Chilly Spring

Morning light on honey locust branches, last day of April 2016

Late afternoon light on honey locust branches, 16 April, 2016

Some readers may have seen the leak about Ontario's Climate Change Action Plan this week. If you didn't, here it is.

Here are a few follow up articles.

Elsewhere, in the land of the Yessir Yessir Highway, our friend the Ruler has also had her hands full.

*******

The ruler of a small and pleasant realm was, as always, applying herself to an epic pile of paperwork when she felt a warm, soft, fuzzy pressure on her lower leg.

Looking down, she was startled to see a pretty calico cat rubbing against her left ankle, looking up at her.

"Now how did you get in here," the Ruler said, bending over to pick the cat up.

"I'm out of the bag," said the cat.

"Of course you are," said the ruler, placing the cat in her lap, scratching it behind the ears and focusing every fibre of her being on trying not to be afraid. 

The cat settled into the Ruler's lap, purring and contented. This gave the Ruler some time to think. She'd heard - many times - about the dangers of talking cats that had gotten out of bags, but this one seemed so domesticated. 

"You must be a very clever cat," said the Ruler, scratching with slightly more pressure.

"I am," said the cat, responding to the pressure with a little of its own against the Ruler's fingers.

"Were you in that bag for long?" asked the Ruler, as she moved her fingers to the top of the cat's head.

"A while," said the cat, slightly bored, turning its head to get the Ruler's fingers on just the right spot.

"And you got out of that bag all on your own," said the Ruler, scratching a bit harder and further down the back of the cat's neck.

"All on my own," said the cat, tensing the muscles in its neck, pushing into the scratch.

"I didn't know cats could do that," said the Ruler, still scratching, but more slowly.

"Shows what you know," said the cat, spinning onto its back, grabbing the Ruler's hand playfully in its four paws. The Ruler could sense claws under the soft pads of the cat's feet.

"What I do know," said the Ruler, using her index finger to scratch the cat right on its nose, "is that there is no way you could have gotten out of that bag all by yourself. And whoever helped you put you here so that people would think it was me who let you free."

All in an instant, the cat hissed, bit the Ruler's index finger, spun back onto its feet, dug its claws into the Ruler's leg and leapt onto the desk top, scattering papers everywhere. 

"Now who's being clever," snarled the cat, springing without effort to the windowsill many feet from the Ruler's desk.

The cat launched itself out the window into the courtyard and made its way toward the teeming crowds on the Yessir Yessir highway.  

The Ruler turned back to her desk to pick up the papers the cat had scattered. Chappie, her most trusted advisor, was already there.

"Some excitement today?" asked Chappie.

"No," said the Ruler, "just a stupid cat that got in through the window."

"That's never happened before," said Chappie, genuinely surprised.

"Probably won't happen again, either," said the Ruler, pulling the shutter closed. "Stupid cats."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Hurricane's Eye

Third Place Winners: Impossibly Cute Future Rulers of the World 

I'm in a bit of a lull at work - hence the title of this post. After busting our humps for a week and a half in order to be ready for an important meeting last week, the meeting, of course, was cancelled. Since then, we've just been waiting for direction.

This gives us time for a trip to the land of the Yessir Yessir Highway and the dark and terrible Troll Bridge.

*******

The ruler of a small and pleasant realm was taking a short break from her paperwork. She'd just read a surprising letter and needed a minute or two to mull it over.

As if on cue, a messenger appeared at the door.

"Oh great ruler," began the messenger, who wore the insignia of the Troll Bridge, "infinite in wisdom and favour, gracious beyond compare, as bright as the sun and as warm as buns fresh from the oven ..."

The Ruler, alarmed by the politeness, braced herself.

"Greetings, messenger" said the Ruler, and she smiled bravely. "What business brings you here?"

"Golden eggs have been stolen," said the messenger, abandoning protocol and cutting right to the chase. "Right beneath our noses, almost a third of them. The Emperor is fit to be tied."

"The Emperor's lost his golden eggs?" the Ruler repeated.

"Yes ma'am," said the messenger.

"And why is this my problem?" asked the Ruler. "You should take this to the Ruler next door. She does eggs."

"No ma'am," said the messenger, "The Head Troll wants you to find the eggs."

"I'll get right on it," said the Ruler, intending to do no such thing. "I'll just need to consult with my advisors first."

"See that you do," threatened the messenger. "The Head Troll wants those eggs." The messenger spun on his heel and left.

Checking first that the messenger was well and truly gone, the Ruler took from the drawer where she had concealed it the letter from the Great Treasury she'd received not two minutes before the Troll Bridge messenger arrived.

The Great Treasury letter set out in detail what the Ruler's boss to the fifth power - The Greatest Ruler - had done with the missing golden eggs. They were spent. 

This problem - as great as it was - was not as great as the problem that the Ruler knew something that neither the Great Troll (her boss to the third power) nor the Emperor (her boss to the fourth power) apparently knew.

The Ruler called Chappie - her most trusted advisor - and the Wizard - her most skilled improvisor - into her chambers. She showed them the letter and told them of the visit from the messenger.

"I can distract the Head Troll with shiny balloons," said the Wizard.

"We could shutter the place and wait for this to blow over," said Chappie.

"These are good ideas," said the Ruler, "and they have worked for us before. But this time, we need something different. No misdirection. No hiding."

This Wizard looked deeper into his bag of tricks. "How about this?" he said, pulling out some sticky tape. "We could make it someone else's problem."

"I tried that," said the Ruler. "What else you got?"

The Wizard dug around at the very bottom of the bag. He pulled out a pair of worn-looking boots.

"Kick it upstairs?" he asked, knowing full well that was it for the bag of tricks.

"Give this to the Henchman?" asked the Ruler, her hand instinctively covering a recently bruised rib. 

"Let's do that."

******

The nice young people lined up in this week's picture were the third-prize winners, but definitely first-place crowd pleasers, at something called a "hack-a-thon" - which I think would be roughly analogous to something like a dance marathon, which is to say a thing that young people do to develop a sense of accomplishment that prepares them for their lives as adults but that is not just something that pleases their parents like finishing their vegetables or doing their homework - where I sat on a panel of judges to select the top three ideas for how to help people modify their behaviour to take action on climate change.

It was fun and demanding. My fellow judges and I watched fifteen, five-minute pitches of varying quality and, after about the sixth one, what seemed like limited variety.

Awards were given for "first group to make a pitch that was clear, easy to follow and thought through" (First Prize), "the group with the truly best idea" (Second Prize), and, as noted above, "the group with the cutest, brightest, most appealing collection of youngsters" (Third Prize).

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen 

  

I Bring My Attic With Me

Sunshine on Sycamore: Allan Gardens, April 5 2016

I'm procrastinating. I'm supposed to be working on materials that have to be in Cabinet Office on Monday, but, instead, I'm rummaging around in my computer looking for files so old that it took until recently for there to be technology that can read them (I'm referring, of course, to old Windows 2 "Write" files). 

Here's one of the things I found: a lament tossed into the void about my mixed feelings as I filled in an application form, in 1993, for the bar examination course. 

I'll admit, I don't really know what the last sentence means.

***********

There are a lot of good reasons why I should feel ambivalent about becoming a lawyer, even if I understand this was my plan ever since that fateful comment to my mother in January, 1989: "Ma, I'm going to quit my job and go to law school."

Of course, what a "lawyer" was to me then was the cooly beautiful Susan Dey on L.A. Law. And I had seen only one episode of that estimable entertainment; I'd had no opportunity to notice that some of the characters on even that programme might have given me pause for thought.

No, thought had very little to do with it then, and has far too much to do with it now. 

There is first this peculiar interlude of being a student. It has rearranged my internal workings, my instincts, and such things as how much I rely on caffeine and nicotine and when I get hungry and how much I sleep (or not). I have now a "work" and a "mope guiltily" mode; I do not have a "relax" mode.  

If I have nothing to do and I'm not moping and feeling guilty, I lapse into a mild state of shock, a mode familiar to me from the six months I spent grieving for my father. It is a disconnected way of being: I sit inside myself like a prisoner in a small room with just enough oxygen so long as I don't move, or talk, or think.

An infusion of panic will break this spell. I keep red buckets full in protected corners of my brain for when my indolent stupor strikes me as career-threatening. When I am not working, or moping, or in a catatonic stupor, then I am out somewhere, staying up too late, drinking too much and smoking too many cigarettes. This is no way to face middle age.

The rigours of my professional schooling, I know, will resemble the rigours of my profession about as much as an acorn resembles a fire hydrant. I have to understand that my first year as a lawyer will be as alienating, alien, frustrating and as full of failure as my first year of law school. I will spend a lot of time working hard at accomplishing nothing. I will struggle over piles and towering piles of my own confusion, fear and insecurity. I will, as I did with law school, get the hang of it, and might even get good at it.

But what will I be getting good at? The law undoubtedly is an ass and the Rules of Civil Procedure make sure we all pick up our ears and ropey tail before we enter the court.

*********

The moral of the story is: Listen to your mixed feelings. 

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Gamify

Looks but Doesn't Feel Like Spring:
Light on the Allan Gardens Greenhouse, -5 degrees C, 5:30 p.m. April 4 2016 

I watched this past week a video of so-called "disruptive" technologies - videos of autonomous cars, drones, sensors and other nifty doodads, all of which threaten to make either a new Utopia or Dark Future, depending in which side of the business case you're on.

The doodad that gave me the title for this blog (pronounced, I imagine, as game-i-fie) was an app that people can load on their phones and then just drive around. The app uses the sensor and GPS technology inside the phone to send information to the city (Winnipeg and Toronto among them) about how bumpy your ride is. The bigger the bump, the more likely there's a pot hole. The more drivers that sense that bump, it's even more likely there's a hole.  The app places these sensed bumps on a map of the city and *presto* the city knows where to dispatch crews to fix potholes. 

This is what I mean by which side of the business case you're on. Rest his soul, Rob Ford would be out of work for sure.

But I haven't gotten to the gamify part yet. In Boston, phones with the app display a simplified graphic showing the vehicle and surrounding streets. When the car hits a bump, a cartoon exclamation point pops up on the screen. I assume this is for the amusement of any passenger in the vehicle and not by any means the driver whose attention is firmly fixed on the road. 

I've often felt this week as if I were in a game, cartoon exclamation points crowding the screen, as I've gone from bump to bump on the impossibly short road to deliver the government's agenda on climate change.  

I wish there were an app for that.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Neologisms

I got a new camera last week and took it for a test drive in the Allen Gardens greenhouse. While the greenhouse itself seemed sad and unblossoming, the camera works a treat.

Keeping it Creepy: Succulent-clad Piano Player in the Palm House

At work, I feel as if we're trying to set new records every week in special public service categories such as:

• most meetings held in a forty-eight-hour period
• most back-pocket items created in a single day
• most last minute requests and
• most strange utterances in a single meeting

I'll share the first and second place winners in that last category. I was hanging around as room meat on a teleconference between my boss and his counterpart at one of the government's largest, most powerful and least ball-playing ministries. The disembodied voice of the other bureaucrat dominated the conversation and I sat spellbound as I heard the word "stakeholder" (normally a noun) used as 

• a verbal: "You've been stakeholdering like crazy on the cap and trade program"
• a past participle: "now that you've stakeholdered" and
• a straight up verb in the infinitive: "it's clear we can continue to stakeholder"

My boss, new to the public service, seemed to want to show the career bureaucrat what he's made of, including a super power he may have. So he blew away the strange utterance competition with a simple phrase, used to recount the events at a recent meeting :

• "you could see the echoes at the Minister's Table meeting..."

*********

Today's moral: Just because you can say something doesn't necessarily mean you should.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen