Winnipeggers

In our hotel: welcoming bouquets, one for each of us, from cousin Paul

Two of my sisters, the eldest and the youngest, and I are in Winnipeg for the first time in at least a decade.

Kim and Carol rocking Lennard Taylor on the Cibo patio

We're here to visit our cousins Paul and Susan, the youngest son and oldest daughter of my mother's second oldest sister and second oldest brother, respectively. 

Family can get a little confusing.

We're staying at a newish hotel - the Mere - by the Red River, close to the Forks and the Human Rights Museum.

Over an Italian-wedding-scale meal featuring something from every part of the Cibo menu (do try the pickerel fritto; avoid the salmon and dill pizza), we sorted out some of the intricacies of the family history.

We also made some plans. 

Stay tuned.

Carol, cousin Paul, cousin Susan, Kim

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Little Help

Fledgling robin waiting to be fed, my back yard.

I've had better weeks: ones that left me feeling better than I feel right now. Weeks where no one famous who was almost exactly my age died.* Where no former boss or colleague died.** And where no sloganeering neophyte of undetectable talent and unclear intentions became the Premier-designate of the province.

These were all unfortunate; the last being possibly the most impactful. 

Bruce and I talked about our new circumstances as we walked together on Friday morning, me on my way to work, Bruce on his way to the bus station to go visit his dad. 

Bruce, trying to be positive, said that we had survived the tenures of other conservative ideologues like Brian Mulroney, Mike Harris and Stephen Harper, so we could likely weather the next four to eight years. 

He is right that we are better situated than many others, but, I said to Bruce, who retires at the end of this month, "When all those other guys were in power, we were less vulnerable than we are now. Our income was steady or growing; we were younger ..."

Then we agreed - and I spent the whole day Friday saying to my staff - "we'll just have to see what happens." 

The Liberals' good intentions didn't keep them from being ineffectual, so there's hope. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen 

* Anthony Bourdain.

** My former boss, Rob Fleming, died suddenly from an aneurysm on Wednesday morning. He'd retired last October. And I learned on Friday of the death of Christopher Wilson. I'd known Christopher, a Canadian-born American citizen who worked for the Lung Association, from my air quality work over the past decade.

March 2017. That's Christopher, the guy with the grey beard and impressive head of hair, gazing off into the distance in Ottawa, the night before a multi-stakeholder working group agreed on a proposal for a new standard for sulphur dioxide emissions in Canada.

Perfect

Found only in the Allan Gardens: red-tailed black squirrel

About six years ago, we ended our contractual relationship - we thought amicably - with Dave our cleaning guy. Evidently Dave thought differently. He would not return our key.

Without further ado, we changed our locks. We opted for top-of-the-line technology that would let us keep the same lock but change the key up to four times. We had these installed on the basement, back and front doors. 

The back and basement doors have never given us trouble, but because it is most fiercely exposed to the elements and because the door hangs a bit crooked in its frame, we have had to call in service on the front door lock two or three times in the past six years.

Most recently, when I turned the key in the lock on Monday, I heard a "bang" on the other side of the door. The deadbolt knob had slipped off its peg. It looked like it had lost its set screw and I couldn't find that anywhere.

So I called the lock company.

A nice young woman, whose name I learned was Courtney, answered the phone. I gave her my name and explained my situation.

"Perfect," she said. "We can get Vlad out today."

Assuming Vlad was the repair technician, I quickly added that Friday would be better.

"Perfect," she said.

I gave her my address.

"Perfect," she said. "What's your phone number?"

I gave her my number.

"Perfect," she said.

I found all this positive feedback encouraging. 

Courtney asked when would be the best time for Vlad to come by. I explained Bruce would be home all day, so, whenever.

"Perfect," said Courtney. "But when?"

I threw out my opening bid. "9:00 a.m.?"

9:00 a.m. was not perfect. The earliest Vlad could show up was 11:00 a.m.

"That will work," I said.

"Perfect," said Courtney.

There was more to the conversation, but you get the picture. 

I have remarked in other posts how once high-calibre words such as icon, avatar and war have been, through overuse and lazy locution, upended and drained of meaning. 

"Perfect" could be the next candidate, except that it has never meant anything.

I'm more worried about another overused, once high-calibre word, the one that now describes everything from a community of similarly-qualified professionals, to a collection of factories, to a sector of the economy, to any kind of system, to the world as we know it: "ecosystem."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

P.S. Vlad came and fixed the lock, at 11:00 a.m. as promised. The set screw was not "lost." Rather, it is permanently set within the deadbolt knob, but you need a special, tiny Allen key to turn it when it comes loose. After reattaching the knob, and charging Bruce $150.00, Vlad gave us our very own tiny Allen key. 

Perfect.









  

Recalibrating

Window display, Yonge Street

Fewer Conservatives

This week, people in Ontario evidently decided that Andrea Horwath was the better "not Doug" candidate. With just under two weeks left in the election, it's still the Conservative's to lose, but the race is a bit more interesting than it was last week.

Because I don't write for a major news outlet, I'll hazard that the victory of either the Conservatives or the NDP will not be the end of the world as we know it. 

Others have that project.

Fewer Bikes

A tower under construction at 2 Carlton Street proposed as part of its plan that there would be parking for 162 cars and 1,148 bikes. 

That's changed.   

Vandalized revised redevelopment posting.

More Time

Since my last update, Bruce has been to the eyeball repair shop three times and will visit again this week. The news is always the same: the retina has reattached; there's nothing wrong with leaving the oil drop in for the time being, except that Bruce can't see out of that eye. 

The eye doc recommends waiting until the end of August to remove the oil.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Life Lessons

In honour of today's royal wedding.
Bruce and I essay our wedding cake, July 4, 2009.

When politicians take to the mats so that one of them will emerge victorious, the public servants waiting at ringside cool their heels, avoid eye contact with stakeholders and go on training courses.

I spent three days this past week learning, with eleven members of my peer group, how to coach.

You might well ask why it would take three whole days to accomplish something so simple. Turns out there's more to it than you'd think. 

And every time up until now that I thought I was coaching someone, it turns out I was doing something else.

Oh well. 

The experience was rewarding. "Aha" moments abounded. We had lots of fun.

But, this is the Ontario Public Service and no shared moment is so special that it can't have the life sucked out of it.

After two and a half days of revelations, self-discovery and camaraderie, we spent the last part of the course being told how we would be pinned to "accountability circles," meeting every week. In our materials pre-drafted agendas set out in five minute intervals what we would do in those circles.

So along with the techniques of coaching, twelve bureaucrats learned the lesson of what over-regulation feels like. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Role Models

Allan Garden Magnolias

At the end of the 1980's and the beginning of the 1990's, Bruce and I lived on Isabella Street. We hung out a lot at the Artful Dodger, a quaintly disreputable pub just east Yonge Street on Isabella.

Across the street from the Dodger was a long single-storey building that has served many purposes over the years and is currently a Rabba, a small grocery.

Back in the day, on our way for a pint or two, we would see spray-painted on the wall of the shop across from the Dodger a graffiti, resonant with loss. 

It said "Where are all my comic book heroes?"

These days, access to comic book heroes has never been easier, though the sense of loss, I find, is still there.

What Equality Looks Like

Over the past week, there were two major conferences for the energy sector. One, attended by about 350 mostly women, focused on supporting women in the sector. The other, attended by about 500 mostly men, was a more typical event. I attended the former, and compared notes with a colleague who attended the latter.

They had a lot in common: swanky venue, great food, cliquey energy sector people who are aren't interested in making small talk with strangers and run-of-the-mill presentations.

Pop Quiz for Grown Ups

To raise money for a charitable work-place campaign this past week, one of my ministry colleagues organized a lunch-time trivia contest. 

Each day, in return for five bucks, we were given answer sheets with blanks for twenty six questions. There were twenty-five one-point answers and one three-point bonus answer. 

The quiz master asked the questions and we had thirty seconds to answer each one. We all sat crammed around a boardroom table. The keeners covered their answers.

We passed our paper to the person next to us to score.

The questions were well drafted with a good variety of topics. And they were tough. 

No one scored 100%. The best score I heard was 14 out of a possible total of 28. My scores ranged between 9 and 12, which put me close to but never at the top. The papers I marked scored 3 and 4. 

Contemporary culture questions were my Waterloo. I did not know what Beyonce's middle name was, or what Nickelodeon show made Ariana Grande famous, and, because these details slide off me like an egg off a Teflon pan, I could not recall, even though I did know, what film won best picture at this year's Oscars.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Answers:
a) Giselle
b) Victorious
c) The Shape of Water

Blurred Images

Spring - when it finally arrives - brings exotic strangers to our back yard.

Migrating birds hang out for a day or two to fill up on the bug life in the pine trees. We hear them more often than we see them, but sometimes their movement gives their location away.

The fetching redhead in this picture was three yards over and twenty feet up, his head a blur from hammering on the tree bark. 

The astonishing white-footed squirrel in the pictures below was closer by, but more skittish than the woodpecker. The autofocus on my camera found the bricks and tree in the background more interesting, but I just cannot get over this little guy. 

I've encountered other fuzzy pictures recently. 

Lazily clicking links on the CBC news website, I came across a statement more amazing to me than the white footed squirrel. That is, an explanation for why men in the Republican leadership outnumber women fifty to one, as opposed to the Democrats who actively recruit women in and have slightly better representation:

"The donors in the Republican Party, they don't see gender. They want commitment to conservative ideology. And so they don't care about the gender of the candidate," [Michelle Swers, a congressional expert] said.

Less hilarious, but equally illustrative of how things change depending on how you look at them, I got my ancestry.ca results to compare with my 23andMe results. 

According to the latter, I am forty percent Scots and twenty percent German. According to Ancestry.ca, it's the other way around. I am predominantly German and Polish and only one fifth Scots. 

It could be the marketing was lying to me.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen