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!!
Sunday, March 01, 2009
Saturday, February 28, 2009
New France is for sale!!
JD Irving, the clear-cutting lumber giant of the Maritimes, or the 'tree-growing people' as they like to call themselves, has arranged for an American real estate broker, LandVest of Portland, Maine, http://www.landvest.com/, to sell approximately 170,000 acres (70,000 hectares) of South West Nova Scotia to the highest bidder.The acreage is listed in three blocks, and you can see some photos of these beautiful lands on Landvest's website here
http://www.landvest.com/property/NS0101/1/ .
The sale is a sealed bid auction due to close on April 9th.
The first block is Weymouth Timberlands in Digby Co. (128,000 acres) including most of the Sissiboo River drainage area, Long Tusket Lake, Silver River, and historic New France.
Anyone who knows me knows this is a very special place for me and Himself, and for all our friends in Digby County.
This historic area was settled by a French family who built a village in the woods - the first electrified town in Nova Scotia, with a railway to Weymouth, and a hydro-power plant, a pub, and every amenity you can imagine.
The village is in ruins now, but you can still walk around New France, camp nearby near one of the lakes, canoe down the old Mi'k Maq paddling routes, used for thousands of years to enable the original settlers of this place to travel easily through the region.
This river and lake system, and the forests that surround them is one of the few places left in South Western Nova Scotia where you can completely get away from it all. Acid rain has already wreaked havoc on it, but it is slowly starting to recover from that.
Let's not lose it to someone who doesn't care about it like we do.
I don't know the other two blocks as well, but I can imagine they are beautiful too, judging from the photos. They include:
Tusket River Lakes in Clare and Yarmouth Co. (28,000 acres) including Barrio Lake, Barrio Falls and the east bank of the Tusket to North Kempt; and Carleton River Lakes in Clare and Yarmouth Co. (17,000 acres) including the east and south sides of Ogden Lake and the east bank of the Carleton River to Lake Fanning.
A group called Buy Back Nova Scotia has started a coalition of diverse individuals and groups to urge the government of Nova Scotia to purchase these Irving lands and thereby halt the further sale of provincial beauty spots to those who might restrict access to the lands, rivers and streams, lakes and wetlands. Maintaining public access to lands and waters for recreation is critical and will become more so in the future.
The people involved are conservationists and ATVers, foresters, fishermen, hunters and hikers, bicyclists and birders, canoeists, campers and cross country skiers, photographers and writers.
Despite their differences about how to spend time in the wilderness, they are working together on this issue, to urge municipal and provincial politicians to purchase the JD Irving lands before more of the province disappears behind “No Trespassing’ signs and locked gates.
A public meeting to rally tri-county support for BUY BACK NOVA SCOTIA has been organized for Sunday, March 8, at 2 p.m., in the gym at the Yarmouth campus, NSCC.
A letter-writing campaign has begun too.
Please help with this. Details of who to write to on http://www.buybacknovascotia.com/
Friday, February 27, 2009
Breakfast Roll Man abandons the Soldiers of Destiny... the muesli parties are on the rise
I despair of my countrymen.... frigging despair...
This is splashed across all the papers this morning:
"An opinion poll conducted by Millward Brown IMS for today’s Irish Independent shows Fine Gael on 30 per cent (up three points since the last election), Fianna Fáil 25 per cent (down 17 points), Labour on 22 per cent (up 12 points)...."
"According to the poll, Fianna Fail would lose anything up to 30 Dail seats if an election was called today. The findings are stark: just over one-in-five voters think their leader is doing a good job; one-in-10 are satisfied with the Government.
The plight of the 'Breakfast Roll Man' -- the group of newly prosperous Celtic Tiger cubs credited with sealing the last election for Fianna Fail -- appears to have mirrored the party's recent misfortunes. The most marked drop in support has been among young professionals in the 25-34 and 35-49 age categories, who are abandoning the party in their droves."
The corruption, the cronyism, and the pathetic inability to look after the sick, the vulnerable and the less well to do in our society was okay while you had a job and could borrow on your property portfolio's value, was it?
But now you're not doing so well, it's time to get rid of Fianna Fail.
RATS..... LEAVING THE SHIP.... SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED... GRUMBLE GRUMBLE GRUMBLE....
This is splashed across all the papers this morning:
"An opinion poll conducted by Millward Brown IMS for today’s Irish Independent shows Fine Gael on 30 per cent (up three points since the last election), Fianna Fáil 25 per cent (down 17 points), Labour on 22 per cent (up 12 points)...."
"According to the poll, Fianna Fail would lose anything up to 30 Dail seats if an election was called today. The findings are stark: just over one-in-five voters think their leader is doing a good job; one-in-10 are satisfied with the Government.
The plight of the 'Breakfast Roll Man' -- the group of newly prosperous Celtic Tiger cubs credited with sealing the last election for Fianna Fail -- appears to have mirrored the party's recent misfortunes. The most marked drop in support has been among young professionals in the 25-34 and 35-49 age categories, who are abandoning the party in their droves."
The corruption, the cronyism, and the pathetic inability to look after the sick, the vulnerable and the less well to do in our society was okay while you had a job and could borrow on your property portfolio's value, was it?
But now you're not doing so well, it's time to get rid of Fianna Fail.
RATS..... LEAVING THE SHIP.... SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED... GRUMBLE GRUMBLE GRUMBLE....
Monday, February 23, 2009
Gingers gone... what's next!
On a sad note, Ginger’s Tavern on Barrington St, home of many a pint had by Queenie and friends of hers, including Mr. and Mrs Monkey and the Byrnes on many occasions including the Monkey wedding, and separately Redser Byrne, as well as Jersey Girl and her Boy, Polly, Shazz and many others..... well, Ginger's Tavern closed last night forever.The owners are moving out of town to focus on their micro-brewery.
Himself says I am a pub joner.
Everytime I leave a place, my local closes down.
Ginger will hold a special place in my heart. Not as special as Smoothies. But special enough.
What I am really worried about is the long, slow death of Barrington St., the main street of Halifax city.
Is there any of the multiple 'development' organizations out there working on this?
Fusion Halifax maybe??
Or the Chamber of Commerce?
Or the Downtown Business Commission??
You know, boys and girls, if you don't stop this slide, soon there'll be nowhere downtown to engage in your true raison d'etre, which is of course to swap business cards.
Book Reviews 2008, part 2: Non-fiction titles
The second round of book reviews is another short category – non-fiction. However, compared to previous years, this category is storming ahead in the lifetime stakes with a total of six entries.
It’s not often that Queenie reads six books that aren’t story books.
These were all second hand items I picked up in desperation, when I didn’t have the price of a novel, or even a CanLit novel (they being cheaper than non CanLit here in Canada) on me, but still needed something to read.
They were all pretty good despite their bought for the sake of buying a book rather than for the sake of owning them status. And there are one or two gems in here.
The Little Immigrants, the Orphans who came to Canada by Kenneth Bagnell, published in 1980, was a book I picked up in a store called ‘So many books, So little time, which we happened upon during our road trip to Algonquin last October. It’s a little shack down a side street in Huntsville, but when you enter the shack, it turns out to be quite the store. Second hand books line shelves that surround the real purpose of the store – tchotchkas and dried flowers. Plus the owner had two of the nicest dogs I have ever seen lounging around a second hand bookstore.
The book is described on the cover as ‘one of the finest pieces of Canadian social history to be written’ and the author was a respected Globe and Mail and Star newspapers, which of course are THE newspapers in Canada. It apparently spent one year on the bestsellers list when it came out.
As befits a book about the littlest immigrants, it is a little book. It really should have been called ‘the littlest hobos’ but I guess that title was taken.
The book traces the fate of over 80,000 orphans or indigent children who were shipped from England (primarily from East End London) to Canada between the 1860s and the 1930s. When they got to Canada, they were dispersed across this vast country to work as farm labourers. A number of organizations were involved in ‘saving’ the street arabs, as they were then known.
The collection, transportation and dispersal of these children was organized mostly by evangelical Christian organizations at first. A number of redoubtable Christian women were involved; women who steam-rolled over the concerns of the Canadian and English authorities.
Despite a serious enquiry that uncovered wholesale abuse and defrauding of these children (they were supposed to be fed, clothed, educated and paid, and a lot of the time, not much of any of these things happened), Canada’s need for cheap agricultural labour and England’s need to rid itself of street children overcame the Dickensian concerns of the media and the child advocates.
The collection and transportation was a bit hit and miss for a number of years. Then a young man named Dr. Barnado got involved and the process hit its stride. Thomas Barnado, born and educated in Dublin of course, sent 30,000 children to Canada. The book spends quite a bit of time on Barnado, his life and works, and the obstacles he overcame with his unwavering zeal that his choice for these children was the right one.
He sounds like a terrible person… one of those individuals so consumed with his calling his actions towards friends and family are monstrous. This monstrosity almost becomes his downfall, as a falling out with a friend results in a plot against him by a number of other evangelists.
It seems Barnado is yet another mixed blessing imposed by the Irish on the British. Having said that, his legacy organization is still fairly highly regarded in some places. But the book cleared up the rationale for a lot of moral standpoints I found strange about the old Barnardos.
The book is interesting in a number of ways. Firstly, it documents the terrible treatment that a lot of these children received on isolated and primitive farms located deep in provincial Canada (all in the name of Jesus of course), and reiterates the fact that in Victorian England and Canada, children were not children as we now know them to be.
Secondly, the book describes very well the result of concerns finally getting a media airing when various well got individuals questioned the value (to the children) of ‘the importation of waifs’. The immediate reaction by God-fearing Canadians was to condemn the practice outright, because Canada should not have to house the scum and wastrels of England.
Nice kick to moral touch there, Upper Canada.
Finally, the book has some local flavour as one of the homes where the children were housed before they were sent to their new masters was in Bedford, near Halifax.
I meant to go find the home last summer and forgot. I must do it this spring.
Many of the stories outlined in the book were from Nova Scotia too, and they don’t come out well from it.
Worth a read if you ever find it.
The Secret Life of Lobsters, by Trevor Corson, is quite simply the best biological book I have ever read. I followed it with The Lobster Chronicles, by Linda Greenlaw (who is the actual woman who is represented by an actress trying to talk the skipper played by George Clooney out of his fool’s errand in A Perfect Storm).
After she lost her friend in that storm, she gave up her career as a swordfish boat captain, and went home to a small island off Maine to fish for lobster. The book describes a season and its not very good. Although I get the sense she was very contrained by the fact that all her neighbours were a little tense about the writing of it.
She does get the whole ‘living on a small island, knowing everyone, knowing their faults and failings and adjusting to them so nobody will kill each other’ thing very well. I’m just not sure it’s as riveting a read as she thought it would be.
Salutary…
As for the fact that I spent quite a lot of my reading time last year reading up on lobsters… it’s all about the fishery, doncha know… you gotta get with the game when you’re in Nova Scotia.
It was funny… when I finished reading The Secret Life of Lobsters, Himself and I were down visiting his folks on Long Island for the weekend. I was so impressed by the book I couldn’t stop talking about it or lobsters, much to everyone’s amusement because usually I pay no heed to the talk of fish. Eventually I had to haul it out of my bag to show them what was pushing my buttons.
Turned out every guy in the room had read the book when it came out first.
It is a great book. Even if you have no interest in lobsters, fishermen, the sea, crustaceans, ocean currents, the Atlantic, North Eastern USA/ Canada, or whatever, you will still love this book.
It is such a labour of love. It is beautifully written. It is painstakingly researched. It understands that a lobster is just one example of the beauty, uniqueness, humour and genius of evolution. In fact, in the dying days of the Empire of Creationism (which is when I read it), it really was a refreshing reminder that the USA can do so much better than Bush and his cronies.
Did you know that lobsters urinate on each others heads when they’re horny? Lobster sex is the most interesting animal sex I have ever read about.
But even more interesting than the description of lobster sex is the description of how US scientists figured out every aspect of lobster sex.
And that’s what I love about this book; it’s celebration of enquiry.
I found Alexander the Great, Journey to the end of the Earth, by Norman F Cantor in the bargain bin at Chapters for $2. As Kitty was doing Classical History I bought it for her, but it ended up being read by me as I had suspected.
It was okay… the maps weren’t great and I would have preferred more what and less why, as we don’t know why.
Late in the year, I found a new second hand bookstore, DustJackets, in the bowels of the Aliant building on Barrington St. and celebrated by buying a copy of A Brief History of The Celts, Peter Bereford Ellis’ recommended tome for beginners in the subject.
It’s a very good, concise overview of every aspect of Celtic society. He breaks it down into aspects of Celtic life – laws, women, religion, politics, architecture, art, money, trade, etc. He does a good job with shitty sources. That’s the problem with the Celts – it’s either some Roman making up stuff about how they’re all mental and they eat brains, or it’s some monk in a monastery in Ireland banging on about Lugh of the Long Hand and giants and such like.
Ellis’ book is famous for being a serious attempt to make sense of it all and I must say I got a lot out of it.
Plus, I found out that my maternal surname is over 3,000 years old and is one of the oldest surviving surnames in Europe.
So there.
Finally, I bought a copy of Getting Past No this year, because it was time I did. This is the sequel to Getting to Yes, the bestselling book on negotiation written by the guys who invented interest-based bargaining.
If you haven’t read GTY yet, then what are you doing reading this article. Go out and buy it. When you get it, I mean get it as in get it…. practice that for a while and then buy Getting Past No.
If you haven’t done any of that stuff yet, and you have children who are going to be older than five soon, then just go straight past GTY and buy Getting Past No.
It’s good for puppies too.
That’s it for the non-fiction.
Onto CanLit...
It’s not often that Queenie reads six books that aren’t story books.
These were all second hand items I picked up in desperation, when I didn’t have the price of a novel, or even a CanLit novel (they being cheaper than non CanLit here in Canada) on me, but still needed something to read.
They were all pretty good despite their bought for the sake of buying a book rather than for the sake of owning them status. And there are one or two gems in here.
The Little Immigrants, the Orphans who came to Canada by Kenneth Bagnell, published in 1980, was a book I picked up in a store called ‘So many books, So little time, which we happened upon during our road trip to Algonquin last October. It’s a little shack down a side street in Huntsville, but when you enter the shack, it turns out to be quite the store. Second hand books line shelves that surround the real purpose of the store – tchotchkas and dried flowers. Plus the owner had two of the nicest dogs I have ever seen lounging around a second hand bookstore.
The book is described on the cover as ‘one of the finest pieces of Canadian social history to be written’ and the author was a respected Globe and Mail and Star newspapers, which of course are THE newspapers in Canada. It apparently spent one year on the bestsellers list when it came out.
As befits a book about the littlest immigrants, it is a little book. It really should have been called ‘the littlest hobos’ but I guess that title was taken.
The book traces the fate of over 80,000 orphans or indigent children who were shipped from England (primarily from East End London) to Canada between the 1860s and the 1930s. When they got to Canada, they were dispersed across this vast country to work as farm labourers. A number of organizations were involved in ‘saving’ the street arabs, as they were then known.
The collection, transportation and dispersal of these children was organized mostly by evangelical Christian organizations at first. A number of redoubtable Christian women were involved; women who steam-rolled over the concerns of the Canadian and English authorities.
Despite a serious enquiry that uncovered wholesale abuse and defrauding of these children (they were supposed to be fed, clothed, educated and paid, and a lot of the time, not much of any of these things happened), Canada’s need for cheap agricultural labour and England’s need to rid itself of street children overcame the Dickensian concerns of the media and the child advocates.
The collection and transportation was a bit hit and miss for a number of years. Then a young man named Dr. Barnado got involved and the process hit its stride. Thomas Barnado, born and educated in Dublin of course, sent 30,000 children to Canada. The book spends quite a bit of time on Barnado, his life and works, and the obstacles he overcame with his unwavering zeal that his choice for these children was the right one.
He sounds like a terrible person… one of those individuals so consumed with his calling his actions towards friends and family are monstrous. This monstrosity almost becomes his downfall, as a falling out with a friend results in a plot against him by a number of other evangelists.
It seems Barnado is yet another mixed blessing imposed by the Irish on the British. Having said that, his legacy organization is still fairly highly regarded in some places. But the book cleared up the rationale for a lot of moral standpoints I found strange about the old Barnardos.
The book is interesting in a number of ways. Firstly, it documents the terrible treatment that a lot of these children received on isolated and primitive farms located deep in provincial Canada (all in the name of Jesus of course), and reiterates the fact that in Victorian England and Canada, children were not children as we now know them to be.
Secondly, the book describes very well the result of concerns finally getting a media airing when various well got individuals questioned the value (to the children) of ‘the importation of waifs’. The immediate reaction by God-fearing Canadians was to condemn the practice outright, because Canada should not have to house the scum and wastrels of England.
Nice kick to moral touch there, Upper Canada.
Finally, the book has some local flavour as one of the homes where the children were housed before they were sent to their new masters was in Bedford, near Halifax.
I meant to go find the home last summer and forgot. I must do it this spring.
Many of the stories outlined in the book were from Nova Scotia too, and they don’t come out well from it.
Worth a read if you ever find it.
The Secret Life of Lobsters, by Trevor Corson, is quite simply the best biological book I have ever read. I followed it with The Lobster Chronicles, by Linda Greenlaw (who is the actual woman who is represented by an actress trying to talk the skipper played by George Clooney out of his fool’s errand in A Perfect Storm).
After she lost her friend in that storm, she gave up her career as a swordfish boat captain, and went home to a small island off Maine to fish for lobster. The book describes a season and its not very good. Although I get the sense she was very contrained by the fact that all her neighbours were a little tense about the writing of it.
She does get the whole ‘living on a small island, knowing everyone, knowing their faults and failings and adjusting to them so nobody will kill each other’ thing very well. I’m just not sure it’s as riveting a read as she thought it would be.
Salutary…
As for the fact that I spent quite a lot of my reading time last year reading up on lobsters… it’s all about the fishery, doncha know… you gotta get with the game when you’re in Nova Scotia.
It was funny… when I finished reading The Secret Life of Lobsters, Himself and I were down visiting his folks on Long Island for the weekend. I was so impressed by the book I couldn’t stop talking about it or lobsters, much to everyone’s amusement because usually I pay no heed to the talk of fish. Eventually I had to haul it out of my bag to show them what was pushing my buttons.
Turned out every guy in the room had read the book when it came out first.
It is a great book. Even if you have no interest in lobsters, fishermen, the sea, crustaceans, ocean currents, the Atlantic, North Eastern USA/ Canada, or whatever, you will still love this book.
It is such a labour of love. It is beautifully written. It is painstakingly researched. It understands that a lobster is just one example of the beauty, uniqueness, humour and genius of evolution. In fact, in the dying days of the Empire of Creationism (which is when I read it), it really was a refreshing reminder that the USA can do so much better than Bush and his cronies.
Did you know that lobsters urinate on each others heads when they’re horny? Lobster sex is the most interesting animal sex I have ever read about.
But even more interesting than the description of lobster sex is the description of how US scientists figured out every aspect of lobster sex.
And that’s what I love about this book; it’s celebration of enquiry.
I found Alexander the Great, Journey to the end of the Earth, by Norman F Cantor in the bargain bin at Chapters for $2. As Kitty was doing Classical History I bought it for her, but it ended up being read by me as I had suspected.
It was okay… the maps weren’t great and I would have preferred more what and less why, as we don’t know why.
Late in the year, I found a new second hand bookstore, DustJackets, in the bowels of the Aliant building on Barrington St. and celebrated by buying a copy of A Brief History of The Celts, Peter Bereford Ellis’ recommended tome for beginners in the subject.
It’s a very good, concise overview of every aspect of Celtic society. He breaks it down into aspects of Celtic life – laws, women, religion, politics, architecture, art, money, trade, etc. He does a good job with shitty sources. That’s the problem with the Celts – it’s either some Roman making up stuff about how they’re all mental and they eat brains, or it’s some monk in a monastery in Ireland banging on about Lugh of the Long Hand and giants and such like.
Ellis’ book is famous for being a serious attempt to make sense of it all and I must say I got a lot out of it.
Plus, I found out that my maternal surname is over 3,000 years old and is one of the oldest surviving surnames in Europe.
So there.
Finally, I bought a copy of Getting Past No this year, because it was time I did. This is the sequel to Getting to Yes, the bestselling book on negotiation written by the guys who invented interest-based bargaining.
If you haven’t read GTY yet, then what are you doing reading this article. Go out and buy it. When you get it, I mean get it as in get it…. practice that for a while and then buy Getting Past No.
If you haven’t done any of that stuff yet, and you have children who are going to be older than five soon, then just go straight past GTY and buy Getting Past No.
It’s good for puppies too.
That’s it for the non-fiction.
Onto CanLit...
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Book Reviews 2008, part 1: Travel Literature
I wasn't quite sure how to do this review job - to do several book reviews in one post and then do nothing for months on end; to try to plough through all the reviews and post them one by one, or by far the most useful idea - to tackle the reviews thematically.
Or to just not do anything and blog about something totally pointless.
However, I'm home alone during a big snow storm so there ain't nuttin' else to do today, work being completed.
I'm thinking maybe I'll tackle a theme.
My themes are: Travel Literature, Non-fiction, CanLit, Literary Fiction.
I know, I know, my originality is stunning.
I may as well start with travel literature, as they are my favourite types of book now that I'm getting old and bored with fiction, and I'm too poor to actually travel anywhere anymore.
Having said that, I only read four TL books last year, for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, the genre is getting squeezed by the useful but not literature Lonely Planet type missives that everyone seems to want to buy now, and consequently, there aren't that many new titles published every year.
Secondly, I have read many, many of the existing travel books, as the Queen Dad has bought extensively in the genre over the years.
Thirdly, I am done with grumpy men who have a cynical attitude to life, especially since Inspectors Morse and Taggart left this world. So, I can't face reading Bill Bryson, or any more Theroux, or anything in that style anymore, and that's what's mostly available.
Fourthly, it's getting more difficult to get copies of what's on my list of 'great travel literature I must read before I go blind or die.' There's one shelf in Chapters and one shelf in Doull's second hand store and that's it for perusal options in Halifax.
And of course I am not supposed to shop at Chapters now, because of the Palestinian conflict. Why I don't really understand.
Yes, yes, yes, I know I can buy books on Amazon and such sites and they have a wide selection of travel literature. Interestingly, there is a list on Amazon.com that contains many of the books I am planning to read: Interesting Amazon travel literature list.
But y'see, Doulls now give you an extra 10% off your books if you promise not to buy anything online for the rest of the day, and I always do and then forget to go shopping online after the 24 hour period is up.
I know, I am pathetic.
This year I will buy more travel books.
In particular, I will track down:
- Eric Newby's book about Ireland, which I only found out about when I opened The Big Red Train Ride the other day and saw it listed in his previous publications;
- William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain, A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East
- Freya Stark's A Winter in Arabia
- Something by Pico Iyer, who is supposed to be shit hot.
- Larry McMurty's Roads, which is supposed to be good on the States
So of course, if you have any of them in a pile marked Oxfam shop, put it in an envelope and send it to me and I will make a contribution to a similar charity!!!!
Back to the task in hand, last year's crop.
As I said, there were four.
There's a trio of older style travel writers - Thubron, Newby and Raban - whom I admire both in terms of their journeys and their ways of describing them. So I am trying to collect all their works. I was lucky last year - I got one from each of them.
And finally, I found Robert Carver's Paradise with Serpents, Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. I couldn't believe it when I saw he had another book set in a country that LOVES DEH GUNS, because I own a copy of Carver's first travel book, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania.
The premise of Accursed Mountains was, Carver gets into Albania after Hoxha falls and all hell is breaking loose. He spends much time in Tirana trying to get into the countryside while not really wanting to be in that much danger. Time passes, he gets to travel to the villages and he spends his time avoiding getting shot and being terrified. He finally leaves in a big relief and writes a book about it.
It was pretty diverting and had some interesting descriptions of Albania. And he had a quote from William Dalrymple on the inside cover. Which must be the Holy Grail of aspiring travel writers...
....Well, what do you know? Paradise with Serpents is the South American version of the same book.
Guess when you find your groove you should stick to it...
Despite that nasty comment, I'd still recommend the book if you are interested in reading about Paraguay.
Lucky for me, I read it shortly before the Paraguayan elections last year, and consequently was able to appear knowledgeable about Paraguayan politics in front of some people who are still gobsmacked at my worldliness.
The book has lots of side bars about La Lynch, the Irish-born concubine of Paraguayan Presidente Lopez, which may interest Irish or French readers.
Mainly though, the book has piles and piles of useful anecdotes on how people manage to live in a hyper-inflationary economy bankrupted by the usual troika of corrupt government, fraudulent banks and business, and of course, armies of lazy public servants grown fat on the backs of the bare-foot, illiterate workers.
When Carver gets there the middle classes, who encompass some of these groups and some other people, and with whom he mainly socialises, are watching with not a little fear and trepidation as the lower orders arm themselves with big guns paid for with drug profits.
It's all very interesting if you are interested in reading about such scenarios at the moment.
Which I suspect many people are.
I like Carver because his writing is very honest. He spends most of the book hiding in the Gran Hotel in Asuncion, terrified he's going to get shot. This is because when he does venture out of the hotel or even out of Asuncion, he usually nearly gets shot. His trips out of town are centred around finding a long lost uncle who vanished into the jungle many years previously.
This type of travel scenario makes Paradise with Serpents not really a travel book; so much of his journey is spent in one place, there's more of an extended journalistic feature feel to large parts of the book. But that is inherently interesting if you like reading about the politics and society of other places.
One other comment, one of the characters he hangs with, a terribly nice person called Gabrielle, tells Carver at some point that she has invested all her savings in an apartment in west London, to avoid losing money in dodgy Paraguay.... I'm wondering how that's going for her now...
Slowly down the Ganges is the story of a journey taken in the early sixties by Eric Newby and his wife Wanda (who saved his life during WWII, the story of which is recounted in one of his other books) down the Ganges from Hardawar to the Bay of Bengal.
I love Eric Newby even though all his trips have 'classics' which have been done to death. I love Eric because a) he did them first, and b) if I held a gun to Tony Wheeler's head he'd probably admit that Newby was one of his inspirations, but Newby chose not to destroy independent travel by enabling the hoi polloi to do it.
(I consider myself hoi polloi by the way).
If you don't already know, Eric Newby is the guy who gave up a shop job in Manchester in the late fifties to travel, went to tribal Pakistan during the winter, and subsequently wrote A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which is one of the greats.
Slowly down the Ganges is a book that brilliantly describes how important it is to have moments, when your romantic illusions about travel are being systematically destroyed by petty beauracrats.
As opposed to corrupt cops with big guns.
Newby and his glorious Wanda don't just get a bus down the length of the Ganges, he proposes to do the trip by boat. Unfortunately, boats come, boats go, boats are not suitable for the depth of the Ganges, or the tide, or whatever, and the author, his wife and their trusty crew have to beg, borrow, bribe, steal and swap craft at every staging post on the journey. Plus haul his considerable luggage on and off boats and swamps and sand pits, and cliffs and sink holes etc at all hours of the day and night.
Wanda is the woman who can feed 100 sailors with two fish, some daal, and the light of the Indian moon. Newby spends much of the book amazed that such an extraordinary woman could love him (which is the other reason why I love his writing).
If you've been to India you will appreciate the vast chunks of this book that deal with lying around waiting for somewhere to open or lunch to finish or 'payment' to be made or whatever.
Slowly is the key word in this particular title.
Mirror to Damascus, by Colin Thubron is the description of a year the author spent in the Syrian capital. It is very early Thubron, and he starts to pick at many of the themes he deals with in his later writing - theories of migration and nomadic culture, the spread of Islam, the great trade routes of Asia and their impact on history. Much of what he discusses in this book is returned to in his brilliant quartet of books about Asia.
It is really interesting, when you read a lot of travel literature, you start to encounter varied descriptions of the same place. It can be quite disconcerting.
Currently I am reading a book about the Queen of Sheba written by a Californian documentary maker with a writing style that is hampered by the lens he uses instead of a pen. The writer, whose name I am too lazy to go to the sitting room to look up, describes Damascus as a Russian engineered concrete monstrosity that surrounds an impressive mosque.
It is itself an impressive description. Memorable. If surrounded by a mass of visual concrete that would be great on a storyboard but is not so good in a book format.
It also destroys the heart of Thubron's description of the same city.
Thubron's description of the city is magical. His Damascus is layered from the inside out, from the bottom up, from the outside in, from the ceiling to the ground, from the sepulchre to the minaret. There is not a layer or cross hatch of the city that he doesn't turn his attention to during his year.
The blurb on the back describes it as a 'work of love' and it is definitely a paeon. But Thubron's style is so classical and clear that the love doesn't ever veer the prose near the colour purple.
Mirror to Damascus was published in 1967, a couple of years after Newby's Ganges adventure.
It is an altogether different type of adventure, more Victorian in its style and length. Colin Thubron takes rooms in the city for a year and burrows down through the history, geography, archaeology and other aspects of this ancient city and culture, trying to pin down the city's soul, and by doing so, perhaps the soul of Middle Eastern Islam.
If we want to figure out the dichotomy in architectural descriptions, maybe it's time-bound.
Perhaps the mid-sixties was a halcyon period before the advent of the Soviet engineers that seem to have destroyed all of Thubron's travel adventures ever since.
In summation, you need to be a Thubron fan, or an Orientalist, or a fan of esoteric musings grouped around a single theme (I am trying to be all of these things) to like this book.
Ideally, you should read it in Damascus.
Finally, my travel literature collection expanded by one more book in 2008. This time it was an early publication by my beloved Jonathan Raban. I chanced upon his Hunting Mr. Heartbreak one day in Doull's, to my great joy.
Hunting Mr. Heartbreak is Raban's take on the States. The eponymous Mr. Heartbreak is Hector St. John de Crevecouer, a fellow emigrant who wrote about how wonderful it was to move to the newly formed United States.
All the great writers have to do the States. All of them have to do it their way. Raban, being Raban, has to approach it from the sea. He leaves England on a ro-ro called The Atlantic Conveyor. Because of this, and because of his tracing of a previous emigrant, the opening sentence is a reworking of the classic, 'having arrived in Liverpool, I took passage for the New World.
Happily for Queenie, The Atlantic Conveyor stops in Halifax port before it heads to New York (oh, why don't more of them do that!!), so she has the wonderful surprise of having her favourite travel writer describe the city in which she lives as he found it in 1990.
He ends up at the Split Crow, of course, that bastion of bad behaviour beloved of visiting crews. Later on he says:
In my shore-going tie, I was overdressed for the town. Everyone else appeared to have just come in from an afternoon's duck shooting. They dressed, not to stand out, but to blend in, in muddy browns, greens, beiges, and plaids, as if the height of Haligonian fashion was perfect camouflage. There was an above average incidence of beards, a below average incidence of jewellry. That cardinal provincial sin, of 'getting above yourself', was not a Nova Scotia weakness; the people of Halifax had carried unshowiness to such a point of fine moral principle that I felt my striped Italian tie was standing out among them as an act of insufferable urban arrogance.
Where they were rich, and showily rich, was in body space. Everyone carried at least 300 cubic feet of the stuff round with them on the streets. Life on a sidewalk in Halifax was a lonely business, with people swerving aside to give you a wide berth, as if you had a contagious social disease.
I nearly laughed myself sick when I read this. Nineteen years on, little has changed. Maybe a few more people on the streets, but not many.
Raban gets to New York and spends some time with the rich people who inhabit the rarified atmosphere of the condos high above Central Park. He doesn't think much of them of course and calls them the Air People. He sublets an apartment from 'Alice' and snoops into her life as much as he can and rips her to shreds in his book - I pity the poor girl, who was probably just trying to keep the apartment for her return to the city.
After a sojourn closer to the streets of New York (this book was written before zero tolerance and the peace that brought) and some encounters with the Street People of Mayor Koch's era, Raban has had enough of both crime and shallowness, and heads out into the heartland of America. The rest of the book deals with time spent in Alabama, Seattle, and the Florida Keys.
The section on Florida in particular is fabulous. Obsessed with boats and the water, Raban charters a fishing boat and heads into the Keys. He becomes enamoured with the idea of the Keys as the traditional piracy hiding grounds. His repeated attempts to get the Coast Guard and various other law-protection agencies to tell him the best way to hide in the Everglades are hilarious and really ironic when you read them with the impact of 9-11 still reverberating throughout North America.
How must Raban feel when he thinks back on the innocence of this time.... how must we all feel. I remember feeling we had hit the absolute bottom of the pits of corruption, cynicism and despair. Compared to now, the early 90s were a Disney movie...
I highly recommend this book for a glimpse of the USA that we all learned to love through MTV USA and the tv shows of the early nineties. It's a USA that has since disappeared, but Raban nails it. And like the rest of us, he liked it so much he moved there (he settled in Seattle).
There. That was a very convoluted way of reviewing four books. I will have to undertake a review redux on the rest, or I'll never get finished.
It has stopped snowing. Would winter be drawing to a close?
Don't get your hopes up Queenie, there's always one more storm...!
Or to just not do anything and blog about something totally pointless.
However, I'm home alone during a big snow storm so there ain't nuttin' else to do today, work being completed.
I'm thinking maybe I'll tackle a theme.
My themes are: Travel Literature, Non-fiction, CanLit, Literary Fiction.
I know, I know, my originality is stunning.
I may as well start with travel literature, as they are my favourite types of book now that I'm getting old and bored with fiction, and I'm too poor to actually travel anywhere anymore.
Having said that, I only read four TL books last year, for a variety of reasons.
Firstly, the genre is getting squeezed by the useful but not literature Lonely Planet type missives that everyone seems to want to buy now, and consequently, there aren't that many new titles published every year.
Secondly, I have read many, many of the existing travel books, as the Queen Dad has bought extensively in the genre over the years.
Thirdly, I am done with grumpy men who have a cynical attitude to life, especially since Inspectors Morse and Taggart left this world. So, I can't face reading Bill Bryson, or any more Theroux, or anything in that style anymore, and that's what's mostly available.
Fourthly, it's getting more difficult to get copies of what's on my list of 'great travel literature I must read before I go blind or die.' There's one shelf in Chapters and one shelf in Doull's second hand store and that's it for perusal options in Halifax.
And of course I am not supposed to shop at Chapters now, because of the Palestinian conflict. Why I don't really understand.
Yes, yes, yes, I know I can buy books on Amazon and such sites and they have a wide selection of travel literature. Interestingly, there is a list on Amazon.com that contains many of the books I am planning to read: Interesting Amazon travel literature list.
But y'see, Doulls now give you an extra 10% off your books if you promise not to buy anything online for the rest of the day, and I always do and then forget to go shopping online after the 24 hour period is up.
I know, I am pathetic.
This year I will buy more travel books.
In particular, I will track down:
- Eric Newby's book about Ireland, which I only found out about when I opened The Big Red Train Ride the other day and saw it listed in his previous publications;
- William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain, A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East
- Freya Stark's A Winter in Arabia
- Something by Pico Iyer, who is supposed to be shit hot.
- Larry McMurty's Roads, which is supposed to be good on the States
So of course, if you have any of them in a pile marked Oxfam shop, put it in an envelope and send it to me and I will make a contribution to a similar charity!!!!
Back to the task in hand, last year's crop.
As I said, there were four.
There's a trio of older style travel writers - Thubron, Newby and Raban - whom I admire both in terms of their journeys and their ways of describing them. So I am trying to collect all their works. I was lucky last year - I got one from each of them.
And finally, I found Robert Carver's Paradise with Serpents, Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. I couldn't believe it when I saw he had another book set in a country that LOVES DEH GUNS, because I own a copy of Carver's first travel book, The Accursed Mountains: Journeys in Albania.
The premise of Accursed Mountains was, Carver gets into Albania after Hoxha falls and all hell is breaking loose. He spends much time in Tirana trying to get into the countryside while not really wanting to be in that much danger. Time passes, he gets to travel to the villages and he spends his time avoiding getting shot and being terrified. He finally leaves in a big relief and writes a book about it.
It was pretty diverting and had some interesting descriptions of Albania. And he had a quote from William Dalrymple on the inside cover. Which must be the Holy Grail of aspiring travel writers...
....Well, what do you know? Paradise with Serpents is the South American version of the same book.
Guess when you find your groove you should stick to it...
Despite that nasty comment, I'd still recommend the book if you are interested in reading about Paraguay.
Lucky for me, I read it shortly before the Paraguayan elections last year, and consequently was able to appear knowledgeable about Paraguayan politics in front of some people who are still gobsmacked at my worldliness.
The book has lots of side bars about La Lynch, the Irish-born concubine of Paraguayan Presidente Lopez, which may interest Irish or French readers.
Mainly though, the book has piles and piles of useful anecdotes on how people manage to live in a hyper-inflationary economy bankrupted by the usual troika of corrupt government, fraudulent banks and business, and of course, armies of lazy public servants grown fat on the backs of the bare-foot, illiterate workers.
When Carver gets there the middle classes, who encompass some of these groups and some other people, and with whom he mainly socialises, are watching with not a little fear and trepidation as the lower orders arm themselves with big guns paid for with drug profits.
It's all very interesting if you are interested in reading about such scenarios at the moment.
Which I suspect many people are.
I like Carver because his writing is very honest. He spends most of the book hiding in the Gran Hotel in Asuncion, terrified he's going to get shot. This is because when he does venture out of the hotel or even out of Asuncion, he usually nearly gets shot. His trips out of town are centred around finding a long lost uncle who vanished into the jungle many years previously.
This type of travel scenario makes Paradise with Serpents not really a travel book; so much of his journey is spent in one place, there's more of an extended journalistic feature feel to large parts of the book. But that is inherently interesting if you like reading about the politics and society of other places.
One other comment, one of the characters he hangs with, a terribly nice person called Gabrielle, tells Carver at some point that she has invested all her savings in an apartment in west London, to avoid losing money in dodgy Paraguay.... I'm wondering how that's going for her now...
Slowly down the Ganges is the story of a journey taken in the early sixties by Eric Newby and his wife Wanda (who saved his life during WWII, the story of which is recounted in one of his other books) down the Ganges from Hardawar to the Bay of Bengal.
I love Eric Newby even though all his trips have 'classics' which have been done to death. I love Eric because a) he did them first, and b) if I held a gun to Tony Wheeler's head he'd probably admit that Newby was one of his inspirations, but Newby chose not to destroy independent travel by enabling the hoi polloi to do it.
(I consider myself hoi polloi by the way).
If you don't already know, Eric Newby is the guy who gave up a shop job in Manchester in the late fifties to travel, went to tribal Pakistan during the winter, and subsequently wrote A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, which is one of the greats.
Slowly down the Ganges is a book that brilliantly describes how important it is to have moments, when your romantic illusions about travel are being systematically destroyed by petty beauracrats.
As opposed to corrupt cops with big guns.
Newby and his glorious Wanda don't just get a bus down the length of the Ganges, he proposes to do the trip by boat. Unfortunately, boats come, boats go, boats are not suitable for the depth of the Ganges, or the tide, or whatever, and the author, his wife and their trusty crew have to beg, borrow, bribe, steal and swap craft at every staging post on the journey. Plus haul his considerable luggage on and off boats and swamps and sand pits, and cliffs and sink holes etc at all hours of the day and night.
Wanda is the woman who can feed 100 sailors with two fish, some daal, and the light of the Indian moon. Newby spends much of the book amazed that such an extraordinary woman could love him (which is the other reason why I love his writing).
If you've been to India you will appreciate the vast chunks of this book that deal with lying around waiting for somewhere to open or lunch to finish or 'payment' to be made or whatever.
Slowly is the key word in this particular title.
Mirror to Damascus, by Colin Thubron is the description of a year the author spent in the Syrian capital. It is very early Thubron, and he starts to pick at many of the themes he deals with in his later writing - theories of migration and nomadic culture, the spread of Islam, the great trade routes of Asia and their impact on history. Much of what he discusses in this book is returned to in his brilliant quartet of books about Asia.
It is really interesting, when you read a lot of travel literature, you start to encounter varied descriptions of the same place. It can be quite disconcerting.
Currently I am reading a book about the Queen of Sheba written by a Californian documentary maker with a writing style that is hampered by the lens he uses instead of a pen. The writer, whose name I am too lazy to go to the sitting room to look up, describes Damascus as a Russian engineered concrete monstrosity that surrounds an impressive mosque.
It is itself an impressive description. Memorable. If surrounded by a mass of visual concrete that would be great on a storyboard but is not so good in a book format.
It also destroys the heart of Thubron's description of the same city.
Thubron's description of the city is magical. His Damascus is layered from the inside out, from the bottom up, from the outside in, from the ceiling to the ground, from the sepulchre to the minaret. There is not a layer or cross hatch of the city that he doesn't turn his attention to during his year.
The blurb on the back describes it as a 'work of love' and it is definitely a paeon. But Thubron's style is so classical and clear that the love doesn't ever veer the prose near the colour purple.
Mirror to Damascus was published in 1967, a couple of years after Newby's Ganges adventure.
It is an altogether different type of adventure, more Victorian in its style and length. Colin Thubron takes rooms in the city for a year and burrows down through the history, geography, archaeology and other aspects of this ancient city and culture, trying to pin down the city's soul, and by doing so, perhaps the soul of Middle Eastern Islam.
If we want to figure out the dichotomy in architectural descriptions, maybe it's time-bound.
Perhaps the mid-sixties was a halcyon period before the advent of the Soviet engineers that seem to have destroyed all of Thubron's travel adventures ever since.
In summation, you need to be a Thubron fan, or an Orientalist, or a fan of esoteric musings grouped around a single theme (I am trying to be all of these things) to like this book.
Ideally, you should read it in Damascus.
Finally, my travel literature collection expanded by one more book in 2008. This time it was an early publication by my beloved Jonathan Raban. I chanced upon his Hunting Mr. Heartbreak one day in Doull's, to my great joy.
Hunting Mr. Heartbreak is Raban's take on the States. The eponymous Mr. Heartbreak is Hector St. John de Crevecouer, a fellow emigrant who wrote about how wonderful it was to move to the newly formed United States.
All the great writers have to do the States. All of them have to do it their way. Raban, being Raban, has to approach it from the sea. He leaves England on a ro-ro called The Atlantic Conveyor. Because of this, and because of his tracing of a previous emigrant, the opening sentence is a reworking of the classic, 'having arrived in Liverpool, I took passage for the New World.
Happily for Queenie, The Atlantic Conveyor stops in Halifax port before it heads to New York (oh, why don't more of them do that!!), so she has the wonderful surprise of having her favourite travel writer describe the city in which she lives as he found it in 1990.
He ends up at the Split Crow, of course, that bastion of bad behaviour beloved of visiting crews. Later on he says:
In my shore-going tie, I was overdressed for the town. Everyone else appeared to have just come in from an afternoon's duck shooting. They dressed, not to stand out, but to blend in, in muddy browns, greens, beiges, and plaids, as if the height of Haligonian fashion was perfect camouflage. There was an above average incidence of beards, a below average incidence of jewellry. That cardinal provincial sin, of 'getting above yourself', was not a Nova Scotia weakness; the people of Halifax had carried unshowiness to such a point of fine moral principle that I felt my striped Italian tie was standing out among them as an act of insufferable urban arrogance.
Where they were rich, and showily rich, was in body space. Everyone carried at least 300 cubic feet of the stuff round with them on the streets. Life on a sidewalk in Halifax was a lonely business, with people swerving aside to give you a wide berth, as if you had a contagious social disease.
I nearly laughed myself sick when I read this. Nineteen years on, little has changed. Maybe a few more people on the streets, but not many.
Raban gets to New York and spends some time with the rich people who inhabit the rarified atmosphere of the condos high above Central Park. He doesn't think much of them of course and calls them the Air People. He sublets an apartment from 'Alice' and snoops into her life as much as he can and rips her to shreds in his book - I pity the poor girl, who was probably just trying to keep the apartment for her return to the city.
After a sojourn closer to the streets of New York (this book was written before zero tolerance and the peace that brought) and some encounters with the Street People of Mayor Koch's era, Raban has had enough of both crime and shallowness, and heads out into the heartland of America. The rest of the book deals with time spent in Alabama, Seattle, and the Florida Keys.
The section on Florida in particular is fabulous. Obsessed with boats and the water, Raban charters a fishing boat and heads into the Keys. He becomes enamoured with the idea of the Keys as the traditional piracy hiding grounds. His repeated attempts to get the Coast Guard and various other law-protection agencies to tell him the best way to hide in the Everglades are hilarious and really ironic when you read them with the impact of 9-11 still reverberating throughout North America.
How must Raban feel when he thinks back on the innocence of this time.... how must we all feel. I remember feeling we had hit the absolute bottom of the pits of corruption, cynicism and despair. Compared to now, the early 90s were a Disney movie...
I highly recommend this book for a glimpse of the USA that we all learned to love through MTV USA and the tv shows of the early nineties. It's a USA that has since disappeared, but Raban nails it. And like the rest of us, he liked it so much he moved there (he settled in Seattle).
There. That was a very convoluted way of reviewing four books. I will have to undertake a review redux on the rest, or I'll never get finished.
It has stopped snowing. Would winter be drawing to a close?
Don't get your hopes up Queenie, there's always one more storm...!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
The Bare Hook
I thought that I was like everyone on the planet in my close following of the soon to be called Second Great Depression. It turns out I was wrong. There are people on the planet who aren't thinking about this crisis. More about them later.
As an Irish person living in Canada I am having a mild schizoid response to the soon to be called SGD, as the Irish person in me wants to sit in a corner Peig-like, rocking myself into a hysterical fit with my smelly shawl over my face.
The east coast Canadian resident in me, who doesn't work in an industry related to cars and petroleum could give a shit about the whole thing.
The reader in me is interested in the narrative of the STBCSGD.
Which of my faces to wear? Which, which??
So far, I've been veering towards 'it'll be alright, Nova Scotia can't really tank much further, pass the potato chips and put on the next episode of The Wire'.
Then a couple of things happened this evening and my potential panic got viralled (is that a verb? It should be.)
A friends noted what appeared to be concern at the crisis on Facebook. As this friend is one of the few of us who is understood to understand money stuff he got some 'what have you read? what? what?' comments.
To which he responded, the Dow.
Classy!
Another friend, whose opinion I also respect, wrote that he had tried to blog about the Irish demiracle-isation and found it too depressing. As this friend is one of my 'black humour and pithy analysis of the underlying themes' reference points on world affairs, I had to restrain myself from the 'no! no! no!' comments. I don't want to further depress him.
Then I had to get back to normal, and have supper with my beloved and then upload his cool photos of a snowy owl for his friends to see on Facebook.
How much of our world we live online now?
During which time we discussed the soon to be called Second Great Depression over the pork chops and baked potatoes and subsequent PhotoFiltre action and photo-posting.
I explained the premise of the article I had found when I typed Credit Default Swaps for Dummies into Google. After I had decided maybe I should give a shit after all.
Firstly Himself laughed uproariously at the punchline. Which appeared to be, you didn't have to own the asset to buy insurance on it.
Then he spent a bit of time figuring out how we'd work such a scheme in our favour if in fact, we had our own version of a CDS.
If we could buy insurance on say, our friend's Kevin's house, even though we don't own it, and get a big pay out if the house burned down.
Then he spent some more time figuring out how many other people we know would have been filled in enough on the situation to have bought insurance. Say, if people started to notice that Kevin had a stupid habit of dumping his still-warm wood stove ashes in the green bin and figured he'd been leaving it a little close to the side of the house. And then looked up the forecast and fixed on a particular night when it wasn't going to snow or rain. And then bought the insurance.
Then he got mad.
Who in the hell sold this insurance to other people?
All of which, on top of everything else, got me a little upset.
But thankfully, I keep our green bin out in the middle of the yard away from everything.
Himself said 'it's like the fishery.'
When you live with a fisherman, even a former fisherman, everything in the world is like the fishery.
Major things like the bible are of course, all about the fishery.
And of course, global finance is like the fishery.
You grow up in the fishery and there's loads of fish, but you can't afford a boat so you go out on someone else's boat and fish, but you can't get much fish. You spend your time thinking about all the fish you could catch if you just had a licence. And a boat. And some nets. And sonar/ radar/ GPS.
Then one day, after a lot of lobbying, the government sets up a fisherman's bank and you get a cheap loan to buy a boat and all the accoutrements and you go out fishing a lot. And you make a lot of money and have a much better life than your parents.
But that's not enough, because you can catch more fish, and there's a market for it and so you buy a dragger.
And so there was a whole generation that left school early and grew up making eighty, ninety, hundred thousand a year just catching boatloads of fish. And a whole generation of financial services executives left college early to get bonuses giving these guys cheap money to buy toys, because they could afford to pay for it out of next year's catch.
And then one day, Queenie, we went out to catch next year's boat payments and car payments and ATV payments and whatever else payments, and there was nothing out on the ocean for us but a bare hook.
That's all it is now, Queenie, it's nothing but a bare hook.
Yes dear, I know it's like the fishery and that means it's really terrible and sad.
- I may seem slightly cynical, but I have heard this story one hundred thousand and four times.
It's just this time, dear, I think maybe the whole world's run out of fish at the same time.
It got me thinking though.
What makes former fishermen really squirm and rage and howl about the death of the fishery is the deadweight of the guilt of their own culpability. The fact that they knew they were destroying the fishery by dragging, but they did it anyway to make their boat payments.
Despite the efforts of legions of university researchers, despite the warnings of generations of environmentalists, nobody who had the power to break the cycle even tried to figure out how to stop it.
They try to make themselves feel better about it of course.
Nobody did anything because it was all about the fish processors needing big catches to pay for their processing plants and value chain modifications.
Goddamn big business.
Maybe.
But nobody made them go out fishing.
Or did they?
It was also all about jobs in rural communities. Crappy, back-breaking, seven bucks an hour processing jobs in rural communities that had nothing else and never would, unless they found oil offshore.
Goddamn small rural communities thinking they have a right to survive and rear another generation of kids on minimum wage jobs!!
Doesn't have quite the same righteous ring to it as goddamn big business, does it? In fact, who'd be against that?
Who'd be against a whole generation being able to stay home if they wanted to?
The deep depression caused by this deep depression is related to the fact that we all knew we were heading towards the bare hook a long time ago and nobody did anything to stop it.
There's no amount of trade union marches going to get rid of that nagging sense of guilt.
Standing on the deck after supper, listening to the sea pound behind us and the coyotes howl in the woods beyond the house, Himself said 'there isn't one person I work with ever talks about any of this. It just never comes up.'
Interesting.
Why do these guys not worry about the future?
Where we live, the bare hook swung by a while ago.
And not just through the fishery.
People adjusted.
They take a short view on things here now.
There are disadvantages to that.
And some advantages.
The guilt lingers though.
Maybe it's our lot to be the ones who feel that guilt.
As an Irish person living in Canada I am having a mild schizoid response to the soon to be called SGD, as the Irish person in me wants to sit in a corner Peig-like, rocking myself into a hysterical fit with my smelly shawl over my face.
The east coast Canadian resident in me, who doesn't work in an industry related to cars and petroleum could give a shit about the whole thing.
The reader in me is interested in the narrative of the STBCSGD.
Which of my faces to wear? Which, which??
So far, I've been veering towards 'it'll be alright, Nova Scotia can't really tank much further, pass the potato chips and put on the next episode of The Wire'.
Then a couple of things happened this evening and my potential panic got viralled (is that a verb? It should be.)
A friends noted what appeared to be concern at the crisis on Facebook. As this friend is one of the few of us who is understood to understand money stuff he got some 'what have you read? what? what?' comments.
To which he responded, the Dow.
Classy!
Another friend, whose opinion I also respect, wrote that he had tried to blog about the Irish demiracle-isation and found it too depressing. As this friend is one of my 'black humour and pithy analysis of the underlying themes' reference points on world affairs, I had to restrain myself from the 'no! no! no!' comments. I don't want to further depress him.
Then I had to get back to normal, and have supper with my beloved and then upload his cool photos of a snowy owl for his friends to see on Facebook.
How much of our world we live online now?
During which time we discussed the soon to be called Second Great Depression over the pork chops and baked potatoes and subsequent PhotoFiltre action and photo-posting.
I explained the premise of the article I had found when I typed Credit Default Swaps for Dummies into Google. After I had decided maybe I should give a shit after all.
Firstly Himself laughed uproariously at the punchline. Which appeared to be, you didn't have to own the asset to buy insurance on it.
Then he spent a bit of time figuring out how we'd work such a scheme in our favour if in fact, we had our own version of a CDS.
If we could buy insurance on say, our friend's Kevin's house, even though we don't own it, and get a big pay out if the house burned down.
Then he spent some more time figuring out how many other people we know would have been filled in enough on the situation to have bought insurance. Say, if people started to notice that Kevin had a stupid habit of dumping his still-warm wood stove ashes in the green bin and figured he'd been leaving it a little close to the side of the house. And then looked up the forecast and fixed on a particular night when it wasn't going to snow or rain. And then bought the insurance.
Then he got mad.
Who in the hell sold this insurance to other people?
All of which, on top of everything else, got me a little upset.
But thankfully, I keep our green bin out in the middle of the yard away from everything.
Himself said 'it's like the fishery.'
When you live with a fisherman, even a former fisherman, everything in the world is like the fishery.
Major things like the bible are of course, all about the fishery.
And of course, global finance is like the fishery.
You grow up in the fishery and there's loads of fish, but you can't afford a boat so you go out on someone else's boat and fish, but you can't get much fish. You spend your time thinking about all the fish you could catch if you just had a licence. And a boat. And some nets. And sonar/ radar/ GPS.
Then one day, after a lot of lobbying, the government sets up a fisherman's bank and you get a cheap loan to buy a boat and all the accoutrements and you go out fishing a lot. And you make a lot of money and have a much better life than your parents.
But that's not enough, because you can catch more fish, and there's a market for it and so you buy a dragger.
And so there was a whole generation that left school early and grew up making eighty, ninety, hundred thousand a year just catching boatloads of fish. And a whole generation of financial services executives left college early to get bonuses giving these guys cheap money to buy toys, because they could afford to pay for it out of next year's catch.
And then one day, Queenie, we went out to catch next year's boat payments and car payments and ATV payments and whatever else payments, and there was nothing out on the ocean for us but a bare hook.
That's all it is now, Queenie, it's nothing but a bare hook.
Yes dear, I know it's like the fishery and that means it's really terrible and sad.
- I may seem slightly cynical, but I have heard this story one hundred thousand and four times.
It's just this time, dear, I think maybe the whole world's run out of fish at the same time.
It got me thinking though.
What makes former fishermen really squirm and rage and howl about the death of the fishery is the deadweight of the guilt of their own culpability. The fact that they knew they were destroying the fishery by dragging, but they did it anyway to make their boat payments.
Despite the efforts of legions of university researchers, despite the warnings of generations of environmentalists, nobody who had the power to break the cycle even tried to figure out how to stop it.
They try to make themselves feel better about it of course.
Nobody did anything because it was all about the fish processors needing big catches to pay for their processing plants and value chain modifications.
Goddamn big business.
Maybe.
But nobody made them go out fishing.
Or did they?
It was also all about jobs in rural communities. Crappy, back-breaking, seven bucks an hour processing jobs in rural communities that had nothing else and never would, unless they found oil offshore.
Goddamn small rural communities thinking they have a right to survive and rear another generation of kids on minimum wage jobs!!
Doesn't have quite the same righteous ring to it as goddamn big business, does it? In fact, who'd be against that?
Who'd be against a whole generation being able to stay home if they wanted to?
The deep depression caused by this deep depression is related to the fact that we all knew we were heading towards the bare hook a long time ago and nobody did anything to stop it.
There's no amount of trade union marches going to get rid of that nagging sense of guilt.
Standing on the deck after supper, listening to the sea pound behind us and the coyotes howl in the woods beyond the house, Himself said 'there isn't one person I work with ever talks about any of this. It just never comes up.'
Interesting.
Why do these guys not worry about the future?
Where we live, the bare hook swung by a while ago.
And not just through the fishery.
People adjusted.
They take a short view on things here now.
There are disadvantages to that.
And some advantages.
The guilt lingers though.
Maybe it's our lot to be the ones who feel that guilt.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Mid-February mid-Atlantic weather advisory
Sometimes I love to post blog entries with titles that will mess up or just get in the way of serious Google searches undertaken by serious people looking for serious information.
And so with this one.
Please be advised this posting will mostly be about vitamins. Not maritime conditions.
So eventually the weather systems aligned. What I mean is, the weather systems that are pounding Atlantic Canada eased off slightly and the weather systems pounding Ireland and the UK ramped up slightly and so there was almost a condition alignment. It brought about some interesting consequences.
The Queen Parents started to get quite panicky about the idea of me driving to Cape Breton by myself, until I pointed out that the snow is scraped/ pushed/ ploughed off the roads here, so it is safer than at home.
Certain random people sent me emails that said 'yeah, okay I understand now'.
I got to see photos of people I know to be grown ups making snowmen when they should have been at work.
I would just like to point out that people don't make snowmen in Canada as a rule. They're too busy getting on with the day. Tobogganing now or skiing is considered acceptable snow fun.
In fact, there's such an absence of snowmen in politically correct Canada, I am beginning to think snowmen is one of those Enid Blyton things along with all those bad, unmentionable things she seems to have encouraged many generations, including mine, to do in her seemingly innocent children's writing.
Maybe we'll all wake up one morning sometime soon and realise that to build a snowman is a really bad thing.
Anyways, back to the weather.
Now that you have the same weather as us, here's some advice.
Take plenty of Vitamin D. At least 1,000mgs a day. This week in Canada, it was announced that they're pretty sure that there's a positive link between Vitamin D deficiency and multiple sclerosis. So take it for that reason too.
Go on. Vitamin D is really cheap. It's sunshine in a bottle.
If the wind is cutting your face, and you live near the sea where there's lots of salt, or near the airport, where there's lots of salt right now, you're going to have dry skin by the end of March. Then one day in April the sun will shine very brightly and you will look in a mirror and go 'ohmygod deh wrinkels!!'
Don't panic!!! Go get some Vitamin E capsules, and take them if you feel like it. But about once a week, cut a capsule open and gently pat the goo onto the skin around your eyes. Let it dry in. Don't do this unless you have an hour to spare to just sit around and do this, as the goo is very very sticky. Do not under any circumstances go for a walk on the beach.
INSTANT WRINKLE REMOVER, EH! EH! EH! FOR LIKE NO MONEY AT ALL!!
See, the Queenie knows how to look after you all.
Those tissues with the goo in them to make your nose feel nice when you have a cold are really great for getting snow/ salt/ sand/ all the winter crap off your shoes/ boots.
WEAR A HAT!!!!
Look after your hair.
It is very important to use the right shampoo and conditioner in the winter because the snow/ ice ruins your hair and the continuous hat wearing gives you a bad case of hat head.
I have tried them all. Organic, non-organic, every supermarket brand, every stylist brand, Aveda, all of them.
The absolute best shampoo - conditioner combo for the winter hair that comes with wind, rain and snow is Head and Shoulders shampoo followed by Pantene conditioner for coloured hair.
So there you go.
Just think... for you guys, this is an exciting period that will end soon with snowdrops and tulips and daffodils. For us, this is what it's going to be like until April.
April is when the snow melts into the rivers, the birds come back, the fishing season begins, the hardy among us get out the camping gear.
And the black fly wake up.
And so with this one.
Please be advised this posting will mostly be about vitamins. Not maritime conditions.
So eventually the weather systems aligned. What I mean is, the weather systems that are pounding Atlantic Canada eased off slightly and the weather systems pounding Ireland and the UK ramped up slightly and so there was almost a condition alignment. It brought about some interesting consequences.
The Queen Parents started to get quite panicky about the idea of me driving to Cape Breton by myself, until I pointed out that the snow is scraped/ pushed/ ploughed off the roads here, so it is safer than at home.
Certain random people sent me emails that said 'yeah, okay I understand now'.
I got to see photos of people I know to be grown ups making snowmen when they should have been at work.
I would just like to point out that people don't make snowmen in Canada as a rule. They're too busy getting on with the day. Tobogganing now or skiing is considered acceptable snow fun.
In fact, there's such an absence of snowmen in politically correct Canada, I am beginning to think snowmen is one of those Enid Blyton things along with all those bad, unmentionable things she seems to have encouraged many generations, including mine, to do in her seemingly innocent children's writing.
Maybe we'll all wake up one morning sometime soon and realise that to build a snowman is a really bad thing.
Anyways, back to the weather.
Now that you have the same weather as us, here's some advice.
Take plenty of Vitamin D. At least 1,000mgs a day. This week in Canada, it was announced that they're pretty sure that there's a positive link between Vitamin D deficiency and multiple sclerosis. So take it for that reason too.
Go on. Vitamin D is really cheap. It's sunshine in a bottle.
If the wind is cutting your face, and you live near the sea where there's lots of salt, or near the airport, where there's lots of salt right now, you're going to have dry skin by the end of March. Then one day in April the sun will shine very brightly and you will look in a mirror and go 'ohmygod deh wrinkels!!'
Don't panic!!! Go get some Vitamin E capsules, and take them if you feel like it. But about once a week, cut a capsule open and gently pat the goo onto the skin around your eyes. Let it dry in. Don't do this unless you have an hour to spare to just sit around and do this, as the goo is very very sticky. Do not under any circumstances go for a walk on the beach.
INSTANT WRINKLE REMOVER, EH! EH! EH! FOR LIKE NO MONEY AT ALL!!
See, the Queenie knows how to look after you all.
Those tissues with the goo in them to make your nose feel nice when you have a cold are really great for getting snow/ salt/ sand/ all the winter crap off your shoes/ boots.
WEAR A HAT!!!!
Look after your hair.
It is very important to use the right shampoo and conditioner in the winter because the snow/ ice ruins your hair and the continuous hat wearing gives you a bad case of hat head.
I have tried them all. Organic, non-organic, every supermarket brand, every stylist brand, Aveda, all of them.
The absolute best shampoo - conditioner combo for the winter hair that comes with wind, rain and snow is Head and Shoulders shampoo followed by Pantene conditioner for coloured hair.
So there you go.
Just think... for you guys, this is an exciting period that will end soon with snowdrops and tulips and daffodils. For us, this is what it's going to be like until April.
April is when the snow melts into the rivers, the birds come back, the fishing season begins, the hardy among us get out the camping gear.
And the black fly wake up.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
MonoMeme to while away some time
I got this from Jersey Girl. You have to provide a one word response to each prompt. It is more difficult than it looks:
1. Where is your cell phone? bag
2. Your significant other? home
3. Your hair? limp
4. Your favorite thing? campfires
5. Your dream last night? unmemorable
6. Your favorite drink? juice
7. Your dream/goal? independence
8. What room you are in? 117
9. Your hobby? snapshotting
10. Your fear? poverty
11. Where do you want to be in 6 years? home
12. Where were you last night? sofa
13. Muffins? usually
14. Wish list item? iPod
15. Where you grew up? Birr
16. Last thing you did? Peed
17. What are you wearing? sweats
18. Your TV? convex
19. Your pets? murdered
20. Friends? scattered
21. Your life? stabilised
22. Your mood? grumpy
23. Missing someone? usually
24. Car? Icy
25. Something you're not wearing? shoes
26. Your favorite store? Biscuit
27. Your favorite color? Biscuit
28. When is the last time you laughed? yesterday
29. Last time you cried? Tuesday
30. Who will resend this? irrelevant
31. One place that I go to over and over? beach
32. One person who emails me regularly? mum
33. Favorite place to eat? Chives
34. Why you participated in this survey? whiling
35. What are you doing tonight? whiling
1. Where is your cell phone? bag
2. Your significant other? home
3. Your hair? limp
4. Your favorite thing? campfires
5. Your dream last night? unmemorable
6. Your favorite drink? juice
7. Your dream/goal? independence
8. What room you are in? 117
9. Your hobby? snapshotting
10. Your fear? poverty
11. Where do you want to be in 6 years? home
12. Where were you last night? sofa
13. Muffins? usually
14. Wish list item? iPod
15. Where you grew up? Birr
16. Last thing you did? Peed
17. What are you wearing? sweats
18. Your TV? convex
19. Your pets? murdered
20. Friends? scattered
21. Your life? stabilised
22. Your mood? grumpy
23. Missing someone? usually
24. Car? Icy
25. Something you're not wearing? shoes
26. Your favorite store? Biscuit
27. Your favorite color? Biscuit
28. When is the last time you laughed? yesterday
29. Last time you cried? Tuesday
30. Who will resend this? irrelevant
31. One place that I go to over and over? beach
32. One person who emails me regularly? mum
33. Favorite place to eat? Chives
34. Why you participated in this survey? whiling
35. What are you doing tonight? whiling
The View from the EconoLodge
So I'm in the EconoLodge in Port Hawkesbury, whiling away a February evening.
A February evening in Inverness County, Cape Breton is a pretty bleak affair to while.
Snow everywhere. Not much else. If things are not shut down due to arrival of the global meltdown, they're closed until the spring melt arrives.
The car is parked at a jaunty angle outside my motel room door, because I got the room at the corner where the snow drifts.
The room is cold, no matter how much I crank the heat.
The bathroom is not conducive to bathing.
I'm not seeing any extra blankets.
The whole thing is a little Bates Motel for me.
I drove up through the mainland of the province in the damp cold afternoon grey of a Nova Scotia day after the day after a twenty hour snow and ice storm. The roads were finally clear, but the landscape is starkly white on black. The only depth in the view is the chiaroscuro of the sky.
Up over Mount Thom, that depth flattens to a couple of feet in front of the car.
I do my usual thing and don't want to stop for fuel because it's too cold. Then I drive twenty kilometres on fumes searching for an exit with a gas station.
I stop at the Dragonfly in Antigonish for a latte and some chocolate cake. The break was warming inside and out, but it meant I drove the last fifty kms in the dark, spitting snow, facing the glare of the oncoming lights.
Driving up to Cape Breton on a snowy Thursday in February puts me in the kind of grumpy mood it takes me days to get out of.
Hopefully, the sunshine forecast for tommorrow will make the drive home bearable and I will be home by seven at the latest.
I still don't know what to blog about... February numbs my brain.
Maybe tomorrow.
A February evening in Inverness County, Cape Breton is a pretty bleak affair to while.
Snow everywhere. Not much else. If things are not shut down due to arrival of the global meltdown, they're closed until the spring melt arrives.
The car is parked at a jaunty angle outside my motel room door, because I got the room at the corner where the snow drifts.
The room is cold, no matter how much I crank the heat.
The bathroom is not conducive to bathing.
I'm not seeing any extra blankets.
The whole thing is a little Bates Motel for me.
I drove up through the mainland of the province in the damp cold afternoon grey of a Nova Scotia day after the day after a twenty hour snow and ice storm. The roads were finally clear, but the landscape is starkly white on black. The only depth in the view is the chiaroscuro of the sky.
Up over Mount Thom, that depth flattens to a couple of feet in front of the car.
I do my usual thing and don't want to stop for fuel because it's too cold. Then I drive twenty kilometres on fumes searching for an exit with a gas station.
I stop at the Dragonfly in Antigonish for a latte and some chocolate cake. The break was warming inside and out, but it meant I drove the last fifty kms in the dark, spitting snow, facing the glare of the oncoming lights.
Driving up to Cape Breton on a snowy Thursday in February puts me in the kind of grumpy mood it takes me days to get out of.
Hopefully, the sunshine forecast for tommorrow will make the drive home bearable and I will be home by seven at the latest.
I still don't know what to blog about... February numbs my brain.
Maybe tomorrow.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Settling down to it
After a couple of weeks, we are starting to feel settled into our new home, and maybe even I will be able to sit still long enough to blog - I have a list of forty books to review if nothing else - but right now, after foostering around with the title for an hour this morning, I really should go outside and refill the bird feeder and chip some more ice from the driveway and get some fresh air.
So far... chickadees, jays, sparrows, pheasants, rabbits, and a big old ginger tom cat that visits us from next door every day. We saw four deer foraging in a group when we walked the trail behind our house last weekend.
No sign of any human neighbours yet...
Maybe when the ice recedes...
So far... chickadees, jays, sparrows, pheasants, rabbits, and a big old ginger tom cat that visits us from next door every day. We saw four deer foraging in a group when we walked the trail behind our house last weekend.
No sign of any human neighbours yet...
Maybe when the ice recedes...
Sunday, January 18, 2009
It's about not being eaten...
This is an excerpt from an interview in the Observer with Bruce Springsteen:
"So the idea is: how do you manage that thing that's eating at you, without letting it eat you? 'Cause that's what it wants to do. The thing that's eating at you, wants to eat you. And so your life is... how do you keep that from happening? That's a pretty interesting story too, and that's what a lot of my records are about, maybe all of them. So now, you know - my records and the music and everything are me attempting to keep from being eaten."
'Xactly...
I think
"So the idea is: how do you manage that thing that's eating at you, without letting it eat you? 'Cause that's what it wants to do. The thing that's eating at you, wants to eat you. And so your life is... how do you keep that from happening? That's a pretty interesting story too, and that's what a lot of my records are about, maybe all of them. So now, you know - my records and the music and everything are me attempting to keep from being eaten."
'Xactly...
I think
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Giving up Chocolate
Our neighbour called up last night with a box of Okanangan Valley apple cider. Which normally would be what I would call 'a class thing to happen'...
What happened was typical Eastern Canada January behaviour.
It was late on a Saturday night in January.
Himself and I were half asleep on the couch. We were trying to remember why we are friends after a trying couple of days arguing over stupide things.
Also we were just about managing to yawn our way to the end of Episode 3 of Series 4 of The Wire.
So we ignored the first knock on the door.
Well, I said, 'that's our door' and Himself said 'no it's not' even though he KNEW it was.
After the second knocked we fessed up to ourselves and shouted 'come in' and then of course it was fine once it was our neighbour and not the landlord or an ax murderer or anyone like that.
But it was late which meant we didn't partake of any of the nice cider because we were too 'tired'.
(Before I continue, can I just say.... after the end of Series 3, which was STONKING, and I have to disagree with JB, I thought Series 3 ending was better than Series 2 ending, although Series 2 overall was GREAT... I'm finding it difficult to re-engage with The Wire, which I assume is the point of the early part of Series 4... also the political candidate it is portraying is too close to the reality of a political candidate to be funny and is indeed scary, and when is George Pelecanos going to write another episode?)
Anyways, we woke up and sat up and switched off the dvd (and now Himself is out ploughing snow all night and I can't watch the end of the episode because the deal is we watch it together.... grrroooaaaannnn) and made nice like grown ups because really, this is our last normal weekend at Chocolate Lake.
Next weekend we'll be moving and the weekend after we'll be sitting in our house in the country being all Johnny No-mates and Jenny No-neighbours, so we should enjoy our neighbours while we still have them....
Fuck me though, it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything in Eastern Canada in January.
Cold, dark, snowing, cold, snowing, did I mention cold.
My life revolves around my snow boots and packing tape.
A heady combo, I can tell you.
No wonder I'm dreaming about eloping to Cuba.
Atlantic Superstore is running an ad campaign that says 'we're lowering prices to cheer you up because it's January'.
They don't even have to pretend it's 'because we know you all maxed out your cards in December and we're trying to lure you into the shop to buy some food with what's left of your income'.
That's how bad it is in Eastern Canada in January.
Count your blessings, Queenie, count your blessings.
New house.
Exciting new house in approximately FOUR DAYS.
When one thinks of all the people in a certain part of the world who are having their houses blown up and if the reports are true, are having to clear up depleted uranium shells from the debris, and walk to hospitals miles away to get treatment for the phosphorous sticking to their children's skin etc...
... and you think about all the people in the world who are losing their houses at the moment because some arsehole told them they were 'richer than they think' and nobody introduced them to the credit union movement as opposed to the sub-prime predators...
Having a new house is an extremely rich blessing.
Thank you to the gods who are overseeing it.
I'm having a profound week, intellectually.
I'm reading Nino Ricci's Testament. It's like reading an award-winning Rolling Stone four part series on an early U2 Stateside tour, told from the point of view of a number of key entourage members.
Except it's the story of one Yeshua of Notzerah.
The four viewpoints are:
Yihuda of Qiryat,
Miryam of Migdal,
Miryam his Mother,
and Simon of Gerghesa.
See.... it's really smart, and yet beautifully simple. Four points of view retelling the greatest story ever told.
It won't get out of my head.
I think the fact that the war is going on right now in a relatively close location is making it stronger for me, but still...
We are nearly packed.
I have good friends who have provided me with all the necessary equipment and I scored big time by buying one of those plastic trays for packing tape so I don't have to keep picking the tape off the next layer of tape (people who are moving will know what I'm talking about - buy one of those devices, they are $4 and they are a life-saver).
I have only had four near-meltdowns.
Which is okay because there is a lot of other stuff going on right now too. Which will too work out, but which involve a lot of 'getting our heads into the right space'.
But happily, I know myself well enough to know that this morning I woke feeling better, and more importantly, in the zone.
I'll be okay now.
Whatever is thrown at us.
And Himself has only gotten annoyed with me the once.
We're doing okay.
We'll make it to Eagle Drive and/ or February in once piece, I think.
The main trouble in our lives right now is a divergence of views on the role of packing.
For Himself, packing is a way to move possessions from Point A to Point B.
Simple but effective.
Himself is nothing if not of the 'simple but effective' school of thought.
For me, packing represents many things....
... mourning the past moments that each of my possessions represent...
... considering the complexity of all of the possessions which are now randomly stuffed in a box...
... opportunities to worry about the lack of flat surfaces upon which to place the possessions in their new home...
... moments of concern that all this movement in my life is really for naught and I should just have stayed in that crappy one bed in that crappy block of flats in crappy south inner city Dublin all those years ago...
all of which are to do with needing to CONTROL MY ENVIRONMENT because despite being a Cancerian, I don't actually get to walk around with my house on my back and so have huge home environment anxiety whenever there is change.
Which in my case happens a lot, because my ascendant is Gemini.
I am truly fucked personality-wise.
The only person on the planet who gets this about me is Gypsy, because she are one too.
Add to this heady mix, the fact that I am living with an Aquarian, who is all about THE FUTURE.
Not HOW TO ACTUALLY MOVE EVERYTHING THERE.
Don't sweat the small stuff was written with Himself in mind.
I am so jealous of his laid back attitude it's making me ugly, I swear.
You see, I see the point in spending three hours separating cables and iPod wires and camera stuff (or the contents of the drawer that has all the pharmacy type stuff in it) and putting them in separate, labelled, Ziploc bags that are then placed in a box that's marked CABLES ETC. The point is:
1. I will be able to find things quickly if I need to. Which I will need to, because Himself will ask me to find the goddamn things for him some day when he's busy/ rushed/ sick/ whatever. And if there not findable, then psychically I will have failed him in some way.
I know, I know... it's january and I'm a crab..
In a pathetic attempt to offload the psychic payload onto Himself, I explain the system to him. Even though I know he will not even listen to the explanation because he is an Aquarian and knowing where stuff is is for LITTLE PEOPLE.
AND PROLES.
Of course, because of this fatal flaw in his personality (which he quite naturally doesn't see as such a bad thing), I will be able to LORD IT OVER HIM FOREVER when he can't find things because the afore-mentioned conversation took place.
That's what keeps me at it. In January.
I know, I know, I am truly pathetic.
... I told you it was in the Cable box...
Of course, being a Cancerian, I'm damned if I'm going to do all this work and not get any appreciation...
So Himself comes home from work and then gets moaned at over the home-cooked dinner because I'm tired. Then he asks why 'm tired if I had a day off, and I tell him why and then he, not unreasonably, trying to be helpful no doubt, points out that if I dumped all the cables onto the kitchen table, and then SWEPT them into a box with an arm, and wrote CABLES on the box and THREW it in the corner, we would still find them IF AND WHEN we ever needed them again.
And also I didn't have to cook dinner if I was that tired.
And that's when I have a meltdown.
Because the 'only' reason I am wasting time packing them is because if he catches me throwing them out he'll have a fit. Because he's an Aquarian packrat.
SO IT'S ALL HIS FAULT.
This is typical January behaviour in Eastern Canada, btw.
Couples all over the Maritimes are having equally stupid arguments over equally stupid stuff.
The advice is, this will end mid-February.
And as Myles said in a recent post, perhaps this global gloom and doom is affecting all of us in some way.
But still.... new house....
No more chocolate...
But in a good way.
What will I call the blog next?
Feel free to make suggestions which I will probably ignore, because I am a control freak.
What happened was typical Eastern Canada January behaviour.
It was late on a Saturday night in January.
Himself and I were half asleep on the couch. We were trying to remember why we are friends after a trying couple of days arguing over stupide things.
Also we were just about managing to yawn our way to the end of Episode 3 of Series 4 of The Wire.
So we ignored the first knock on the door.
Well, I said, 'that's our door' and Himself said 'no it's not' even though he KNEW it was.
After the second knocked we fessed up to ourselves and shouted 'come in' and then of course it was fine once it was our neighbour and not the landlord or an ax murderer or anyone like that.
But it was late which meant we didn't partake of any of the nice cider because we were too 'tired'.
(Before I continue, can I just say.... after the end of Series 3, which was STONKING, and I have to disagree with JB, I thought Series 3 ending was better than Series 2 ending, although Series 2 overall was GREAT... I'm finding it difficult to re-engage with The Wire, which I assume is the point of the early part of Series 4... also the political candidate it is portraying is too close to the reality of a political candidate to be funny and is indeed scary, and when is George Pelecanos going to write another episode?)
Anyways, we woke up and sat up and switched off the dvd (and now Himself is out ploughing snow all night and I can't watch the end of the episode because the deal is we watch it together.... grrroooaaaannnn) and made nice like grown ups because really, this is our last normal weekend at Chocolate Lake.
Next weekend we'll be moving and the weekend after we'll be sitting in our house in the country being all Johnny No-mates and Jenny No-neighbours, so we should enjoy our neighbours while we still have them....
Fuck me though, it's hard to be enthusiastic about anything in Eastern Canada in January.
Cold, dark, snowing, cold, snowing, did I mention cold.
My life revolves around my snow boots and packing tape.
A heady combo, I can tell you.
No wonder I'm dreaming about eloping to Cuba.
Atlantic Superstore is running an ad campaign that says 'we're lowering prices to cheer you up because it's January'.
They don't even have to pretend it's 'because we know you all maxed out your cards in December and we're trying to lure you into the shop to buy some food with what's left of your income'.
That's how bad it is in Eastern Canada in January.
Count your blessings, Queenie, count your blessings.
New house.
Exciting new house in approximately FOUR DAYS.
When one thinks of all the people in a certain part of the world who are having their houses blown up and if the reports are true, are having to clear up depleted uranium shells from the debris, and walk to hospitals miles away to get treatment for the phosphorous sticking to their children's skin etc...
... and you think about all the people in the world who are losing their houses at the moment because some arsehole told them they were 'richer than they think' and nobody introduced them to the credit union movement as opposed to the sub-prime predators...
Having a new house is an extremely rich blessing.
Thank you to the gods who are overseeing it.
I'm having a profound week, intellectually.
I'm reading Nino Ricci's Testament. It's like reading an award-winning Rolling Stone four part series on an early U2 Stateside tour, told from the point of view of a number of key entourage members.
Except it's the story of one Yeshua of Notzerah.
The four viewpoints are:
Yihuda of Qiryat,
Miryam of Migdal,
Miryam his Mother,
and Simon of Gerghesa.
See.... it's really smart, and yet beautifully simple. Four points of view retelling the greatest story ever told.
It won't get out of my head.
I think the fact that the war is going on right now in a relatively close location is making it stronger for me, but still...
We are nearly packed.
I have good friends who have provided me with all the necessary equipment and I scored big time by buying one of those plastic trays for packing tape so I don't have to keep picking the tape off the next layer of tape (people who are moving will know what I'm talking about - buy one of those devices, they are $4 and they are a life-saver).
I have only had four near-meltdowns.
Which is okay because there is a lot of other stuff going on right now too. Which will too work out, but which involve a lot of 'getting our heads into the right space'.
But happily, I know myself well enough to know that this morning I woke feeling better, and more importantly, in the zone.
I'll be okay now.
Whatever is thrown at us.
And Himself has only gotten annoyed with me the once.
We're doing okay.
We'll make it to Eagle Drive and/ or February in once piece, I think.
The main trouble in our lives right now is a divergence of views on the role of packing.
For Himself, packing is a way to move possessions from Point A to Point B.
Simple but effective.
Himself is nothing if not of the 'simple but effective' school of thought.
For me, packing represents many things....
... mourning the past moments that each of my possessions represent...
... considering the complexity of all of the possessions which are now randomly stuffed in a box...
... opportunities to worry about the lack of flat surfaces upon which to place the possessions in their new home...
... moments of concern that all this movement in my life is really for naught and I should just have stayed in that crappy one bed in that crappy block of flats in crappy south inner city Dublin all those years ago...
all of which are to do with needing to CONTROL MY ENVIRONMENT because despite being a Cancerian, I don't actually get to walk around with my house on my back and so have huge home environment anxiety whenever there is change.
Which in my case happens a lot, because my ascendant is Gemini.
I am truly fucked personality-wise.
The only person on the planet who gets this about me is Gypsy, because she are one too.
Add to this heady mix, the fact that I am living with an Aquarian, who is all about THE FUTURE.
Not HOW TO ACTUALLY MOVE EVERYTHING THERE.
Don't sweat the small stuff was written with Himself in mind.
I am so jealous of his laid back attitude it's making me ugly, I swear.
You see, I see the point in spending three hours separating cables and iPod wires and camera stuff (or the contents of the drawer that has all the pharmacy type stuff in it) and putting them in separate, labelled, Ziploc bags that are then placed in a box that's marked CABLES ETC. The point is:
1. I will be able to find things quickly if I need to. Which I will need to, because Himself will ask me to find the goddamn things for him some day when he's busy/ rushed/ sick/ whatever. And if there not findable, then psychically I will have failed him in some way.
I know, I know... it's january and I'm a crab..
In a pathetic attempt to offload the psychic payload onto Himself, I explain the system to him. Even though I know he will not even listen to the explanation because he is an Aquarian and knowing where stuff is is for LITTLE PEOPLE.
AND PROLES.
Of course, because of this fatal flaw in his personality (which he quite naturally doesn't see as such a bad thing), I will be able to LORD IT OVER HIM FOREVER when he can't find things because the afore-mentioned conversation took place.
That's what keeps me at it. In January.
I know, I know, I am truly pathetic.
... I told you it was in the Cable box...
Of course, being a Cancerian, I'm damned if I'm going to do all this work and not get any appreciation...
So Himself comes home from work and then gets moaned at over the home-cooked dinner because I'm tired. Then he asks why 'm tired if I had a day off, and I tell him why and then he, not unreasonably, trying to be helpful no doubt, points out that if I dumped all the cables onto the kitchen table, and then SWEPT them into a box with an arm, and wrote CABLES on the box and THREW it in the corner, we would still find them IF AND WHEN we ever needed them again.
And also I didn't have to cook dinner if I was that tired.
And that's when I have a meltdown.
Because the 'only' reason I am wasting time packing them is because if he catches me throwing them out he'll have a fit. Because he's an Aquarian packrat.
SO IT'S ALL HIS FAULT.
This is typical January behaviour in Eastern Canada, btw.
Couples all over the Maritimes are having equally stupid arguments over equally stupid stuff.
The advice is, this will end mid-February.
And as Myles said in a recent post, perhaps this global gloom and doom is affecting all of us in some way.
But still.... new house....
No more chocolate...
But in a good way.
What will I call the blog next?
Feel free to make suggestions which I will probably ignore, because I am a control freak.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Your turn to intern
From this morning's Guardian:
This year's graduates face the toughest battle in a generation for jobs, with tens of thousands facing unemployment, according to evidence documenting the impact of the economic downturn.
Ministers are so concerned that they are drawing up a rescue package to help the class of 2009 find a job or get new skills when they graduate this summer. The proposals, from the universities secretary John Denham's office, will target the 18-24 age group amid fears that a generation of young people will be scarred by recession. They include an internship scheme where students would work at a reduced wage to gain experience. Four firms - including Barclays and Microsoft - have agreed to take part in the scheme, which is being called the National Internship Scheme.
Denham told the Guardian: "This year there will be a large number of graduates - the children of the babyboomers - and we are keen to make sure that they get as good a chance as we can give them to get jobs and build good careers. We will not leave them to fend for themselves.
He says: "We don't want these spells of unemployment to get long. A spell of unemployment is bad when young, and the longer it is, the worse it is. We want to do everything to prevent it becoming long-term unemployment."
Evidence of the extent of the downturn in graduate recruitment uncovered by the Guardian includes:
• Major companies have narrowed their search for graduates to five elite universities as they cut recruitment numbers.
• The organisers of the annual graduate recruitment "milk round" say jobs in finance and retail are drying up. Even where companies are recruiting, vacancies will not necessarily last until summer as the economic slump worsens.
• The management consultancy KPMG, seen as a recruitment barometer, says its 600 graduate entry jobs are nearly all taken months ahead of schedule as students scramble for the top jobs.
First of all, don't panic, it'll be fine.
Back in the day, when I were a young one, whiling away my days in the Free Palestinian Liberation Cafe drinking god-awful organic coffee from Chiapas, the milk round dried up regularly. I still managed to get a free weekend in England (I think it was with Lloyds Bank) where I had a very nice time and failed miserably to get a job in finance because I didn't have the killer instinct they needed for retail banking.
Imagine if I hadda gotten that job. I'd be an unemployed branch manager by now probably.
More importantly, I'd be miserable.
When we left university, we had a two stop trip.
Stop one. Out the college, turn right, down to Tara St. dole office to sign on.
Every Thursday morning you had to go down to get your money - £59.63 if I remember rightly, and yeah it was a pain because you had to queue for an hour, but you met everyone you knew there and spent the time figuring out where to meet up that night.
Stop two. Continue down Tara St. to the quays, turn left, then left again onto D'Olier St. to the FAS office. Ask the nice man in the FAS office if you could get on a FAS scheme.
A FAS scheme was/ is like a National Intern Program, except the government paid you to work for a theatre or a charity, or a hospice or a school, or a community radio station, something in the public sphere that needed help and had no money. It differs from the new National Intern Program in that it didn't subsidize labour for a multinational that should be paying proper wages. And unlike the new NIP, if you needed to change your hours, or make your point strongly, or try new things, you were allowed. I have a feeling you'll have to work very hard in the NIP to be one of the interns that gets kept on.
On a FAS scheme everyone worked about 20 hours a week. Lots of important social capital got made and spent. There was a lot of sitting around chatting and learning about other people's lives and dreams. A lot of bad coffee was drunk. I sat in a Portakabin in Coolock for a few months and dreamed up a community arts festival. A friend of mine ran a radio station. Another friend of mine managed a domestic abuse shelter.
The other twenty hours a week, you lived your life. You made art, or wrote, or helped run a magazine, or a theatre collective and of course you had some class of a nixer job so you could eat meat a couple of times a week.
You went to the cinema during the day.
Eventually, the world turned, the economy got better, all those compatriots of mine who had studied real subjects, like computer engineering, got the multinationals interested in Ireland, and we all landed in the real world. Started making a little money.
A little money.
That's the thing. The wages will be lower now. You'll have to work your way up to the big bucks for a few years.
Life's a bitch to random generations.
This recession business happened to us.
It's happening to you.
It didn't happen to the one in between.
But, far worse things happened to previous generations.
And the fair trade coffee is at least drinkable nowadays.
You'll be the better generation for it.
And we should spare a thought for those Palestinian 18 - 24 year olds who have no future to look forward to, only the bitter harvest of what's being sown today.
This year's graduates face the toughest battle in a generation for jobs, with tens of thousands facing unemployment, according to evidence documenting the impact of the economic downturn.
Ministers are so concerned that they are drawing up a rescue package to help the class of 2009 find a job or get new skills when they graduate this summer. The proposals, from the universities secretary John Denham's office, will target the 18-24 age group amid fears that a generation of young people will be scarred by recession. They include an internship scheme where students would work at a reduced wage to gain experience. Four firms - including Barclays and Microsoft - have agreed to take part in the scheme, which is being called the National Internship Scheme.
Denham told the Guardian: "This year there will be a large number of graduates - the children of the babyboomers - and we are keen to make sure that they get as good a chance as we can give them to get jobs and build good careers. We will not leave them to fend for themselves.
He says: "We don't want these spells of unemployment to get long. A spell of unemployment is bad when young, and the longer it is, the worse it is. We want to do everything to prevent it becoming long-term unemployment."
Evidence of the extent of the downturn in graduate recruitment uncovered by the Guardian includes:
• Major companies have narrowed their search for graduates to five elite universities as they cut recruitment numbers.
• The organisers of the annual graduate recruitment "milk round" say jobs in finance and retail are drying up. Even where companies are recruiting, vacancies will not necessarily last until summer as the economic slump worsens.
• The management consultancy KPMG, seen as a recruitment barometer, says its 600 graduate entry jobs are nearly all taken months ahead of schedule as students scramble for the top jobs.
First of all, don't panic, it'll be fine.
Back in the day, when I were a young one, whiling away my days in the Free Palestinian Liberation Cafe drinking god-awful organic coffee from Chiapas, the milk round dried up regularly. I still managed to get a free weekend in England (I think it was with Lloyds Bank) where I had a very nice time and failed miserably to get a job in finance because I didn't have the killer instinct they needed for retail banking.
Imagine if I hadda gotten that job. I'd be an unemployed branch manager by now probably.
More importantly, I'd be miserable.
When we left university, we had a two stop trip.
Stop one. Out the college, turn right, down to Tara St. dole office to sign on.
Every Thursday morning you had to go down to get your money - £59.63 if I remember rightly, and yeah it was a pain because you had to queue for an hour, but you met everyone you knew there and spent the time figuring out where to meet up that night.
Stop two. Continue down Tara St. to the quays, turn left, then left again onto D'Olier St. to the FAS office. Ask the nice man in the FAS office if you could get on a FAS scheme.
A FAS scheme was/ is like a National Intern Program, except the government paid you to work for a theatre or a charity, or a hospice or a school, or a community radio station, something in the public sphere that needed help and had no money. It differs from the new National Intern Program in that it didn't subsidize labour for a multinational that should be paying proper wages. And unlike the new NIP, if you needed to change your hours, or make your point strongly, or try new things, you were allowed. I have a feeling you'll have to work very hard in the NIP to be one of the interns that gets kept on.
On a FAS scheme everyone worked about 20 hours a week. Lots of important social capital got made and spent. There was a lot of sitting around chatting and learning about other people's lives and dreams. A lot of bad coffee was drunk. I sat in a Portakabin in Coolock for a few months and dreamed up a community arts festival. A friend of mine ran a radio station. Another friend of mine managed a domestic abuse shelter.
The other twenty hours a week, you lived your life. You made art, or wrote, or helped run a magazine, or a theatre collective and of course you had some class of a nixer job so you could eat meat a couple of times a week.
You went to the cinema during the day.
Eventually, the world turned, the economy got better, all those compatriots of mine who had studied real subjects, like computer engineering, got the multinationals interested in Ireland, and we all landed in the real world. Started making a little money.
A little money.
That's the thing. The wages will be lower now. You'll have to work your way up to the big bucks for a few years.
Life's a bitch to random generations.
This recession business happened to us.
It's happening to you.
It didn't happen to the one in between.
But, far worse things happened to previous generations.
And the fair trade coffee is at least drinkable nowadays.
You'll be the better generation for it.
And we should spare a thought for those Palestinian 18 - 24 year olds who have no future to look forward to, only the bitter harvest of what's being sown today.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
A shift from Victorian thinking
I have mentioned to people here a number of times that I find the Victorian model of caring for the poor that is played out in Nova Scotia quite stunning in its dinosaurosity. I usually get the Nova Scotia huh stare for that, and it's not just my unacceptable use of the non-word dinosaurosity.
Poverty is usually structurally-based, I explain.
More staring.
People who are poor are generally poor because there's some flaw in the design of the society's structures, not because they are lazy or bad, I explain.
Shift to polite staring.
For example, the best way to get a job here is through networking, yeah... so, if you're poor and you don't know any working people/ golf people/ can't join a gym/ drive to a volunteering event, then your chances of getting a job go down, yeah... and that's a structural issue in society....
Extreme polite staring with added uncomfortable shuffle.
Sheesh.... I never know if they think I'm wrong, or they think I'm insane, or if they just don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
Then today, I get this in an email from some social policy institute in Canada (the Caledon Instititue I think.... I get so many).
How I chuckled... hahahaha.... they just think I'm a bleedin' socialist, that's what!!!!
Community Roles in Policy Sherri Torjman, January 2009
There has been growing interest in recent years in place-based interventions and their unique contribution to tackling complex issues, such as poverty. While communities are pursuing a range of direct interventions, they are recognizing increasingly that the problems faced by individuals and households living with low income result not from their own weaknesses but rather from problems and barriers in the broader economic and social system. This paper discusses the following activities in which communities can engage with respect to policy:
· monitoring policy developments
· building an evidence base
· enabling access to existing benefits
· improving programs and services
· creating new programs or services
· reducing basic costs
· designing appropriate environments
· creating contextual change
· reducing barriers and disincentives
· assessing policy impact.
ISBN - 1-55382-328-1
29 pages
Read away, boys and girls.
Now, I wonder if the wonderful Irish policy-makers who gave us the national anti-poverty strategy and the partnerships approach to urban regeneration, etc, have figured out the structural causes of the latest kerfuffle in the nation's finances.
Or do they give a crap about some rich blokes who've got caught with their billions exposed?
Prob'ly not.
Poverty is usually structurally-based, I explain.
More staring.
People who are poor are generally poor because there's some flaw in the design of the society's structures, not because they are lazy or bad, I explain.
Shift to polite staring.
For example, the best way to get a job here is through networking, yeah... so, if you're poor and you don't know any working people/ golf people/ can't join a gym/ drive to a volunteering event, then your chances of getting a job go down, yeah... and that's a structural issue in society....
Extreme polite staring with added uncomfortable shuffle.
Sheesh.... I never know if they think I'm wrong, or they think I'm insane, or if they just don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
Then today, I get this in an email from some social policy institute in Canada (the Caledon Instititue I think.... I get so many).
How I chuckled... hahahaha.... they just think I'm a bleedin' socialist, that's what!!!!
Community Roles in Policy Sherri Torjman, January 2009
There has been growing interest in recent years in place-based interventions and their unique contribution to tackling complex issues, such as poverty. While communities are pursuing a range of direct interventions, they are recognizing increasingly that the problems faced by individuals and households living with low income result not from their own weaknesses but rather from problems and barriers in the broader economic and social system. This paper discusses the following activities in which communities can engage with respect to policy:
· monitoring policy developments
· building an evidence base
· enabling access to existing benefits
· improving programs and services
· creating new programs or services
· reducing basic costs
· designing appropriate environments
· creating contextual change
· reducing barriers and disincentives
· assessing policy impact.
ISBN - 1-55382-328-1
29 pages
Read away, boys and girls.
Now, I wonder if the wonderful Irish policy-makers who gave us the national anti-poverty strategy and the partnerships approach to urban regeneration, etc, have figured out the structural causes of the latest kerfuffle in the nation's finances.
Or do they give a crap about some rich blokes who've got caught with their billions exposed?
Prob'ly not.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
The real New Year's Post
I've had a quick scoot around some of my favourite blogs and people are talking about resolutions and stuff. Some people are even looking back at last year's resolutions and seeing how they did.
So how did Queenie do?
Queenie didn't have any resolutions in 2007 that she wrote down.
I had to go back to 2006, and it's not even a list of resolutions, it's more a stream of consciousness about various aspects of my personality and life, some of which I really should improve if possible, and some of which is beyond my control completely.
http://sadpercy.blogspot.com/2007/01/in-response-to-my-previous-post-when-i.html
However, having looked at it, there's been some progress, so here is my new dictat.
New Year's Resolutions should run for TWO YEARS. That way, you get to faff around for a year not doing them, then get your act together the second year.
Much easier.
Which means less possibility of feeling bad because you've 'failed' in some way. Which I have always felt is the Achilles Heel of New Year's Resolutions.
So.... how did I do?
Sitting around feeling sorry for myself in November.
Many many Novembers have been spent this way. It was something that really really annoyed me about myself, but not something I ever felt I could change. However, this year I didn't sit around depressed and feeling sorry for myself. Instead, I bought a house and gave up smoking in November, which meant that I was very stressed (very very stressed) some of the time and my sleep pattern went to hell in a handbasket.
But I got shit done in November. For the first time ever.
December, I did some weeping. But that was due to tiredness, the crappy weather, and the lack of a trip home. And the continuing stress of moving, not smoking, etc.
And it was nothing like the depression that used to floor me in November years ago.
(I have a confession to make by the way, I fell off the smoking wagon over Christmas, but in my defence I can say: I was being driven demented by the karmic activities of the world, I didn't buy any cigarettes, I didn't smoke a daytime cigarette, I am back on the smoking wagon again, and 2009 is the year I won't smoke any cigarettes, so I am okay about it).
Wean myself off television.
We still have a television. When Kitty was here it was necessary, because she needed to have the tv on all the time, being a member of the reality tv generation. But now Kitty is gone, there's no need to have a tv package, which incidentally costs $54.95 per month plus tax.
Which is $745 a year.
Which is a tank of furnace oil.
Or a new laptop.
Hmmm, I wonder whether we should have a tv service this year. I should talk about it to the man who uses the service. The only shows I watch are News at 10 in the winter, The Tudors and The Border. That's nine hours a week for twenty four weeks. Himself only watches about another hour a day in the winter.
That's $3.10 per hour of television watched.
Christ, it's cheaper to park downtown.
Although, if you add in the NHL play-offs in the spring, that would come down some.
Needing other people's affirmation to feel good about myself.
Much better. Much much better.
Fuck other people. I mostly don't care what they think anymore.
Although I must say, the reader who made anonymous comments about how boring and self-indulgent my blog was really needled me and has me second guessing my writing a bit. But, then again, if it's that boring, move the fuck on.... Having said that, I suspect it may have been someone I have the joy to know, who has the personality of a thirsty rattlesnake trussed up in a plastic bag, which would make it less hurtful.
Also, I got my Permanent Residency last year, which meant I could get a better job, which meant I got away from a lot of negative stuff, which was great. Of course, there's negative stuff in my current job, because there always is negativity in a paid working environment, but I don't care about it, because it's just other people.
With regards to my appearance, getting a proper job meant all kinds of exciting, albeit really basic health and dental activity this year, which improved my confidence a lot.
Also, I have started using NeoStrata's Oil Free Smoothing Lotion, Level 3, which is one of those AHA type products, and it has taken about five years off my face (even before I stopped smoking).
The beauty manager in the Shoppers Drugmart on Herring Cove Rd. deserves a big shout out. She worked with me until we got a moisturiser that dealt with all my issues, and she didn't charge me a penny until we got the right one. She just gave me a bit in a little jar and got me to report back in a few days. Then onto the next one until we hit paydirt.
That's what a beauty manager should do. She's an older woman of course, so she understands its not about the packaging or the price, it's about pushing back against the inevitable as cost effectively as possible.
I went into her yesterday and showed her the bags under my eyes (which are gignormous right now) and she sent me off with some products to try out for a week.
If she sorts out the bags under my eyes I am going to nominate her for the Order of Canada.
Fuck the novel.
Well, this resolution went exceedingly well. I have had two guilt-free years where I can read whatever I want now without having to think that I should be trying to write something myself.
In 2007, I sold a lot of photos and photo cards, but 2008 did not go well at all, because I didn't have time to work on my photography at all. I didn't even take many interesting pictures this year. This year's third resolution is to take the Digital Photography course in the NSCC. I will leave it till the spring though, as I have too much on over the next two months.
I have enough things.
So I went out and bought a house to put them all in and a car to drive them over there.
Well done, Queenie. Nice bit of non-consumerism there.
Although, to be fair, I did save like a bastard this year, in order to afford deposit on said house.
But I have not stopped buying books. The African tribal art collection is growing apace. I made a few trips to Biscuit this year for some new clothes. And I invested in a couple of pieces of furniture so that we can have people to stay, a table to eat on, etc.
However, I think Himself and I do pretty well on the recycled, frugality stuff, so I'm not going to sweat this. And next year I will have no money at all, so I guess I will achieve the non-consumption resolution pretty easily.
Auld Dog column
That went pretty well, and I loved the stuff people wrote in their columns. I still treasure them. I was hoping to put them together with some photos and publish a little book of them, but we never got to the magic number (I can't remember what it was now), so I never got round to it.
Maybe this year....
So.... what is my resolution for 2009?
Apart from the three or four I've already listed, my main resolution for this year is to innoculate myself better against the irrational, self-obsessed rage that has pounded us for too many years now.
I hope this year is a good one for everyone, and that all the panic and mayhem settles down and we emerge from it feeling more like neighbours and less like consumer capitalist spending units.
And if you are in trouble, cut up your fucking credit cards.
It's the most liberating thing you will ever do, trust me.
Bless xx Queenie
So how did Queenie do?
Queenie didn't have any resolutions in 2007 that she wrote down.
I had to go back to 2006, and it's not even a list of resolutions, it's more a stream of consciousness about various aspects of my personality and life, some of which I really should improve if possible, and some of which is beyond my control completely.
http://sadpercy.blogspot.com/2007/01/in-response-to-my-previous-post-when-i.html
However, having looked at it, there's been some progress, so here is my new dictat.
New Year's Resolutions should run for TWO YEARS. That way, you get to faff around for a year not doing them, then get your act together the second year.
Much easier.
Which means less possibility of feeling bad because you've 'failed' in some way. Which I have always felt is the Achilles Heel of New Year's Resolutions.
So.... how did I do?
Sitting around feeling sorry for myself in November.
Many many Novembers have been spent this way. It was something that really really annoyed me about myself, but not something I ever felt I could change. However, this year I didn't sit around depressed and feeling sorry for myself. Instead, I bought a house and gave up smoking in November, which meant that I was very stressed (very very stressed) some of the time and my sleep pattern went to hell in a handbasket.
But I got shit done in November. For the first time ever.
December, I did some weeping. But that was due to tiredness, the crappy weather, and the lack of a trip home. And the continuing stress of moving, not smoking, etc.
And it was nothing like the depression that used to floor me in November years ago.
(I have a confession to make by the way, I fell off the smoking wagon over Christmas, but in my defence I can say: I was being driven demented by the karmic activities of the world, I didn't buy any cigarettes, I didn't smoke a daytime cigarette, I am back on the smoking wagon again, and 2009 is the year I won't smoke any cigarettes, so I am okay about it).
Wean myself off television.
We still have a television. When Kitty was here it was necessary, because she needed to have the tv on all the time, being a member of the reality tv generation. But now Kitty is gone, there's no need to have a tv package, which incidentally costs $54.95 per month plus tax.
Which is $745 a year.
Which is a tank of furnace oil.
Or a new laptop.
Hmmm, I wonder whether we should have a tv service this year. I should talk about it to the man who uses the service. The only shows I watch are News at 10 in the winter, The Tudors and The Border. That's nine hours a week for twenty four weeks. Himself only watches about another hour a day in the winter.
That's $3.10 per hour of television watched.
Christ, it's cheaper to park downtown.
Although, if you add in the NHL play-offs in the spring, that would come down some.
Needing other people's affirmation to feel good about myself.
Much better. Much much better.
Fuck other people. I mostly don't care what they think anymore.
Although I must say, the reader who made anonymous comments about how boring and self-indulgent my blog was really needled me and has me second guessing my writing a bit. But, then again, if it's that boring, move the fuck on.... Having said that, I suspect it may have been someone I have the joy to know, who has the personality of a thirsty rattlesnake trussed up in a plastic bag, which would make it less hurtful.
Also, I got my Permanent Residency last year, which meant I could get a better job, which meant I got away from a lot of negative stuff, which was great. Of course, there's negative stuff in my current job, because there always is negativity in a paid working environment, but I don't care about it, because it's just other people.
With regards to my appearance, getting a proper job meant all kinds of exciting, albeit really basic health and dental activity this year, which improved my confidence a lot.
Also, I have started using NeoStrata's Oil Free Smoothing Lotion, Level 3, which is one of those AHA type products, and it has taken about five years off my face (even before I stopped smoking).
The beauty manager in the Shoppers Drugmart on Herring Cove Rd. deserves a big shout out. She worked with me until we got a moisturiser that dealt with all my issues, and she didn't charge me a penny until we got the right one. She just gave me a bit in a little jar and got me to report back in a few days. Then onto the next one until we hit paydirt.
That's what a beauty manager should do. She's an older woman of course, so she understands its not about the packaging or the price, it's about pushing back against the inevitable as cost effectively as possible.
I went into her yesterday and showed her the bags under my eyes (which are gignormous right now) and she sent me off with some products to try out for a week.
If she sorts out the bags under my eyes I am going to nominate her for the Order of Canada.
Fuck the novel.
Well, this resolution went exceedingly well. I have had two guilt-free years where I can read whatever I want now without having to think that I should be trying to write something myself.
In 2007, I sold a lot of photos and photo cards, but 2008 did not go well at all, because I didn't have time to work on my photography at all. I didn't even take many interesting pictures this year. This year's third resolution is to take the Digital Photography course in the NSCC. I will leave it till the spring though, as I have too much on over the next two months.
I have enough things.
So I went out and bought a house to put them all in and a car to drive them over there.
Well done, Queenie. Nice bit of non-consumerism there.
Although, to be fair, I did save like a bastard this year, in order to afford deposit on said house.
But I have not stopped buying books. The African tribal art collection is growing apace. I made a few trips to Biscuit this year for some new clothes. And I invested in a couple of pieces of furniture so that we can have people to stay, a table to eat on, etc.
However, I think Himself and I do pretty well on the recycled, frugality stuff, so I'm not going to sweat this. And next year I will have no money at all, so I guess I will achieve the non-consumption resolution pretty easily.
Auld Dog column
That went pretty well, and I loved the stuff people wrote in their columns. I still treasure them. I was hoping to put them together with some photos and publish a little book of them, but we never got to the magic number (I can't remember what it was now), so I never got round to it.
Maybe this year....
So.... what is my resolution for 2009?
Apart from the three or four I've already listed, my main resolution for this year is to innoculate myself better against the irrational, self-obsessed rage that has pounded us for too many years now.
I hope this year is a good one for everyone, and that all the panic and mayhem settles down and we emerge from it feeling more like neighbours and less like consumer capitalist spending units.
And if you are in trouble, cut up your fucking credit cards.
It's the most liberating thing you will ever do, trust me.
Bless xx Queenie
Finally 2009 is here. Which means 2008 is over. Which is probably a good thing, but still, every year is precious.
I wonder what it will be like?
So far, it's a screaming white blizzard that started last night. My world has disappeared into white. All I can see from the window is next door's trees and the side of their house. No paths, no road (where is the plough?), no horizon. The wind is blowing the snow off the neighbour's roof onto the ground below. Thankfully they are not there, because they would not be able to open their front door now.
CBC Radio 2 is playing the full length version of Star Wars, by John Williams, on their classical music show this afternoon so I am listening to that. We are at the bit in the music where Leia and Luke find themselves having an irresistable pull towards each other, but somehow know it's not the gold bikini type of pull.
OH NOOOOO!!!! We're onto another piece!!
BOM BOM BOM BOMDIBOM BOMDIBOM...
I'm sure you know which bit we're at now.
One of my new year resolutions for 2009 is to convince Himself that I am walking down the aisle to this piece of music.
So far, he is pretty sure I am only messing when I say it.
Himself is ploughing snow of course, so I am on my own for New Year's Day until at least 11pm tonight. Oh Joy.
Count your blessings, Queenie!!!
1. I am not out ploughing snow. 2. The power is still on. 3. The Internet cable is still working. 4. I don't have to go to work until Monday.
I have to start packing though. Today is the day I promised to start packing up the stuff I have accumulated over the last three and a half years in order to be able to move it across the city to the new place in two weeks.
I do not want to do this. I do not want to pack. I do not want to move. I do not want to organize. I am completely fed up of the endless endless logistical and organizational bullcrap I end up doing here in Canada.
I want to go to bed for four days and not get up for anything apart from a hot drop in my coffee mug or a new book.
In fact, my second New Year's Resolution is to become afflicted by some mysterious ailment that reduces my vastly superior organizational skills to those of a normal person, after which I won't be compelle to organize everything and everyone anymore, because other people can in fact do it just as well, or... shock, horror Queenie... better than me.
In layman's terms, I will chill the fuck out this year.
Time passes as Queenie looks at vacation brochures.
Himself has just called and told me not to pack anything today. We will do it at the weekend together.
Sometimes, I swear he must have implanted a listening device in my brain early on.
His knowledge of what I'm thinking is uncanny.
Now the CBC is playing Beethoven's Ninth.
Very uplifting.
More time passes as Queenie messes around on Facebook.
Facebook was the crack of 2008, wasn't it?! I would sit down at the computer in the evening, all ready to blog, and after an hour of desultory faffing on FB, my eyes/ hands would be sore and that would be it.
It is very handy though. For checking up on your friends, without having to ever speak to them.
More time passes as Queenie starts to clean up last night's debris and sweeps half the floor.
Rich Terfry, aka Buck 65, hosts the CBC Radio 2 Drive show from 3 - 6pm every day, which is a most excellent Canadian, indie and some world music extravaganza every day. (That would be available on http://www.cbc.ca/ from 7 - 10pm every evening, for Buck's Irish fans). Right now he's doing a Montreal special for New Year's Day.
I am going to post this, because it is going nowhere. And start again.
So far, it's a screaming white blizzard that started last night. My world has disappeared into white. All I can see from the window is next door's trees and the side of their house. No paths, no road (where is the plough?), no horizon. The wind is blowing the snow off the neighbour's roof onto the ground below. Thankfully they are not there, because they would not be able to open their front door now.
CBC Radio 2 is playing the full length version of Star Wars, by John Williams, on their classical music show this afternoon so I am listening to that. We are at the bit in the music where Leia and Luke find themselves having an irresistable pull towards each other, but somehow know it's not the gold bikini type of pull.
OH NOOOOO!!!! We're onto another piece!!
BOM BOM BOM BOMDIBOM BOMDIBOM...
I'm sure you know which bit we're at now.
One of my new year resolutions for 2009 is to convince Himself that I am walking down the aisle to this piece of music.
So far, he is pretty sure I am only messing when I say it.
Himself is ploughing snow of course, so I am on my own for New Year's Day until at least 11pm tonight. Oh Joy.
Count your blessings, Queenie!!!
1. I am not out ploughing snow. 2. The power is still on. 3. The Internet cable is still working. 4. I don't have to go to work until Monday.
I have to start packing though. Today is the day I promised to start packing up the stuff I have accumulated over the last three and a half years in order to be able to move it across the city to the new place in two weeks.
I do not want to do this. I do not want to pack. I do not want to move. I do not want to organize. I am completely fed up of the endless endless logistical and organizational bullcrap I end up doing here in Canada.
I want to go to bed for four days and not get up for anything apart from a hot drop in my coffee mug or a new book.
In fact, my second New Year's Resolution is to become afflicted by some mysterious ailment that reduces my vastly superior organizational skills to those of a normal person, after which I won't be compelle to organize everything and everyone anymore, because other people can in fact do it just as well, or... shock, horror Queenie... better than me.
In layman's terms, I will chill the fuck out this year.
Time passes as Queenie looks at vacation brochures.
Himself has just called and told me not to pack anything today. We will do it at the weekend together.
Sometimes, I swear he must have implanted a listening device in my brain early on.
His knowledge of what I'm thinking is uncanny.
Now the CBC is playing Beethoven's Ninth.
Very uplifting.
More time passes as Queenie messes around on Facebook.
Facebook was the crack of 2008, wasn't it?! I would sit down at the computer in the evening, all ready to blog, and after an hour of desultory faffing on FB, my eyes/ hands would be sore and that would be it.
It is very handy though. For checking up on your friends, without having to ever speak to them.
More time passes as Queenie starts to clean up last night's debris and sweeps half the floor.
Rich Terfry, aka Buck 65, hosts the CBC Radio 2 Drive show from 3 - 6pm every day, which is a most excellent Canadian, indie and some world music extravaganza every day. (That would be available on http://www.cbc.ca/ from 7 - 10pm every evening, for Buck's Irish fans). Right now he's doing a Montreal special for New Year's Day.
I am going to post this, because it is going nowhere. And start again.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
The Cruiser departs
I see the Cruiser is departed this world at the ripe old age of 91. He had a good long life anyway.
His books always made me feel incredibly stupid, so I shall continue that tradition by not saying anything intelligent now either.
His books always made me feel incredibly stupid, so I shall continue that tradition by not saying anything intelligent now either.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Immaculate Shopping Lennon Day goes pear-shaped
When I was growing up, 8th December was a religious holiday in Ireland (well it still is I assume). The Feast of the Conception of the Virgin. Who was conceived by Elizabeth. Who is my favourite saint. For a number of reasons I won't go into, mainly around not really wanting to be the mother of the flippin' Virgin Mary.
It was also culchie shopping day in Dublin. Which is also known as GOIN"ONNATRAINTOSEESANTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Santy is the Irish for Santa.
Then it turned into John Lennon Died Day around thirty years ago, which was too early to mean anything much to me, even though I know it's important.
Now I live in Canada it's just another day when I feel all weird and homesick and everyone else has no idea why.
I am sitting in Cape Breton International Airport as I begin to write this, but there is no wi-fi so I will post when I get home.
If I get home…
Today was a day. I am going to rename this day Queenie's realization that winter is going to happen every year till she leaves Canada Day.
I wake at 4am because Himself’s cell phone is ringing. Normally when Himself’s cell phone rings at that hour of the morning in the winter, it means there is snow on the ground. I am so sleepy I don’t figure that out this morning, even as I listen to Himself wash, dress, make coffee and get ready to leave the house. I am irrationally annoyed because he is up so early.
Above me, the neighbours German Shepherd is pounding around begging to go out for a pee.
Finally, I call out to Himself and he says, ‘there’s a foot of snow on the ground, baby, be careful driving to the airport’ and then leaves to plough it away from all the shopping malls.
After an hour’s pointless worrying about snow and driving and lateness and the complexity of my day, I get back to sleep and have a bizarre dream about my aunt and cousin from Dublin who are visiting us in Halifax, but actually the city is Florence, Italy (this is my subconscious not wanting to deal with snow, I think). And in the dream Himself is a famous artist working in scrap metal (I don’t want to know what this is my subconscious not dealing with right now).
The alarm clock doesn’t wake me up at 5.30am when it was supposed to because I have forgotten to switch it on, so when I wake up in a panic at 5.47am, my day is already pear-shaped.
It takes about 15 minutes to scrape the snow off the car, see. And I have to be at the airport for 7am.
Up. Shower. Dress for a formal workshop presentation.
Coffee. Pot full.
I put snow clothes on over proper clothes.
Tramp downstairs. Scrape snow off car.
Tramp back upstairs.
Get coffee mug, laptop, proper boots for inside.
Tramp back downstairs with an armful of stuff.
Check I have torch, blanket, safety blanket, reflector panels, etc in the car.
Defrost the front windscreen again.
Finally, I back the car out of driveway at 6.36am. Everyone else in the building is still asleep. Apart from the dog of course.
Dogs don't shovel snow though.
Not too bad on time. My day is not too pear-shaped, but pear-shaped enough.
I drive to airport in the lightly falling snow.
In the dark of course.
On unploughed roads of course.
At 60kms per hour.
Because I’m too scared to drive any faster in case I crash, or in case Himself finds out somehow that I’ve done it, and has a fit at me for being so stupid.
I still haven’t recovered from the time I tried to sneak up to Cape Breton by road in the snow last winter because I was new at my job and thought it was important and Himself KNEW I was doing that, even though he was at work, and called me on my cell on the highway and told me I was to come home now or not at all.
Himself places a care call from the plough truck.
What speed am I doing?
I tell him.
Am I in four wheel drive?
Yes.
Good.
Keep ‘er slow now.
He listens to me moan through my blue tooth device about how unfair my life is from December to March every year. And how my snow driving stomach knots are really bad this morning, etc.
Then he has to go plough more snow.
At the airport, the signs for the long term carpark are covered in snow, and I have never parked there, so I drive around in confusion for a bit, then get lucky and follow the recently arrived LTP bus to the car park.
I park the Explorer in a snow drift.
There was nowhere else.
Anyways, it’s an Explorer, for chrissakes. It’s for moments like this.
I get on the airport bus at 7.35am.
Then I realize I am still wearing my snow boots.
I apologize to everyone on the bus for delaying the bus. Get off bus. Climb over snow drift to car. Change into proper leather-soled boots. Slither back down snow drift to bus. Re-embark bus.
We drive to the Departures Lounge in the dawn glimmer.
I have to re-check-in at 7.52am because my mobile device barcode check-in foolishness is just that.
That makes it too late for the latte and muffin I’d been promising myself on the highway…
I take off my boots and my belt in the security zone because I am beeping.
I put them back on.
I sit in the Departures Lounge for one hour with no coffee.
Finally, with the permission of the ground crew, I make a break for Tim Hortons…. Starbucks is too far away, way over in the International Flights Departure Area.
I get back to Gate 6 to find everyone has boarded.
But I can take my Timmy’s on the plane.
Hooray!!
Fifteen of us sit on the commuter plane to Cape Breton for two and a half hours while every other friggin’ plane at the airport gets de-iced before us.
No wonder Cape Bretoners are pure mule.
Now I am going to be late.
Frantically, as we barrel up to the de-icer, I email how-to-facilitate-workshop instructions to a colleague in Cape Breton and beg him to save my ass.
Then we are taking off and I have to switch off my phone without knowing whether my ass is being saved.
I panic the whole way to Cape Breton, while sitting in front of the man with the worst halitosis on the planet.
I can still smell his breath.
I decide to take my Champix on an empty stomach because I couldn’t feel any more nauseous.
Actually I could.
We get to Cape Breton only an hour after the start of the workshop.
Hoo-fuckin-ray.
The single taxi parked outside the airport has nobody in it.
I run around the airport trying to find the taxi driver.
I find the taxi driver.
I impress the urgency of my trip on the taxi driver.
He tells me he’s been here since 7.30am without a fare, so he’s taking a carload.
The taxi driver takes his time rounding up a full mini-van load.
It includes halitosis man.
I get into the front of the taxi, speechless with fury.
SPEECHLESS!
The workshop venue is the last stop on the taxi route.
I throw the money at taxi-driver who throws the receipt at me.
I burst into workshop to find everyone working quietly at correct point in workshop, thanks to innate genius of my colleague.
He is more pleased to see me than I am to see him, however, and he hands workshop over to me in alacratious relief before I even get my snow coat off.
I manage to complete the workshop in only a mild state of anxiety, which eases when I realize the participants are enjoying it.
This workshop is my baby right now. Everyone must coo at it. Everyone.
My colleague drives me back to Cape Breton International Airport.
I blag my way onto the early flight home. Which is late of course.
I go to the restaurant and order sausages and pancakes and tea for my nerves.
They burn the pancakes.
How can you burn pancakes?
The plane was due in at 4pm, but it’s arrives at 5pm covered in de-icing goo.
I wonder why…
Right now, I am sitting with seven other people and the pilot on the commuter plane from Cape Breton, bowling through the winter skies towards home.
Himself has texted to say he will be home around nine, hopefully.
That means it has probably stopped snowing in Halifax. But it’s supposed to go down to minus 10 tonight, so I hope that I scraped enough snow off the car so it’s not frozen too much.
If it’s not frozen too much, I can open my car door to get my snow boots on. With my snow boots on, I can stand up long enough to haul the ice scraper out. With the ice scraper in my hand, I can scrape the ice off the windscreen and windows and car lights. With my car in compliance with the highway winter code, I can see my way out of the snow drift and then out of the car park and finally onto the highway and home.
If not, I’ll have to hang onto the door and yank at it till it opens and I fall on my ass.
Normally I don’t drink on a Monday, but all I can think of right now is that I am two hours and a snow drift away from a big glass of red wine.
I get to the airport and I find the bus and we find my car and I get the door open after a couple of yanks and I sit there until my fingers are warm enough to drive (it's now -18) and I drive home in the dark and I get home and it's HOME and then I realise...
... NOBODY'S FUCKING SHOVELLED THE FRONT DOOR STEPS.
Anyways, it only took a few minutes and now I'm inside in the warm listening to Dragon's Den and finishing this and soooo glad I'm not out in the cold.
I hates the winter....
It was also culchie shopping day in Dublin. Which is also known as GOIN"ONNATRAINTOSEESANTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Santy is the Irish for Santa.
Then it turned into John Lennon Died Day around thirty years ago, which was too early to mean anything much to me, even though I know it's important.
Now I live in Canada it's just another day when I feel all weird and homesick and everyone else has no idea why.
I am sitting in Cape Breton International Airport as I begin to write this, but there is no wi-fi so I will post when I get home.
If I get home…
Today was a day. I am going to rename this day Queenie's realization that winter is going to happen every year till she leaves Canada Day.
I wake at 4am because Himself’s cell phone is ringing. Normally when Himself’s cell phone rings at that hour of the morning in the winter, it means there is snow on the ground. I am so sleepy I don’t figure that out this morning, even as I listen to Himself wash, dress, make coffee and get ready to leave the house. I am irrationally annoyed because he is up so early.
Above me, the neighbours German Shepherd is pounding around begging to go out for a pee.
Finally, I call out to Himself and he says, ‘there’s a foot of snow on the ground, baby, be careful driving to the airport’ and then leaves to plough it away from all the shopping malls.
After an hour’s pointless worrying about snow and driving and lateness and the complexity of my day, I get back to sleep and have a bizarre dream about my aunt and cousin from Dublin who are visiting us in Halifax, but actually the city is Florence, Italy (this is my subconscious not wanting to deal with snow, I think). And in the dream Himself is a famous artist working in scrap metal (I don’t want to know what this is my subconscious not dealing with right now).
The alarm clock doesn’t wake me up at 5.30am when it was supposed to because I have forgotten to switch it on, so when I wake up in a panic at 5.47am, my day is already pear-shaped.
It takes about 15 minutes to scrape the snow off the car, see. And I have to be at the airport for 7am.
Up. Shower. Dress for a formal workshop presentation.
Coffee. Pot full.
I put snow clothes on over proper clothes.
Tramp downstairs. Scrape snow off car.
Tramp back upstairs.
Get coffee mug, laptop, proper boots for inside.
Tramp back downstairs with an armful of stuff.
Check I have torch, blanket, safety blanket, reflector panels, etc in the car.
Defrost the front windscreen again.
Finally, I back the car out of driveway at 6.36am. Everyone else in the building is still asleep. Apart from the dog of course.
Dogs don't shovel snow though.
Not too bad on time. My day is not too pear-shaped, but pear-shaped enough.
I drive to airport in the lightly falling snow.
In the dark of course.
On unploughed roads of course.
At 60kms per hour.
Because I’m too scared to drive any faster in case I crash, or in case Himself finds out somehow that I’ve done it, and has a fit at me for being so stupid.
I still haven’t recovered from the time I tried to sneak up to Cape Breton by road in the snow last winter because I was new at my job and thought it was important and Himself KNEW I was doing that, even though he was at work, and called me on my cell on the highway and told me I was to come home now or not at all.
Himself places a care call from the plough truck.
What speed am I doing?
I tell him.
Am I in four wheel drive?
Yes.
Good.
Keep ‘er slow now.
He listens to me moan through my blue tooth device about how unfair my life is from December to March every year. And how my snow driving stomach knots are really bad this morning, etc.
Then he has to go plough more snow.
At the airport, the signs for the long term carpark are covered in snow, and I have never parked there, so I drive around in confusion for a bit, then get lucky and follow the recently arrived LTP bus to the car park.
I park the Explorer in a snow drift.
There was nowhere else.
Anyways, it’s an Explorer, for chrissakes. It’s for moments like this.
I get on the airport bus at 7.35am.
Then I realize I am still wearing my snow boots.
I apologize to everyone on the bus for delaying the bus. Get off bus. Climb over snow drift to car. Change into proper leather-soled boots. Slither back down snow drift to bus. Re-embark bus.
We drive to the Departures Lounge in the dawn glimmer.
I have to re-check-in at 7.52am because my mobile device barcode check-in foolishness is just that.
That makes it too late for the latte and muffin I’d been promising myself on the highway…
I take off my boots and my belt in the security zone because I am beeping.
I put them back on.
I sit in the Departures Lounge for one hour with no coffee.
Finally, with the permission of the ground crew, I make a break for Tim Hortons…. Starbucks is too far away, way over in the International Flights Departure Area.
I get back to Gate 6 to find everyone has boarded.
But I can take my Timmy’s on the plane.
Hooray!!
Fifteen of us sit on the commuter plane to Cape Breton for two and a half hours while every other friggin’ plane at the airport gets de-iced before us.
No wonder Cape Bretoners are pure mule.
Now I am going to be late.
Frantically, as we barrel up to the de-icer, I email how-to-facilitate-workshop instructions to a colleague in Cape Breton and beg him to save my ass.
Then we are taking off and I have to switch off my phone without knowing whether my ass is being saved.
I panic the whole way to Cape Breton, while sitting in front of the man with the worst halitosis on the planet.
I can still smell his breath.
I decide to take my Champix on an empty stomach because I couldn’t feel any more nauseous.
Actually I could.
We get to Cape Breton only an hour after the start of the workshop.
Hoo-fuckin-ray.
The single taxi parked outside the airport has nobody in it.
I run around the airport trying to find the taxi driver.
I find the taxi driver.
I impress the urgency of my trip on the taxi driver.
He tells me he’s been here since 7.30am without a fare, so he’s taking a carload.
The taxi driver takes his time rounding up a full mini-van load.
It includes halitosis man.
I get into the front of the taxi, speechless with fury.
SPEECHLESS!
The workshop venue is the last stop on the taxi route.
I throw the money at taxi-driver who throws the receipt at me.
I burst into workshop to find everyone working quietly at correct point in workshop, thanks to innate genius of my colleague.
He is more pleased to see me than I am to see him, however, and he hands workshop over to me in alacratious relief before I even get my snow coat off.
I manage to complete the workshop in only a mild state of anxiety, which eases when I realize the participants are enjoying it.
This workshop is my baby right now. Everyone must coo at it. Everyone.
My colleague drives me back to Cape Breton International Airport.
I blag my way onto the early flight home. Which is late of course.
I go to the restaurant and order sausages and pancakes and tea for my nerves.
They burn the pancakes.
How can you burn pancakes?
The plane was due in at 4pm, but it’s arrives at 5pm covered in de-icing goo.
I wonder why…
Right now, I am sitting with seven other people and the pilot on the commuter plane from Cape Breton, bowling through the winter skies towards home.
Himself has texted to say he will be home around nine, hopefully.
That means it has probably stopped snowing in Halifax. But it’s supposed to go down to minus 10 tonight, so I hope that I scraped enough snow off the car so it’s not frozen too much.
If it’s not frozen too much, I can open my car door to get my snow boots on. With my snow boots on, I can stand up long enough to haul the ice scraper out. With the ice scraper in my hand, I can scrape the ice off the windscreen and windows and car lights. With my car in compliance with the highway winter code, I can see my way out of the snow drift and then out of the car park and finally onto the highway and home.
If not, I’ll have to hang onto the door and yank at it till it opens and I fall on my ass.
Normally I don’t drink on a Monday, but all I can think of right now is that I am two hours and a snow drift away from a big glass of red wine.
I get to the airport and I find the bus and we find my car and I get the door open after a couple of yanks and I sit there until my fingers are warm enough to drive (it's now -18) and I drive home in the dark and I get home and it's HOME and then I realise...
... NOBODY'S FUCKING SHOVELLED THE FRONT DOOR STEPS.
Anyways, it only took a few minutes and now I'm inside in the warm listening to Dragon's Den and finishing this and soooo glad I'm not out in the cold.
I hates the winter....
Saturday, December 06, 2008
The Fall of the Court
Chocolate Court went on the rental market this morning.
Sniffle.
Queenie is sad.
Hopefully the next people will have as much fun here as we did.
Sniffle.
Queenie is sad.
Hopefully the next people will have as much fun here as we did.
To Coalesce or not to Coalesce
I can't be bothered trying to write about the mess that's going on in Canadian politics right now, so just read Jeffrey Simpson's article from the Globe and Mail this morning. It just about sums up what's going on.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081205.wsimpsonessay1206/BNStory/specialComment/home/?pageRequested=1
Alternatively, if you want a sense of what real Canadians think, you can read this article by Rick Mercer, from the same organ.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081205.wPOLmercer1205/BNStory/politics/home
With apologies to Knut fans.
Actually, the best comment I've read on all of this recently was from some Joe Bloe writing on the G&M site, who said what he wanted to see was Harper and Dion gone, replaced by Prentice and Ignatieff. Then we could get back to normal and watch them wiggle their stupendous eyebrows at each other across the floor of the House.
He he he...
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081205.wsimpsonessay1206/BNStory/specialComment/home/?pageRequested=1
Alternatively, if you want a sense of what real Canadians think, you can read this article by Rick Mercer, from the same organ.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081205.wPOLmercer1205/BNStory/politics/home
With apologies to Knut fans.
Actually, the best comment I've read on all of this recently was from some Joe Bloe writing on the G&M site, who said what he wanted to see was Harper and Dion gone, replaced by Prentice and Ignatieff. Then we could get back to normal and watch them wiggle their stupendous eyebrows at each other across the floor of the House.
He he he...
Thursday, December 04, 2008
The trouble is, we used to make things in this country....
... and now we just put our hands in the next guy's pockets....
We are about to watch Episode 12 of Season 2 of The Wire.
I don't know when normal service will be restored - there's too much to think about right now.
I still don't smoke.
Himself nearly doesn't smoke.
I don't know what kind of unfucked Canada is the last of right now, but it sure isn't democracy.
TTYL
We are about to watch Episode 12 of Season 2 of The Wire.
I don't know when normal service will be restored - there's too much to think about right now.
I still don't smoke.
Himself nearly doesn't smoke.
I don't know what kind of unfucked Canada is the last of right now, but it sure isn't democracy.
TTYL
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