Enough

This is what our back patio looked like on Wednesday night, and I hear it's going to be minus twelve tomorrow.

Enough already. We're going to Florida.

Stay tuned! Two Saturdays from now will bring the next thrilling instalment of the small details of my life and the first of the last three of the increasingly tragicomic stories about Molly-the-Dog.

Thanks for reading!

Stay warm!

Karen

Bubble World: Finale

What passed for normal in the structured world of the Queen's Public Executive Program was that we began class at 8:30 every morning, broke for lunch at 12:30, resumed class at 1:30, broke again at 3:30 - and enjoyed lifestyle activities such as yoga, ceramics class and rock climbing -  and reconvened at 6:00 p.m. for the last class of the day, which went right to 9:00 p.m.

After every evening session, Bill, the course co-ordinator, would invite the class to join him and the guest speaker in the convention centre pub (a former coach house) for a refreshing beverage and conversation. With the one exception of the night I engaged with the right-wing nut (I tossed a glass of white wine down my throat and fled), I passed on the offer. My normal path at 9:00 p.m. was to take a swing by the snack jars for some sesame things and by the pop fridge for a cranberry juice and head back to my room in time to have a chat on the phone with Bruce. Then I would go to bed.

As the course progressed I picked up from the break and dinner time chatter that some of my course mates were regulars at the pub. They had good stories about Bob the bartender, who was convinced the place was haunted.

None of these stories made me change my pattern, except for the last full day of classes, Thursday, February 20. I was already worn down by the stress of being away from home and being force fed giant amounts of information. On top of that, the day started very early. The program wranglers had arranged for me two morning yoga classes, and Thursday's was the last of those. This was also the day the Canadian women's hockey team played their final. So, I was out of bed at five a.m., the first class was at 8:30 as usual, but, rather than holding a class from 1:30 to 3:30, Bill put the hockey game up on the screen in the classroom. While my classmates rooted for the home team, I went for a walk to take pictures of treacherous sidewalks and spooky old prison buildings. 

Bill's magnanimity in giving over class time to the hockey game did not extend to giving us less class time. We still had to sit through three more hours of lectures after the game was over. Then, we had to sprint over to another part of the convention centre for a reception and farewell banquet.

Both of these events featured all the wine you could drink, and the wait staff were assiduous in keeping glasses full. 

My table mates at dinner included a man who had distinguished himself in class as bright, funny and engagingly argumentative. He was also one of the pub regulars. We had such a good chat over dinner I failed to keep track of how much wine I drank, so had no judgement left to say "no" when my table mates said, "Let's go to the pub."

Practically the whole class was there. The place roared with conversation and laughter. I ordered what I thought would be my only drink: a single shot of Jack Daniels paired with a big glass of ice water.

By the time I finished my fourth drink, there were about five of us left in the pub. Among other things as I consumed all those drinks, I'd watched a classmate deliver drop-dead perfect impressions of some of the most oddly mannered of our course lecturers and laughed so hard at other random silliness that I feared I would pee my pants.

I also chatted up Bob the bartender about the ghosts. This is what he said:

"It was during one of the biggest events we hold here and there must have been eighty people in the room. There were two women sitting at the bar. They were dressed funny - like goths or something. Anyway, the noise in the room was incredible but I could hear them plain as day, even at the other end of the bar. One of them was talking about how she'd played in the rafters - this place used to be a coach house you know - and then they turned and looked right at me. I went over to them and had my hand on the bar in front of them. One of them put her hand on mine - it was cold as ice! - and said, 'everything will be OK'." 

I believed every word he said. I wished a ghost would reassure me, too.

But, Bob had taken exception to the drop-dead perfect impression of Bill the course co-ordinator and called time early to throw us out. 

And that's when the man I'd shared dinner conversation with said he had an expensive bottle of Irish whiskey in the trunk of his car. Consensus was quickly reached that he should go get it while we all retired to another classmate's room.

After two shots of perhaps the best Irish in the world, I called a halt to my participation in the festivities. I said I had to go to bed. It was after two in the morning. I'd been awake for more than twenty hours, had had far too much to drink - and had mixed wine and whiskey - and even in my state of extreme inebriation worried that I might feel a bit unwell the next (later the same) day.

But before they let me go, my fellows demanded one more thing of me. One of them held an invisible microphone in front of my face and asked me, "Karen, what one thing would you have done different?"

"I'd have been born with a penis," I said, and went to my room.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Here's Molly's newest post!

Karen

Bubble World Part Two: Stockholm

I should explain what were the circumstances of my accommodations during my weeks away.

They did not just treat us well. They treated us exceptionally, enormously, almost shamefully well at the Donald Gordon Conference Centre, a part of Queen's University. 

I don't think I've slept in a more comfortable bed. The food - you can guess I'm a bit picky about my food - was tremendous. There was no whim or trouble so great or small that they would not move heaven and earth to accommodate it. I'm not kidding. 

I forgot to pack my calcium supplement and vitamins (both of these run to some money) and hazarded a request that someone be sent out to fetch me some. So it was done (at no charge). 

I hankered to go for walks but it was terribly cold and had not brought a hat. Could they get me one of those? So it was done. 

We received some oversized maps of the polar regions as swag from one of the speakers. I fretted that mine might be crushed on the train. They fetched tubes. 

But the tubes are awkward to carry, I said, can't these be shipped? They made it so.

The food was not only good, it was readily available in considerable quantity during the entire day. Every imaginable breakfast - cereal, fruit, eggs, meat of just about any description, pastries, oatmeal - was already on the buffet or could be ordered. Lunch and supper offered every possible option: carnivore, omnivore, vegetarian, vegan, gluten free. And, if you wanted something else, so long as they had it in the kitchen, your wish was their command.

Life below stairs: the classroom I sat in for 9 hours every day.

Then there were the snacks. At every break goodies awaited us up the stairs from our subterranean classroom: mini smoothies in shot glasses festooned with short drinking straws; spears of fresh berries; endive spoons with dollops of blue cheese, toasted hazelnuts and pear chutney; savoury pinwheel pastries with jalapeño peppers and jack cheese. 

If fresh gourmet snacks were not your thing, there were large mouth jars (fourteen of them) full of pre-fabricated snacks: jelly beans, mini chocolate bars, jujubes, wine gums, wasabi peas, dried fruit, a bunch that I couldn't readily identify and those salty, slightly greasy, sesame snack things I ate so many of I made myself a little sick.

No wonder that by the beginning of the second week I was starting to identify with my captors.

The group of people I was spending every day with were accomplished, interesting, fun and friendly.

The official photo from the sidelines.
I asked a student to take a picture of us getting our picture taken.

I got to go to yoga.

330 Yoga in Kingston offered us a private class every day. We were shepherded there by Queen's students, in this instance, Tara, the one with her hands over her head. 

On the Saturday of our short weekend (we had classes on Saturday morning and Sunday night), I took a walking tour of old Kingston with a professor emeritus of History and Geography from Queen's university. 

The view from the courtyard by Miss Piggy's

A small cohort of my classmates and I -- those of us left behind  for the weekend like boarding school kids at Christmas -- ate another fine meal Saturday night at old Fort Henry.

I was hammered into submission not only by the good food and easy living. The course offerings were better in week two; there was more group work and there were some practical lessons offered up from interesting case studies. We almost never heard about the good old days.

Still, there is no question that I was holding a lot in. I missed Bruce. I missed my home. I missed the mobility of my life as a pedestrian in Toronto. Students don't shovel sidewalks and the freeze/thaw cycle made even the cleared pathways perilous. I felt pretty cooped up.

In case you're wondering, that's all ice.

All of this sets the stage for my last night in Kingston, which featured an epic tear down, more about which next week.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

You can read Molly's latest post here.

Karen

Bubble World: Part One

I'm back home from my executive training at Queen's. Here are some notes I sent myself over the first week. They evince a growing measure of resistance, pique, discontent:

Sunday, February 9

The program started at two o'clock in the afternoon. The objective of the day was to get to know one another a bit.

I got teamed up with four other people: three men and one woman. The men are a military doctor, a Director in the federal food safety program, a Director for MNR stationed in Sault St Marie, and the woman is a Director with the provincial gaming commission.

These were all pretty impressive people - the doctor served in Kandahar and told a story of a harrowing helicopter crash he and his team had to pick up the pieces from; the MNR director is 100% a resource management guy; the food agency director is pretty high energy and really achievement oriented; the provincial gaming commission director is focused, tough, responsible and a marshmallow all wrapped up in one.

Every one of us is successful and in a loving relationship that keeps us happy. All of my teammates have kids and are very proud of them. I know all of these things - and others - because of the exercises we did on Day One. We introduced ourselves by speaking in turn on a number of increasingly personal topics sitting knee to knee in circles of five. Then we did an exercise called "bombardment" where we first listed things we felt we'd been successful at. Then we each recounted these in turn to our group and then each member of the group kneeled in front of us and put stickers with words describing us on a bullseye target we held in our laps.

The kneeling got a strong reaction. At least one class member was really not comfortable with the kneeling. Another group of people said some of them knelt and some didn't. Everyone in my group did.

Monday, February 10

We spent the first full day in class. We're ranged along the tiers of an internal room that is also below stairs. So no windows. No sounds of the outside world. Bill - the program lead - presented his quite dated-seeming version of what public policy is, how it works and how public servants move through their careers. Then Hugh Segal, of whom I am a big fan, gave a long and maundering rant about the good old days and how much it sucks to be us.

After lunch was Nick Nanos, the first of two number crunchers good at revealing patterns in peoples' thought and behaviour but less gifted at telling us what these patterns might mean.

After supper, we listened to David Foot, another guy who reveals interesting signals in the numbers but doesn't have enough stuff left over to say what it all means.

Tuesday, February 11

After a long day of multiple harangues on national security and a rapid-fire overview of Canada/US relations by a maniac in a bow tie, Janice Gross Stein came to talk with us about speaking truth to power using her book on Kandahar as a starting point.

When several federal staffers described how the long standing, poor relationship between the politicians and the bureaucrats in Ottawa had the effect of deteriorating the quality of advice given, I put up my hand and invoked the example of the cancelled power plants in Ontario to make the point that there are times where the bureaucrats are clearly providing good advice and the political staff are just as clearly ignoring it.

That's when one of the other students went off her coconut. She turned to me, pointed her finger at me and scolded me for apparently not appreciating the fact that those catastrophically capricious decisions are fully legit. Well, it wasn't my point that they weren't so it's just telling that that's where her head went.

Not sure where the class is going to be after two weeks of this. Glad to see I haven't lost my special power of getting fully, deeply and unwittingly under people's fingernails.

Wednesday, February 12

It's been clear since the very first day that Bill's network is a bit past its best before date, for example Hugh Segal - a lion of another age. But Wednesday's after-dinner speaker was only technically a living fossil. Michael Hart was his name. He's one of those highly opinionated right wing free market fundamentalists, which is fine, who values no opinon but his own, which is less fine.

It was bad enough to sit through his version of the gospel of Adam Smith but after the break under the grotesque title of "evidence-based policy", he broke into a climate change denier riff. It was late and I was tired so I rose to the bait. Everyone said they found it very amusing but I'm thinking that sitting through crap like that is not what the province of Ontario paid for when they signed me up for the course. 

Thursday, February 13

My only note to myself was to make me remember to be sure to take a photo of a hand-drawn sign on the front door of a house on Johnson Street:

Friday, February 14

I sent myself two notes. This one in the morning:

I understand the thesis. Things are not as they should be for the public service and we know this to be true because of the way things were before. But the way things were before was because of a vast range of conditions and variables some we are aware of and understand, some we're aware of but don't understand and a whole bunch of other important things that we are not aware of at all.

Thinking about the good old days doesn't do a damn thing to tell us about what we should do now. We need to do a contemporary real time diagnostic of the situation to see what we might do about this. And, sadly, I guess that's what we won't ever have the luxury of time to do.

If we can't do a real time diagnostic can we please also not talk about the good old days.

I sent this one just before I went to bed:

While travelling to the movie American Hustle, two other course members and I talked about the program.

Several things I had not been admitting to myself came into focus. The course is not that great. The relentless lecture format fails to acknowledge and makes very poor use of the expertise in the room. The lectures are uneven. All try to squeeze too much into the time available. Some have been very poor. And we paid a lot of money for this. And we've taken two weeks away from our homes and our jobs. 

This doesn't feel like executive training. It feels like undergrad.

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So, readers, things are looking bad for our protagonist at the end of Week One.

How did Week Two go? Did they ever stop whining about the good old days? Did a speaker under the age of sixty ever show up?

Come back next week for the thrilling conclusion to Bubble World! 

Thanks for reading! You can find Molly's latest post here.

And have a great week!

Karen

From Kingston

It's so cold I'm speechless, which is just as well considering how impossible it is to blog with an iPad. I'll put up a better post next week. Molly's blog will also have to wait, but here's a shot to tide you over.

Thanks for reading! Have a great week!

Karen

Allan Garden Update: Bite Me

The giant hole project in the Allan Gardens - otherwise known as the Gerrard Watermain Replacement Project - has entered its third year.

You can see a satellite view of the hole with Apple Maps, but not Google. The Apple view does not convey much about what's going on. Both Apple and Google miss entirely the events observed at eye level.

Readers recall how first the hoarding went up around the excavation site, presenting a welcoming canvas for graffiti artists: 

And then for actual artists: 

Next, Superstorm Sandy came along and made some harsh edits to the murals facing north east. 

And then a tree fell on one corner.

Most recently, in the photo at the start of this post, an enterprising graffiti practitioner cum pastry chef has piped a universal invitation in rosettes and flowing script on a panel at the easternmost edge of the hoarding.

However, as happened with da Vinci's mural of the Last Supper, the artist did not prepare the surface well and the masterwork was a ruin almost as it was being made. Still, the magnificent vision is preserved in the wreckage and makes passers-by hope the next person who comes along with something to say truly tops the Bite Me artist.

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

I'm on my way to Kingston tomorrow for two weeks of executive training at Queen's. I am taking a computer with me, my camera and my iPad and it is fully my intention to blog next Saturday. But we'll see. I may have too much homework.

Molly's new post can be read here.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen































Gerrard Watermain Replacement Project
In early January 2012 wooden fencing was put up around a large area in the south east corner of Allan Gardens. This wooden fencing (called hoarding) separates the public space from the construction area required for the Gerrard - Elm - D’Arcy - River Street Watermain Replacement project. The hoarding will be in place until around
May 2015.

Cold Enough to Freeze the Glue Off Your Baubles

I imagine it's a testament to the interesting variety of my job that I can have, in the space of a single week, every conceivable kind of meeting: productive, collaborative, confrontational, baffling, amusing, frustrating and boring. 

This list does not preclude the chance that one, some or all of the meetings I've had this week were more than one of the above.

Ranged like a band of Disney dwarves, these events peppered my week, stole my time, brought me only the most intangible results and made me think about the nature of the public service.

I have this on my mind these days because not next week but the week after that I'll be taking two weeks of executive training at Queen's University in Kingston. The advance reading dwells heavily on the theme of the ruination of the role of the public service, its degradation in the public eye, the names it gets called and the cultivated, pervasive notion that government workers are spoiled parasites leaching value out of the economy and living high on the hog on the broken back of the taxpayer. 

Depending on which meeting I'm at, I think these notions either are manifestly false or ring sadly true. It takes all kinds to make a public service.

It's probably also true that the public service holds no monopoly on the worst or best kind of meetings.

But the public service meeting I really don't get and have zero patience for is "confrontational." The one meeting I had this week in this category featured people from four different ministries and multiple divisions within those ministries. The people who convened the meeting made it clear that, while others were invited, their thoughts were really not all that welcome. So this was a baffling meeting. When those invited dared to speak their thoughts anyway, the baffling meeting became confrontational.

In case you're wondering, this meeting was the first step in a multi-ministry collaboration to review some public policies affecting about eleven million Ontarians.

It was sort of like starting the multi-country collaboration on the International Space Station with a fist fight.  

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The title of today's post is something I heard someone say this past week. 

Here's another line I heard: "Don't let a burrito take you down."

Each has a back story, but I think they're funnier without 'em.

Molly's post this week can be found here.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!  

Karen