A Stern Warning

Read the Stern Review on Climate Change.

Well, read the Executive Summary anyways.

The Long Version if you don't mind.

Go on, it's only 27 pages. I read it on the bus home.

Thanks...

Happiness, by Robertson Davies

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.

Don't say you weren't told now...

I hate when my horoscope orders me around

"It's my job to be emotional," rock music goddess Bjork told Nylon magazine. "Doctors cure diseases and shoemakers make shoes. It's my job to go through emotions and describe them to other people." By my astrological reckoning, this is also an apt description of the role you should play in the coming weeks, my fellow Cancerian. It's a perfect time for you to commune with every feeling on your vast palette, as well as to add some new colors and textures you've never imagined before. One more piece of advice: As you express the richness of your inner world to interested parties, be artistic and entertaining, never self-indulgent or sloppy.

Free Will Astrology (c)

I LIKE being self-indulgent and sloppy. 'Specially when I'm tired.

I've opened Queenie's Store on www.lulu.com by the way, for all your Christmas calendar shopping. You can shop for my stuff here. My margin is very small. I'm going for the bulk sales business model.

Actually, I was going for the high end market and then I looked at the competition and they were all charging less than me.

Maybe you should check out their stuff. Some of it is pretty good.

But then again, you KNOW me, don't you. Brand loyalty and all of that. Cradle to grave marketing.

Speaking of, I could probably do a baby calendar when I go home to Ireland, such is the level of fecundity on the big island. I have friends emailing me in extreme excitement to tell me they're going to be GRANDPARENTS these days.

ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I want to hear about other things now please.

That sounds very Sarah Jessica doesn't it. I don't mean it to.

Thing is, there's a lot of baby talk in my physical surroundings and on my electronic airwaves, which is lovely and I'm all for being excited about new lives and new people arriving on the scene.

But I can't help thinking that there must be some people who have to listen to this stuff day in day out who don't want babies, or can't have babies, or won't have babies, or don't feel capable of rearing children, or have had miscarriages or have chosen to have terminations, or are facing into the emotional centrifuge that is IVF, or are trying to get accepted for adoption, or fostering, or whatever.

And I think that people who are lucky enough to produce issue with fuck all effort or thought (although I'm sure a huge amount of thought has gone into most of the issue I know about recently) - watch Queenie tiptoe around the sleeping baby of this issue - still, people who are lucky to have a perfect baby in their lives (or two or three) should be a bit more understanding of the huge range of emotions that constant babbling about how easy/ fantastic/ brilliant/ tiring/ exhausting/ etc etc babies are can bring on in those of us who fit into one or more of the other categories.

There. I've said it.

It needed to be said.

Back to lulu.com.

Now that I've alienated my entire customer base!

My photobook will be on electronic shelves soon as they get the template out of Beta.

Will SOMEONE please effing explain Beta to me sometime!

Mr. Monkey??

Anyone??

One final baby thought... wouldn't it be great if people could be as open about not having babies as they are about having them. That would sort it all out wouldn't it.

That'll never happen of course.

But it would get over the whole 'there I was just being excited about reproducing myself and hoping my mates were and now they're bitching about me on their blog which they have time to write because they're childless selfish bitches' backlash I totally deserve now.

I do love my future pension contributors. Everyone of them. And I promise to check out early to save them a few bucks.

Am I forgiven now?

I'm wondering why this is news

Some guy who used to run faith-based initiatives for Bush said:

There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," he said. "What you've got is everything - and I mean everything - being run by the political arm."

Jesus Christ on a bike, what did he think he was getting into when he went into politics?

Harvest Full Moon tomorrow night

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus

Modern day Clampetts

I had to meet with some oil people again yesterday. I keep having to meet with oil people who are over from Alberta politically schmoozing, as I am the researcher with responsiblity for stuff like that.

Because of what the oil industry in general is doing to the prairies, I am usually very cross with them and manifest my anger by looking over the top of my glasses at them and locking stares, which is becoming a more effective put down strategy as I get older.

Unfortunately they are almost always slightly modified cowboys, who act like they just happened upon enormous oil patches and the accompanying business wheeling and dealing, and they don't wear thousand dollar suits or smoke big cigars, or have Crackberries like other people who just think they are important, and consequently they are very charming in a completely non-schmoozy way, with strange body language and a hatred of having to suck up to politicians that's palpable. It's so funny and endearing I have to keep poking my guard to make sure it stays up.

Sometimes my job is very difficult!

Do headless android chickens run in electric circles?

I am starting to forget things. I don't know if it is my age, or if I am too mithered with work and other things to focus properly. I am a bit worried about it, as what I do is very much dependent on remembering a gazillion little things and multi-tasking them all the time.

But work is getting out of control. Today, the bus was late and slow so I spent most of the time reading the Halifax Regional Economic Development plan while getting into work. I got a good chunk of it read and hoped to have it finished by eleven. Since getting into work though, I have been interrupted so many times I gave up. I have had to deal with: school sidewalks, or lack thereof, adult literacy, energy efficiency in public buildings, the alcohol and gaming authority, trade union recognition in the food sector, violence in the workplace, workers compensation and wind energy. I have had to take calls, visits from lobbyists, journalists, members of the public, politicians, civil servants and colleagues.

I am now eating my lunch and writing this on my lunchbreak which I never get, because I am too tired in the evening to blog.

After lunch, I will try to get back to HRM economic development. Then after that, I have reading/ policy work to do on: gambling and young people, the Nova Scotia oil and gas industry, energy demand side management strategies, comparative Canadian labour relations legislation, elementary education policy in rural areas, pensions, the economic implications of trade liberalisation with east Asia (I kid you not), chronic pain in women workers (I assume my tendonitis is included in that), after which time my inbox will be full and it will all start over again.

My work outputs range from verbal briefings to written briefings, to meeting positions, to letters, to legislation, to parliamentary questions, to press releases, to spreadsheets.

My outcomes... well as with most knowledge workers I don't have any. Cos they're kinda hard to measure. But I'm sure I'm doing a great job. The key thing is to always know the answer to the question that you're being asked or to know how to get the answer in ten seconds.

Is everyone's job like this nowadays? Or is it just my sector? I think I am getting too old for this. Would someone like to give me a job where I don't have to multi-task so much all the time?
Where I could sit around and think about stuff for just a minute or two?

My kind of bear

Recent news reports from Washington State are telling the story of a bear who ambled up to a campsite and got into someone's cooler in a national park, drank 36 cans of beer and climbed a tree (unsteadily, I'd imagine) to sleep it off. Park rangers managed to coax him down from the tree and capture him, for release away from the campsite, using two cans of beer.

The hair of the dog etc..

Cape Breton Fall Colours

Everything you've ever heard about Cape Breton in the Fall when the leaves turn is true.

Magenta claret plum lilac crimson fire engine red rose peach apricot sienna umber terracotta traffic light orange tangerine lemon gold blonde palest yellow leaves all bouncing and shaking in the autumn wind against the backdrop of evergreens - sage, emerald, moss, Sherwood green. Tufts of heather and blazing ferns at the base of every tree. Rivers winding slowly through boulder-strewn valleys, waiting for rain to fill up the channels.

Winding roads up and down the North Mountain and Smokey, hugging the side of the hills with nothing beyond the cliff edge but a vast cerulean sky and a dark blue ocean capped with off-white tufts of foam meeting at a horizon that stretches all the way east to home.

Doubting the need for doubt is a doubtful strategy

I always try to remember the words of the great man himself, Plato:

One of the penalties of refusing to be involved in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Then sometimes I wonder whether he wasn't talking about me.

But it's not something I can ever have a conversation with my colleagues about, because doubt is a scarce commodity in political staffers.

Which is a bad thing, I think.

But maybe that's just me.

Tired. Of politics. And crazy men shooting women and children in schools because of the way they were raised. The men I mean.

Why do we raise our boys so badly?