Land Of Ice And Snow

Photo credit: Alfred Ng

Our small corner of Sherbourne Street survived the ice storm almost completely unscathed. We never lost power. The one small casualty was a teeny fuse in the adapter on the power cord to our modem. Surges that made it past the surge "protector" fried the poor little thing, leaving us bereft of wifi for about two days.

The Christmas miracle in our household was the prompt, cheerful, helpful service we got from Bell Canada in the face of our small crisis. Along with my wifi, my faith in humanity is restored.

Per the photo above, taken by local artist and photographer Alfred Ng, some trees in the Allan Gardens fell apart under the weight of the ice. Based on my count as I walked through the gardens the morning after the storm, somewhere between two and three dozen photographers recorded the casualties.

As sad as we were about the fate of some of the nice old trees in the Gardens, we were most interested in the seventy-foot-tall honey locusts in our back yard.

Photo Credit: CBC

But they were well trimmed and protected from the wind, so hardly a single branch fell.

We were very fortunate indeed. I wish even greater measures of luck to my subscribers for the balance of 2013 and all of 2014.

Happy New Year!

Thanks for reading.

Karen 

  

Solstice

It's 21 December, the shortest day of the year. 

Coming up next will be, for me, the longest week of the year with lots of things to do to feed various hordes of people and make the place look festive.

I offer for this week's post a re-run from February 2010, a reminder that there are connections among us we may not see, but that come in handy when you're doing your taxes.

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On Monday night Bruce, our friend Angie and I were heading home for a nightcap after a nice meal out. We were down by the St. Lawrence Market on Front Street. We'd just turned the corner onto George Street. It was dark, cold and I was hunched inside my winter coat.

In the darkness, on the street, I thought I saw something in the gutter that struck me as strange. I was walking briskly along, so I was already twenty feet past the thing when I thought, "What was that? Was that a face??"

Had I seen a face in the gutter? "That's not right," I thought. So I stopped, turned on my heel and went back to see. Bruce and Angela weren't immediately aware that I’d broken ranks and were wandering away in the other direction on the sidewalk.

They realised I wasn't with them about the same time I got back to the strange thing in the gutter. It was a face. Betty Boop's to be exact. It was a beaded change purse. I picked it up.

Angie said "Ewwwww, what are you picking up out of the gutter?" 

My answer, when I'd had a better look was, "Credit cards, health card... all kinds of stuff."

I decided to take the purse home and see if I could contact the owner. Once home, I got online and reverse searched the address on the owner's driver's license to get her phone number. I called and got her answering machine, but she picked up after I'd explained why I was calling.

"You've got to be kidding," she said. When I'd convinced her that I really had no other reason to just call her up, she said she'd be right by to pick it up. I gave her my address and told her I'd be waiting for her.

Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door. The owner had come with her partner, just in case, I assume. The purse had simply fallen out of her pocket after she'd run some errands on George Street. It was handy I'd found it because she was flying out to Ireland the following day, and it would have been very hard to manage without her credit cards.

I gave her the purse. She offered me a reward. I said "thanks, but there's no need. Why don't you give the money to the food bank or something?" She said she'd do that. I wished her a nice trip, closed the door and they went away.

That's the first story about how oddly things align sometimes. Now for the second.

On Tuesday night, I took my first crack at my tax return. Every year when I do my taxes online, I write down my user name so I won't forget for the next year... and then I forget where I wrote it down.

I forgot this year, of course, and requested the online system to e-mail me my user name.

When I hit the "Send/Receive" button on my e-mail so I could retrieve my user name and do my taxes, I noted, to my dismay, that I was about to receive more than 3,000 e-mails.

This happens sometimes with Bell. Some glitch in the system tags every e-mail in my account on their server as undelivered, so the server tries to send thousands of messages at one time. Because it can never send them all successfully, every time I contact the server the system tries to send them all again. Long and short of it, after several attempts to clear the glitch I had over 9,000 "unread" messages in my inbox, but still didn't have my user name to do my taxes.

Bell, for its part, provides only the appearance of customer service. They encourage you to call their "24/7" technical support line so that you can hear the recorded message that their offices are now closed. They want you to log onto their live chat service so you can sit for twenty minutes staring at a message that says you're second in line and need wait only one more minute. They provide numerous means to send them e-mail messages so they can ignore them all.

This was driving me crazy. I couldn't get any e-mail because Bell kept trying to send me every e-mail I'd ever been sent for the past three years.  No one at Bell was going to help me.  And I didn't know how to solve the problem.

Then, on Thursday morning when the alarm went off, I got out of bed, put on my slippers, walked down the stairs to the "office", turned on my computer, logged onto the internet, and Googled "Bell Mail." When I got to the Bell Mail site, I logged onto my account. There they were - 3,442 e-mails - with a helpful message from Bell that I had "storage issues." I wiped all the old e-mails off the system and, when I called up my Outlook e-mail and hit "Send/Receive" I got only those e-mails sent to me since Tuesday. Problem solved. Now I get to do my taxes (hooray!).

But how did I know how to do this? Bruce suggested that I had done some "good thinking," but I assured him I had not been "thinking" at all. I'm not sure I was even entirely awake.

What made me take another look in the gutter on Monday night? What "tech support for the collective unconscious" told me what to do on Thursday morning? 

Beats the holy heck out of me. But I really hope that lady makes that donation to the food bank.

Thanks for reading! Have a safe and happy holiday!

The Real Me

First things first. For the information of subscribers for whom I do not have a current e-mail address and who are looking for something fun to do over the holidays, you are invited to:

Bruce and Karen's 

"Stay in Shape for the Holidays"*

Festive Season Open House

Where: #2 - 280 Sherbourne Street, Toronto

When: Sunday December 29, 2-6 p.m.

*The "Stay in Shape" theme has a lot of people quite worried but there is no cause for alarm. All we mean by it is that you can drop by and, between Christmas and New Years, keep your eating and drinking skills honed.

It's quiet at the office this time of year. The legislature has risen, inducing diminished anxiety levels above my head so the frenzy of e-mails and phone calls has all but stopped. Many people have taken their vacations before the winter break so the hallways are comparatively clear of scurrying bureaucrats looking to give me and my team more work.

The usual austerity measures (at least for those of us who don't work for the local power authority) apply, so, while we have fewer pressures on our time, the team still needs to have holiday season fun on the cheap.

This week we did this by sharing profiles of ourselves featuring avatars from South Park, Mad Men and other applications (I note in passing that the only term in current English to have fallen further from its original meaning than icon is avatar). 

As the only true baby boomer left on the staff, I eschewed South Park and explored my options on Mad Men. Here's how it turned out:

But, everyone else's South Park avatars were so funny, I have decided to give it a try.

I hope to see everyone at my party. Who knows, I might even get a hair cut.

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Range Anxiety

For the second week in a row, I was away from the office for two days in a row in order to co-chair a multi-jurisdictional meeting.

This time it was in Montreal, and government officials from across the country (except for the ones grounded by travel restrictions: they participated by webinar) were talking about what we call "mobile sources." This was our topic of discussion, because, on the air quality and climate change front, internal combustion engines are the final frontier.

If we could just figure out how to get from point A to point B without also destroying the planet, the problem would be solved (so long as we also asked China, nicely, to stop burning coal).

As tough as saving the future is, co-chairing is itself hard work. I have to really, really listen. I have to make sure the discussion serves its purpose. I have to respect the time of everyone both in the room and the large numbers of people on the phone.

Because I'm paying such close attention most of the time, there is one thing that really stands out from my perspective at the head of the table: people falling asleep in their chairs. 

Canada's big, as you know, so at least one person at these meetings can be counted on to be jet lagged. Plus a lot of people don't sleep well in hotel beds. And government officials - as fine a crop of hard-working professionals as you could hope to find - can, sometimes, go on at length in soft-cornered monotones soporific as a lullaby.

The lowering eye lids, drooping heads and sudden jerks to attention start after lunch and, depending on the individual, will last a few minutes or all the way to coffee break.

In Toronto (as opposed to Montreal), people found sleeping on the job get their photo in the local news.

But, because there are probably rules about these things, I did not take a photo of the man at the Montreal airport whose job it was to scan images of x-rayed luggage and who was also very obviously falling asleep at his station.

I did, however, take some shots from my 30th floor hotel room window with my iPad.

This is the view at night. You can't see it in the still photo, but many buildings have moving pictures projected on them or are covered in LED screens blasting out giga-lumens of light pollution.

The same view in the morning.

Flow pattern paths worn in the snow around platforms of uncertain purpose next to a METRO station.

Pretty little church surrounded by big ugly buildings.

Finally, what is range anxiety and why is it the title of this post? 

"Range anxiety" is one of the phantom worries people have when thinking about electric cars. Although the average commute is 15 km and most people have never actually been in the middle of nowhere, that's where they imagine they will be when the battery dies.

I don't think about driving cars electric or otherwise, but I do worry about what two-day-long meeting I'll be co-chairing when my battery runs out and I fall asleep at the head of the table.

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen 

Ain't It The Truth

I ran into Rob Ford last week. It was while I was co-chairing two-and-a-half days worth of meetings at the centrally-located and reasonably priced Cambridge Suites Hotel on Richmond Street East in downtown Toronto. I was on a break. Everyone was going out for dinner after the meeting and I needed to find a cash machine.

Just as I stepped off the elevator on the ground floor, a short, stout, grumpy-looking guy came in through the hotel lobby doors. He was headed for the elevator. I was headed for the door and we were on a collision course. We were about a metre apart when it dawned on me who he was. I stepped out of his way and he zipped by me without so much as an "excuse me."

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All of the above two paragraphs is absolutely and completely true - except for the part about Rob Ford.  And the bit about stepping out to get some cash.

But, the passage has a certain truthiness about it.

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When I was out for dinner during my two-and-a-half days of meetings this past week, I heard the following story, the details of which I have changed to honour my pledge to the Crown while still retaining some truthiness. 

Many years ago, a senior researcher working for the Department of Ice Cream got a call from someone working for a person of high political office. The person wanted some facts from the senior researcher to use in a speech. The person said, "I need some figures showing the increase in ice-cream related deaths due to increased ice cream emissions." 

The researcher replied saying, "I can't really give you what you're looking for. It's actually the case that ice-cream-related deaths are decreasing because ice cream emissions are going down, and have been for some years now."

"Well," said the person working for the high-ranking politico, "It doesn't have to be true."

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When not at meetings for half my work week, I am leading my team on a search for truthiness. 

I have this project now because some criticisms have arisen in the press about a long-standing program. The powers that be (PTB) would like some facts to prove the criticisms are not true. 

In this case the criticisms are untrue and there is a quick and easy way to say so. 

But the PTB feel they need something with a greater ring of truthiness. So phalanxes of researchers, engineers and analysts are being marshalled to build a better factoid because the simple truth won't do.

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

It has been a bit more than two years since Molly went on to her next reward. It's true I still miss her.

  Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Wag The Dog

In the well-done satirical film Wag the Dog, Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman play characters retained by the President of the United States to help with some bad press.

To aid the president, the characters create a fake war and a fake hero. The hero they fake - played by Woody Harrelson - is an unlikely number who left to his own devices would have achieved very little. More than this, the fake hero is in fact a very sick man, and his elevation into the realm of public scrutiny threatens to take down the whole house of cards. 

Does this sound familiar?

The machine behind the Progressive Conservatives lent a big hand to the Ford campaign for Mayor three years ago. They saw in him a likeable guy with a strong popular appeal. In the fake war against the gravy train, Rob Ford was their PC hero.

Left to his own devices, it is hard to imagine that Rob could achieve leading the 6th largest government in the country. Forget the substance abuse and the anger management problems. Who else among political leaders needs his big brother to hold his hand when he talks to the CBC?

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

This post is coming to you early because, in the vale of shame where every Torontonian currently dwells, the restorative powers of volunteering have a strong appeal. I'll be up early tomorrow to help clean up the Allan Gardens. 

I leave you with a photo taken on the way to the Wheat Sheaf Tavern after our visit to the food bank last week. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Sometimes It's Good To Be Boss...

At 2:00 p.m. on Friday afternoon, fifteen comfortably dressed and well-fed-looking people walked into the Fort York Food Bank on Dundas Street West in Toronto. They looked a little out of place and some of them may have felt so. One of them walked purposefully to the back of the shop and made some enquiries. 

Before long, these fifteen people were folding eggs three at a time into newsprint sheets...

or portioning day old buns and bread loaves into bags....

or breaking down cardboard boxes...

or unpacking bags of carrots, potatoes and beets into crates...

or sorting and shelving packaged food.

The Fort York Food bank is one of the largest agencies of the Daily Bread Food Bank. It provides food and a suite of other services to the 180-200 people who walk through its doors every day.

The food the fifteen people separated, sorted and packaged for two hours will all be more-or-less gone within the next 24 hours.

This is how my exceptional team and I spent our "Branch Day." 

Thanks for reading!  Have a great week!

Karen

Jennifer?

The title of today's post is the question a young woman asked me last Saturday just after I'd stepped through the sliding glass doors to the Loblaws at Maple Leaf Gardens.

I was making my way through the mob of people who were either waiting to order something at the deli or shopping for flowers or grabbing a shopping cart or stepping onto the escalator up to the liquor store or entering or leaving the store. 

MLG Loblaws is a nice place but I think they could have spent a bit more time thinking about crowd flow.

Anyway. I step in the door, look over to see if there are any small shopping carts and the face of an absolutely not familiar-looking young woman emerges from the anonymous hubbub of the crowd. She's looking right at me, so I smile because why on earth wouldn't I. Her eyes lock onto mine. I see that she seems to recognize me. I get that much-more-frequent-these-days feeling of slight panic as I search for information in my brain to help me know who this young woman is.

My panic is completely diffused by her question "Jennifer?" and I smile more broadly. "No, not Jennifer," I say. The young woman is thunderstruck. "Oh my God," she says, "You look exactly like her."

Sadly, I failed to act on this. True dopplegangers are hard to come by and come in handy. I should have asked for Jennifer's number.

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

I flew to Washington this week. Because I persist in packing illegal-sized liquids, I have to check my luggage (and pay an additional $25 - for which I apologize to Ontario taxpayers). 

I needed to go to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the Air Quality Committee - an august body operating under the auspices of the Canada-US Air Quality Agreement. The AQA has been around for a long time and the international cooperation under it has been remarkably successful, and not just because the competition - action on climate change or protecting the Great Lakes, say - is so weak. Things are moving along so well in fact that there really wasn't much to talk about. 

The fact that we had little to say notwithstanding, I spent my 22 hours in Washington DC -- one of America's most beautiful and interesting cities -- inside one of a cab, the hotel where I was staying, or the room where the meeting was held. The only photo I took was of this card I found in my luggage:

A very polite notice -- in both official languages -- telling me that after I'd sent my bag on its way along the belt conveyor, someone with the Screening Officer Number of 5279, and with a closed circuit television as a witness, had rummaged through my luggage.

Stay safe! Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

I'd Rather Talk About Something Else, Thanks

Let's just get this out of the way now: yes, the video showing Rob Ford smoking *something* has been brought to light by virtue of the hard work and expert investigative skills of Toronto's finest. Now, if you don't mind, I'd like to turn to more pressing matters along the lines of my mother's change hoarding habits, or the privileged lives of feral cats, or what is the most popular topic on this blog: my dad.

Accupressure for Loiterers

During the Mike Harris years, a ten-story former government building on the south-east corner of the intersection of Yonge and Wellesley was converted into a condo. The street-level retail space is occupied by the bank that assures us that we're richer than we think. 

The condo conversion included cladding the building exterior with slabs of polished granite, even along the surface of the exterior ledge under the first floor windows. For many years this slick smooth ledge afforded the tired, homeless and incapacitated a place to hang out, sleep and do other things.

Recently, workmen installed bumpy metal strips on the ledge. 
  

The ledge, just after installation.

The ledge, the very next day.

More About Smelly Trees

A couple of years ago, cutting across the Allan Gardens on my way home, I smelled something truly godawful just north and west of the south-east corner of the park. I assumed that someone had taken a dump in a flower bed. The horrible stench subsided eventually and, for another year, I did not encounter it again. But, the next fall, the horrible stink came back.

Yes, I picked this ginkgo nut up to arrange this shot; yes, my hands smelled very bad.

Driven to the Internet to test a hunch about a tree growing close to the path at that end of the Gardens, I learned that the fruit of female ginkgo trees comes encased in pulpy flesh that, depending on an individual's olfactory, smells like vomit, farts, rancid butter or poo. Some people complain about this; some cities cut the trees down; in Toronto, people carefully search among the grass and fallen leaves below the trees and take the fruit - a delicacy and a medicine - home.

The Fate of the Allan Gardens Agave Spike

The stalk is gone; the glass pane repaired; the fate of the bulbils unknown. Come back in 70 years and we can talk again.

My last shot of the spike.

One week later.

Now, This Guy Probably Did Lose His Job

Around 6:00 p.m. on Thursday night, I was walking south along the highrise canyon on Bay Street just south of Wellesley. It was warm, but very windy. I could hear a loud, strange sound which I could not immediately place, but it reminded me of the noise a hoist rope makes when the wind drives it against a flag pole. It was dark, so I couldn't really place the noise, but I guessed it had something to do with the window-washing platform resting on the sidewalk at the foot of a highrise. It was an incredible racket and I wondered if anyone was going to do something about it.

Just behind the blue car: the window washing platform. You can also just barely see the rope.

The next morning I confirmed what I had supposed. Someone had lowered the window washing platform from the roof fifty stories above and left it there so that the ropes, in the high winds that blew all night, could lash against the side of the building. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Persistence of Memory

My mother made me believe from an early age that there were riches undiscovered in small change. She collected coins - as in they would come her way through everyday commerce and rather than having them move on to the next person, she would put them into piggy banks. This was one of her ways of saving money. 

Mom believed there was always the prospect that a coin both valuable and rare would find its way into pocket change. If all else failed, time would turn those thin disks of copper and silver (before 1968) into wealth untold.

In 1973, just before we moved to Trenton from our home in Edmonton, I helped mom and dad impose order on the chaos of collected coins in the house. They dumped banks full of pennies onto a card table set up in the living room and we counted and rolled, counted and rolled - sorting the pennies by the year they were minted - for what seemed like hours. 

I surprised both my parents and myself by how engrossing I found this task. They beguiled the tedium by discussing politics. And as I turned the messy piles of pennies into tidy, uniform rolls, I absorbed every word, my concentration perfectly split between their conversation and my counting to fifty.

Many years later, after Mom died, my sisters and I found some of those rolls of pennies, about fifteen dollars' worth, in a box. I took possession of the pennies and promised my sisters I would take them to someone who could tell us if there was treasure buried there.

Turns out not. Just 30 rolls of pennies that were worth quite a lot more when they were rolled than when we found them.

Nowadays banks and grocery stores have machines that will sort loose change. But I still roll my own, an idle pass time that masquerades as being productive. When I do roll the loose change that accumulates in a small dish in our home office, the trace of the memory of my parents' long ago conversation bubbles forward and I will find myself musing about present day politics. 

It's a small irony that the federal government has discontinued the penny.

The photo is of one of my mother's piggy banks. I didn't keep the pennies, but I kept one of her treasure rooms. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

The Extraction Crew News

At about 7:45 this morning, this nice group of people smiled and posed for a photo just before heading out to climb 1776 stairs in support of the United Way. Of these six, only two - me and the woman at the far left of the shot - had ever climbed before. Despite my being a veteran of two previous climbs - in 2009 and 2011 - my promise to my team was that I would take longer to climb than any of them. 

I kept my promise.  

In the photo I'm wearing the shirt I got after my very first time up the tower, with a climb time recorded on the back of 33 minutes, 26 seconds. As climb times go, it's a few minutes longer than average. Talented climbers can do the whole 144 flights in less than half of that. My former boss used to boast that he'd once done the climb in fourteen minutes. 

He doesn't do that now.

My climb time in 2011 was slower than in 2009. That t-shirt says 36 minutes and 37 seconds. 

The t-shirt from today says 33 minutes, 32 seconds.

If this inspiring story of human endurance and fussy time keeping makes you think you'd like to support the efforts of my team, you can still make a donation. Just click here. 

Oh, right. The post title. Who is the Extraction Crew? They're the group of paramedics who identified themselves on the landing of the 26th level as they radioed to another crew that two climbers had gone far enough and needed help getting out of the tower.

Good to know the Extraction Crew is on the job. Maybe I don't need to retire right away after all.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen