Rafe Mair’s column in The Tyee
March 23, 2015
Rafe Mair offers a very well researched essay on some elements of Justin Trudeau’s recent speech.
Finally, a crust
March 12, 2015
Anyone who has read far in this blog knows about my weakness for crusted snow. I love to travel on it, to enjoy the freedom it gives, to watch the dog react to her new mobility, to wiggle some powered vehicle to the top of the thin icy layer and giddily drive around in expanding circles until it drops through with a great, tire-spinning crash.
After four days of thaws dragged the bottom out of the huge snow accumulation in this area, last night it froze hard. At dawn (after the online papers and breakfast, anyway) I set out with a bemused spaniel to see how far we could get on the snowmobile trails which were the consistency of a Dairy Queen slushy yesterday afternoon.
While the crust over unpacked snow was fine for Taffy, it wouldn’t hold me. The packed trails were solid, though, so we set off, lightly dressed (no vest for the dog, vest and light jacket for me) to explore this fresh wonderland.
The northwest wind was pretty cool, but that sped us along until we reached the woodlot. It’s been a while since we’ve walked through this section. Two middle-aged maples have died and shed their bark at the tops, and one small elm. I might be able to salvage a log or two from one maple.
We came upon feathers and bones from a kill. At first I thought it was a grouse, but the grouse-sized feathers looked more like turkey plumage, and a remaining leg bone was quite large. It surprised me that the predator left a bit of skin and some bones. Perhaps it wasn’t a coyote. A little further along Taffy found another kill just emerging from the snow: something furry, likely a squirrel. I called her away from it in case of porcupine quills, and didn’t investigate further. I haven’t examined a fox kill before, perhaps the smaller canine is less fastidious than the coyote. Or the predator could be an owl, I suppose.
As we followed the trail to the north side of the woods I stepped gingerly around tracks of the mess I made a week ago when the Ski Doo bogged down in drifts. I had to blast a wide circular path through small saplings or else leave the machine there until spring and worse, walk the half-mile back to the house through deep, soft snow. (You won’t laugh if you’ve ever had to do this.)
In today’s cold I decided to jog back to the house. That worked fine until one foot broke through the track, then both feet, and then my wrists and elbows. Oh, well, I wasn’t cold any more and the lungs were now getting an excellent workout.
A fast walk would have to do. Taffy enjoyed the chance to range across the small fields wherever her nose took her. She had a great time digging beneath the crust near a small ash and came up chewing a couple of times. There’d been a lot of vole damage on those particular trees last winter, so go get ’em, Taff.
And back to the house, still clean, refreshed, and a bit chuffed at taking advantage of the window of cold temperature. I love the crust.
There’s a lot of snow out there.
March 5, 2015
Just back from a very strenuous snowmobile ride in the woodlot. Is there ever a lot of soft snow in those tall drifts! Three times I corkscrewed my machine into bottomless snow when I lost the edge of the packed track.
The last time with my dog aboard, the trick of using the throttle to get out of an unstable situation (before the laws of physics applied themselves) didn’t work. Neither could I shift our weight fast enough to right the tilting snowmobile as it found its way into pristine snow under the overhanging boughs of a walnut tree. It probably seemed like any other disembarkation from the snowmobile for Taffy: face first into deep snow, swim to the track, run home to Mommy. That’s how she gets her winter runs. This one was shorter than most. By the time I found my way out of the white abyss, she was well on her way back to the house.
The tumble, however, was a novel experience for me. I just lay there for a while, weightless after the low-speed overturn, mildly surprised that when I put a foot down to stand up, there was no down to stand up on. There was nothing for it but to swim up onto the Ski Doo, perch on the far side, and power out of the snow, panting mightily from the unexpected exertion.
Great cardio, I guess. Non interficat triumphat.
The Canadian Police Association: charity or scam?
March 4, 2015
The Canadian Police Association
mgendron@cpa-acp.ca
Dear Sir:
I hold power of attorney for my mother, Mrs. Edna Croskery, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. She has been disturbed of late by repeated calls from the Canadian Police Association requesting contributions. They won’t take no for an answer. These calls have upset her.
My wife on Feb 2, 2015 intercepted one of these calls, confronted the operator and extracted a promise to make no more calls to 613-272-2***. Today in the mail, dated Feb 2, 2015, was a colourful demand for payment of a pledge for $50.00, entitled “Bullying in Schools.” The irony of the letter did not amuse.
I made a number of attempts to penetrate the telephone fortress but was unable to contact an operator at the Canadian Police Association.
Please consider this note your notification that on behalf of Mrs. Croskery I will not be honouring pledge #492***61, and you should be ashamed of a business model which condones this kind of harassment.
Sincerely,
Rod Croskery, M.Ed.
UPDATE 20 August, 2015
Definitely a scam. Another automated call came at mealtime today. I answered and after a delay a male with an Indian accent went into his spiel about Mom’s previous donations. I unloaded on the guy pretty well. My accusation of harassment of an Alzheimer’s sufferer meant nothing to him. Only when I told him that my mother no longer lives here did he apologize and hang up.
According to the Internet, the Canadian Police Association is a lobby group with Conservative ties. It seems its fundraising is subcontracted offshore as well, and preying upon the elderly is its standard practice.
A plague on them.
Auntie, Auntie, I Over
March 2, 2015
The time had come for the annual game of “Auntie, Auntie, I Over” but the acoustics are such around our house that players routinely shout themselves hoarse, so this time we resolved to put our cell phones to good use.
The game reached a successful conclusion on its fourth round of play after Bet gave me a nosebleed in the second, but not in the way one might expect.
This traditional sport was generally staged over the ridge-cap of a one-room country school with the whole cohort involved in a great game of catch and tag. Only three participants were available at our house today, and we put the dog inside for fear of tangled lines, but it turned out it was Bet who put her foot on the rope she was attempting to throw.
You see the child’s game has evolved into a mixed-skills team effort to position a heating strip over the edge of the roof on our house in order to burn a trough down through a huge accumulation of ice before a thaw turned it into a dam capable of flooding interior walls.
The brick house generously dumps almost half of its snow onto the end of the stone house, itself with a complex roofline, so by this time of year there’s quite a bit of ice up there.
My dad’s approach was to risk life and limb on a ladder with an axe, the occasion of many repairs to that section of roof over the years. Dad wasn’t as steady with the axe as he pretended to be. Over a generation I watched this annual procedure and decided to do the thing from the ground.
I originally started this game by tying to the line of my fishing rod a substantial iron nut from one of the tin cans full of them in the garage. Then I lobbed a tall cast over the house, taking care to miss the chimney, upright sewer pipe, and three dormers on the south side. At the time there were no trees to obstruct the cast. Someone would tie a sturdy mason’s cord to the fishing line for strength, and I would reel it in while spotters screamed instructions back and forth. For some reason you can’t hear over or around our house. The mason’s cord would pull back over the ridgecap a ¼” nylon rope with the 10’ heating strip firmly taped to it.
These hardware-store strips have thermostats to keep exposed pipes from freezing, but I have found they’re pretty good at melting their way through ice dams, as well. I securely tape a long extension cord to the heating strip temporarily anchored to the railing on the verandah on the back side of the house by the 1/4″ yellow rope. Once the tape and attached power cord are moved to the optimum position and final adjustments to the anchor rope are complete, it’s good for another spring thaw, shutting itself off as the temperature rises. Horrific icicles forming on the extension cord haven’t seemed to hinder the system’s operation.
This cockamamie arrangement has gone well for quite a few years. For the last two mild winters it hasn’t been needed. In the interim the rear stairs off the deck have become unusable from age, and what used to be a tiny maple tree has had a growth spurt, both events complicating the procedure somewhat.
For the last ten years we must have been on an incredible run of beginner’s luck, because today everything went wrong.
The vanquisher of countless bass over many years (and last summer’s sockeye salmon), my trusty Shimano Calcutta 250 reel wouldn’t retrieve when I dug it out of the boat’s rod locker. I needed its sturdy 30 lb test line for this exercise, but decided to try its lighter locker-mate, a Calcutta 150 with 20 lb test.
My first cast was crisp and accurate. Unfortunately I had overshot with the hook/bolt/artificial worm combination and the trinket ended up dangling 4’ off the ground at the foot of a 30’ maple tree which has grown up beside the deck over the years.
I had bought a reel of mason’s cord at Princess Auto on impulse some months before. In a half-hour or so I had located it on my bench and pressed it into service. I envisaged Bet allowing the neat spool with its swivel handle to backlash when I pulled the cord through the foliage of the tree from the other side of the house, so I asked her to walk down the hill on a snowmobile trail until about sixty feet of line had unraveled.
This, of course, was so interesting to the dog that she flat-out refused to come into the house with me and had to be dragged in by leash. Taffy is definitely Bet’s dog.
So I doubled it around to the front of the house and started to crank the reel. But the nut/fish-hook/artificial worm caught on a fork in the maple tree and the line broke. So much for 20 lb. test for this job.
Back to the house while I repaired the heavier reel, then another Auntie, Auntie, over the roof, and the game began anew. This time the new weight landed on the deck, so we needed the mason’s cord up there, ten feet above where it was on a snowmobile track about thirty feet from the house. I asked Bet to throw it up to me and I’d catch it.
First try she threw short. I should specify that Bet makes a throw like this first by removing her mitts, then her trapper hat, adjusts her hair out of her eyes, then gingerly approaches the edge of the snowmobile track until she falls into the knee-deep snow, then fixes her face in a rage of concentration, pivots her entire being, and launches a sidearm throw.
The anticipation gets pretty funny. On the second throw when she discovered that she had been standing on a loop of the line, I nearly burst, but I couldn’t show any mirth because I needed her to get the line to the deck.
Next throw was perfect but I had gloves on and missed the weight, and then allowed the line to slide off my dumb fingers while I gazed at the errant spool. On went the hat and mitts. In came the line. Bet prepared again.
When her hat came off this time I could see the steam rising. She threw. I missed again.
I couldn’t hold back any longer. Sagging helplessly over the rickety railing, I burst out laughing. Joyful at the release of tension, my nose began to spurt blood as well.
This time Bet forgot all about hat and mitts. She gathered up the string and the spool and threw the thing over the railing with a heave of perfect ferocity, turned and stamped up the trail to the front of the house. I tied the string to the heavier line and Bet began to wind. After a few minutes she stuck her head out the back door to see if she should wind it any more. Nothing had moved. The reel was misbehaving again, refusing to engage the spool.
A few repairs and it got back to work. I reeled and Bet directed the line up, over the roof, and down to my waiting yellow ¼” rope. I tied on and traded places with Bet, warning her not to let the heating strip make it out of reach up the side of the house.
Things were going very well until the rope/cord joint broke right at the edge of the dormer, ten feet from my grasp. Crappy cheap cord. Why didn’t I buy brand name cord instead of junk?
Back to the drawing board. Repeated everything. This time we pulled the cord from the front of the house to the back to avoid the dormer trap. It worked fine except the cord hung up on a piece of ice on the north side. I’d had enough bad luck today, so I tied off the cord, stomped through the house, grabbed the rope from the side and gave it a judicious tug. The ice protrusion broke with a sound rather like a front tooth snapping off, leaving the rig free to continue its journey up the roof.
We actually used the cell phones to pull the heating cable the last couple of feet into position.
“Are you there?”
“Yes.
“Can you hear me? WHOA!
“You’d better come and look at this.”
The cable was in place. I taped the extension cord to it, plugged it in, and concluded our game of “Auntie Auntie I Over.”
Next year I hope to have a roof over a new deck. That should make the game even more satisfyingly complex.
UPDATE, 16 March, 2015
The tape did its job perfectly, consuming 10.6 KWH* in the process of de-icing our roof for another year.
*I found this cool little meter online.
UPDATE, 30 March, 2019
Our electrician friend read this account and decided that enough was enough. When we built the new deck and added a roof, he showed up with 90′ of proper roof-heating cable and installed it, complete with a switch beside the back door. It draws 600 watts, but only needs to be used about 48 hours per year, so the massive energy cost which had held me back for years turned out to be illusory.
Great Lakes Ice Coverage Records
February 20, 2015
For those of you who like to use meta data in formulating your ice-out predictions, here is a bit of climate geography courtesy of Tom Stutzman.
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/res/glcfs/compare_years/compare_years_o.html
The Tyee article: McCarthyism in Canada?
February 16, 2015
Dimitri Soudas as Enigma
February 12, 2015
In the mind of the media Dimitri Soudas has become Trudeau’s captured Enigma machine.
Information derived from cracking the Enigma code (when Germany didn’t know it) won Churchill the war. Of course the Harper camp is fully aware of the Dimitrieve situation, so Trudeau’s main tactical advantage will likely lie in the amount of effort the Tories have to make to cover their tracks. This may well ensure that there will be no early election call, if Harper was ever thinking of one. The threat of electoral dirty tricks from the Conservative War Room may have been blunted somewhat.
The question in every political junkie’s mind is how effectively will JT use this intelligence bonanza?
Notice the subtle shift in columnists’ attitudes over the last week: the election is again Trudeau’s to lose, and Eve Adams’ previously risable attempt to win a Liberal nomination has turned into a David and Goliath battle against the towering Joe Oliver.
Eve Adams bails for Trudeau’s Camp
February 9, 2015
I just watched a live press conference where Justin Trudeau introduced the latest defector to the Liberal camp, Eve Adams. Wow! Of all of the idiotic things for a leader to do…
My first impression was that JT is nuts to let this hot potato anywhere near the LPC. But then I thought he was crazy to get into that boxing ring, too. There’s no doubt Eve Adams gets a lot of attention from TV cameras, and if she has it in for Harper, JT can continue with his sunny ways while she does the dirty work.
Trudeau has promised to take the high road, specifically not to run attack ads. But with Eve primed and ready for every camera which comes by with her story of her flight from the horrible Conservatives, he’ll have a walking, talking, free attack ad to knock Harper off message whenever he wants it. Somewhere down the road there’ll be a nomination meeting which she may or may not win.
In the meantime, ski while there’s snow, Justin.
Adams was surprisingly articulate in her dissection of income splitting this morning at the presser. If her two-minute lecture before the cameras makes it to the national news, income splitting is dead as a campaign plank.
And she’s sorta the horse’s mouth, eh?
Who knows what dirt Dimitri Soudas will dig up to help Eve along, too?
Update: 10:31 a.m.
Turns out Harper shuffled his cabinet today. Who knew? I wonder which faces will be above the fold in tomorrow’s papers, Harper, Poilievre and Kenney or Trudeau and Adams?
Saint Mary’s University advertising
February 9, 2015
Everywhere I look on the Internet and Canadian TV these days I am inundated with advertisements for Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. This seems increasingly strange because St. Mary’s is a small school. Why are they funneling so much of their limited resources into advertising?
Google quickly put me onto last fall’s viral frosh-week video in which a group of students performed what became known as the rape chant.
Oh. Crisis control in this case apparently involves burying that ugly story under an avalanche of ads touting the excellent career opportunites which come with your degree from St. Mary’s. Perhaps they don’t want any more parchments mailed back to them by offended graduates.
If I were an administrator at St. Mary’s I would probably try the same tactic. After all, a university is dead without applicants for next semester.
But my issue has to do with the look and feel of the ads. I find it hard to distinguish them from the current round of publicly funded government propaganda ads masquerading as apprenticeship program announcements. The look and feel of the St. Mary’s and the PMO ads closely resemble each other. Both programs attempt to inspire the same sort of hope for a prosperous future.
Both also seem designed to pave over serious credibility gaps and are best not examined too closely.
the Walnut Diary 