Seasons Greetings

The Allan Gardens greenhouse decks itself out every holiday season with poinsettias and other pretty foliage. 

In the central palm house the gardeners usually make a special display.

This year, the gardeners have made homage to Downton Abbey and The Walking Dead for an effect that is both festive and creepy. 

I wish everyone a safe and happy holiday with no zombies.

Thanks for reading! Have a Happy New Year!

Karen

... Aaand We're Back

Huaca Pucllana - At night, by the restaurant where I had guinea pig for an appetizer

Every week Air Canada runs a non-stop flight from Toronto to Lima, Peru, taking off at 5:30 in the afternoon on Saturday and landing in Lima about eight hours later on Sunday morning. Once on the ground, the plane disgorges its passengers, refuels, takes on another load of passengers and lifts off back to Toronto at 3:15 a.m.

These two flights - AC80 and AC81 - were the beginning and end points of my recent trip to COP 20, where the world met to talk and, as always, at the very last minute, pull together a document they will talk about at the next COP.

On the surface, the conversation is about climate change, reducing emissions and averting the sure disaster that will arise of we don't stop spewing C02 into the apple-skin-thin layer of breathable gases that envelopes our lovely home.

Ever so slightly below the surface rages every conceivable dispute you might imagine could arise among 190 of the world's nations. Rich versus poor. Free market versus controlled economy. Socialist versus capitalist. The whole megillah.

At this COP there was a new set of opposites: the difference between what non-state actors (provinces, regions, cities) are doing and what nations are doing. The former group are reducing emissions and still growing their economies while the  latter, with the exception of the EU, just sit around, as mentioned, and talk.

I was Ontario's "super delegate", the joke-inducing title given to provincial and territorial officials who can roam freely among the real delegates, but who can't negotiate or claim to represent the actual party to the agreement, in my case Canada.  

During the week since I returned from Lima, when asked what my trip was like, I've answered there were three big parts to the story. There was the COP story, which has been reported in the newspapers, so I won't trouble with those details here. There was the Ontario story, which also got some ink, so I'll let that go too.

And then there was the Lima story - the things that registered on me and did not make the news at all.

These were, in no particular order:

Traffic

I took this shot from the second level of the double-decker shuttle bus that took me from my hotel to the COP venue. If I caught the 7:00 a.m. shuttle, it took 25 minutes to travel the 9 kilometres to the temporary installation on the CGEP base. If I caught the 7:15 a.m. shuttle, the trip took an hour and 15 minutes. After I'd taken this shot, the young Peruvian sitting next to me asked, "Do you like traffic?"

Global Retail

Directly across from our hotel was a large retail mall built into the side of Lima's stunning seaside gravel cliffs. Sadly, I felt right at home.

Boy bands and Plants vs. Zombies.

The Differences in the Similarities

Smooching mannikins.

Post-colonial bureaucratic residue. 

The River That No Longer Flows Through Lima

This bulldozed gravel ditch is all that remains of the Rimac river. When I arrived in Lima seventeen years ago, the Rimac was a sewage-stinking muddy trench lined on its banks with shanties. Now, the private company that provides water to Lima, unconstrained by anything as elaborate as an environmental assessment regime, collects all the water before it even arrives in the city. The City of Lima is in the process of turning the dry riverbed into a park.

The Stunning Gravel Cliffs

Past Prosperity

For at least 2000 years, Lima has been an important centre for many different civilizations. The past 500 years have seen severe swings between tremendous plenty and astonishing collapse. It shows.

Interior courtyard, featuring an 180-year-old ficus tree, of a home continuously occupied for 500 years by the same Lima family.

Interior courtyard of an 18th century home largely fallen into ruin and currently occupied by forty families - 260 people - squatting on the property, using electricity stolen from the hydro lines outside and sharing three toilets. There is no other running water.

These remarkable views of the two sides of Lima were brought to us by Ronald Elward who owns and operates Lima Walks. If you are in Lima, you must arrange a tour with Ronald.

Work

We were accosted by beggars very rarely in Lima, and mostly in the vicinity of our hotel. In the city centre, everybody works. They sell Chicklets, or juice, or churros on the street.

Other economic activity in Lima's historic centre clusters in categories. Ronald took us through the printing sector, where tiny presses, surrounded sometimes by dozens of people, crank out mountains of paper flyers, billets, tickets, broadsheets, brochures, posters and other crap. The Internet has not come to Lima so all this paper provides employment, for the time being.

Christmas in Lima

A hatless Santa launched in the lobby of the JW Marriot hotel. He is made all of chocolate.

This Christmas Paneton cottage is life-sized, but I never saw anyone go in, or come out. 

Together in the same roundabout boulevard, a green sphere  showing the size of a tonne of carbon dioxide and an even bigger Christmas tree.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Have You Packed Your Bags Yet?

The title of today's post is the question I was asked most this past week. It's nice that people are interested. But I had to say "no" each time.

In fact, even as I write this, I am not packed. 

But I'm working on it.

There are clothes in the dryer that I'll be putting in my suitcase.

I've done a reconnaissance of my closets to make sure I have the things I need.

It's hot and humid in Lima. Word is the conference venue is cramped and close.

So it's summer dresses and flats for me. These don't take a lot of time to pack.

Other than that, I have to do a run to a pharmacy to fill a preventative prescription for antibiotics because my dentist didn't like the look of the shadow at the base of a tooth that troubled me for a day or two last week. I'll get other useful small-sized products, too.

Around 2:00 p.m. I'll grab a cab to the airport and will be airborne by 6:00 p.m.  I will land in Lima in the middle of the night, about four hours before Google gets this to your mailbox.

To complete your The Week's Picture experience today, here's a link to an old post. The pictures are sunny, there's lots of useful information and I like the tone.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

The Last Time I Was In Lima ...

That's me on the right, knocking on the door of the massive Cathedral of Lima , on May 10, 1997 

I've been telling this story many times this past week:

"The last time I was in Lima was about fifteen years ago (actually 17 years; in May 1997). I travelled there on my way to and from an international workshop regarding access to genetic resources and the protection of intellectual property rights.

"I was at the Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy at the time. The Executive Director, Anne Mitchell, had arranged the project through her contacts in the world of international development.

"I really had no idea what was going on with the workshop. My contribution so far (which you can find here) had been to comb through the laws and statutes of the whole of Canada - including the traditional environmental knowledge of first nations - which had resulted in a resounding and definitive goose egg. So far as the laws of this land were concerned, accessing genetic resources and preserving intellectual property rights therein was not a thing at all. That is not to say that a creative reading of say, the Ontario Bees Act, could not find a right or entitlement to these things, but, you really would have to read beyond what the law intended. 

"At any rate, representatives from environmental law associations and environment ministries from the United States, Columbia, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Peru and a couple of other countries that I forget, all gathered first in Lima, and then Cusco and finally in a small settlement one hour out of Cusco called Urubamba.

"We spent three or four days at a little resort in Urubamba mulling over the weighty issue of protecting indigenous knowledge of the properties of plants from the privations of bioprospectors, and, as a day trip on our second last day, we went to Machu Picchu. 

That's me on the right. Anne's on my right.
Details about everyone else are as fuzzy as this photo.

We flew out of Cusco the following day, and had many hours to kill before our flight to Toronto, so we hung out in Lima. We visited the main square and toured the ossuary in the catacombs below the Franciscan monastery (not my favourite part of the trip). Because we were accompanied by Spanish-speaking Lima natives, we also fearlessly hopped into a taxi cab, drove to an utterly unknown part of the city and stopped in at a very local and authentic restaurant where I tasted the first and best ceviche ever in my life."

Subscribers may be wondering why I've been telling this particular story all week. That's because next week, on December 6, I will be flying to Lima again, this time as part of  the Canadian delegation to the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - or COP 20 as those familiar with these things call it.

The difference between my two trips (so far) to Lima will be that, on reflection, the 1997 trip was probably 75% down time and 25% work. This time, I'll be spending seven consecutive fifteen hour days in the climate change whirlwind. There will be main events, side events, receptions, panel discussions, briefings, protests, security checks, shuttle trips (our hotel is 9 kilometres from the COP pavilion - or about an hour in Lima traffic), announcements, gossip, rumour and media scrums. 

I may wax nostalgic for the peace and quiet of the catacombs.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Molly - Three Years On

A little more than three years ago, on November 19, 2011, we took our little Molly dog to the vet to send her on to her next reward.

This photo was taken about five years ago, in December 2009, when she should still see and play with her ball.

Some subscribers may recall that This Week's Picture was originally an e-mail series and, for many years, the featured photograph was of the dog. 

For the information of subscribers recently joined to this blog, there is a Molly the Dog blog that recounts the highlights of her career.

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People continue to ask us, as we proceed doglessly, whether or not we would have another dog.

The early answer to that question was "no." Mostly because we were not in the mood to need to eventually put another dog down.

The answer evolved over time to "not now." Because, once past the pain of Molly's passing, we could recall more clearly how much joy there is in having a dog. But there's the present problem that we both work office jobs and we would want a companion, not a prisoner in solitary confinement for most of its day.

Recently, when asked the dog question, we've been saying, "probably, but not until we retire." And, for the first time in our lives, we're not only thinking about retirement, but have turned a lot of energy toward figuring out how to do that as soon as possible.

We may be as close as three years to the day when our grey-haired colleagues will shake our hands one last time, roughly the same span of time since Molly's been gone. 

The blink of an eye, really, then, before we find ourselves another furry little friend.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

November

On November 11, the day set aside to remember those who fell in defence of the wonderful life we lead, I took pictures of sunny dying leaves on the boughs of trees preparing to live through the winter.

Plus one hydrangea.

And then I Waterlogued and Percolatered them to accentuate, even in the sad end, the beauty of the colours and patterns. 

 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Security and Ritual

Clock tower: Yonge and Yorkville, Toronto, Ontario

After the tragic, criminal and deeply sad events in Ottawa on October 22 2014, the Ontario Provincial Police officers who normally maintain a lax and cheerful security presence in the granite halls of Queens Park where I work, were, for about a week, doubled up in numbers and not cheerful. 

The precipitating event was miles away, and within hours shown to be the act of one bad crazy individual having the worst day of his life. But, security was intensified in Queen's Park because, well, we just don't know how far the threat extends....

Edgy, less friendly OPP officers is one thing, I suppose, but I personally don't see any reason to shrink the liberties of the whole population because a deranged and angry young man took a deer rifle with six bullets in it to Canada's Parliament. There are laws enough on the books to address the terrible wasting of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo's life. The young gunman certainly paid the price for his awful intentions.

But, because of the times we live in, these events create a space in the public mind where we openly contemplate making everyone less free for the sake of creating an illusion of security.   

I can say this even though I know that I am utterly ignorant of the terrible threats that surround us. 

I have enough on my mind with the threats I do know about: the annual toll on the roads from people texting while driving; the lives wasted and the costs to society due to drug abuse and an inadequate social safety net; and climate change! Plus vampires!

Anyway. 

Just the other day I performed a small ritual that proves the illusion. 

I was flying to Ottawa. 

The ritual to ward off evil before every flight is to pass through a small archway and not make it beep. To avoid the beep, people unburden themselves of anything metal: men remove their watches and belts; women their jewellery. People also often remove their footwear.

I was wearing a pair of shoes that I'd never travelled in before and, after conferring with the security guard who'd just handed me back my boarding pass, I took them off as a sign of my willingness to not make the archway beep. 

But the archway beeped.

The price of causing a beep is to be wanded by security personnel so that the offending item can be located and removed. Then you have to go back through the arch again.

While I was being wanded, I wondered what might be the offending item.

The wand found something, but, the guard waved me on without making me take anything off or go through the archway again. 

She said, sotto voce, "It's your bra."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Calculated Risks

Two Toronto bike owners have calculated that the risk the City will come along and take away their bikes is not as great as the risk that their bikes will be stolen if they are not locked to the post that says "Do Not Lock Your Bike Here."

At the other end of the spectrum of risk calculation are great efforts that go into avoiding small risks.

For example, due to circumstances beyond my control, I recently found myself faced with the task of simultaneously recruiting four positions in my shop. Anyone familiar with the nightmare of excessively risk adverse public sector procurement knows that the only thing worse than that is even more excessively risk adverse public sector human resources recruitment.

Because these are confidential matters, I will describe fanciful circumstances to shed light on the real.

Once upon a time the ruler of small kingdom found herself short a few officials. Consulting with her advisors on how she might add to her bureaucracy, they all cautioned her of the grave danger that, among the many who could be asked to serve, one might be a witch.

"A witch?" asked the ruler. "Are you serious?"

"Very serious," all her advisors agreed, vigorously nodding their heads. "You can't be too careful about witches."

"OK then," said the ruler, "How do I guard myself against witches?"

"Easy," said her advisors. "You just plug your ears when they answer your questions at their interview."

"When you say they, are you referring to just the witches or all the candidates," asked the ruler.

"Oh," said her advisors, a bit surprised that their ruler was so stupid, "All of the candidates, because one of them might be a witch. Witches lure you with their spells you know."

"I see," said the ruler, worried that she might be appearing stupid. "But if I plug my ears, I won't be able to hear what any of the candidates say."

"That's right," said her smiling advisers, relieved that their ruler was not stupid after all.

"So let me just make sure I've got this right. Because one of the people I talk to may be a witch and lure me with spells, and, I suppose, get me to bring them into court where, again I'm speculating, they may do bad witchy things....?" The ruler trailed off to see how she was doing. 

Her advisors were enrapt. They nodded to encourage her.

"So, to avoid the chance of being lured into bad unknown witchy things, I will stop my ears and not hear any of my candidates so I won't know if they are bad or good, which will mean that I will make a decision based on no other information than how they look that day ...." The ruler stopped again.

"Yes! Yes!" Her advisors cheered. "Hooray for our wise and noble ruler!"

Distracted by the force of this extreme flattery, the ruler thanked her advisors, said goodbye and made one last observation.

"You know, if I can't hear any of the candidates, that means I still could recruit a witch, or maybe something even worse ..."

Demoralized by their ruler's sudden change in position, the advisors bowed their way backward out of the room, resolved to add blindfolds to the recruitment rules. 

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Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Opportunities

Not long ago I was at St Michael's hospital for an unlovely mammogram. I came in, for the first time ever, through the old Bond Street entrance, views of which are shown in the photos above. 

Walk into this monster downtown hospital through any other door and all you will see is institutional functionality in the spaces and design. Linoleum. Stainless steel. Lucite. Composites of plastic. Amalgams of stone. Plaques commemorating donors. Nothing is pretty for its own sake, not even the flowers.

The hospital is connected with all its parts through labyrinthine hallways no matter what door you come in. So, from now on, I will go in through the Bond Street doors.

Sparky Readers' Poll Results

When asked if they had the chance to live their life again and still spend the time to read Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery, 100% of those polled said "yes."

100% of respondents also wondered if there would be more Sparky stories.

Based on this overwhelming response by one billionth of the world's population, there will be more Sparky stories, featuring more fun characters with less complicated personal histories. Also, if the comedy of manners swirling around Sparky goes in its current direction there will be fewer - and perhaps no - mysterious deaths.

(It's not too late to participate in the poll! You can find it here.)

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Gather Ye Rosebuds

Biggest rose bud I've ever seen. Victoria B.C July 2014

I forget why now, but I was reading up recently on the Internet about Alferd Packer, an American famous for allegedly having eaten other Americans.

The story is that Alferd and five companions headed out -- against the sage advice of a local first nations leader -- into late season weather in search of gold. They were poorly provisioned, the going was hard and after weeks on the trail they were out of food, starving and immobilized by bad weather.

The sole survivor of this ordeal, Alferd, was seen coming some months later into a town, well-fed looking, his pockets brimming with gold coins.

An individual made suspicious by Alferd's account of what happened investigated and found to his horror human remains on the trail - Alferd's companions - at least one headless and all showing signs of having been gnawed upon.

The surmise of the good townsfolk was that Alferd had killed, eaten and robbed his companions and, so charged, Alferd was incarcerated.

The snippets of information scattered randomly over Wikipedia and other sources of rumour and half-truths said that Alferd had made three contradictory confessions.

I drove myself a little crazy trying to find those three confessions on the Internet but find them I did.

The grisly details about anthropophagy are not the only things that pique my interest. Stories of wilderness survival often contain other useful information. 

In two of Alferd's three confessions he includes details of how he searched mountainsides for food, in particular he searched for wild rose bushes containing rose buds (now called rose hips) that could be boiled and eaten. 

Rose hips have been food for humans since the stone age apparently and are good sources of vitamin C and anti-oxidants, so, while you may still eventually die in the wilderness, eating rose hips will ensure you suffer from neither colds nor cancer.

You are also well advised, per the photo above, to lose your path and not have groceries at the south end of Vancouver Island, where the rose hips grow to a great size and can feed a multitude.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

What the Hell Is That?!? and Sparky: The Reader Survey

On rare occasions these days I have fun at my job. And so I recently was in Union Station to start a tour of the unimaginably complicated "Big Move" infrastructure works - or, at least, the parts of those works involving the connection of Union Station with Pearson Airport. I had people from all over the country trailing after me as we made our way through the mobs of commuters and construction-caused congestion on the walkways into the station.

Then we looked up and saw the thing in the picture. Everyone wanted an explanation right away and the one I gave them ... "I think it has something to do with Nuit Blanche " ... didn't suffice.

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I want to thank all my readers - 22 of you according to Google - who chugged all the way through Sparky's murder mystery. I had a lot of fun writing the story, though it caused me a recreational level of stress, too. The same sort of stress, I imagine, a reasonably capable downhill skier feels when they're on a difficult or new slope. They know they've got the skills to get to the bottom in one piece, they're just not entirely sure how they'll get there. The uncertainty is part of the fun.

As I fumbled my way through the twenty-one episodes, my thrilling uncertainty was twofold: is anyone reading this? and, if people are reading it, are they enjoying it? 

If you'd like, you can answer a very short, five minute survey to sate my lingering curiosity about the readers' response to Sparky's story.

You can find the Readers' Survey here.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

This One's For Kevan and Sparky: Final Chapter

This clean, well-lit place is the far-below-ground-level workshop in the Bank of America Tower in New York City. The building engineer was as proud of this space as any he showed us during our tour of NYC's most energy-efficent office tower. He also explained, not at all defensively, that even though a recent news article had said New York's third tallest tower consumed twice as much energy as the Empire State Building, that did not account for the fact that there is a lot more going on, and a lot more people working in, the Bank of America Tower. 

Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Final Chapter 

Sparky here. This is the final chapter of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

The last person I would have expected to see standing behind the counter at the Starbucks by the ravine was Marriba, but, there she was, big as life. She seemed happy to see me.

After I ordered and sat down with my vente decaf skim iced latte and cranberry scone, Marriba joined me at my table.

What are you doing here?” I asked her, leaving unstated the second part of the question, which was “I thought you’d been banned for life from the entire service sector.”

“New medication,” she snapped, ”I feel a little fuzzy and stupid at times but I am much calmer around people and can perform the meaningless tasks the job requires. It keeps me out of the house and that is far to be preferred.”

She looked hard at me, and the scratches and bites on my arms and face.

“What has happened to you?”

I told her about my day’s adventure in the ravine and why I had gone there in the first place.

I showed her the jar.

She grabbed it out of my hand.

“I knew she stole it!”

“Who?”

“Carol!”

“Is that how you lost your job at the Gardens? You kept asking Carol about the jar?”

Marriba looked a little puzzled.

“No,” she said. “They told me they could not renew my contract. I never asked why. I was happy to leave.”

“Did you ever ask Carol about the jar?”

“Yes. Many times. I asked everyone about the jar. Some one had stolen it. Carol stole it!”

I stopped her.

“Did you ever tell Carol that you had put hand cream in the jar?"

“No. What was in the jar was not the point. The point was I had the jar and then it was stolen!”

I told Marriba about my theory about how Carol or Dubs may have put hogweed sap into the jar. They wouldn’t have known that Marriba rinsed it out and replaced it with hand cream. They had the jar with them when they went into the ravine.

“I have no idea what exactly happened to them in the ravine, but they must have run into Gerry.

“Otherwise, they would have retrieved the truck after it broke down. They could easily have explained what two tree specialists were doing in the ravine. But, when they found out the next morning that Gerry was dead, they went back, tipped it off the path and covered it up and let the police think it was lost forever. The only reason they would do that is because they thought if the police knew they were in the ravine, they would have been implicated in Gerry’s death.

“It has something to do with that jar.

“When I started asking questions last summer about hogweed Carol stopped talking to me. When you wouldn’t stop asking questions about your jar you suddenly couldn’t work at the Gardens anymore.”

“But there was nothing in the jar to hurt anyone,” said Marriba.

“Yes. But Carol and Dubs didn’t know that.”

Marriba took a deep breath.

“You think that Carol and Dubs stole the gardeners’ truck and ran into Gerry Ringbold in the midst of drug dealers and prostitutes. Then these three had some kind of adventure that included an offer by Carol or Dubs and the acceptance by Ringbold of what was thought to be a toxic substance disguised as sunscreen. Ringbold then applied this to his person and thoughtfully returned the jar to his tormentors. Some time after this our suspects drove away deeper into the ravine until the truck broke down while Gerry made his way into the Gardens, got as far as the gardener’s shed where he collapsed and died of a heart attack that could not have been related to the hypothetical application of a substance that was not toxic.”

“Well, when you say it like that, it seems far fetched,” I said, “but I imagine something like that did happen.”

“If so,” said Marriba, “Then it is not a murder. It is just a natural death dressed up with lots of silly details.

“It has been nice to talk with you,” said Marriba, “Good luck with the rest of your research.”  And she got up from the table and went back to work behind the counter.

Epilogue

When I started this story about the mysterious death of Gerry Ringbold, the case was still open and I had not yet gone into the ravine. I imagined that I had it all figured out and would find everything I needed to know in the ravine to complete the story, but, I didn’t. So I did the next best thing.

After my chat with Marriba, I phoned in an anonymous tip to the police about where they would find the gardener’s truck. Dubs and Carol were arrested and confessed shortly after that. The lead on the truck unlocked some unanswered questions the police had not disclosed to the media about tapes missing from the security cameras.

It turns out Dubs and Carol had run into Gerry in the ravine. There was a short, mostly verbal fight and Gerry collapsed. When Dubs and Carol loaded him into the truck he was still alive, but, by the time they got him to street level, he was dead. 

They panicked, fearing they would be blamed for his death, dropped his corpse in the garden shed and high tailed it back through the ravine. They drove until they had a reasonable distance between themselves and the Gardens, ditched the truck and went for a coffee to establish an alibi.

Other than stealing the truck, and removing the tapes from the security cameras, Dubs and Carol had committed no actual crime but they lost their jobs anyway. There’s a new chief arborist in the Thompson Gardens and a new lead botanist in the Palm House.

As for me, I’m heading into second year law school. Next year I’ll spend my summer either at a law firm or maybe as an unpaid intern at a local media company. I’m done with the Thompson Gardens.