Northward Bound

A great spangled fritillary butterfly, the only bug we met not bent on piercing our flesh and drinking our blood. 

The Ontario Northland bus from Toronto Yorkdale to Sudbury has 23 stops on the way. We disembarked at stop 19, the Key River Marina, where our friends Kate and Ed picked us up and took us to their cottage on the shore of the Pickerel River.

As for bus travel, five hours on the ground - the time it takes to get to Key River - is infinitely more tolerable than five in the air. There's less terror of falling from the skies for one thing. And more scenery. 

On the Sunday morning trip north, there was almost no one on the bus with us. There was a cheerful, gregarious driver who kept the schedule like the Sabbath.

On the Wednesday evening trip south, by the time it got to Key River, the bus didn't have two empty seats together. We commandeered the seats a woman and her luggage vacated at Mactier. That put us across the aisle from another woman with a shocking cough.

The Northlander bus is fine. It improves with fewer fellow passengers. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

 

Ten Years Ago Today

Leslie Street Spit, 15 July 2012. First photo ever published on this blog.

Ten years ago today, I published my first post on this blog. That's 620 posts (including this one), and, according to Google stats, 27,800 views. 

(To put that in perspective, a blog considered to be successful gets 150,000 views a month.)

Recently Hank Green tweeted this: 

The universe is less than 14 billion years old and there are more than 7 billion people.

So humanity’s collective experience of the COVID-19 pandemic has been longer than the entire life of the universe...

Following this example, assuming each post takes five minutes to read, my readers' collective experience of my blog has been 469 days, which is shorter than the life of the universe, but exactly how long it took for the US Patent office to approve a Sandersville, Georgia inventor’s patent for waste stream product management.

Anyway. Milestones like this may make you wonder which of all these posts is my favourite.

My favourite post is always the one I'm writing now. But, some posts have garnered more reader reactions than others, including the ones where

...  firemen rescued a cat

... I wrote short fiction: Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery

... I wrote about post-hip-surgery physiotherapy.

The blog has been a chronicle of sorts of my life for the past ten years, first as a bureaucrat and then as a retired person.

From March 2020 to, well, now, it's also been a chronicle of the COVID-19 pandemic, my special contribution to which has been to collect pictures of previously non-ironic signs and advertisements. 

And from the outset this blog has, from time to time, reminded people that climate change is a thing, and we really ought to do something about it, besides just burn and sweat and perish in the floods.

Thanks for reading for ten whole years!

Karen

Also ten years ago: Bruce was clean
shaven, and smoked cigarettes.

Certified

Just before my impulsive decision to retire from the Ontario Public Service in 2019, I completed training in how to be a coach. 

Is this another example of Doug Ford throwing away scarce resources financed by the public dime (in this case me)? 

Sure, but it's more my point that my good experience with coaching in the public service made me suggestible when the notion of being a book coach presented itself late last year. 

And now, seven months and many hours of self-directed learning and practicums later, I am officially certified. 

The best part of being a book coach, as opposed to a policy director in the public service, is I can tell people what I do and they don't get that look in their eye. The look that says they want me to stop talking about what I do.

A book coach helps people write books. People who want to start their book project the best way possible. People who are writing a book and need support, cheerleading and honest feedback. People who have written a book and want help to market it to agents and publishers. 

A coach supports all these things, so a writer can, in much less time and for much less money, write their best book. And maybe even get it published.

So now there's a new meaning when I say thanks for reading.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

 

Guest Column

Picturesque ruins, Glendalough, Ireland, 25 April 2022.

Forgive me, but I'm just going to do a couple of cuts and pastes today. 

Lately, I and Edward Keenan, the US correspondent for the Toronto Star, have been thinking about the same poem, The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats.

Here's the poem, written after the first World War in January 1919 and during the pandemic they had then:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

***

Here's an article written by Edward Keenan alluding to the poem. I've edited it for length, but give full credit to Mr. Keenan. (Shoo! you nasty copyright lawyers). Things must be bad when a Toronto Star writer cites a writer for the Globe and Mail:

This Week in Politics

Watching news from around the world this week summoned to mind the words of William Butler Yeat’s The Second Coming:

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold…”

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated by a gunman while giving a speech Friday, stunning the world. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his resignation after the waves of scandal that have defined his career finally caught up with him and members of his own cabinet had abandoned him. A “humanitarian catastrophe” was reportedly at hand in Ukraine’s Luhansk region as Russians took near-total control of the area, and the United Nations warned of a worldwide “looming hunger catastrophe” because of that war.  

[It all] adds to a sense of — well, falling apart, of growing chaos spiralling out of control.

In the U.S., the stock market was down again after a report delivered news you might otherwise consider good (employment and wages up) but that fed fears of continued inflation and accompanying interest rate hikes that could spur a recession. U.S. President Joe Biden heralded the jobs as signs of his success, but voters appear to disagree, as inflation worries top their list of ballot-box concerns. Biden has made fighting inflation his “number one goal” for months, and despite weeks of slowly declining gas prices in the U.S., he hasn’t tamed the rough beast yet.

Meanwhile, across the country: yet another mass shooting of an increasingly familiar kind Biden and everyone else seem powerless to stop. And a series of decisions from the Supreme Court that repeal abortion rights, disembowel gun control measures, gut climate change regulations and weaken the separation of church and state.

There were reports this week that Democrats and progressives were “frustrated” with Biden’s inability to do much to handle the overlapping crises they perceive to be plaguing the U.S. One told CNN Biden’s administration was “rudderless, aimless, and hopeless.” 

[...]

Biden’s popular support in polls is disastrously low. ...

And yet, as [Andrew Coyne for the Globe and Mail] asked, what alternative is on offer? Unlike in Britain where a famously buffoonish, dishonest populist was finally given the boot by his own party, the right-of-centre parties in Canada and the U.S. have been almost entirely taken over by buffoonish populist authoritarian movements fed on resentment and conspiracy theories.

[...]

[E]ven as new hearings for new revelations in the Jan. 6 commission are scheduled to continue to outline how close the country came to being victim of a coup, the movement that tried to stage it marches on: Florida schools are now being required to audit their ideology for signs of being too woke, star Rep. Lauren Boebert won her primary after denouncing the separation of church and state; South Carolina became the first state post-Roe v. Wade to bring forward a new near-total ban on abortion. The U.S. Supreme Court will soon consider a case that could give states veto power over federal election rules and results. Donald Trump stumps on the campaign trail as the party he still unofficially leads appears poised to win control of Congress in elections later this year.  

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” Yeats’ poem famously says, again feeling like a summary of the moment. Perhaps conviction isn’t what — or not only what — one side is missing, and “best” isn’t a superlative many would apply to any of the bunch. But the worst in our politics across the continent are surely the loudest, the angriest, the most strident. Meanwhile, things fall apart.

Citizens are caught between a squish and a hard place — between the ineffective and the unhinged, the incapable and the unfit. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” as Yeats had it. And yet, finding no place to turn to for stability, or sanity, or competence.

Well said. 

A little long, though.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

 

Stay Angry

Brickworks lily pond. June 30 2022

When I was in the environmental non-government sector, I worked with angry people. When they were at rest, just sitting over coffee, their anger seemed generalized, unspecific. But, give them an environmental cause and they'd have something to focus their anger on. 

Anger gave them the passion missing from their quiet lives. Passion gave them conviction. Conviction gave them the endurance to sit through years-long processes or law suits. Sometimes they won.

Almost always, government action was the accelerant for their anger. In the old days it was dams and power projects.

These days vaccine mandates and lockdowns are government's gift to angry people looking for some passion in their otherwise quiet lives. 

Happy Canada Day.

Karen