Good Friday in Toronto and an Update from the Yessir Yessir Highway

Still another strange little vehicle. The youngish man to whom these contraptions belong also has many stuffed bears. He brings a different bear each day with him and talks to it softly and kindly as he walks down the street. He always wears a helmet.

Sleeping raccoon high in a bare tree on the Sherbourne Common on the Toronto Waterfront.

Famous troupe l'oeil painting (1980), newly renovated park, Gooderham Flatiron Building.

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

The Ruler of a small but pleasant realm was seated at her desk behind the locked door of her chambers. She'd just opened an envelope marked with the Great Troll's shaky handwriting.

[Editor's note: the earliest versions of this account had reported that the note inside the envelope said "Congratulations," but, more authoritative texts show that the note said "Open the door."]

There was a knock at her chamber door.

"Who is it?" asked the Ruler, really missing Chappie, her most trusted advisor, long since gone. She also missed the Wizard, who today had sent an intern when she called for assistance. In other times, he would have brought his magic sack himself.

The Ruler began to regret the long time she spent in the wilderness getting rid of the Thing. It seemed as if many things had changed in her absence.

"It's me," said a voice from behind the door. The Ruler recognized the Wizard's voice. This was odd. The Wizard had his own entry into her chamber. So he must not have been alone.

"Greetings Wizard," said the Ruler, making her voice cheerful. "Who accompanies you today?"

"It's me," said the Henchman, the Ruler's boss to the first power.

"And me." The Ruler recognized the softy, raspy voice of the Ghost, her seldom-seen boss to the second power. 

"What a red letter day this is," said the Ruler, keeping her voice cheerful as she walked across the room, unlocked and opened the door. "Three of the greatest, most noble, wisest men in the kingdom all visiting me at the same time. To what do I owe the great honour?"

The men filed in past the Ruler, made their way into the chamber, and turned to face her, in a row, their arms folded. They looked like three big, stern-faced chess pieces. 

"No time for pleasantries," said the Henchman. "We're here to take you to the Troll Bridge." The Troll Bridge was the place of greatest power and peril in the kingdom where lay the corpse-strewn lair of the Great Troll.

The Ruler, perplexed by the means but not entirely surprised by the request, grabbed her cloak and left her chambers, she assumed for the last time, with the three men.  

They made their way down the Yessir Yessir Highway in formation. Bosses One and Two flanked the Ruler on each side and the Wizard walked behind her. No one spoke.

None of the bustling crowds on the busy highway paid much heed to the foursome as they strode along. The day was warm and sunny, with a gentle breeze. The Ruler noted, in passing and without thinking too much about it, the sharp but not unpleasant smell of someone burning herbs.

To be continued....

Thanks for reading!

Have a Happy Easter!

Karen

Let Me Clarify

Photo taken almost exactly one year ago - April 9 2016: Second Floor Stained Glass Window 

A couple of readers wondered aloud - or at least by e-mail - about the import of last week's post. 

If I didn't win the competition for the job I've been doing for the past four years, then what ...? 

Am I fired? Demoted? Shuffled off to some obscure post?

I can't completely answer that question right now. Other people are involved. Announcements need to be drafted and circulated for approval a couple of thousand times. 

But, an old friend has returned from her sojourn in the wilderness. The Ruler and her Advisors got a handful of beans from a grizzled old man in exchange for The Thing. 

As far as she was concerned, that was a good and fair trade.

***********

The Ruler of a small but pleasant realm was tidying up her chambers which had been neglected during her time away.

Chappie, her most trusted Advisor and one-time right-hand-man, was long since gone so there was no one to keep the place in order. Towering, teetering stacks of undone paperwork obscured her desk, her chair and covered the floor. 

The Ruler called for assistance. A young advisor scurried in trailing a great big sack. 

The Ruler did not recognize the advisor but she had seen the sack before.

"Hello," the Ruler said to the young advisor, "did the Wizard send you to help me?"

"Yes'm," said the ridiculously young-looking advisor. "He gave me this and said you knew what to do."

"Indeed I do," said the Ruler. "Bring that over here. I'll show you how the sack works and then you can take it from there."

The Ruler grabbed as much paper as she could lift from the top of an especially burdensome looking pile and dumped it into the sack the young advisor held open.

There was a brief flash. The paper was gone. The young advisor, braced for a great weight of paper, almost fell over.

"Where'd it go?" she asked. 

"Not sure," said the Ruler, "just so long as it's not here. The Wizard likely knows. But the less I know about it the better."

The young advisor, a quick study, did not need to be told twice what to do. She scooped up a pile of paper, dropped it into the sack and moved onto the next pile.

In about a half hour, she was done. There was no paper anywhere, except for one small white envelope on the Ruler's desk that neither of them had noticed before.

"What's that?" asked the advisor. "Was it even there a minute ago?"

Startled because she knew full well that there had not been a white envelope there a minute ago, the Ruler thanked the young advisor for her work and hurried her out the door. 

"Take that sack back to the Wizard right away," the Ruler warned. "No side trips."

The Ruler shut and, on second thought, locked her chamber door.

She went to her desk.

The envelope sat smack dab in the middle of the desktop. Plain white. No embossing or official insignia. Nothing on it but the Ruler's name in the shaky handwriting of the Great Troll, the Ruler's Boss to the Third Power.

The best and worst case scenario for what might be in that envelope was the unicorn the Ruler had always dreamed of.

She figured it would be not be that. There had been no unicorn sightings in the realm for many years.

She sat down. She inhaled and exhaled deeply a time or two.

She opened the envelope.

Inside was a single piece of paper with three words, also written in the Great Troll's shaky script.

"Open the door"

To be continued...

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Your Tax Dollars - One Last Time

Me and John Cooper - 29 March, 2017, Ottawa

This is a picture of me and John Cooper. John's my fellow co-chair of a multi-stakeholder working group that develops new standards to protect the air you breathe. The day after this photo was taken, we brought the group to consensus one more time. 

Your tax dollars ....

John works - at least for the next few months - at Health Canada. And then he will retire. 

John's long been one of my favourite public servants. He's smart, dedicated and fun to work with. He's also courageous, determined and a man of great integrity.

It was a real pleasure to work with him and I will miss him when he's gone.

I'd heard this past week of the imminent retirement of a few other air quality warriors, and I'm a little sad I'm not among them.

You Start to Wonder Why On Earth You Still Work for Government When ...

After three years, eight months and nineteen days at a job, I was told that the hour I spent talking about myself on March 2, 2017 put an end to all that. 

I lost the competition for my own job.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Happy Anniversary

As many readers are aware, Bruce and I hooked up in March, 1979.

Thirty years later, in March 2009, we got married .... 

Over ....

March 9, 2009, Huatulco, Mexico. Bruce and I chant with Jeannine Woodall in a ceremony shared by all the people at our yoga retreat, including my dear friend Kate Storey. 

These roses were part of the ceremony and I photographed them in their water bottle in the washroom in our room.

... and over ...

March 21, 2009. Bruce and I got married full and proper in front of a small crowd, including my dear friend Kate Storey, gathered in Bruce's parents' living room. 

As you can see in this array of corsages and boutonnieres, I stayed with the orange rose colour scheme. Our talented florists added green roses, peacock feathers and orange orchids for flair.

... and over again

On July 4, 2009, we threw a yard party featuring a handmade ceremony for a crowd of about 100 people, including my dear friend Kate Storey.

Flowers weren't a big part of the July party. But, we did have pony rides, a bounce castle and, most expensive of all, this cake. 

All these parties are happy memories. But that doesn't mean it's out of the question I might forget.

On Tuesday, March 21, 2017, I came home from work and spotted a vase of roses on the dining room table. 

"What're the flowers for?" I asked.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen 

Nothing to See Here

Wasp's nest: empty

It's March Break in this part of the country. Everyone with or claiming to have children took some or all of the past week off. 

The office was a ghost town. Crumpled bits of post it notes tumble-weeded down the deserted paths between the cubicles. Saved late afternoon daylight slanted in through half-blinded windows and sparkled on suspended dust flecks undisturbed by the breeze of policy advisors rushing around.

My calendar, crammed past capacity just last week sat half fallow, granting me time to catch up with those whose nests have always been or have recently become empty.

What do harried bureaucrats talk about when the work-driven gales have, for the moment, ceased to blow? When we can pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, go and grab a decaf in the late afternoon and chew the fat for ten minutes or so, what topics engage our interest?

Just one.

Retirement.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

P.S.

Busy Busy Busy

These two photos - the first one taken in April 2105, the second in March 2017 - show the industriousness of squirrels. Someone, some time ago, thought they would block a squirrel hole in a silver maple in the Allan Gardens. The squirrels, as you can see, thought different.

You Know You Work for Government When...

This is a picture of my calendar for the work week just past. The areas blocked off are almost exclusively chunks of time that other people have reserved for themselves in my calendar.  Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday have been tidied up so that there are only a few double booked spaces. On Friday, I was double and triple booked for almost the whole day, except  lunch, which got cancelled.

There's variety in all that quantity. 

On Tuesday, 

• I met for half an hour with one of my bosses to talk about a document on its way to Cabinet the next day, then 
• I talked for half an hour with a colleague in another division about clean tech, then 
• I spent an hour on a video conference with five high school students talking about their successful entry in a hackathon, then 
• I had an hour-long meeting with one of my managers to talk about sulphur, mercury and nitrogen dioxide, then 
• I attended for an hour a meeting on how things are progressing with First Nations and climate change, then 
• I briefed another boss for half an hour about changes to the Residential Tenancies Act and then 
• I closed the day with a 30 minute conversation that echoed the first conversation of the day, with more people looking for more details about the document going to Cabinet the next day.

I know everyone likes to be busy and you're probably wondering how you could get your calendar to look like mine. My advice is to have lots of bosses. Bosses keep you busy, and, at last count, I have four.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Surprising Numbers

Today's first two pictures illustrate the infinite variations available to anyone playing with digital information. 

They also illustrate popular taste. The app I use, ColorFLY, lets you post your efforts to a showroom, and thousands, maybe even millions of others who also have the app can look at and "like" your work.

I "like" the work of unseen strangers so that they will "like" mine. This seems to work and my highest number of "likes", until recently, had been 11, for this image.

The greatest number of likes I had ever seen on the ColorFly showroom for anyone's work was 35 for an impressive pixelated image of Johnny Depp. 

The pink romanticized horse head that starts this blog, coloured in less than a minute and posted absent-mindedly in a lazy attempt to see what would happen ... got 36 likes.

Being Watched

Another of my idle pastimes to recently score unusually high numbers is this blog. Normally, in a given week, along with the views from two dozen subscribers, This Week's Picture will get about 10 page views. 

But, on one day - February 17, 2017 - not long after I made what could hardly even be called disparaging remarks about the leader of the free world, there were 194 page views of my blog - all from the United States. 

You Know You Work for Government When...

This past week, I interviewed for the job I've been doing for the past 3 years, 8 months and 1 day.

Boy, sure hope I get it.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen