Family visit: Days One and Two

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

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

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

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

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!

In lieu of regular posting

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

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

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

Yes there are photos on the camera.

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiatus

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Hooking for dollars

My blogbuddy beachcomber had this brilliant idea that four of us from the Harbour would go to a local hooker and get her to teach us to hook, and then we four would hook a rug of our own design and raffle it off to help pay for the community hall in the Harbour. The hall has racked up some debts that people in the Harbour are always trying to think of ways to pay off.

The hall was gifted to the community by the church, along with the church itself and a small fund to help pay for its upkeep. Emphasis on small. After the wiring and the insulation and the paint and the roof and... well, it was very small.

I think hooking for money is a fabulous idea.

It is pretty though

Fed up

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.

Force of Nature

So at the height of the blizzard I went to a movie. I half-slid all the way down the hill to the theatre, there were a few other people out on the road and everybody seemed to be having a good time in the deep snow. The movie would have been sold out if it weren't for the weather, only people who could walk, ski or snowshoe in were there. On the theatre website they said that they would only cancel if the power went out. They only have the film for one day, so they can't postpone a show. It was Force of Nature.

I'm afraid I've been putting off going to see this one, I figured I knew what it was about and wasn't really up for it. The subject of the film is Canadian environmental icon, David Suzuki, and you'd have to be pretty isolated for the past fifty years not to know who he is and what he stands for. One can assume the film would be essentially a paean of praise for an extremely well-known and respected environmental activist.

The vehicle for the film is Suzuki's Legacy Speech, given in 2009 in Vancouver to celebrate his 75th birthday. Half it is his biography, half it is his thoughts on where the planet and the human race are today. I'm glad I went to see it, although postponing the viewing until a major blizzard was perhaps not the best thing.

Given Suzuki's long time involvement in all things environmental and climate change related, his activist background and his outspoken nature, it is not surprising that he paints a dismal picture of the current state of the planet. Nevertheless it is a surprisingly upbeat film that leaves you feeling quite inspired.

He talks about the four sacred elements, earth, air, fire and water. For air he tells us that a certain proportion of each breath is made up of argon atoms. Argon is an unreactive element, it does not stay in the body or bind with any other element. It goes in, it comes out on the outbreath. He says that in the time it takes for him to deliver his speech, every person in that hall will have breathed the same argon atoms that he has. Within a year, every breathing living being on the planet will have breathed those same argon atoms. We are all made of air, and we all share the same air. We are the air, the air is us.

It is not we humans here and the environment out there, we are the environment and the environment is us. Suzuki talked about the beginning of the universe and how every particle of matter in the universe is attracted to every other particle. The universe is filled with tendrils of attraction, and we can call that Love.

What distinguishes humans is our brains, in particular our capacity to remember, our memories. I'm reading a book, The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio (1999), and Damasio says that while all living things with nervous systems have consciousness, we have something he calls extended or autobiographical consciousness based on our capacity to remember. We are self-conscious. Memory and self-consciousness have allowed us to create an amazing array of technologies, cultures and civilizations. But there has been a downside to all that creativity as well.

Suzuki talks about our mythologies that connect or separate us to/from our environments, how they have changed over the millennia. He gave the example of dragons, how we once believed in dragons and when things went wrong we knew we had to appease the dragons, whether it was with gold, animal sacrifices or virgins. But now that we don't believe in dragons any more we don't go around sacrificing to them or trying to appease them. But, he says, now we believe in The Economy, and when the The Economy is not feeling well we have to appease it, make sacrifices to it. Suzuki says that we forget that we invented The Economy, just as we once invented dragons. Suzuki says that there is something very wrong when we think that appeasing The Economy takes precedence over taking care of the environment that sustains us.

These are a few of the things that I took away from watching this film, there were many other things as well.

I wanted to get home quickly after the film because as it happened there was going to be a talk on CBC Ideas about whether dealing with climate change and economic growth are contradictory. It seemed kind of appropriate. The Ideas talk was not nearly as inspiring of course, but still interesting.

One of the things that was mentioned was that when we talk about economic growth we are usually referencing GDP (gross domestic product), and that GDP is quite arbitrarily defined as including certain human activities but not others. So when we talk about economic growth it is fairly narrowly defined, and usually activities that increase consumption are good and those that do not involve consumption are not.

It is theoretically possible to have a vibrant economy based on life quality-enhancing activity rather than destructive and consumption-based activity. There are all kinds of reasons why we don't, political, historical and so forth, but none that are insurmountable.

Another thing that was pointed out was about human nature, whether it is fundamentally selfish and greedy and short-sighted, or the opposite. Again it was pointed out that we are both, and we are capable of both, individually and as societies. Just because we have defined economics on the basis of self-serving activity does not make it a given, we can change that if we want to.

It is easy to fall into despair about the state of the world and our seeming inability to transcend our baser qualities. It is also easy to beat ourselves as a species up for being so stupid and selfish in our treatment of the rest of the world. These things are true but they are not the whole story, and in my opinion nothing will change until we start focussing on our ability and capacity to change, for the good. It is time to stop giving energy to what is wrong with the world and start giving energy to what needs to be done. Our presence in the universe is a small miracle, we need to live up to that. As Stewart Brand once said, We are as gods so we might as well get good at it.

It's unanimous

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.