Tag: Weather, Holidays and Seasons

Friday Bullets For Stay-cation Week

Well, I suppose that the promised break in the days of rain that have been mid-July in Easlakia has to stand for something. I can’t think when I last took a summer week off and did not load the family for somewhere – which is just as well as a van full of damp is not a happy van. It has been a time of napping and of reading something other than the glowing screen. I did not home repair. Of that you can be truly proud.

  • Byelection Fever Update: About 1% of the Canadian electorate go to the polls on 8 September. Woooot!!! This is what we have been waiting for.
  • Ben is proxy blogging Berlin. I hear we need change.
  • What do you think about the fence?
  • My new found status as Canada’s sixth most popular political blogger demands that I make some obtuse observations on the state of doings in Ottawa. Except nothing seems to be going on. Who cares about election plans – I want substance. But aside from the general quality of Federal leadership, there seems to be only one big issue: carbon tax. I still think this is a yawner and a loser for whoever gets marked with the green tint. It shouldn’t be so but as there are no strong answers yet, proposing the unpopular and the unlikely-to-succeed is seldom a yellow brick road to a majority hold on Parliament. And it’s no more than a plank at best. We need more.
  • So which Federal issues deserve more airplay?? The recent premiers’ gathering raised the prospect of actual steps towards First Nations reconciliation. Wouldn’t that be nice of real steps were taken towards that national quandary? How about infrastructure – Ottawa and Toronto have made nice to buy bridges and buses. But do you run an election on that? Rideology not ideology??
  • Al Purdy’s cottage is for sale. Owning that would be rather neato.
  • This week’s weather shattered the promise of a massive harvest for a lot of Ontario fruit growers. Hailstorms. We need to start the “Buy A Peach With A Bruise” campaign. Why do all the farmer’s protests have to be around the combine harvesters? Who’s behind this anyway?
  • Apparently the oversight committee decided to lay off hitting each other in the head with hammers. Who thought that was ever a good idea?

Full disclosure: I wrote most of this Thursday. Between the dodgy internet access and my new found love for not being up at 6:15 am, I thought it would be prudent to plan ahead so as to ensure you desk jockeys have your moments of bulletty bliss at the crack of dawn.

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Happy Canada Day!

What joy! A stranded Tuesday off – even though I took Monday off, too, to smoke a chunk of pork for five hours. This morning I was asked what smells like bacon. Me, I replied. More great Canada Day photos here from three years ago when I was a much more clever blogger. We are off to be in a canoe at someone else’s cottage, there being no truer Canadian activity.

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Tra-Laa! It is May Again!!!

Is May the best month? Every year I get to March with gasping relief that the piercing cold is gone but it is only 60 days later that you can relax – just yesterday there was snow and hail…the size of corn kernels, too. No canned hams or golf balls but definitely corn. The crocus is done and lily of the valley is on its way. Even the annual two day ant infestation of the house is over. I should mow by Monday.

But April was kind, too. How many times did the Red Sox win in the last few innings, coming from behind or, like last night, waiting for the starter to fade so that they might attack his team mate – the unfortunate signing, the untested prospect or the fading star? Going 17-12 in an April that started in Japan is neither fluke nor overheated. Who would have thought May’s games against Tampa Beelzebubbians, Baltimore or KC would have meaning?

The Last Friday Bullets Before February

Janufeb. The grey blur before the melt, made more grey those three out of four years without Olympic curling. It is the time when the Morton teeters, when show turns that other colour. We’ve seen the dark edge of the storm and even had double lake effect this week. I heard an ad for large screen TVs telling me how they bring the family together.

  • Australians should be scared of coming to Canada? What a load. I thought Australians were fearless of backpacking though third world gang zones blind drunk, spraying the combatants with obscenities and just emptied beer cans? Bleaters of the right will go on about the terrorist references but note this:

    “Heavy snowfalls and ice in the winter can make driving dangerous. The wind-chill factor can also create dangerously cold outdoor conditions. … The province of British Columbia in western Canada is in an active earthquake zone. Alberta and British Columbia are also subject to avalanches. … Tornadoes can occur in some areas of Canada between May and September. Bush and forest fires can occur any time in Canada.”

    Whimps! This is the real crisis and a funny one as we consider what terrorism and natural disasters really means to an Australian – no access to beer for a couple of days.

  • What happens if two pass too close and the lines tangle?
  • One point on the Manley Report that is important and telling in the brader context is a critique of the Government of One policy that we are living under these days:

    The panel members called the policy unhelpful and said it was undermining public support for the mission and presenting a skewed picture of why Canadian troops are being asked to put their lives on the line in Afghanistan. Chairman John Manley, a former foreign affairs minister, said the decision taken at the “centre” – in the Prime Minister’s Office or the Privy Council Office – to allow only the Defence Department to speak on the mission means Canadians are being told their young men and women are dying without being given “any context in which they can say this is why and this is meaningful and this is tragic but it’s worth it.”

    Leadership tells us why we need to do things, makes it compelling. Shutting up is the same as creating confusion. No wonder he gets treated the same way. Would you vote for Manley now? Who wouldn’t?

  • I haven’t watched tennis for years but maybe that will change now that the log jam has broken.
  • Rampant freeloadery and responsibility shiftery which can’t even get its act together on a 42 year timeline for achieving something!
  • The Economist puts it well:

    Mr Harper has been unable to do much more than survive. Respected for his competence, he has all the charisma of an automaton. “I thought that people needed time to get used to Mr Harper,” says Roger Gibbins of the Canada West Foundation, an Alberta-based think-tank. “But it’s turned out that to know Harper is not to love him.” That is especially true for women. Opinion polls show little change in allegiance since the last election—except for a brief moment of Conservative advance last autumn…This year is shaping up to be Mr Harper’s most difficult so far. But there is not yet any sign that the opposition will feel sufficiently emboldened to bring him down and trigger an election.

    So more of the Great White Yawn…except to Australians. Boo!

How long until The Beat Authority? How long until Darcey posts the Beer and Blues? Lord, how long?

The Friday Bullet Points Of Christmas

Here we are. Another Christmas is upon us and the worst Friday for the idle clock watcher. What to not do when there may not be much to actually do? Eat candy canes in the morning, feel ill and ridden with guilt in the afternoon.

  • Sad Tech Update: Twitter as best bloggy app thingie of the year? Worth having the italicized statement that it “matters“?? While it is sweet to read that some people believe that some others don’t “get it” when, in fact, something just sucks and/or sucks time, how it is possible to think that something as useless (if usable) Twitter “matters”? Love matters. Health matters. Twitter is a place on the web for people who cannot sustain sufficient attention to write, comment upon or even read a blog. The content-driven internet without the obligation of substance. Warning: thought-fraud is afoot. Look out for consultants. Observation: Snood was the last great addition to the world of computing.
  • Update: David updates his post on Catholic rights and I respond sorta thusly with less than success technically speaking so I repeat myself:

    As much as to make sure I comment here as anything, Catholic rights seems a very odd concept to me but, as you will say, it is there plain as plain can be and most likely it is the lack of relation to me that makes me scratch my head. These rights are like PEI being a province, a fact of positive law making it so regardless of the need. But unlike PEI, Catholic rights now seem unbalanced as they are not balancing against their former nemisis – Victorian era Protestant power. Left to its devices, PEI would become Anticosti – but would Rome in Canada fall so easily? In the secularized Canada, is it not the faithful against the materialist shallow Hitchenites as much as the violent puritanical terrorist hijackers whether of Oklahoma City or 9/11? But could there be general Christian rights to state funding, to acceptance as a minority? If not, can Catholic rights (surely now a sub-set homogenous within the whole of the shrinking Canadian patch of Christendom) be anything other than a historic quirk locked into our Constitution? This is not to be anti-Catholic so much as contemporaneously contextual, something admittedly the constitution and perhaps the Church cares little for.

  • Speaking of the workplace, is boredom the natural outcome of the technological miracle of the last 40 years? Not only have we not received out jetpacks, we have not entered into that leisure society that was promised as someone has to answer the phone – or at least record their voice mail message – every single day.
  • Are they morphing into one? Pete Roger Rose-Clemens? Is Schilling that nutty?
  • From meany-pants to Mr. Drip. Please oh please can we be given an effective Federal opposition communications campaign under the tree this year?
  • Wow – doing the right thing actually is a heck of a lot less painful than doing the wrong thing.
  • Rejoice! Now there is more Europe for neocons to crap on. The most successful economic and social experiment since WWII is taking in the poor and making them kings. What will this mean for the dirt poor guy on the bus in Poland who looked at me like I was from outer space when I was there in 1991 teaching in a small Baltic city, when bootlegged western shampoo that smelled like a flower instead of industrial effluent was just showing up in the market?

That’s it for now. Someone has to get to work to wait for the Yule buffet to begin.

An Election In Ontario

Ontario suffers from a funny sort of guilt – sorry it is so large and populous and diverse and economically strong and sets the national agenda. It could spin off Toronto, you know…that might work. And, because someone had a whacky idea a few years back, Ontario has fixed provincial elections and I guess one is coming up. The problem with fixed elections without primaries and stuff is that they sort of creep up on you so here we are about five weeks off and no one is listening that much. Well they will today:

There was a real holiday flavour to the unofficial kickoff of the Ontario election campaign yesterday. The Liberal party promised a new statutory holiday in February if it is re-elected on Oct. 10, something that would give Ontarians a long-called-for winter break.

I say the Conservatives go one better and promise to mirror the, what, 37 or so statutory holidays of Newfoundland. Until we get Regatta Day off – are we really free?

Friday “After The Thunder” Chatfest

Don’t expect much from me today. What a thunder storm. Like the 1812 Symphony without the orchestra: boom, blam, whammo. What with the many mouths a wailing, not a lot of sleep. I almost wrote “flat chest” up there. One more week in August and therefore in summer. Summer really ends around here in October compared to the Maritimes but you know what I mean:

  • Update #2: A neato series of photos from the collection of a new technology museaum in the UK with photos of things like a lump of concrete from 1899 and early 1900s analogue computers including one called “the totalisator” which is my new nickname for me.
  • Update: Brendan Carney, subject of last fall’s overly wrought series on the SU football team, made the pros.
  • Nice to see the scoffing one dimensional right wing bloggers were wrong – again – as the police did infiltrate the wacko protest group at the summit. Darcey’s comment makers display an interesting learning curve but Darcey’s own response is gold:

    Wouldn’t it be crazy if they were undercover protesters pretending to be police officers pretending to be protesters? That would be the ultimate…Or wouldn’t it be weird…if they were police who wanted to be involved in the protest? Maybe their overwhelming zeal was too much for some of the more moderate protesters on the line. This is a good story.

    Cheeky monkey. Far more entertaining that the scoffing one dimensional left wing bloggers

  • What started as a funny idea for naming a sport team seems to end up in a grade seven locker room.
  • If you ever worry about your own beer intake or, conversely, consider it boring check out Ron’s series of posts of drinking his way thought Germany’s Franconia region. Plenty of gems like this:

    Andy met someone he recognised. It turned out to be Dan Shelton and his wife. He was making a documentary about Bamberg or something. I wasn’t concentrating that much on the conversation. I was in my beer zone. Feeling the warm glow of contentment that comes after a morning’s drinking. Very tall. I can remember that. Dan Shelton’s very tall. And annoyingly skinny for someone who works with beer.

  • Amy Winehouse update. I sent portland a copy. Let’s see what happens.
  • The Australian government has been tidying up wikipedia, too.

That is it. Not caffeine in the brain yet.

Group Project: What Are you Doing With your Summer?

These group projects don’t always have to be so stodgy. Why can’t we lighten up and just tell each other what is going on this summer. This seems to be what we are up to:

  • Canoeing. I think I am terrified of lakes now. All I want to do is hug the shoreline. There are animals in lakes you know. Hidden ones.
  • Camping. We are planning to take the kids camping in a couple of weeks for the first time. Nothing rustic. There are animals in the woods.
  • Backyard. Having one for the first summer since 2002, we are BBQing plenty and have had a whack of visitors over the last few weeks. We have seven kids under eight right now. Help. Plus there are fewer animals in the backyard but they are still about. Gotta be careful.

Remember – Labour Day is only six weeks off. What are you doing to pack fun into those few days?