Makes me sick ... see how far we done fell

This blog is about seeing the beauty in small things.

Like this afternoon.

I was home sick. It was snowing. I was trying to read an article on rural broadband and figure out what to do next. I had the tv on in the background. People were banging on about trillions of dollars and toxic debts and the death of Jade Goody. Then the door opened and it was Himself home for a nap until he had to go out and plough snow all night.

We sat on the couch for a while. Then I looked up and out the window and saw a deer's ass in the corner of the yard. We got up to investigate.

A young doe had her head all screwed up and her tongue in the slit at the bottom of the bird feeder and she was just a hoovering out the seed. I tapped on the window. She looked at me and tensed just a little.

Then I swear she gave a little shrug before she recommenced her hoovering.

Sometimes it's difficult to see the beauty in small things when the world is shouting at you about the big things.

And you can't see the point in fucking people, as Mrs. Monkey would say.

And it won't stop snowing.

There's nothing like an animal to make you see the pointlessness of the human race.

I should get a dog.

To remind me of my place in the world.

I'm going to call him Bunk when I get him.

This is for Mrs. Monkey....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wmgghlEagA

Generation Loser has a great soundtrack thanks to Buck 65

Seeing the beauty in small things is what this blog is supposed to be about.

It's quite difficult to do that at the moment, because the world and the weather keeps dumpin' a load on us all, don't they.

But as I am up at the crack of dawn this morning, due to the not-so-small snoring sounds that were emanating from the body in the bed beside me, I thought maybe I'd catch up on some of the small things that are keeping me going through this long winter and recession.

1. CBC Radio 2 Drive, with Rich Terfry (aka Buck 65).
Those of you who know me will know I am a Buck 65 fan anyways. I feel we are psychically connected (but not in a scary, over-enthusiastic way of course) because Buck 65 played Whelans in Dublin the night before I left Ireland for Canada. And then I ended up living in his home province.

Anyways, after spending time in Paris and New York, and just a few months after his amazing collaboration with Symphony Nova Scotia (take one hour out of your day this weekend to listen to this concert - you will not be sorry), Mr. Terfry abandoned the Maritimes again, moved to Toronto, but thankfully, was snatched up by the CBC for its relaunch of its Radio 2. The Drive show goes out 3 - 6pm every weekday.

So it's like he's here in a way.

It's a good show.

You don't want to get out of the car... yes, the show is that good.

The howls of outrage from the baby boomers who wanted wall to wall classical are drowned out every day by the best of Canadian singer-songwriters, roots, and urban (whatever that is).

Drive focuses on Canadian music naturally, but plays international stuff too (actually, Buck plays Irish artist, Damian Rice a lot... I keep meaning to email the show to tell him to check out good Irish artists) and there's a little sub-genre of south american pop and reggae and dub going on there too.

The best part of the show - apart from the music and Rich Terfry's rich-voiced ramblings about whatever - is the live sessions he hosts. Tune in here for the back calendar.

There, now I've done a 'nice thing in Queenie's world', there's a rant that's been building for a bit....

I was reading Macleans magazine the other day and they had one of those moan, whinge, complain, horror articles (well they had many, but I'm going to talk about one in particular) that was all about 'Generation Loser: the generation that will be poorer than its parents'.

It featured a nice, unfortunate, Ontario-based couple in their thirties, who had done the usual thing - arsed through college and their twenties, then 'gotten lucky' working for an auto-parts company for $33 an hour, then gotten even luckier in meeting each other. They bought a house and started a baby, before suddenly getting their pink slips.

Now he's making $11 an hour doing something menial, she's at home with the baby, and they don't know how they will survive THE FUTURE.

According to Macleans, they are typical of a generation that are losers BECAUSE WE ARE THE FIRST TO END UP POORER THAN OUR PARENTS.

A number of things struck me about the article.

Firstly, to go from a household income of $1ook plus, to one of under $25k two months before you have your first child is friggin' scary enough, without having Macleans come in to do a feature on what a pair of losers you are. Even if Macleans is using that term to describe an entire generation and not just you two.

Secondly, our parents did well overall, yes, but their high end manufacturing jobs and conspicuous consumption has damaged the planet, and..... as far as I can make out, they have mostly all just lost their pensions in the stock market (as well as ours) ....

....so I'm kind of at a loss about why we are the losers.

Are we losers because we are the first generation not going to be able to do the same as our parents because it's unsustainable?

Because we could maybe wait a few more years and get judged on our overall performance.

Oh, that's right, Macleans being a paper-based media organization, it will probably have folded by then. ;-)

Thirdly... what is this shit about 'the first generation'?

There have been thousands of generations. I'm sure there are earlier generations that lost more of their best and brightest to the sabre-toothed tiger than their parents, or got whipped into a worse chain gang building some more insane necropolis than their parents, or had to pay more rent to the local squire than their parents, or didn't last as long in some hellish part of the Imperial bureaucracy, or WHATEVER.

It annoys me intensely that economic commentators only look back as far as the development of the Model T factory line, and generational commentators only look back as far as the development of the American middle classes when they purport to examine historical trends.

It narrows the potential for insight so much.

The simple fact remains that under the current model of economic development (i.e. the growth model), if we were all (as a generation) to 'do better' than our parent's generation, the natural world would collapse under the strain.

So we can't.

I'm sure some of us will.

But most of us won't.

People who build a future on a job making car parts in Upper Canada certainly won't, unless they change life direction rapid.

Our parents did the best they could with the decades they got, and they got some of it right and some of it wrong and we will be the same.

I wish we could all accept, internalise and celebrate this concept and move on with it.

Then instead of wringing our hands about what a loser generation we are, we could redefine progress and get ourselves out of this mess.

After that wish, I wish I could find some economic commentators who are looking at the slowdown in sustainability terms (feel free to post links).

And if I got the full complement of wishes, I wish Macleans et al would find and publish numbers that measure the benefits of sustaining and repairing what we already have, rather than droning on with the shock horror statistics measuring cataclysmic drops in the creation of mountains of poisonous plastic and chrome.

As JD Irving, the Tree Growing People would say in their ads that pretend they give a shit about nature 'that's my what if!'

Most hilarious economic meltdown occurance of the week

What: The world's stock markets plunging yet again, after hearing that the Chinese government wouldn't spend billions on a stimulus package to make things better.

Why: Did the running dogs of capitalism actually think that the Chinese government was going to save them?

Chow time on Eagle

When we moved to this house, we were very excited at the thought of lots of new critters to bond with and observe and work around, so much so that Himself went out straight away and got a big bag of cracked corn and another big bag of mixed bird seed.

So, the bird seed goes in the bird feeder at the back of the house, and the cracked corn gets spread out on the ground near the garage (or as we call it here, the building), so that it is far enough away from the house (which is also a building of course but not called a building). This allows the shyer critters to eat without disturbance.

The spare seed and corn are stored in the building.

Me, with all this largesse being spread around the property, I'm already worrying about my vegetable gardening prospects in a yard where the critters are used to being fed.

Apparently that's not going to be a problem.

Hmmmm.

It's my humble experience that if there's food, and there's critters, and there's humans, then critters beat humans to the food supply every time.

And so it goes on Eagle.

The bird feeder is not too bad. We have a large and varied clientele who seem to have organized themselves into an all day rota that involves tits and chickadees first, then jays, then other birds.

Repeat cycle.

The birds spill seed onto the frozen ground while getting it out of the feeder of course, and lately we've been seeing a northern short-tailed shrew (as in the picture) burrowing around under the snow to get at the seeds.

I'm so tempted to trap him just to pet him: his coat is the shiniest, furriest, most beautiful I've seen on a critter yet.

What a sable must look like against the snow???

I am very excited that he is living in our yard because Northern short-tailed shrews neuro-toxinate and kill snakes, which is a good thing as snakes are to Himself as bears are to Queenie.

And as we have a pond, that means we have frogs, which means we probably have some snakes around somewhere.

Further over near the building, we were absolutely thrilled to coast down the driveway one evening and catch a very big deer having himself a snack of cracked corn.

Himself in particular was beside himself with pleasure... none of this short-tailed shrew bullshit.... a critter isn't a REAL critter unless you can track it, shoot it, skin it, stick its head on your living room wall and eat what's left of it.

That evening, the deer watched us for a while, then ambled into the woods behind the house. Then, after a while, he ambled back into the yard and walked around. Chowed down a bit more, and then left.

Since then, he and his friends have been by quite a few times for an amble and a snack, but we've not had the pleasure of being here to watch them. We just find deer tracks all over the yard when we get home.

In addition, Himself has been finding pheasant tracks leading to and from the chow.

Yum yum, I keep thinking to myself.... corn-fed pheasant....

We rarely see the pheasants either though.

Himself is getting annoyed - he has a vague, irritating feeling that there's a whole pile of critters laughing at him behind his back.

He's probably right. Just after he leaves every morning, the pheasants start calling to each other. Ten minutes after I leave, I imagine they're knee deep in breakfast goodness.

This morning, I'm home waiting on the cable guy and sure enough, twenty minutes after Himself drove off, there were two pheasant, a partridge and a mess of crows standing around the cracked corn pile eating like there's no tomorrow!!

No doubt Mr. Bambi will be along later.

And the squirrel of course.

Our squirrel is one cheeky little bastard, as only a squirrel can be.

He infuriates Himself, who didn't spend a pile of money on nice cracked corn just so some rat with a furry tail could eat it all!

He's out there right now, engaging in a kind of hoover-sweeper movement across the cracked corn...

He spends a good part of every day scurrying around just to annoy Himself, with his cheeks full of corn and he has the temerity to sit on his favourite tree stump basking in the winter sunshine while chewing, right in front of Himself.

Then he got into the building, well, I think he lives there.... anyways, he managed to open the bag of bird seed, separate out every sunflower seed and eat them all.

Himself nearly had a fit when that happened, as Mr Squirrel dropped all the other seeds on the floor while sorting through them.

I sense many spats between those two occuring over the next few months. Himself might think it's his building.... but we all know who can more easily climb up on the rafters to shit on whose head.

Right now, the cable guy is here reorganizing our tv package - we're going digital in a last ditch attempt to find something to watch - and he nearly fell off the pole in excitement as a beautiful cock pheasant strolled across the lawn in front of him.

Yeah.. he's coming over for his breakfast I expect, I said.

Time for me to go to work... let the chow times begin in earnest.

Cllr. John Foley, Edenderry - take a bow

This is priceless. You have to watch it to the end.

Cllr. Foley is the bearded gentleman towards the back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3elLmrCmOqo

With thanks to Baz for the heads up!!

The pensions conundrum continues with the Big Three

I am reposting this article from Gwyn Morgan, founder of EnCana oil company (and current director of HSBC), because I think it's interesting in a 'how are we going to deal with this baby boomer pension issue' kind of way.

From today's Globe and Mail:

The recent Globe and Mail headline, “GM seeks government pension aid,” took me back to April, 2005, when former Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) president and labour movement icon Bob White received the Public Policy Forum's prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award.

Mr. White's acceptance speech was delivered with the serenity possible only for those of us who can savour our career's journey freed from the load of full-time stakeholder accountability weighing upon our shoulders. Nevertheless, as this retired union leader recounted his career, the most repeated word could just as easily have come from the memoirs of a famous war general.

That word was “fight” and it seemed Mr. White had spent his entire career fighting a never-ending series of battles: fighting to break away from the U.S.-based United Auto Workers union to form the CAW, fighting against the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement, and on and on.
But one of the biggest battles Mr. White recounted, and the victory he held up as his finest hour, was the strike-driven extraction of those rich CAW pension plans that may ultimately prove to be the deadweight that drags the Detroit Three down to their demise.

As co-chairmen of that Public Policy Forum dinner, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and I alternated the presentation of awards. As it turned out, I presented Mr. White's award. However unlikely an image this free enterpriser and that lifelong socialist made as podium fellows that evening, it's just as well that it was me and not Mr. McGuinty who presented Mr. White's award.

Now that federal Industry Minister Tony Clement has made it very clear that pensions are a provincial responsibility, it is up to Queen's Park to decide whether hard-pressed Ontario taxpayers should bail out the spiralling CAW pension funding shortfalls. In wrestling with this toxic dilemma, at least Mr. McGuinty will not have to recall honouring the architect of one of the biggest financial and political problems he will ever face.

At the end of 2007, GM Canada's pension plan alone had a shortfall of over $4-billion and, given the collapse of securities markets since then, the current shortfall is probably closer to $6-billion. But it is going to get much worse.

At GM, the pension plan Mr. White was so proud of now has 34,000 retirees versus only 14,000 active employees, and each time the foundering company throws workers overboard to try and keep the sinking ship afloat, most of those workers climb back on board as pensioners.

In an opening salvo designed to coerce government to include pension bailouts in the billions of dollars in taxpayer largess already requested, GM Canada's vice-president of corporate and environmental affairs, David Paterson, said: “Instead of carrying one work force like our competition at Honda and Toyota, we're effectively carrying three additional work forces out there, and those will grow further.”

Grow indeed. GM's bailout filings predict that its work force in Canada will drop by half next year to 7,000, and most of those laid off will be added to the pension fund. So, for every active worker, GM will need to pay pension costs for almost six retirees. While I haven't seen corresponding data for Chrysler and Ford, their pension plans are designed in the same disastrous way.

Even if Queen's Park were to saddle Ontarians with the huge decades-long expense of the Detroit Three pension plans, it wouldn't prevent more layoffs. The breathtaking rate at which the Detroit auto makers are burning through cash makes it highly probable that another bailout-begging trip to Ottawa and Queen's Park won't be far off.

Some insight into that question may be gained by looking at the $13.4-billion (U.S.) granted to GM by the U.S. Congress in December. GM has stated that without more funds, they will be in bankruptcy by the end of March. That works out to a cash burn rate of around $4-billion a month for GM alone, not including their burgeoning pension shortfall.

Meanwhile, GM and Chrysler continue their bailout dances on both sides of the border.
GM Canada's request is reported to be around $7-billion (Canadian). Using their projected 2010 employment number of 7,000 yields a bailout cost of a whopping $1,000,000 per worker.

And despite union and corporate assertions that their pitiful state is all because of the economic crisis, in actual fact, the Detroit Three were bleeding billions in red ink years before last fall's financial meltdown, at the same time as competitors like Toyota and Volkswagen were racking up record profits.

In the midst of this job-destroying financial crisis, and if the U.S. Congress keeps handing out cash to Detroit auto makers, Canadian politicians face the threat of the closing of all GM and Chrysler plants if they don't ante up.

But let's be realistic. The 18-million-a-year North American vehicle market is never coming back and a legacy of lethal decisions by auto executives acceding to union demands means they can't be competitive in a smaller market against more nimble and lower-cost auto makers.

The idea of taxing beleaguered Canadians to fund auto bailouts is already unpopular across the country. As politicians consider operating cash and pension bailouts now, imagine how much more unpopular those decisions will be when these companies fail anyway, taking billions of dollars of taxpayers' money down the drain.

The sad thing is that if only a fraction of the taxpayer money wasted on extending the tenuous life of these doomed companies were spent on transitional financial support and retraining, taxpayers and auto workers would both have a much brighter future.

Generals January and February have retreated... one to go

I just happened to notice on my blog dashboard, as I waited interminably for my laptop to get with the program (it being on its last legs for the last while) and open a new post page, that this is my 599th post.

I am quite proud of that. I'm not noted for being a sticker at things that involve work or routine.

Apart from work generally, and the daily routine.

Well done, Queenie, pour yourself a glass of wine and say cheers.

Thanks, I just did.

The other cause for celebration today is that it is the 1st March, which means that February is over for another year.

I heard someone say recently on the radio that there were only three things wrong with Canada - January, February and March.

Probably. March is generally not as bad as January and February, because the days are longer and there are *warm* days. But today the universe hurled ice pellets at the front of the house all day and covered the driveway in white again. A heady combination of rain, freezing rain, and snow has us in its grips for the next couple of days.

This means that driving and walking becomes a nightmare.

However, the upside is no shovelling.

March... at least in March there is an end in sight. Easter is soonish. It is possible to get up after dawn and drive home before sunset if you work normal hours.

February is just dead. Four weeks of unmitigating cold, damp, snow, rain, freezing rain, ice and wind. You get up in the dark and shovel the previous night's precipitation off the car in minus 10 - 15 degree cold, then shiver for eight miles until the heater starts to work. Any attempt at fresh air during the day involves slipping and falling, or being blown over by the wind, or getting caught in the snow/ rain/ sleet that has decided to fall at lunchtime.

In February nobody goes anywhere, or calls anyone, or does anything. Everyone just sits home and moans about the weather and their miserable lives.

We do try to be healthy. We made an effort every weekend and we got a few hikes in, but after one particularly icy one, which did more damage to Himself's back than good, we said to hell with this till March.

I wonder if I had actually thought about the fact that Canada is the second coldest country in the world (I'm assuming this is true because the man on the weather channel said it), would I have settled here.

However, I have not been alone in hating this winter in particular: the general consensus is that this has been one of the longest winters ever, that Canada has had two crappy winters in a row and a bummer of a summer last year so WE ARE OWED.

And we - idiots that we are - we moved house in the middle of it.

Of course, we know bigger idiots who moved twice.

The people who used to own our house - the LAZY BASTINERS - as we like to call them, left us with a busted furnace, a non-functioning water softener, rooms full of animal hair, and a yard full of dog shit. We got all these issues sorted out in a few days, but we were very angry at the lack of consideration.

IT WAS JANUARY AND IT WAS -18 OUT, YOU INCOMPETENT, LAZY, SELFISH, PENNY-PINCHING SOANDSOs!!

Halifax is a small town and I will find you some day if I can ever be bothered to go in search of you at the branch of the large electronics chain where you work.

Yes, I've been noting where your mail is coming from, dude....

And when I do bother my ass some day when I have nothing better to do, you will be sorry that you decided not to care that I would have no heat for three days in mid-January, after I had spent every penny I had on your house.

When we talk about what you did very loudly in front of the entire store.

And even when I never bother to do any of this because it is too much effort on my part, it doesn't matter that I don't ever find you, because your karma will.

But enough of that... we don't really care that the people who sold the house to us were so greedy they wouldn't spend a few hundred bucks on the furnace before they left. We are used to dealing with selfish, greedy, unreasonable people. It's best just to get on with life as best you can, let those kind of people get on with their own greed until it sinks them, and hope to hell you don't get dragged down with the shipwreck.

Oh, and by the way, the reason you had to lie about whether or not the basement leaked is because you put the rain gutters up assways... once they were fixed you were telling the truth, the basement doesn't leak!

Home repair is really not your forte is it, Mr. FLAT SCREEN TV Guy.

Other than those minor mishaps, the house has been fantastic: as Accent Monkey said, at least when you move in in January you know what works. We have settled in well and we are looking forward to the end of the winter and the re-emergence of the garden.

And company of course. Lots of company.

Won't that be a novelty after the last six weeks!!