bundled up that it was hard to recognize each other through the scarves and hoods and balaclavas. Cars driving by stopped to ask what was going on. The RCMP treated us kindly, they used their back door to come and go and we stayed clear of the exit from their parking lot.

Jane's lawyer accompanied her to the interview with the Border Services people. He came out with her when they were done to tell us how it went. He is the top immigration lawyer in the province and he had volunteered his services to Jane. He said that there are two kinds of deportation orders, a regular deportation order and an exclusion order. The exclusion order is the milder of the two and that was what was issued to Jane. She must leave but she can return after a year. However because of the pending court case the order is not enforceable, so she can stay and continue her school studies. In the meantime the lawyer said, there are several things we can do to have the exclusion order changed, and now there is time to do that. He said that community support was the most important thing, and we had already made an impression on the Border Services people. One of the first things they said to Jane was, We see that you have friends!

Jane expressed her tremendous gratitude to us, she said she couldn't believe the love and support she was receiving and it was hard for her to find words to express how grateful she was.

I try to put myself in her shoes and I think about how terribly awry one's life can go by making mistakes when one is young. I don't know the full details but it seems to me that she made some mistakes that have cost her dearly. I cannot imagine how it must have been for her to lose her infant daughter in the way that she did.

I've been singing in a local church choir the past couple of months, and every Sunday I wonder what the heck I am doing here. But this past Sunday a woman in the congregation got up to tell us Jane's story and invite us to support her the next morning at the RCMP office. I would not have known about this had I not been there. She also contacted several other church congregations in town and many of the people at the RCMP office this morning came because of that. Others were students who knew Jane from school, and others knew about it from a recent NDP meeting at which this woman spoke. This brings home to me the important role local churches can play in a community, to provide support and galvanize citizens to do the same.

Oh but it was cold cold cold out there!!!

The Red Green show

2011-01-23T20:40:00.000-04:00

We have a pair of cardinals in our neighbourhood. I see the female at my bird feeder fairly often, the male only occasionally.

This morning on my way to the bathroom, I saw him out the bathroom window, perched in a pine tree. Tried to get a closer photo of him, but he saw me and flew away.

The Stupid Pete Award

2011-01-21T14:15:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I cleaned out my tool trunk. I don't think I have sorted and cleaned that trunk since the mid-90s sometime. Anyway, seemed like it was time again.

Many decades ago in my very early 20s I left home, for good I thought. Some time later I came back to retrieve belongings that I had left in storage in my parents' basement. At that time my brother was using the basement as a workshop. I discovered that he had been into my stuff and left his "calling card" in the form of stickers with his name on it, all over my stuff. For years after I kept finding those stickers in odd places.

And yesterday, I found another on a cheesebox in that tool trunk.

Well brother, when you leave your name all over your big sister's stuff, you have only yourself to blame when it gets blasted all over the internet.

The War of the World

2011-01-19T11:33:00.001-04:00

The book that currently sits at the top of the pile by my bed is The War of the World by Niall Ferguson (2006). Subtitled Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. It is one of those big fat daunting books with more than 800 pages of fine print, and I have three weeks to read it.

One thing I have learned to do with big non-fiction books is to read the first and last chapters first, and then read the middle. The author presents his thesis in the first chapter, and ties it up in the last; everything in the middle is details. By the time I've read the first and last chapters, I know whether I want to bother with the rest.

This book is no different, although there are in effect two first chapters, the preface and the official first chapter, and two last chapters, the official last chapter and an appendix. Oh well. It still works.

Parts of the middle were hard to read. This being essentially a book about war, it has its fair share of atrocities described in it. No one is spared, atrocities are committed by all, to all. The graphic detail is a little hard to read, and it is hard to escape the notion that atrocity is just under the skin for most peoples. However, having said that, obviously the first and last chapters were sufficiently interesting to entice me to dip into the middle. I am actually not done yet, I have only just made it to the end of "World War I".

It is Ferguson's contention that the entire twentieth century was just one big fat world war. The title of his book is a deliberate play on H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Ferguson says that Wells' book, written at the beginning of the twentieth century, was prescient; the only thing different from what actually happened was that it identified the enemy as aliens from Mars when in fact it was humans.

Another contention is that although the West thinks it won the war(s), it in fact lost. The underlying story is the Descent of the West and the Rise of the East.

In the opening chapters he describes what the world was like at the beginning of the twentieth century, how it was globalized to a point not seen before or for the rest of the century. He describes a world where products from all over the world are readily available, communications by mail, telephone and telegraph are highly developed and quite rapid, no passport is necessary for extensive travel and one is free to live almost anywhere. The movement of capital, labour, resources and products was free and extensive.

Racism and ethnic hatred was growing---the early twentieth century was much more racist than the early nineteenth century---and this was one of the major contributing factors to coming conflicts and warfare.

Another theme of this book is about empires and nation-states. Empires became too costly to maintain for most nations, all European empires were disbanded due to the cost. We think of empires as lucrative, the wealth of subject areas flowing to the centre, but what was actually happening was that the wealth was flowing to increasingly wealthier corporations and the expense of running the empire being born by central governments. The only thing that happened with the demise of an empire was that the central government divested itself of the cost; the wealth continued to flow to the corporations in most cases.

Nation-states are a recent phenomenon and have their own set of problems. The idea of a nation is that it should consist of people of a single ethnic "nationality", but the reality is that ethnic groups are too diffusely spread out to create geographic nations corresponding to ethnic nationalities. He describes the problem of Germany as a case in point, ethnic Germans being located as far east as Moscow, westward into the European lowlands and France, and southward into Italy. The "ethnic problem" is pervasive, examples abound in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa.

In describing the so-called Cold War, Ferguson says that it wasn't really cold, active warfare continued but not in Western Europe or North America. The Cold War merely spared those areas from being the battlefields, which were moved to Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Korea.

Something that Ferguson makes explicit and I have being suspecting, is that major conflicts are in effect swan songs, even (and perhaps especially) for the victors. Warfare is always expensive, winning a war in no way mitigates that. We are witnessing the swan song of Western power, the East is rising.

An interesting and ironic anecdote concerns CIA interventions. I don't know if they are quite so active in this regard now, but certainly in the '50s and '60s they were actively fomenting coups in countries seen as potentially threatening to the USA in some way or another. One of the coups instigated by the CIA was in Guatemala, which resulted in active genocide of thousands of Mayans over several decades. However, it also resulted in the politicization of a certain lawyer, Castro by name, who successfully instigated his own coup in Cuba and also successfully resisted several CIA attempts to overthrow him.

Ferguson points out that many wars fought to quell Communism around the world were actually genocides of aboriginal peoples in the countries those wars were being fought in. The CIA perceived Communism in every instance of poor people fighting for land and human rights.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I wrote this post several weeks ago, I have since finished the book and would recommend it if you have the stomach and perseverance for it. Or, you could just do as I do and read only the first and last chapters.

Bring it about that the people will return

2011-01-14T00:18:00.000-04:00

Bring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope,
Will find relish in their food
And beauty in their clothes,
Will be content in their abode
And happy in the way they live.

I saw this mysterious bit of I-don't-know-what (poetry? advice? aphorism?) on a scrap of paper tacked to a post in a friend's house in the woods. He didn't know the source of it. It struck me and I wrote it down. A couple of years later I finally Googled it, and it turns out that it comes from chapter 80 in D.C. Lau's translation of the Tao Te Ching.

I think it is about the attainment of simplicity, the richness of a life when even the most mundane of things are valued, cherished and made beautiful. I like the first line, it is so jarring (what the heck do we do with a knotted rope?!?) but I think it speaks to how we go about achieving that simplicity and richness, by learning old intricate skills that actually serve a purpose of some kind in a simple life. There is deep happiness, contentment, in that.

In the past couple of years I have had need of knotted rope, and I know that there are many kinds of knots, each one serving a particular purpose. Knowing your knots can be a handy thing indeed.

I am laying low for a bit. I took delivery of two cord of firewood the day before a major snow storm here. I spent as much time as I could chucking and stacking that wood in a shed before the storm started, and then a major amount of time shovelling snow afterwards. Between those two things my back is complaining bitterly.

Final curve

2011-01-12T13:06:00.004-04:00

When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know that you have turned
All the corners that are left.

~Langston Hughes, in Montage of a Dream Deferred, 1951

Happy finds

2011-01-09T07:40:00.001-04:00

I just got email from my brother in Ontario pointing me to a website in California where someone has a copy of Folk Songs for Little Sailors available for download. What a treat!

This album was released in 1966 by Riverside Records, it is a compilation of sea chanteys apparently intended for children, but in fact for anyone who likes that kind of music. Back in the '60s my parents gave this record album to my sister for Christmas, but it quickly became a family classic.

Somehow it was lost. I remember borrowing the album from my parents as an adult, but I was pretty sure I had returned it. However it hasn't been seen since and I don't have it. What can I say.

Anyway. This morning I downloaded it from the website, firing off a Thank you note to the website owner (and she wrote back "May you and your family enjoy a rousing chorus of Twinkie-doodle-um, twinkie-doodle-um, sang the bold fisherman."). Now I am listening to it as I write this. It is scratchy, as one would expect from forty-year-old well-played vinyl, but still a treat.

Sail Away, Sail Away – Bob Gibson
The Walloping Windowblind – Oscar Brand
The Bold Fisherman – Oscar Brand
High Barbary – Billy Faier
The Sailor's Hornpipe – Billy Faier
The Fishes Song – Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl
The Golden Vanitee – Peggy Seeger & Ewan MacColl
Two Little Boats I Spy – Louise DeCormier
The Mermaid – John Runge
The Flying Dutchman – Dean Gitter
Belfast Hornpipe – Margaret Barry
Sir Patrick Spens – Ed McCurdy
Bunch Of Roses – Oscar Brand
Midnight On The Ocean – Oscar Brand
Sailing Along And Singing – The Renaissance Chorus

"Sir Patrick Spens" was one of Dad's favourites, "The Flying Dutchman" one of mine. But they're all good.

Another delightful find:

Last year I went to the spring One Of A Kind craft show in Toronto and bought--among other things--a wooden fountain pen. Again, I managed to lose it. Don't know how or where, but it is gone. And of course I didn't remember who I bought it from and there were no clues on the OneOfAKind website. I just remembered that the fellow who made it was francophone, I thought maybe from Montreal. I did a search on that information, but nothing that tweaked my memory showed up.

So yesterday, I was browsing old blog entries, and it turns out I had one about that visit to the OneOfAKind. Not only that, but I had (very thoughtfully I think ;-) put weblinks to the sites of the artisans that I purchased items from. And there he was, Richard Boucher at Stylos Boucher. I emailed him and he told me which model he thought I had purchased. He said it was out of stock, but if I told him what kind of wood I wanted he'd make another one for me. It'll cost me more than I paid for the first one but I suppose that's what you get for losing something valuable.

I chose spalted maple, which is maple wood with black lines running along the grain from some kind of fungus. Quite pretty I think. I am looking forward to its arrival.

Tour of the new-old place

2011-01-05T11:27:00.000-04:00

1. The back door, in the kitchen. Immediately to the right in this photo is the stairway down to the basement.

2. The left hand side of the kitchen counter...

3. ...and the right hand side.

4. Looking from the kitchen toward the living room.

5. The front door and vestibule, to the right of the dining table in the photo above. The floor in the vestibule is uninsulated so I keep the inner door closed.

6. Big rocking armchair chair (that doesn't really rock so it's safe to put a mug of coffee on the wooden arms) and couch on the left facing toward the kitchen.

7. Woodstove and desk on the right.

8. View from living room toward the kitchen.

9. Sunset on the living room wall above the couch.

10. Standing between living room and kitchen, looking down the hallway toward the bathroom, loomroom (on the left) and bedroom (on the right).

11. Standing at the other end of the hallway, looking toward the kitchen (on the left) and the living room (on the right). That door on the right is a closet, but when I used to live here before it was the door to the stairway to the basement. I keep walking into that closet when I want to go downstairs.

12. Loom and computer desk in the loomroom...

13. There's no closet in my bedroom because it isn't really intended to be a bedroom. The loomroom is supposed to be the master bedroom so it has the closet.

14. Across the hall from the loomroom, looking into my bedroom.

I haven't done much with the basement yet, and I haven't put up pictures yet either. Lots of time for that.

Old Toronto pics

2011-01-03T08:50:00.000-04:00

I happened on a website last week, unfortunately I don't have the URL so I am afraid I can't attribute it, but at any rate there were many old photos from the City of Toronto Archives there. A few of them caught my eye:

I love this one!

Iceboats! I'd never heard of nor seen such a thing until I saw this photo and the next one. Amazing!

In 1912, a race between an iceboat and some motorcycles on the frozen Toronto harbour.

The old Rosedale Hotel at Shaftesbury and Yonge, near where I lived as a teenager.

I remember this building. Around the corner were two doors marked "Gents" and "Ladies and Escorts", both opening into the same room. But in days gone by---or so my parents told me---they opened into separate rooms because "Ladies" and "Gents" did not mix in Public Rooms (pubs). This building was torn down and replaced with the Ports of Call restaurant in the mid '60s, it became a favourite site for our family get-togethers in those days, but that too is gone now. [I looked it up, the Ports of Call was built in 1963 and torn down in 1984.]

Midnight at the barn

2011-01-01T10:47:00.006-04:00

Happy new year to all of you. May it bring good things into your life and leave sleeping dogs lie.

I'm still in my PJs lounging in bed with tea and toast and laptop. Yesterday I was wide awake at 4.00am and managed to stay awake until some time after midnight, at which time it then became impossible to sleep for another couple of hours, so I am quite exhausted now. I look forward to some kind of normal sleep regime in the near future, I hope.

Why 4.00am? Don't ask me, it certainly wasn't my idea.

A few of us gathered for a kind of Last Supper of the Year: some gorgeous big fat scallops, veggies, "German junk food" as our host called it (chocolates from Germany) and a bit of sparkling wine for a toast. These were friends from the '70s and '80s, so we shared a few memories of "the good ol' days". Turns out our shared memories conflicted a bit, we remembered things happening in a different order, to different people, or in a different place entirely.

Then we hied ourselves off to a New Year's dance at the Old O Barn. A kind of barn dance I guess. The band played a unique mix of '70s-'80s rock and Celtic jigs and reels, and most folks were on the dance floor unless they had medical reason not to be. Well, most of the women that is. For some reason guys don't dance. Medical condition maybe?

The age range was pretty broad, I'd say late teens to late eighties. On the dance floor you could tell how old a dancer was by how high they bounced. One young woman in flying pigtails wore what looked like skiboots with gigantic rubber heels and soles, she towered over us even when she wasn't bouncing.

With the 4.00am rising bit, I found I had to stay on the dance floor or else I'd go catatonic in a chair somewhere.

Countdown at midnight, hugs and kisses all 'round, then I was out the door and scooting home before collapsing altogether. Some midnight bean bacon and kale soup and off to bed, only to lie there another hour or two waiting for sleep. Argh!

Holiday odds and ends

2010-12-26T13:31:00.004-04:00

Depending on how it goes, we may or may not get the first big snowdump of the season. Most likely we will. Supposed to go to a Boxing Day open house this evening, I think I'll go early rather than late. It's just out of town, I don't want to be driving home in a blizzard.

Yesterday, Christmas Day, there was a community dinner down at the Lions Club, I went. It was organized by someone I used to know here, but in the last week she came down with a life-threatening infection and has had to spend Christmas in the hospital. Her husband says she's in recovery but it will be a long haul. So a lot of people had to step in to make the dinner happen, and they did and it did.

This is a phenomenon across the province, in the past few years many communities have started these community Christmas dinners. Not just for folks who might be needy but for everybody. Great idea. I had a good time.

I went alone, but arrived at the same time as one of my neighbours and his mother-in-law. She quickly took me under her wing and introduced me to many people there. It was kind of cute, some of those people already knew me and were wondering why I was being introduced to them. But it was nice too.

We had a full table, the food was great and the conversation fun. There were leftovers, and for a toonie you could buy a special dinner made up from the leftovers. I've got too much food in my fridge that I have to eat before it goes bad so I declined, but lots took advantage.

Before I went to dinner I talked to two sons and DILs via Skype video. That was great too. Little Eva can see the computer screen and she was fascinated with watching me wave at her. She's a going concern now, smiling and laughing and raring to go. Almost 4 months.

I also had a more traditional phone call with my brother who is in northern Ontario with lots of snow. But he says there is more snow at his southern Ontario home than in northern Ontario, due to the same storm that knocked the power out here a couple of weeks ago.

After dinner I called the third son who insisted he was about to call me. I should have given him another few minutes. He was headed to Christmas dinner with his boss's family, a tradition in his isolated west coast valley.

The last few days my birdfeeder has been getting enormous traffic, I love it. On Christmas Eve, I had a nuthatch and a (yellow shafted) flicker, and on Christmas Day, a hairy woodpecker and a pair of cardinals. Cardinals! In the winter? The male of course is bright red and the female a lovely brown tinged with red and they both have bright orangy-red beaks. On that male you don't notice it so much because of how bright his plumage is, but on the female that bright orange beak is stunning.

Besides those birds there are the usual jays, starlings and chickadees. I am so happy with all the bird activity. I'd love to show photos here but the moment I approach the window they all fly away. Maybe they'll get used to me with time.

The last couple of days I have been lounging around in my PJs till well after noon. As I am now. Today I read on the internet some of those year summaries that will be out there all week. Not just the summary of the year but of the decade because of this being then end of the first decade of the century.

Interesting obituaries (to me): Anna McGarrigle and Lena Horne. A lot of musicians actually, but those two are significant to me.

Interesting weather story: how the lack of snow in Siberia is causing heavy-duty winters around the northern hemisphere, in apparent contradiction to global warming (but the lack of snow is of course caused by global warming). And how meteorologists are missing the major weather catastrophes by focussing on the warming of the oceans rather than the warming of Siberia.

Birdfeeder and fishbowl

2010-12-24T14:19:00.001-04:00

It's kind of a dull grey day, it snowed briefly this morning but not enough to stick.

The bird feeder is going great guns though. Today I've seen the usual jays, chickadees and juncoes, but also nuthatches and a flicker. They're too skittish to photograph though, as soon as I approach the window with my camera they're gone. I love seeing them all though.

Right in front of my house is a streetlight that sways in the wind. It is half full of water. It's kind of funny seeing that little pool of water suspended over the street, especially at night when the light is on. I imagine creatures living in the water, like a little goldfish bowl suspended over the street.

I wonder if it will freeze in the cold weather.

Truck goes away and stays away?

2010-12-20T20:13:00.006-04:00

Twice last week I took my truck out to Canning to get it undercoated for the winter. Twice Garage Guy told me to come back another time because he couldn't do it that day, even though we'd set up an appointment. He was very apologetic and offered me a discount when he finally did do it.

I told him about the water leak and how since the storm last week the truck has been full of water and I couldn't dry it out because it is too cold. He said that if I left the truck with him over the weekend, he'd dry it out, find the leak and fix it. And I could have my truck back on Monday.

Well, I thought that was a good deal, I could get through a half week or so without the truck.

Then on Saturday morning my brand new espresso maker stopped working. Just when I was becoming nicely addicted to my morning espresso.

The store I bought it at said, No problem, they'd replace it, just bring it in.

Which I couldn't do, because of no truck. Well, I hauled out the old French Press coffee maker but it was just not the same. But for a couple of days I could manage.

So today, Monday, I packed up the espresso maker in readiness for returning it to the store as soon as my truck was ready. While packing, I thumbed through the manual and noticed there was a 1-800 number for the manufacturer so what the heck I thought I'd give it a try.

Wouldn't you know it, the customer service person there identified the problem right away and told me what to do about it and she was right and now the espresso maker works just like it is supposed to. So I don't have to return it.

My neighbours asked where I'd been all weekend.

I told them, Right here but my truck is away. Told them it was coming home later in the afternoon.

Of course, another major storm is on its way and they were worried about me driving back from Canning across the dikes in the blowing snow, so they suggested that if I waited until tomorrow they would drive me to Canning themselves.

But I was looking forward to getting my truck back today, I was prepared to drive through a blizzard if necessary.

Then Garage Guy phoned.

He dried out the truck and he found the leak, but he didn't undercoat the truck, yet again. He said the leak was due to the detached rubber seals around the doors, and if I took the truck home today it would only get wet again because of the storm we're supposed to get tonight. And also, if he undercoated then he wouldn't be able to install new rubber seals, the doorways would be too greasy.

So he suggested I leave the truck with him until he could get the rubber seals, maybe tomorrow, maybe later.

Hmmm.

He said he was really hoping this storm would dump three feet of snow. He badly wants to get out on his snowmobile.

I said, Yeah right, if we get three feet of snow I'm never going to get my truck back.

He said, That would be OK with me. I could just hear him grinning.

Well I might have something to say about that, I said.

OK, my dear, call me tomorrow and we'll talk. He laughed.

He's got my truck hostage. Weatherman is on my side though, Weatherman says 5 cm of snow and 25 mm of rain overnight, I think Garage Guy's out of luck with the three feet. And for the meantime my truck is indoors, warm and dry.

First thing tomorrow is the lunar eclipse and the winter solstice. We won't see the eclipse here with all that snow and rain but hopefully someone will see it. Happy solstice! At the very least it means the days will start to get a little longer now. That's gotta be good news.

Deda

2010-12-17T23:11:00.007-04:00

We called my grandfather Deda (dee-da). The story goes that his first grandchild called him "Deda", which was "Da-ddy" reversed, and it stuck.

I was poking around on the internet and guess what, I found a photo of him in Wikipedia! Back row, second from the left, that's my Deda! 1929...

In case you're wondering, this photo is part of the Wikipedia article "Forest Hill, Toronto".

The Spirit Level

2010-12-17T09:55:00.003-04:00

The little public library in my new hometown doesn't compare with the Toronto Public Library system. However it is part of a larger network, the Annapolis Valley Regional Library system, and has connections to other libraries, including university libraries, across the province. The interlibrary loan system lets me borrow from them all. And as a local university alumna, I also have a university library card here. Over the past few weeks I have been building up my Books on Hold list and it is starting to bear fruit.

A book that I had put on hold in Toronto almost a year ago just came to me via the local library, after only a week or two on my Hold list. So there are a few advantages to a much smaller system. I imagine the one copy in the Toronto library was much in demand necessitating a lengthy wait for it, while here in the Valley hardly anyone had ever heard of the book and I got it almost immediately.

The book is The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009). The authors are experts in social determinants of health and the book is a look at the statistics of various social and physical health indicators compared to relative income inequalities in various countries and American states. The final chapter of the book explains which statistics and countries they used and why they chose them. For the most part the countries are European and North American, generally the more affluent countries of the world. That's not why they were chosen, but rather for the availability of comparable statistics. No point comparing apples and oranges.

The most obvious conclusions one could draw from the many graphs in this book are:

1. There is a very clear link between levels of income inequality and both individual and social health indicators. The authors argue that the link is directional: income inequality causes health and social problems, not vice versa.

1. The USA does very badly: it has one of the highest levels of income inequality and very poorest levels of social, mental and physical health and educational attainment. The UK is in a somewhat distant second place for badness.

2. In almost every instance Canada stands in the middle of the pack, neither very good nor very bad. We Canadians are not surprised.

3. Japan does very well on all fronts, the Scandinavian countries also do well for the most part.

The authors attribute these findings largely to our human need for status. We are crushed by a sense of low status and thrive when we think we have high status. A sense of low status brings out the worst in us, young men respond with violence, young women with early pregnancy, everyone with headaches and sick stomachs.

In our modern world status is largely dictated by financial well-being, and the further the distance between the most well off and the least well off then the greater the inequality and the greater the pressure on status. Curiously, other forms of inequality do not have such a large impact. Gender inequality does not have the same repercussions for either men or women as does income inequality. In Japan women generally do not have the same levels of gender equality as we have here in North America and Europe, but nevertheless appear to fare very well with respect to mental, physical and social health. And educational attainment.

The achievement of greater income equality is accomplished in different ways in different countries. In the Scandinavian countries high redistributive taxes ensure that the after-tax income of all citizens is within a fairly narrow range; in Japan the same result is achieved by simply having a much narrower gap between high and low before-tax income levels. CEOs and labourers are not that different from each other.

A very interesting conclusion to this study is around the issues of climate change and social justice. The authors discuss what needs to be done in order to reduce carbon emissions globally, and essentially it requires the popular acceptance of serious curtailment in carbon consumption. The level of cynicism in a country with high income inequalities works against such acceptance. At the same time, it is clear that the greatest contributors to carbon emissions are the wealthy, those who can afford it. In broad strokes, the way to reduce global carbon emissions is to reduce the carbon emissions of the wealthy, which almost automatically alleviates income inequality as well. The two issues have the same solution, but will be difficult to implement in countries of high income inequality.

At the end of the book there is a graph plotting environmental footprint against income level for all of the countries of the world, and two lines indicating an environmentally sustainable footprint (horizontal line) and threshold of adequate income (vertical line). All of the poor countries of the world are also the most environmentally sustainable with respect to carbon emissions; the rich countries of the world are hugely unsustainable.

With one notable exception. One country---one country alone in the whole world---manages to be both environmentally sustainable and provide an adequate income for its citizens. Cuba?!?

Within the USA there is a range of income inequality levels across the states, and the global correlation between inequality and health also applies within the USA. Curiously, the state with the lowest income inequality level is Alaska. I guess the very wealthy don't see Alaska as their Shangri-la.

Something I did not know but learned from this book is about crime and punishment, penal policies in different countries. The USA has one of the highest per capita prison populations not because of its extremely high crime levels but because of its harsh sentencing policies. In California alone there are 340 prisoners doing life sentences for shoplifting. Amnesty International has repeatedly protested what amounts to torture in the American prison system.

Ironically, most of the routine forms of punishment in American prisons are far more likely to produce hardened criminals than to reduce crime levels. Prisoners are systematically isolated from normal social interaction and generally rendered incapable of functioning in normal social life once they are released. Prisons are being created and built at a much greater rate than universities, 'supermax' prisons are essentially and deliberately the most socially degraded environments possible.

Japan has one of the most civilized penal policies with noticeable good effects: low prison populations and low crime rates. In general accused lawbreakers are shown extreme leniency if they confess and express remorse and contrition. Once in prison the rules are very strict but social life is encouraged and positively directed. Prison guards are expected to perform as mentors and counsellors to prisoners. Former prisoners generally express satisfaction and even gratitude for the experience, it turns their lives around.

Another interesting factoid is around the issue of teenage pregnancy.

We generally think of teen mothers as a bad idea: bad for the mother and bad for the baby. However, in some populations the health of the mother is at its best in her teen years, and babies born to such mothers are ironically better off than babies born to the same mothers at a later age. These would be mothers of such low income and social status that their health is seriously challenged, and these would also be the ones most likely to bear children in their teen years.

The rate of teen pregnancy in the USA was declining until 2005, since then it has been rising again (likewise for the rate of violent crime). Most teen mothers in the USA are unmarried. In Japan the rate of teen pregnancy is low and the mothers are far more likely to be married. As a result these mothers and babies fare much better than their counterparts in the USA.

In light of all this, I think that it is very ironic that the USA was created out of the ideals of freedom and equality. The concept of equality was about equality of opportunity, everyone gets a shot at the goal. These ideals are still cherished but their reality in practice has not lived up to expectation. The USA has turned out to be a land of great inequality, and in some ways one can attribute that to the very pursuit of freedom and equality.

It should also be noted that many of the greatest critics of American achievement are Americans, they hold themselves to very lofty standards.

It is not surprising that Canada has turned out to be somewhere in the middle, not too good not too bad. Never in our history did we take on freedom and equality as our ideals, it was all about keeping the peace, whatever it takes. We try not to get too excited about stuff. Not to say we don't care about freedom and equality, but I think our attitude is more along the lines of good housekeeping; it saves a lot of trouble to not let things get too far out of hand.

Our country was born out of the passions of the American Civil War, we wanted to avoid that at all costs. The American Civil War ended in 1865, Canada began in 1867, it is not coincidental. Recent Wikileaks cables indicate that some American diplomats think Canadians watch the USA enviously and snipe at American political actions out of that envy. There is an element of truth in that, but we also watch in a bit of dread: whither thou goest...

In the teeth of a booming gale

2010-12-14T21:50:00.002-04:00

They didn't call it a hurricane, or even a gale, but it might just as well have been. I guess because it didn't come up from the Caribbean but across from Lower Canada (aka Quebec), and before that, Upper Canada. Anyway it knocked Kings County on its backside. I haven't been out today so I haven't seen the damage, but apparently a lot of trees came down and power poles were just snapped in half. This morning the list of roads closed was endless, you couldn't go anywhere. And it looked so benign out, no wind or rain and blue sky moving in from the west.

Yesterday was another story though. The wind just howled. Crazy. No rain at first, but when it came it came hard.

Around 8.00pm the power went out, all over the county. This morning they were giving different numbers, anywhere from 62,000 to 79,000 households. That would be the whole county I think.

When the lights went out I was taken by surprise. I had to stop and think, where are the candles? the matches? the flashlight? Nothing has its own place, I am still in the process of moving in and when I put something down I lose it because I can never remember where I last put it down. I knew I had candles and matches and I had seen them recently, but where, I had no idea. I did find them, but it took a bit of stumbling around in the dark.

I had just bought a share of a pig and put it in my new freezer, I wondered if I was going to lose it. As each hour with no power went by it became more and more a possibility.

We were lucky, this storm came with rising temperatures, so there was no risk of freezing. This morning I heard about a seniors residence whose roof blew off in the storm and all the residents were taken to an arena to spend the night. In the morning they said the arena was pretty cold, they would have been warmer staying in their own apartments at the seniors residence, even with the damaged roof.

In the middle of the night I got up to tie down the tarp on my truck, it had gotten loose in the wind. Still no power. The sky was amazing, clouds raced by and every once in a while the moon put in a brief appearance.

In the morning the lawn was littered with roof shingles, but not mine. From somewhere up the street. I dug out my campstove to heat water for tea. I could listen to the radio on my iPhone and my next door neighbour said that NS Power was saying the power would be back for most people by evening. The house had cooled off a few degrees but was still livable, and there was sunlight. I thought I would start putting up blinds and curtains, which I have been procrastinating on. There wasn't really anything else to do, except maybe go for a walk. And I ended up being glad of the coolness, it made working more comfortable. Around 4.00pm the power came back, my radio leaped into life scaring the heck out of me.

Tonight after the power came back I got my wireless router working, I am back online. There are still lots of boxes to unpack---mostly books and odds and ends---but things are starting to look settled in. I still have an endless to-do list, address changes and emails and that sort of thing.

In spite of the tarp my truck is full of water. I don't know where it is getting in, and it makes the floor carpet smell. At this time of year I have little hope of drying it out.

I'm in

2010-12-01T15:24:00.002-04:00

Got the keys to the kingdom yesterday, emptied the truck and parked the kayak under the porch. Most of my stuff is in the house, and I got a delivery of new furniture this morning.

So I'm into my house---finally---and going to be busy with the unpacking for awhile. Don't know if I have internet in the house or not.

If you don't hear from me, you know where I am. And what I'm doing.

The last leg

2010-11-24T09:46:00.003-04:00

This post covers the period of November 17 - 20, 2010, the trip from Toronto Ontario to Wolfville Nova Scotia.

I ended up leaving Toronto a day later than planned. The week before my doctor had sent me off for a round of standard tests, the kind that you are supposed to do periodically. I had not expected that but rather than explain the situation to her I just went off and did it. Well, it turned out one of those tests had a questionable result and they phoned to make an appointment for me to do some follow-up testing.

I told the lady that I was leaving the city that very day and so would do the follow-up in Nova Scotia, she freaked and strongly advised me to hang around for the appointment, the next week. I said that was just not in the cards.

So the lady in question asked me to give her an hour or so while she made some calls, and then called me back to say she had me rescheduled for that afternoon. Reluctantly I agreed and postponed my leaving until the next day.

As it turned out, the follow-up test was negative, there was no problem after all. I suppose I should have been relieved, but mostly I was just annoyed at having spent my day in a medical facility and postponed leaving for nothing.

The thing is, I had been carefully following the weather along my route and I knew I had a brief window of fair weather if I left as planned, now that window was closed. If I hung around for another week another window might have opened, but all this waiting is starting to get to me. So I left first thing the next day.

My plan was, drive to Ottawa and stay with a friend there over night, then drive from there to Nova Scotia in a day and a half, with one night on the road somewhere in New Brunswick. I did manage to do that with clear weather all the way, but it was bloody cold. And I had one of the coldest nights I have ever spent, at an Irving Big Stop near Fredericton.

The catalytic heater I bought worked fine, but the stupid butane lighter I bought to start it with did not. Fortunately I had matches as a backup which was fine just before going to bed, but when I woke up with frozen feet a few hours later, I managed to also freeze my hands fumbling with the matches trying to light the heater again. Crawling back into the sleeping bag piled with blankets didn't help, so I was up well before dawn and back on the road just to warm up. The kind overnight attendant at the Irving gave me my mug of coffee for free.

The upside I guess is that I arrived at my destination just after noon that day, a good hour before the snow started. And I got to watch a pretty impressive sunrise. Not only was the southeast lit up with red and purple clouds but the northwest was also lit up with a purple glow. There was one sundog to the east of the rising sun, but its western mate not apparent in the dark snow clouds in that direction.

Eastward bound

2010-11-23T10:11:00.000-04:00

This post covers the period of Nov 2 - 4, 2010, the trip from Winnipeg Manitoba to Barrie Ontario.

Driving through north Ontario is kind of a treat. I did not have great weather but still, the scenery was fine. I made it to Thunderbay in the first day with no problem, and spent the night at Kakabeka Falls just outside of town. I was very pleased with the 'snake oil' additive, the engine noise seemed quieter, my gas mileage better, and I did not appear to be burning oil at the former alarming rate. In Thunderbay I stopped at a shop in the same chain as the one in Winnipeg to find out the name of this amazing little oil additive and maybe pick up another bottle of the stuff for the rest of the trip. As it turned out they told me I could get the stuff at any Canadian Tire store. I didn't bother go looking for the local Canadian Tire but just continued on the next leg of the trip with somewhere between Wawa and The Soo as my destination.

I made it to Wawa with no problem and thought I may as well continue on to The Soo as I still had a bit of daylight left. But the weather went downhill after that, heavy rain and poor visibility. Several potential overnight stopping points turned out to be inaccessible so I continued to drive. By the time I got to The Soo I'd had enough, I wanted off the road. Now my cell phone worked again, so I tried calling my Edmonton friend Inger because she had said she had a friend in The Soo that could put me up, but this was her Toastmasters' night and all I could do was leave a message. I decided to continue driving.

Fortunately the weather cleared substantially after I left The Soo and a few kilometers down the road I found a boat launch place on a small lake that I could stop at. It was quiet and pretty, the lapping of the waves on the lakeshore close to the truck was soothing.

On the third day I made it to Barrie where my brother lives. I got to wash the clothes I had not changed in three days and have a nice hot bath for myself. We watched videos while we ate supper, and then I toddled off to a big soft bed for the night.

On numerous occasions through the prairies and northern Ontario I saw a curious little bird, somewhat smaller than a robin and looking a bit like a sparrow but with white patches on its wings. I have since found out that that bird is the Snow Bunting, otherwise known as the "snowbird" of Anne Murray fame. Neat.

Currently...

2010-11-21T11:41:00.000-04:00

Sun., Nov. 21: Arrived in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, yesterday shortly after noon, an hour before the snow. Spent one warm night at a friend's place in Ottawa and one very cold night at an Irving Big Stop just south of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Cold enough to get me out of bed and back on the road long before dawn.

The snow was beautiful in Wolfville, especially knowing I didn't have to drive in it. Huge soft flakes filling the air, and very quickly a thin white blanket covering the ground. Last night the downtown was beautiful with Christmas lights and decorations in the snow.

Speaking of snow, I saw snow geese in Quebec. Driving by farmers' fields, one field in particular looked like it had its very own snow storm, the whiteness filling the field and boiling in the air above it. Not snow, but snow geese. Wonderful.

It feels a little strange now, this time I am not visiting but here to stay. Just waiting to get into my home.

Tues., Nov. 16: Still in Toronto, but planning to leave tomorrow. First stop Ottawa, then on to Nova Scotia. Had a pleasant time here visiting with family and my Toronto friends, the Dog Ladies. The truck is almost all packed---I am picking up a few last possessions still remaining in Toronto---and I am almost ready to leave.

Sun., Nov. 7: In Toronto for a week or so, got warm greeting from Dobby and gave Tristan his birthday present.

Thurs., Nov. 4: After 3 days on the road I am in Barrie at my brother's place. Truck did fine, I guess the Winnipeg 'snake oil' was just the ticket!

Mon., Nov. 1: I will most likely leave Winnipeg tomorrow, and if all goes well I should arrive in Barrie very late on Thursday Nov. 4. Expecting lots of weather over the next few days, but right now it is sunny and warm and at least a few of the trees are leafy and green.

Sat., Oct. 30: I am leaving Edmonton, planning to spend Saturday night on the road somewhere in Saskatchewan and arrive at my niece's in Winnipeg on Sunday.

We went for lunch near where Inger works (the Maz), walked on Whyte Ave and checked out some funky stores, and then later went to see "Red" at the cinema. It was fun. In honour of the movie we had vodka shots when we got back to the house, Dale downed his in a single gulp. I sipped.

Wed., Oct. 27: I am posting a little behind, so if you're interested, I am currently in Edmonton, waiting for weather further east to improve...

Again with the AGO

2010-11-11T10:38:00.003-04:00

I love Toronto. I don't want to leave.

When I am in Vancouver, I love Vancouver and don't want to leave.

When I am in Wolfville, I love Wolfville and don't want to leave.

Anyway, I love being here in Toronto.

I go to the dogpark every morning and see some of my favourite neighbours and their dogs, it's a great way to start the day. However a couple of days ago, three of the dogs---including Dobby---were chasing each other around the field and simultaneously ran into Barbara from the rear, bowling her over and breaking her ankle. The dogs of course were oblivious and careened off as if nothing had happened, but Barbara was left lying on the ground in considerable pain. One of the dogs that knocked her down was her own dog, we are now taking turns walking him since Barbara is confined to home in a cast.

Today I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario and spent a few hours wandering around the different galleries. There were special exhibits of Henry Moore and Shary Boyle, as well as the regular exhibits. I especially wanted to see the African gallery since I didn't get there on my last two visits, however it was somewhat reduced due to the Henry Moore exhibit.

I have never had any particular interest in Henry Moore, I know him only as the sculptor who did The Archer in front of Toronto City Hall. But I learned two things of interest about him that made me a little bit more interested in his work. One was that he studied aboriginal and African art and took a lot of inspiration from those sources, and the other was that he was the survivor of a gas attack during World War I. Of his battalion of 400 men, only 52 survived and Moore was marked for life by the ghastly experience. These two things were great influences in his art, and after learning those facts about him I could see that it was true when I went into the gallery where his sculpture was displayed. His figures have distinctively African appearances, and some of the imagery seems to me a little haunted.

In the African art gallery I watched part of a video of a West African artist talking about his work. He talked about his mother and how she had joined the ancestors, he said how fundamentally different the African view of life and our position in it is from the conventional western view. When I was walking around the AGO that idea reverberated everywhere for me.

Sometimes it seems to me that our conventional view of what constitutes reality is but a thin sliver of what is possible. When we look at things from the point of view of different cultures, we get a glimpse of things we hardly can imagine. Listening to that African artist speak about his mother joining the ancestors, I caught a view of life that is endless, and tried to imagine what it would be like to live within that framework as my everyday reality. Looking at works of art by aboriginal artists who worked within mythological frameworks very different from our European-centred western mythology, I tried to imagine worlds of strange gods and goddesses, spirits and myths that might permeate my everyday life. Where the spoon I ladle soup with is carved in the shape of some totem animal or spirit with a meaningful story I might think about every time I served a bowl of soup. Or not. I might use that spoon so often that I don't even see the carving.

I don't know how well I am communicating what was going through my head looking at all this art, but it seemed like in every gallery I was transported to a different way of looking at the world. When I walked through the European galleries, my conventional worldview came into focus, but I could see it as just another way, one of many.

There were a couple of interesting quotes on the walls of the art gallery. One was that when aboriginal people saw European artists going around painting what they saw in North America, they perceived it as a way for Europeans to possess the land, that by painting it they were tacitly expressing ownership of it. I would guess that European artists didn't see it that way, they probably simply saw it the same way we see taking photographs. Although, isn't it funny that when painting or photographing something we talk about "capturing" it?

The other was a quote from Ansel Adams the great American photographer:

"Myths ... are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth of the world."

A couple of galleries of European art were devoted to Biblical subjects, a good deal of one gallery centred on the story of Jesus' crucifixion. There were also quite a few paintings around the birth of Jesus, and I was thinking about the focus on birth and death so obvious in these paintings. There were no works of art devoted to what Jesus actually taught. I was thinking about how that particular religion, Christianity, seems to focus on a very mythological birth story and a rather horrific death story, and that very little of what Jesus taught seems to be central to the faith. If you want to be considered an official Christian, you need to acknowledge a creed of belief in those two events plus a third, a very mythological resurrection story. I remember once attending a class on the basic tenets of Christian belief, and the major lesson I learned was that the point of Jesus' life was to "die for our sins", which always struck me as a very odd purpose in life. I have great respect for the teachings attributed to Jesus, but not a lot for the strange slant subsequently applied to his life and unfortunate end.

I'm rambling. But thinking about all this in the context of the Ansel Adams quote, that myths are heroic efforts to understand the truth of the world, I just wonder what kind of truth we are getting at in the mythology of Jesus' life, which seems to be the fundamental myth of our European/western worldview. Not that the myths of other cultures aren't equally horrific. There was a painting by Emily Carr of Sonoqua, a kind of northwest coast Wild Woman of the Woods that mothers used to scare their kids into good behaviour ("if you don't behave, Sonoqua will get you!"), and another of an Inuit sea goddess who performed a similar role in their culture. And in one gallery there was displayed a buffalo robe of a 19th century Plains' Indian that was inscribed with pictures relating the exploits of his life, killing one Indian after another and managing to steal a herd of horses. Quite the heroic life.

I guess we humans are fundamentally fascinated by birth and death, beginnings and endings, and the question of whether that's all there is or if there is some greater context for our finite lives.

Last trip home

2010-11-01T14:48:00.003-03:00

The truck is not in great shape. We are now making ominous engine noises and burning oil, the gas mileage is way down.

There was an unfortunate side effect to the wiper switch fix in Edmonton, the headlights stopped working. I did not find this out until dusk of the first day on the road, somewhere just west of Regina. Needless to say I had to get off the road right quick. I had highbeams but no lowbeams, I took side roads to get to Buffalo Pound Lake Park to camp overnight.

In the morning the inside of the truck was lined with ice, probably a good thing as it would have dripped on me if it hadn't been frozen. All of Saskatchewan was cold and there was lots of snow and ice on the ground. It was cold and windy, and east of Regina I ran into ice fog which lasted pretty much into Manitoba. However by Brandon it was clear and sunny, and snow was a distant memory.

I made it into Winnipeg by dusk on Hallowe'en, and I am staying with my niece Tara and her family. In "The 'Peg" there are still a few green trees, it is autumn not winter here.

First thing this morning I called a shop in the same chain as the one in Edmonton and they got my truck in right away and fixed the headlight problem, charging the cost back to the shop in Edmonton. I asked them about the engine problem, they really couldn't say much about the prognosis, told me to keep the oil up. They put in some additive---couldn't promise it was anything more than snake oil but at this point I am grasping at straws---topped up the oil, and sold me an extra liter for the road.

So I guess I will do some laundry (I've been sleeping in my clothes because it is cold at night), clean up the truck a bit, make sandwiches for the road and hope for the best. Once I leave Winnipeg I will not have cell phone coverage for almost three days, a bit disconcerting to say the least but what can you do. The weather forecast for the next three days is a mixed bag: sun, rain, snow, warm, cold, windy, fine. November weather.

In Edmonton Dale said, You're on an adventure, you'll laugh about all this when it's over. But until then I am just gritting my teeth and trying to think positive thoughts.

I guess this is the last time I do a road trip in this truck.

Edmonton, and best laid plans...

2010-10-29T12:54:00.001-03:00

I arrived in Edmonton around 5.00 pm on Saturday, finding my host's home without too much difficulty.

Inger is a woman I worked with way back when in Vancouver, we have kept in touch over the years. She and her husband moved to Edmonton shortly after I moved to Toronto, to better jobs, more affordable housing, and wonder of wonders, a way better social life. They pay the price of a nasty winter for all that. I have been promising to visit ever since they moved here, finally I've made it.

I told Inger about the dog at the rest stop and wondered if it would be rescued or euthanized. Inger said, Around here they don't euthanize dogs. They'll find a home for him.

I planned to stay a day or two to visit before heading on. Sunday morning we woke to sleet, mixed snow and rain. It only got worse.

My host---who was off to a course at 7.45 am---said, No snow, that's just Fat Rain.

She refused to admit to the possibility of the white stuff.

Sure as heck looked like snow to me.

Inger left for a conference in Vancouver on Monday and I got an invitation to stay in Calgary on my trip east. Although making my trip slightly longer it worked well with my itinerary plans so I packed up to leave the same day as Inger. On her way to the airport Inger was surfing the net on her Crackberry and found a catalytic heater she thought would make my nights on the road a little more comfortable. She sent the info to me and I looked a little further and discovered that a nearby Canadian Tire had such a beast so I hopped in the truck to go pick it up.

Turns out that sometime since I arrived in Edmonton, the windshield wiper motor switch on my truck gave out. Not a good thing when it is snowing, it meant I had to physically hold the switch on to get the wipers to work which is hard to do when you are signalling a turn and then attempting to actually make the turn.

So, I returned to the house and woke up Inger's husband Dale, who is working night shift this week. He was gracious about being woken up and immediately got on the phone looking for a garage that would repair my truck toute de suite.

This was the first snow of the season here, which means most of the city was trying to get into a garage to get their snow tires on. Trying to find one that would fix a wiper motor switch the same day was kind of out to lunch. Nevertheless he tried, and managed to find a garage that would do it the next day. Dale went back to bed and at the appointed hour got up and went off for his night shift. The idea was that when he returned at 6.30am we would then drive the truck to the garage.

However, we did not write down the name and address of the garage, and sure enough, we both forgot where we had the appointment. In a mad scramble at 7.00am we found another garage that would "take a look" at the truck. When we got there though they were booked up and couldn't even look, they sent us off to another garage further out of town. That garage said it could do the job almost right away, however Dale was exhausted and needed to sleep before his next shift, so the earliest we could pick up the truck was considerably later in the day.

The garage called to give me their cost estimate: $350. The switch is inside the steering wheel column, making it a labour intensive job.

Then they called back to say that they had broken something inside the column and would have to replace the entire column.

Then they called back to say that they couldn't find a steering wheel column for my truck. Still later they called to say that they had found one at a wrecking yard, but it was going to be different from my original steering wheel column (something called a slant column), and that they were having trouble removing it from the vehicle it was in at the wrecking yard, so they were very sorry but they would not be able to finish the job until the next day.

My invitation to stay in Calgary is fairly open-ended, they even went so far as to say that if I got there after they were planning to go to Vancouver, they would leave the key at their neighbour's so I could stay over even if they were not home. Who knows when I'll get my truck back. Or what the new steering column is going to be like. I do know that the cost is going to be higher than the original estimate, but the fellow at the garage thinks he can keep it down to only a $50 increase.

He gave me a bit of a rant about car companies that discontinue perfectly good truck models and then don't keep up parts inventories for them. As if we can all afford to buy a new vehicle every couple of years. He expressed some admiration that I had kept this particular truck going for as long as I have, and some chagrin at failing to support me in that endeavour. But he hoped this substitute slant column would be acceptable.

I sure hope it does not have one of those safety air bag thingies in it.

Heading eastward

2010-10-27T13:31:00.000-03:00

The Duffy Lake Road was fine, no construction line-ups, no snow, spectacular views, and even a rainbow.

I stopped to look at Seton Lake near the end of the Duffy Lake Road; this lake connects to Anderson Lake at its far western end, and D'Arcy is at the south end of Anderson.

On my first day on the road I got as far as Valemount on Highway 5, just before the Yellowhead Highway.

Just before Valemount I stopped for gas and the attendant there eyeballed the stickers on my windshield. One is my Nova Scotia safety sticker, the other is my Toronto parking sticker.

He recognized Toronto City Hall on the parking sticker and asked if I worked for the City of Toronto.

I said, No but I used to live there.

He said that he used to live in Ontario too, in Kingston. He liked Toronto he said, he felt safe there.

He said he'd walked the streets of Toronto at night---he rhymed off a few---and he never felt unsafe there. Vancouver, he shook his head, is a different story. Downtown Eastside...

I agreed with him.

He said, You know, Toronto is multicultural, but Vancouver is,
...is...
...is just mean. The people are just mean.

Hmmm, haven't heard that one before, I wondered what his experience was. It's a beautiful city set in a fabulous landscape, but some parts of that city are very hard.

He wished me a good trip.

The next day I drove through Robson Provincial Park and Jasper National Park on the Yellowhead.

The boundary between the two parks is also the border between British Columbia and Alberta.

I think Jasper is way more interesting than Banff National Park just south of it, but not nearly as famous. I saw lots more wildlife in Jasper Park than I did on my trip through Banff on the way to Vancouver in August. But that may have had something to do with all the road construction going on then.

I saw mostly elk and mountain goats, hanging out close to the road. In Jasper Park, the valley between the mountains is relatively broad so you can get wonderful views of the mountains without craning your neck upward. There are broad swaths of grass along the highway and I think that attracts the elk and goats in the fall, they appeared to be fattening up for the winter. On one occasion the cars slowed to almost a halt, passing by a couple of nonchalant mountain goats on the shoulder. They seem unafraid of vehicles, or of the people that emerge from them with cameras in hand. And they are huge, easily as big as large deer, almost as big as the elk. And fat.

I stopped in the town of Jasper just to see it, and also to deposit a cheque that Sam gave me in exchange for cash to hold him over till the next time he got near a bank machine.

The next town on the highway after Jasper Park was Hinton. Passing through Hinton brought back memories. It is the gateway to the Rockies on the Yellowhead, it is also the CN train station where the Mounties used to come on board westward headed passenger trains to remove the drunks. For all I know they still do, but it's been a long time since I travelled on that train.

In 1969 I headed west on the train with my boyfriend, for the grand price of $50 for a one-way ticket from Toronto to Vancouver. That got you a seat in coach class for the 3-4 day trip. They were bench seats, if you were lucky you snagged two facing benches so you could sleep more or less lying down. Everyone smoked and many drank. The air was pretty gross by the time you got to Vancouver.

The drinkers got their come-uppance in Hinton, the worst of the lot being removed by the aforementioned Mounties. I am not sure why they did that in Hinton, maybe it's OK to be drunk in the north woods and across the prairies, but not in the mountains. Or maybe it took that long for them to become obnoxious enough for the train people to be fed up with them.

And that is pretty much all I know about Hinton.

In a rest stop somewhere after that an old dog was wandering around. There were a lot of vehicles there, but after a few minutes most of the vehicles were gone and the old dog was still there. An older fellow in a car gave the dog scraps and asked me if it was my dog. I said No, and we looked at each other and the one other truck still at the rest stop. The fellow in that truck didn't own the dog either. The truck driver tried to read the dog's collar, but the dog growled at him. The old man phoned somebody to report the stray dog.

Aside from growling at the truck driver, the dog seemed friendly. If I wasn't planning to spend the night at a friend's place I would seriously have considered picking him up. He let me look at his collar but there was no tag. I hope whoever the old man called came to get the dog.

Goodbye to D'Arcy

2010-10-24T13:42:00.002-03:00

I am staying at Sam's place in D'Arcy before heading east for the winter.

Doesn't that sound backwards? Shouldn't I be heading west or south? Silly me!

On Tuesday night I slept in the truck. It was cold but fine in my warm sleeping bag.

On Wednesday night, knowing that it would be colder than Tuesday, I thought I'd sleep in Sam's guest room, the attic. But the place is absolutely infested with stink bugs. I started out killing a bunch of them, they are slow-moving and easy targets, but it didn't stop the tide. I read in bed for awhile, occasionally smashing a stink bug, but when one crawled up onto my chest I gave up. Shaking out all my bedding and clothes I beat a retreat to the truck.

Sam has closed off his attic in hopes that the cold will do in the miserable creatures, but at the very least the closed trapdoor should keep them up in the attic rather than downstairs in his living space.

They're fairly harmless, just disgusting. Sam tells me they are not native to North America, so they have no predators here. They are vegetarian and cause problems for some farmers, but do not bite humans or carry disease. They are large and slow-moving and when they fly they seem incapable of landing, they just crash into things. Also they emit a bad smell, hence their name.

Nights are getting cold, in the truck it dropped to +3C. By the time I reach northern Ontario it should be closer to -3C.

I am debating whether to take the Duffy Lake Road (the switchback road from hell) from here, or retrace my steps to Vancouver and take the Coquihalla. Apparently there is construction on the Duffy Lake with one lane of traffic for almost 50 km. On those switchbacks that means a good hour or more, so if you get to the flag point at the wrong time you could be waiting for up to 2 hours to go through. Normally that road would cut hundreds of kilometers and a couple of hours off the trip east, so it's a dilemma. Also it's very scenic when driven during the daytime with no snow on the road.

I have friends in Edmonton that I will stay with and visit, a night on the road in Saskatchewan---hopefully I will make it back to Buffalo Pound Lake Provincial Park for that night---and another night with my niece in Winnipeg. Then two nights on the road in northern Ontario and a visit with my brother in Kirkland Lake. Another dilemma. Take the colder northern route or the slightly warmer but considerably longer southern route? I will have to play it by ear, it will depend on just how cold. I think I can handle -5C, but I am not sure about -10C.

Yesterday I went walking on the mountain with the dogs, and they took off on me. There was no hope of finding them, they move a lot faster than I can. I didn't know if they had found some shortcut home or if they were off hunting (they do that sometimes). I called them a bunch of times and then started walking back to Sam's place. The lousy buggers caught up with me about 15 minutes away from the cabin. Hapi (the female) is the instigator, Hiro (the male) is more inclined to return when called than she is, but he gets anxious when she doesn't come too so he tends to stay with her.

While walking home without them I was thinking bad thoughts about them. They don't like to abandon each other in the mountains, but they sure don't care about abandoning me. However they did stick close to me after they returned, waiting for me to catch up whenever they got just out of sight. And they were completely beat for the rest of the day when we got back to the cabin.

This will probably be the last time I visit this place, I will most likely not return before Sam moves to Windsong.

What's he doing?

2010-10-22T18:39:00.001-03:00

Whistler

2010-10-20T14:37:00.005-03:00

I finished the last Larsson book and packed up to leave Vancouver on Friday. Beofre leaving however, I had to get snow tires on the truck, and Dave insisted I get the engine noise checked out before I left. It has been noisy for so long that I was used to it and didn't think it was unusual, but he did. He thought it was my water pump and as it turned out, he was correct. Good thing I got it checked out I guess, but between that and the snow tires I dropped $1400 in two days at the same auto shop. That hurt.

My intention was to visit yet more friends who live in Whistler and then pick up the last of my stuff at D'arcy before heading east. I had wonderful sunny clear weather for the scenic drive to Whistler, and arrived in time to go for a lengthy hike around the neighbourhood. Lots of great views of the surrounding mountains. This picture is of the Armchair Glacier, just to the "left" of Blackcomb and Whistler ski mountains.

We walked out to Green Lake, where we saw a beaver lodge built into the shore and considerable beaver damage among the nearby trees. They had felled a bunch of trees, some of them quite large. One tree had been girdled but not felled. Several trees had fallen only partially, hung up in other trees. The girdled tree had another felled tree leaning on it so if they ever chew threw they will get two very big trees in one.

Whistler is a well-known resort town, houses there sell for millions of dollars. We walked through a neighbourhood of some of those million-dollar homes. They are fairly spectacular, with large wooden beams and lots of glass to take advantage of the surrounding mountain views. But they are also crowded together like a subdivision. If you want privacy in Whistler, you pay way more than a million or two for it.

My friends in Whistler live in a cabin that he, Keith, built in the early '70s, before Whistler was a money destination. It is well done, he being an engineer, but he says that for Whistler it is a tear-down. They are doing some renovations to make it more comfortable but there is no point in renovating for resale value because all the value is in the site, not the house.

We watched the Stellar's Jays on their deck, they come for the peanuts that Keith and Judy throw to them. One jay is quite fearless, he takes the peanut from your hand. In the morning he perches on the patio door frame, insistent on his peanut handout. Other jays are not so bold, they wait hidden in the surrounding spruces to pounce on a thrown peanut. They are very beautiful birds with large black crests bigger than the eastern Blue Jay's crest. But just as raucous.

On my second day in Whistler we drove out to the Olympic Village, built near the old site of the town dump (I have to laugh at that). We then followed a trail up the Cheakamus River, across a suspension foot bridge and back down the other side of the river. Along the way we looked at many mushrooms. Judy had recently been on a mushroom identification walk in Whistler and wanted to reinforce her newfound knowledge of mushrooms. It was quite interesting all the different kinds of mushrooms we saw, but being rank amateurs none of us knew their names or edibility status.

At night we could see lights on the two skiing mountains, Blackcomb and Whistler. Tiny lights outlined the lifts to different ski runs and one bright light identified a shelter high on Blackcomb. We speculated as to why it was lit up, Judy told me their was a summer road up there and we wondered if maybe they were provisioning the cabin for the winter when the road was closed.

Besides the Stellar's Jays I also saw my first Clark's Nutcracker, hanging upside down from spruce branches prying loose the seeds from the spruce cones. Smart and handsome looking bird.

My alter ego

2010-10-18T15:36:00.002-03:00

Johanna and I in our matching jackets, holding our matching water bottles.

I'm off on the road again.

Sechelt renos, Vibes, smugglers and eagles

2010-10-15T14:13:00.001-03:00

I visited friends who live near Sechelt for a few days. They are in the midst of renovations, so it was hard to pick a good time to visit between all the scheduled (and rescheduled) rounds of contractors and renovations. They were redoing the floors, windows and doors, and installing an all-new kitchen. We finally managed a couple of days when they were between contractors. The floors, windows and doors were done and the old kitchen largely dismantled, but the new kitchen still in the works. That meant no kitchen cabinets and no dishwasher or kitchen sink. Dishes were stored temporarily in a laundry room cabinet and water came from the laundry tub (good thing they had one!). Carpets were rolled up and furniture was shoved into corners.

The visit was fun though, we spent one day in town doing errands and shopping and another day hiking out to nearby Smugglers' Cove. While in town I checked around for the cost of snow tires for my truck, I need new tires and they may as well be snow tires at this time of year.

I told my friends about a car that friends in Nova Scotia think I should consider for my next vehicle, the Pontiac Vibe. We saw one parked on the street in front of a store where they cut keys, it turned out to belong to the store owner. When he wasn't running the store he was out gold prospecting, he said he used the Vibe for everything and it was a helluva good car. He couldn't understand why they discontinued it, it was so good. Maybe that's why.

Anyway, after that Morrie was spotting Vibes everywhere. It's based on the Toyota Matrix, and looks almost identical to it, but Morrie quickly determined and pointed out the small differences in styling. I would never have figured that out.

Smugglers' Cove is a little cove hidden from view on the coast, as most smugglers' coves are. This particular smugglers' cove was used for human smuggling. When the first national railway was completed in 1885 many Chinese labourers were let go and had no work. They were unable to leave the country and were mistreated because of racism. So human smugglers transported them, for a price, into the United States to find work there. This was one of the points of embarkment.

We hiked out to a rocky point where we enjoyed the sunlight and beautiful view. A bald eagle in a tree there was disturbed by our arrival with three dogs, but it did not budge from its perch. We took a few pictures of it while it pretended not to notice us.

We watched a tugboat slowly towing a huge log boom, the logs looked to be very large and at least three deep. I think the tugboat was moving at no more than one knot, it took a very long time to cross our line of sight. We had lunch while watching its progress.

On the walk back we encountered a couple of mushroom pickers. They were from one of the yachts moored in the cove, and were looking for edible mushrooms in the woods. They said it was a poor year for them, too dry.

We later went for an early supper at a nearby pub with a view of another cove just up the way. I had a hamburger and fries with beer. Although the walk was not strenuous or long, we were quite exhausted by the time we got back to my friends' house.

While at their place I was happy to be sleeping in the truck, it was not cold and was more comfortable than an air mattress on the floor. I don't much care for air mattresses.

The ferry trip back to Horseshoe Bay was uneventful and I got in some reading. Johanna and Dave, my hosts in Vancouver, and I have been working our ways through the Stieg Larsson Millennium trilogy (The Girl Who... books). I recently bought the last one and am trying to get through it in time to leave it behind for Johanna and Dave to read after I leave. So I have a bit of a deadline and it is a huge book. Reading time is valuable.