Never Rob A Bank Without A Plan

This is my Christmas tree. A bit like the living things it is a twisted simulacrum of, this zip-tied concatenation of impulse and panic buys came into being organically.

I haven't decorated my home for Christmas for the past two years. There was no need. We were going away for the holidays and no one was coming over. I'm long since past the uplift I used to feel as a kid when my sisters and I rummaged through the boxes in the basement to find the ornaments we'd put away the year before. So, unless there are witnesses, I give Christmas decorations a pass. 

But, this year we are holding an event between Christmas day and New Years, so I set myself the task of figuring out what to do to make the premises more festive.

I had no plan, just one principle: no freshly-sacrificed conifer would cross my threshold. The title to this post is good advice (as is "never use your tongue to stop a fan"). It applies to holiday decorations, too.

I started my journey at the Loblaws in Maple Leaf Gardens. I was thinking more about the food for the event than the decoration but as I wandered around disoriented and slightly panicking, I saw large packages of reasonably priced and attractive Christmas crackers (the ones you pull apart and find a paper hat in - not the kind you eat). I thought I would come back in a few days and pick some of those up. Then I remembered what has happened every time I have ever had such a thought.

Fully panicked, I grabbed a couple of boxes with more than twenty crackers, and fled to the check out. "And what am I going to do with these?" I wondered as I walked home.

Almost immediately came the notion to make them into the Christmas tree. I bounced this idea off of Bruce, who at least half listens when I'm talking. "Sounds good," he said, as he would have had I told him I wanted to make the tree out of killer bees.

Heartened by my husband's strong endorsement, my next errant thought was that I needed an armature for the tree, meaning the next logical step was Canadian Tire.

Scouring the pawed-over-looking contents of the shelves of the Christmas section at CT, I found a tall, skinny, silver-snowflake-covered tree-like thing, advertised as a table top decoration. It was on sale for half price.

When I got it home, I discovered that it was in fact two trees, with a smaller, skinnier one tucked inside the other. I jammed the small one on top of the bigger one, and, voila, a pretty tall, pretty ugly tree-shape just begging to be obscured by something more attractive.

I had my armature. I had twenty-four Christmas crackers. What's next?

Two pieces of equipment I have never trusted myself with are a chain saw and a glue gun, which is too bad, because the latter would have come in handy at this point. My fall back is zip ties, those cleverly engineered strips of plastic good for so many uses including restraining prisoners and, this time, attaching festive Christmas crackers to a plug ugly sparkly cone.

Were this actually a project that I'd found in the pages of a glossy magazine, I would have had detailed instructions in 8-point type toward the back to follow, and a pattern showing how to start at the bottom of the tree and work up, spacing the crackers on one level so there was room for the crackers on the next level to nestle attractively above 'em.

Without those instructions, I know only in retrospect, having learned from my mistakes, that that would have been the right way to do it.

Instead, the final result is as illustrated above, a seeming collaboration between Dr. Seuss and an angry toddler. 

My guests will be invited to demolish the tree cracker by cracker. Should be fun.

Happy Holidays!

Karen

Don't Peak Too Soon

Timing matters.  

I got my flu shot on November 20, which turned out to be three or four days after a flu bug worked its way into my unsuspecting system. So, while my upper arm was still sore at the injection site, I felt the first stirrings - the unmistakeable sore throat - of a flu that would ultimately lay me low for two weeks.

I ruminated on the irony of a flu shot taken a week too late and whiled away time on my sick bed watching some not-very-recent movies.

One was Spellbound, a 2002 movie about eight young people competing in the 1999 National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. That was such a long time ago, and the group of young contestants so interesting, that there are a few "where are they now" sites, the most recent from 2010. That site notes that one of the contestants died young, in 2007, although you can still read his blog here. 

Sad. And creepy.

The other movie I watched was Grizzly Man, a 2005 documentary by Werner Herzog built around footage shot by Timothy Treadwell, the forty-something Californian who got himself eaten by a grizzly bear after several years of hanging around with them for a few months each year, taking amazing videos. 

You don't need to watch the footage Timothy shot of himself for very long before your mind strays to the hard-to-shake notion that he was a bit crazy. Or at least delusional. He said he was there on his wilderness sojourns to "protect" the bears, in the same way, I suppose, that a barnyard chicken "protects" the farmer - and the farmer weighs 800 pounds, stands seven feet high on his hind legs and has four-inch-long claws. 

I wondered how Treadwell could be both so accomplished and so like a little kid. He camped alone (except for the last year) in the wilderness of an Alaskan wildlife refuge with bear-proof canisters of meagre provisions, an astonishing high tech tent that may have collapsed during a torrential downpour but did not leak a bit, sophisticated video equipment that he used with great skill and... his teddy bear from when he was a little boy. 

Sad. And creepy.

**********************************************************

While I was sick, I also read a book sent to me by my dear friend Kate about a thirty-six-year-old woman who had also perhaps peaked too soon, but who got the chance after she'd lost her job to pursue her dream of learning to cook at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.

The author, Kathleen Flinn, made me think about the fine points of preparing a meal. Her story also cured me of any notion that I might want to go to Cordon Bleu one day.

The way I see it, my chopping technique may not be all that accomplished, but it gets the job done.

Have a great week!

Karen






  

  

Bicycles

Because I had decided not to wash my hair yesterday before I stepped out to go grocery shopping, I was stopped by a CityTV news guy with a giant camera on his shoulder at the corner of Jarvis and Carlton streets.

He wanted to ask me some questions about the Jarvis Street bike lane, the painted line demarking which had been, under protest, removed the week before.

But it was Saturday morning, for heaven's sake, and I hadn't washed my hair, so, while I did not refuse to answer questions under the glare of the big, empty-eyed camera, I struggled for something not stupid to say.

My mind went instantly to the construction of the bike lane on Sherbourne Street, but that seemed off topic. The racing electrical pulses in my brain then took me to the conversation I'd had earlier in the week with a colleague who lives on Jarvis Street and who had witnessed the protesters sitting in the path of the City vehicle specially designed to remove paint stripes from roads.

She said that the Sherbourne lane - which I had offered up in our conversation as a fair trade off - was not the answer. "There should be bike lanes everywhere," she said, making a solidly irrefutable point.

So I said to the man behind the camera, whose face I could barely see, that I thought there should be bike lanes everywhere. 

He then asked me about the drivers. At that point my struggle truly began. I blathered something about the ridiculousness of worrying about a minute or two added to a commute that could be made in any case in about ten minutes on the subway and it was too bad it was a political decision and fuel is getting more expensive every day and did I mention that I thought there should be bike lanes everywhere.

I felt like an idiot.

He let me go then, and I went on to do my shopping.

I didn't give the interview another thought until I'd finished my shopping and was on my way back home. A guy on an electric bike, riding on the sidewalk, had his vehicle barely enough under control to narrowly miss me and stop right in front of me as I walked up to the fateful corner of Jarvis and Carlton. I looked him in the eye and said, in an even tone of voice, "You're a menace, you know that?"  

The cyclist then advised me to do something both pleasant but inappropriate in public. I thanked him for his kind advice and encouraged him to do the same.

And then the best answer to the camera-guy's question about the bike lanes occurred to me: "I'm fully in favour of anything that will keep cyclists off the sidewalk."  

*************************************************************

The Sherbourne Street bike heaven was supposed to have been completed before the Jarvis lanes were removed.

But it's less than half done:

So share the road, folks, and have a great week!

Karen

My Finite and Fleeting Lifetime

We all know our days are numbered. Here's a couple of paragraphs on how I've spent the last seven.

Complicated Versus Complex

In a calculated move to suck up to my boss's boss, I volunteered to work on something called "Polivery" (apologies; I will explain later), which is a day-long conference held every year or so, organized by the Ontario government's Cabinet Office, for the purpose of firing up the minds and imaginations of a couple of hundred Ontario public servants.

This year, the event had to be done on the super cheap, which meant most of the speakers were local (no travel costs to reimburse) and most of them generously waived their fee.

The keynote speaker was David Weiss. He's written a book called Innovative Intelligence and he shared some of the concepts in it with the 250 middle-management level bureaucrats gathered. He's a terrific speaker and his talk was full of great stuff, but the part that clung tightest to my forgetful middle-aged brain was the difference he described between complicated problems and complex problems.

Complicated problems have many parts and processes. They need to be simplified and organized. So, building a shoe factory is a complicated problem. The thinking most appropriate for complicated problems is to leverage existing expertise to develop a common solution that simplifies and solves the complicated problem. For the shoe factory, you convene a couple of experts who have built factories before and off you go.

Complex problems are ambiguous, possibly unique, and probably involve a lot of different interests. So, ensuring everyone has a pair of shoes is a complex problem. The approach most appropriate for complex problems requires innovative thinking to deal with the ambiguity, and to gain insight into the complexity. Usually you can't limit the discussion to just a few experts, for the perhaps obvious reason that, since this is a new problem, there likely are no real experts. Instead, you ask the people involved to share their knowledge and perspective and from that discussion, the picture emerges of what the problem actually is. From there, the problem can transform into one that is merely complicated and off you go.

A very common error, said Mr. Weiss, occurs when people treat a complex problem as if it were complicated. He said, "For every complex problem, there is a simple, elegant complicated solution that is dead wrong." 

Dead wrong complicated solutions to complex problems would be along the lines of adding more police to the municipal force to deal with the urban gang problem, or using the rules and concepts of the market to solve the problem of climate change.  

And, At the Very Opposite End of the Spectrum

I have stumbled upon and invited into my life a video game based on the Simpsons called Tapped Out.  This frightful time-sucker has extensive presence on the Internet, with its own Facebook page, a fan page, numerous hack posts and, according to the unreliable source that is the game's creator, millions and millions of players.  

I really can't say more about this because I have to log on to my Springfield and see what's going on.

No actual picture this week, but I hope the many links are diverting and amusing.

Have a great week!

Karen

Oh. Right. "Polivery" is the word you get when you squish "policy" and "delivery" together into one word. I could go into more detail, but why on earth would I do that.

Mostly About Trees

Many, many years ago, back in the day when the man-made, world-as-we-know-it-ending pin prick of anxiety in the back of my head was nuclear war, I worried about the sad things that mutually assured destruction would bring. I recall feeling especially bad for trees (go figure).  

Trees, particularly if that is where we came from, seem to be a necessary precondition to human thriving. Trees provide shade, fruits, nuts, spice, building materials and small mammals and birds to skin or pluck and eat. Cultural and religious images frequently include trees. The Buddha sat under one.  Christ was crucified on a wooden cross. Newton sat under a tree so a falling apple could give him the notion of gravity. Adam and Eve also discovered something important in the vicinity of an apple tree. George Washington allegedly chopped down a cherry tree. 

We call it a tree of knowledge. We have family trees. To feel homey, snug, safe and warm, we burn trees.        

Were you to ask me if, of all the trees in the Allan Gardens, I had a favourite, I would say yes I do. It's the graceful, 100-plus year-old sycamore growing just east of the greenhouse and just south of where all the walkways meet:

Were you to ask me if I was dismayed by the toll building bike heaven is taking on the trees in front of my home, I would also say yes. Two tiny chestnuts less than 10 years old and one very big maple easily more than fifty years old have had their roots cut back and abutted by concrete. I assume the chestnuts will be dead by spring and the maple by this time next year, at which point it will become a hazard and will have to be cut down.

Some readers may recall my observation that big trees next to the sewer project excavation in the Allan Gardens were protected by boards made of the flesh of less fortunate trees. Readers may also recall my ongoing interest in the murals painted on those boards. And now, in the wake of Sandy, the wind has declared supremacy over both art and trees.

Half of the panels of the north-east facing mural have been blown away: 

And Sandy felled two old trees in one big blow. 

On Sunday a City of Toronto worker carved up and took away most of the two trees. 

I chatted with him briefly.  He said it was sad to lose the two trees - the big one was 125 years old - but they'd come by and plant two more.  I said, sure, and in a hundred years or so, it'll be just like it was.  

I was just making conversation, of course.  The disturbances my neighbourhood saw because of Sandy are nothing compared to other events in Toronto let alone the eastern United States.  Some things are never again going to be what they were.

Now the man-made, world-as-we-know-it-ending pin prick of anxiety in the back of my head is climate change.  But this problem doesn't come like nuclear war did with a handy enemy to hold in a balance of mutually assured destruction.  Climate change proposes to us nice people who do good things and who just want to live a good life, that we have to rethink how we do that. We'll either figure it out for ourselves, or the world will do it for us.

Have a great week!

Karen

The Things They Don't Tell You

Because this is Canada, and, more to the point, because this is Toronto, raging civic debates are about  things like bike lanes and plastic bags instead of religion or race.

But, while the topics may be mild the rage is very real.

Take, for example, the current kerfuffle about the Jarvis Street and Sherbourne Street bike lanes. During the watch of our previous not-all-that-insane mayor David Miller, a five-lane in-city highway -- Jarvis Street -- connecting the tony north-of-Bloor neighbourhoods with the bank tower canyons downtown was renovated to lose one car lane and add north- and southbound bike lanes. The tony people who live in those north-of-Bloor neighbourhoods and who work in the bank towers were outraged at the loss of the car lane because it added, oh, a minute or so to their commute.

Rob Ford, our current, not-all-that-sane mayor promised in his election campaign that he would destroy the Jarvis bike lanes, a promise he has still not quite kept, but the plans are afoot.

One foot of that plan is to renovate about ten blocks of Sherbourne Street into bike heaven, with the niftiest kind of biking environment imaginable, as you can see here.

Sherbourne and Jarvis run parallel to one another, are only one block apart and both connect the nice north-of-Bloor regions with the concrete core, so from a perspective of providing a reasonable alternative to the Jarvis lanes -- if you are inclined to mollify the well-heeled -- you could do worse than Sherbourne Street.

Unless, of course, you are a Toronto bike rider. Then the switch to Sherbourne and its nice raised biking spaces (the lanes on Jarvis are just paint on the road) is a travesty unparalleled in history. In the meantime, motorists of all stripes are complaining about the construction congestion on both Jarvis and Sherbourne Streets.  

As a pedestrian, and a resident of Sherbourne Street, I find myself short of compassion for either side. My neighbours and I have thrown our own little fits over the loss of street parking on our stretch of Sherbourne and over the stunning new restrictions on access to our own properties. But I'm also sure the bike lanes will calm traffic on Sherbourne, diverting a lot of the heavy trucks and buses to Jarvis. Most of all, the bike lane construction plan includes the complete resurfacing of our street, a civic project overdue these past ten years or so. The cracks and potholes on Sherbourne are the stuff of city legend and it will be good to put that behind us.

But, just when you think you understand a situation something unexpected comes along:

No one mentioned Sherbourne would be shredded right to my doorstep, so this came as a bit of a surprise.  

Work crews are quickly filling these excavations with concrete.  Next week's picture: Bike Heaven.

Have a great week!

Karen

It's That Time of Year Again

It's mid-to-late October, which must mean that the United Way workplace campaign is underway.

In the years since I joined the Ministry of the Environment in 2006, I have, for the United Way, climbed the stairs of the CN tower twice (raising more than $3,500), co-chaired the campaign for 2009 (that raised $154,000), organized a fund-raising event where three lucky winners got to put a cream pie in the face of a high-profile apparatchik from the Deputy Minister's Office ($900) and last year, I promised to feed a colleague one lunch for every $10 people contributed to the United Way. The colleague in question was famous for standing in the middle of the kitchen, forking sardines into his mouth straight from the can. That raised $240. My colleague ate pretty well for five weeks and the rest of us were spared for that time the spectacle of fork-borne sardines disappearing into a deep, dark hole.

This year, the workplace has been a bit unsettled for a campaign. First there was some labour unrest. My staff were first supporting, and then, after the negotiators offered it up to them to read, largely opposing a proposed new labour contract with the provincial government (which, this past week, was ratified anyway).  

And, second, suddenly and without warning, the Premier resigned.  

It is one of the great notions of our democracy that a head of state can quit his job and ... nothing happens. Business proceeds as usual and (if) the trains (were anything but VIA, they would) continue to run on time.

But the United Way campaign has suffered. People respond to uncertainty by holding more fast to what they have.   

One thing that seems to loosen that grip a bit is, of course, food. We raised $250 on Friday by inviting people to cough up seven bucks and then sample from ten different homemade soups. I contributed Italian Wedding Soup.

The other thing that will inspire people to donate is impressive but pointless acts of physical endurance, such as the aforementioned climbing of the CN Tower. Even as I write (which is about 24 hours before you'll receive notice of this post), Ministry teams are lined up and waiting for their turn to sprint/step/hurl themselves up the stairs. 

The web site to collect donations is now closed. The MOE Empower Rangers, thanks to the enthusiastic support of many sponsors, and especially the Clark sisters, met their fundraising goal.  

************************************************************
One more note about the dog. As silly as it sounds - and I have heard myself say this to several people over the past while - I think Bruce and I are coming out of our mourning period for Molly.

The signs that this is so are that we have started seeing people again and, as related two weeks ago, we finally found the strength to give the dog's stuff away.

I have also begun posting on the blog I created in 2008 (and left empty for four years) called Molly-the-Dog. There's only one post there so far, and one picture:

You can see it again here.   
And have a great week!

Karen

Five Years of Work in Less Than 500 Words

A couple of news outlets, including the CBC, picked up on a little story that broke toward the end of the day on Thursday, October 11.  It went like this:

Lake Louise – October 11, 2012 – Federal, provincial and territorial Environment Ministers are taking further action to protect the health of Canadians and the environment with measures to improve air quality in Canada, through a comprehensive new Air Quality Management System (AQMS). A flexible approach to implementation will assist jurisdictions to ensure good air quality outcomes while maintaining competitiveness in all regions of Canada.

“There is nothing more fundamental to Canadians than clean air,” said Diana McQueen, Alberta’s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development. “The AQMS builds on measures that jurisdictions already have in place, and helps to align the actions of federal, provincial and territorial governments to deal with air quality issues.”

“The System is the result of unprecedented collaboration by governments and stakeholders over the past five years,” said McQueen, who hosted her colleagues at the annual CCME meeting. “We’re grateful for the contributions made by the hundreds of stakeholders who participated in this ground-breaking work.”


The AQMS includes:

• Standards to set the bar for outdoor air quality management across the country; 
• Industrial emission requirements that set a base level of performance for major industries in Canada;
• A framework for air zone management within provinces and territories that enables action tailored to specific sources of air emissions in a given area
• Regional airsheds that facilitate coordinated action when air pollution crosses a border; and
• An intergovernmental working group to improve collaboration and develop a plan to reduce emissions from the transportation sector.
 


Governments have agreed on new standards under the AQMS for fine particulate matter and ozone, the two main components of smog. Work has also begun on new standards for sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which are significant components of air pollution.

There's more to the announcement than this, but you get the idea.

Or, maybe not.  In the five years that I've worked on the AQMS I have learned that "air quality" is a concept people do get in that they breathe air and would prefer that it be of the highest quality.  And it's a concept they don't get when some pointy-headed official like me starts gassing on about micrograms per cubic metre and the difference between emission standards and ambient standards.

For my work, in cases where comprehension is important, I write Qs & As to help everyone understand each other.  I think I can do this in one:

Q: What the heck is AQMS and why does it matter?

A: AQMS in its essence is the common-sensical agreement by governments that they will stop passing the ball (of controlling air pollution) back and forth between them and will start to work together instead.  It matters because we need air to live.

There you go.

Here's a link to a blog with many lovely pictures of Lake Louise where the momentous achievement in common sense took place.

Have a great week!

Karen

Mastery ✣ Autonomy ✣ Purpose

I'm going to start with another video, one a career counsellor pointed me to.  It's about 11 minutes long, which exceeds most people's patience for these things, I know, but it features clever animation and a telling observation of how the Federal Reserve is a hotbed of leftist ideology. You can find it here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

In an earlier version of this post, I somehow managed to create a Venn diagram of the video's three main motivators: mastery, autonomy and purpose. However, that pretty graphic has disappeared into the failed-to-blogosphere. 

So imagine if you will a Venn diagram and read on.  


I think more highly of these clever theories if I can find a practical link to my own experience.  

I can think of lots of things that I'm pretty good at that have no purpose: playing Angry Birds for instance.

Purposeful things I'm good at but where I have little autonomy: that would be my day job.

Where there's a purpose, but little autonomy or mastery: yoga maybe.

And where the circles all intersect, what do I get to do that is all of purposeful, autonomous and masterful?  I can think of three: sleeping, eating and cooking.

All you Canadians have a happy Thanksgiving!

And have a great week!