Maggie

Left to right: Bob, Maggie, Mike, Arabind, Renan. The team split two shifts: nine to noon and noon to three. I was on the morning shift; these guys, the afternoon.

This week, for the third time over the past five years, I took my team with me to volunteer at the Fort York Food Bank. The Bank has moved from larger premises on Dundas Street to the compact space of the former Amadeo's Pizza at the corner of Borden and College Streets. 

We were met, as always, by Maggie, the Bank's volunteer coordinator. Maggie is herself a volunteer, dedicated to the point of obsession with her work.

Maggie's somewhere between fifty and sixty years old. Five foot five or six in height, soaking wet she might weigh 95 pounds. From the back, she looks more like a large child than a small adult. Her wiry, scant hair falls past her shoulders. She sometimes pulls it to the front and twists it in her hands when she talks.

On Wednesday she was wearing a new-looking pair of jeans and a thin grey sweater. She always wears a hat because it gets cold in the back.

The past two times we've volunteered, we spent three very full hours sorting, packaging, unpacking and shelving food.

This time, we "made" lunch, by refreshing salad, reheating cooked chicken and frying roasted potatoes. This was all done and the food loaded in the steam table by 10:30 a.m. 

To pass the rest of the way to lunch time, we hauled food out of the back and put it on the shelves out front where people get their food baskets.

I helped in the back, as Maggie, muttering to herself about the kinds and quantities of food that she needed, pulled heavy boxes off of overloaded shelves, which I then handed to members of my team who carried them to the front. 

I thought about the logistics of food banks. Shipments arrive several times a week from the central Daily Bread Food Bank (the shipments balance protein, vegetables, starch), from the Ontario Food Terminal (Maggie had several huge boxes of green onions on Wednesday, two 100-pound bags of carrots starting to sprout and at least one crate of deeply rotten apples) and from donors (while we were there four young women arrived bearing large bags of packaged food). 

So, the inputs are hard to control. On top of this, food banks have no way to gauge demand. Over the past two months, crowds at the Fort York Food Bank Wednesday lunch had ranged from under fifty to more than 200. You never know, when you're running a food bank, what food you'll have available and you never know how many people you'll have to feed. "It depends on the weather," says Maggie, "if it's cold they'll come for lunch to get inside."

While I mulled all of this over, and helped lift more boxes off the shelves, I noticed my team members had stopped coming to the back.

Uh oh, I thought. They better not be shelving the food.

I'd long since learned that Maggie manages the chaos of the food bank by being very particular about how some things are done, especially shelving food.

So it was when Maggie and I brought out the last haul from the back that my team learned the first rule of the Fort York Food Bank: do what Maggie tells you to do the way Maggie tells you to do it or don't do it at all.

Hundreds of cans and jars and packages had been egregiously mis-shelved. They had to do it all again.

Maggie keeps up a steady stream of patter on the job, talking to herself if she doesn't have an audience. She mentioned a couple of times when we were there to listen that she has a thirty-year-old son who lives with her. According to Maggie, he complains that she spends too much time at the food bank. He asks her why she doesn't stay home more. "Because," she explains, "No one knows how to do it right like I do."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Learn How to Fall

Stunning transformation: Just the day before this ornamental cabbage
had been brilliant green and creamy white. 

It could definitely have been worse. The fall I took in the middle of the intersection of Yonge and Wellesley I mean.

It was about quarter after five on Wednesday afternoon. Dark, because it's almost the solstice. I was headed east, on the south side of Wellesley. The pedestrian signal countdown had started so I picked up the pace.

My forward momentum made it impossible to catch myself by a stutter step of my trailing leg when my right foot caught a rough spot in the pavement. Down I went. 

Did I mention I was in the middle of an intersection in downtown Toronto at the height of rush hour? And it was dark?

As I began my split second journey to meet the pavement a chorus of human voices rose around me. There were inarticulate calls and sounds of dismay. Two distinct voices rose above the ruckus. A woman kept asking me if I was all right. A man exhorted the crowds to "look at that!"

Anyway. 

As my body reacted to the sudden change in my relationship with gravity, I did both the right and the wrong thing. 

It was cold enough that I had my down-filled winter coat on, a  warm hat, my hood up and gloves on. It was not so cold that I had my hands in my pockets. So I did the wrong thing and tried to break my fall with my outstretched arms (in injuries from falls lingo this is FOOSH). That's the wrong thing to do. That's how people break their wrists.

I pivoted in mid-fall and landed on my left hip and shoulder. That's the right thing to do. It's better than breaking your fall with your face and distributes the impact across a greater area.

Once the fall was done, I became preoccupied with recovery. My greatest absolutely legitimate fear was that a westbound driver late to the scene would decide to use what seemed to them like a quiet moment in the intersection to make a quick left hand turn.

So I got to my feet. Easily. That was a relief.

Even though I'd stood up unassisted, the unseen woman still demanded to know if I was all right. The man still wanted everyone to look at that.

So I turned in the direction of their voices, smiled, thanked them for their concern and said I was OK. She was a tiny middle aged woman, he, a less tiny middle aged man. 

I finished crossing the intersection. The countdown was still running. The whole thing took four seconds, tops.

The gloves on my hands saved them from abrasions. My hat and hood protected my head and kept my glasses from flying off my face. My over-the-knee leather boots kept me scrape free.

The last lucky stroke: I was on my way to an appointment with my massage therapist. She assessed me for broken bones or serious soft tissue injuries. There were none.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Civil Servants

Mild-mannered fooling around: a pest spray bottle for irritating staff,
a gift from an irritating member of my staff. 

In another unusual turn for me, I quite like my boss at the Ministry of Energy Northern Development and Mines (hereafter Energy etc.). She was the director of legal services before becoming Assistant Deputy Minister. She's smart, dedicated to her team and fun to work with.

We're divided only by our perspective on the cause of chaos in our jobs. I tend to blame the politicians. She blames the bureaucrats.

We're both right.

This past week, my boss and I turned our different views of our world on what could well prove to be a classic in the annals of political/bureaucratic collaboration on gumming things up.

Twenty or so pages into the 55 page Fall Economic Statement, the government announced that it would start overseeing labour negotiations of all government agencies. 

This is part of the new crew's commitment to fiscal management and making sure the taxpayer is not being milked.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, but the government did forget to tell the agencies what they were planning to do.

So when I got on the phone with a couple of the agencies I deal with - one of which is in the middle of its labour negotiations - there were what I would describe as carefully contained reactions to my news.

To the element of surprise was added the extra fun that the internal department in charge of oversight had not figured out any part of the process. There were draft templates and vague notions about who should fill them out and who should sign them, but nothing had been approved....

Of course the deadline was three days before the release of the Fall Economic Statement. 

In chaos-rich situations like this, where everyone is stressed and angry, the bureaucracy erupts in a rash of civility, festooning the end of every e-mail with defusing bromides such as "should you have any other questions please do not hesitate to contact me" and "I can definitely make myself available if you require anything further."

I gave serious thought to asking the last guy to do my Christmas shopping for me, but decided not to break the mood.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

FitBit(e) Me

Gingko berries: abundant, smelly, delicious (?). Find the answers here. 

I first strapped on my Fitbit on October 25. It's been my bossy, know-it-all little friend ever since.

I got the Fitbit because I don't trust the heart monitoring sensors on the equipment at the gym. It seemed impossible that my heart rate could be so high.

Now I wonder.

Anyway. Now, not only do I know all about my heart rate, I am fully briefed on the steps I've taken, the calories I've burned and how well I have slept.

The gist: I get enough exercise; I don't get enough sleep. And it takes everything I can do in a day to burn 2,000 calories.

A few surprising things about my new gadget: the Fitbit is a movie critic. While I watched the new Coen brothers movie - the Ballad of Buster Scruggs - on Netflix, the 'Bit said "Oh, I see you've taken a nap."

The 'Bit is also easy to fool. I chopped vegetables to make a pot roast and it said, "Overachiever! You're 2,000 steps over your goal!"

Thanks for reading!

Karen

I made this in 2,367 steps.

Kids These Days

Greater than teen pregnancy or drugs or alcohol, the prevailing parental prohibition of my youth was ear piercing. My folks were agin it. Father said so many times it's seared in my aural memory that if any of us got our ears pierced we'd get our heads pierced, too.

And then, quietly, without fanfare, on the day of her eighteenth birthday, my oldest sister Carol went to the jewellery store - Bruinix - in downtown Trenton, and had her ears pierced. 

The sky did not fall. Father did not pierce her head. A precedent had been set.

The next one across the bright line was, of all people, my mother.

That was it. I got my ears pierced.

Back then you could wander into a jewellery store and have a retail clerk under not sanitary conditions use a sort of staple gun to install gold-plated studs through the fleshy, tender but comparatively blood-vessel-free part of your ear lobe. 

Then you were to turn the stud every day and apply copious amounts of hydrogen peroxide to your ear. Infections were common.

After I'd had my pierced ears for a while, I'd amassed a collection of single earrings, so I had another store clerk put another hole in my head some time in the mid-80's.

And that was it. As the years passed and tattoo and piercing parlours took an increasing share of the "do weird shit to your body" market, my flesh remained unsullied but for the three small additional holes in my ear lobes.

Until now.

I bought myself some sapphire studs for my birthday this year. I already have a pair of diamond studs that Bruce got me for Christmas a while back. That's four earrings. But I have only three holes.

You can appreciate my dilemma.

So I googled "best piercing parlour Toronto." Chronic Ink, three blocks from here on Yonge Street at Gerrard is the local favourite according to Yelp. I called to see if I needed an appointment. I didn't. But I did, said the young man on the phone, need to eat before I came. "For your blood sugar levels," he explained.

So, after lunch, I walked over to Yonge Street and up four flights of stairs (Chronic Ink is over the fine old bank building formerly occupied by the Elephant and Castle) and entered a space different from any I'd ever been in to date.

This was Monday, November 12 at about 2 in the afternoon. Four or five of the ten or so tattoo stations were occupied. The tattoo chairs were a cross between a chaise lounge and a dentist's chair, upholstered in black leather or leather-like material. There were lots of latex-free gloves and face masks. Everyone was twenty-five or younger.

Trying to blend in, I pulled out my phone and read Facebook posts while I waited.

I also filled in a form, signed a disclaimer, and bought, for about $100, the "jewel" that would be inserted in my ear lobe. The piercing itself was $25. 

Of course the person who provided the service was young enough to be my granddaughter. Everyone these days is.

She was pleasant and skilled and did her job with dispatch. I imagined it was one of the usual enquiries someone in her trade makes, to see if the customer has had any bad experiences with past piercings, when she asked me when I'd gotten the other piercings in my ears.

To my credit, I did not say "twenty years before you were born, dear." 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Ways of Seeing

I've blogged before about the poster in this week's picture. It hangs in an examination room at the clinic where I see my family doctor. 

The last time I wrote about it, I observed how traditional depictions of a thing can be different from their current version. Christmas was the example I used. 

I surreptitiously took this shot on Thursday when I was visiting the doctor for a routine test. 

I'm still sorting out my feelings about it. (The poster I mean. Not the test.)

On the one hand, the poster has a grade school textbook appeal; it conveys a simple message that could build a foundation for understanding more complex ideas such as, for example, in the USA, you could hear every one of the ways to say "hello" in just one place. 

On the other hand, these days, a cheerful depiction of girl-positive racial diversity feels like nostalgia for a lost age. 

Eyeball Update

The last we heard of Bruce's eye was when he went in for his "final" procedure at the end of August. That was to remove the oil bubble in his eye, replace it with an air bubble and, within a couple of days, Bruce's vision in that eye was to come back to what would be the new normal.

Except that didn't happen.

A week after the procedure, Bruce still couldn't see at all out of the eye. The doc peered into the gooey depths and saw a lot of blood. Bruce might, said the doc, have to have another surgery to remove the blood.

The idea of putting Bruce's poor, perforated eyeball through another procedure did not appeal to us in any way. We opted to wait for a while longer.

But, when the eyeball doc declared in late October that not only was the blood still there, it seemed fresh, Bruce resigned himself to undergo another procedure. It didn't seem like there was any other choice.

He booked another surgery for November 1. 

And then, almost immediately, Bruce's eyesight improved. A quick trip to the doc confirmed the eye was clearing. 

Bruce cancelled the last procedure. He can see again.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

That's Real Life

Hallowe'en at the Ministry: Deni, a policy analyst on my team, is the late, great, Ontario Hydro, the Crown corporation privatized into Hydro One in 1999.

Twice this past week I pretended I was something I'm not. Hallowe'en had nothing to do with it. I went to work dressed up as a bureaucrat that day.

On Tuesday I was the Innovation Manager at the WestEnergy coal-fired power facility situated in the fictional land of Newtonia. In that role, I failed to persuade my CEO to invest in renewable energy early enough and, by our third year, our company was getting crushed by the competition. 

On Thursday, I was a 35-year-old, freshly minted Senior Vice-President of a pharmaceutical and cosmetics company. In that role, I had to let my star performer, Jamie, know that she was not going to get that promotion she had her eye on. 

These roles were in safe-to-fail simulations. So I embraced the learning and failed in each.

My first "year" as Innovation Manager went well enough. I brokered a four-way partnership to install Newtonia's first section of smart grid. But, then, real life got in the way and I had to step away from the simulation to brief the Premier's Office.

By the time I got back, it was year three, the plant was still burning coal and the competition had gobbled up the scarce supply of renewable power. Worse, my corporate colleagues had gotten used to my not being there and I had no real role.

I went rogue and cooked up a deal with the federal government and a local steel company to build a carbon sequestration plant, clean up the power that we had and sell it to fussy, climate-conscious customers.  

While I was doing that the CEO made a deal to buy fusion power from another energy utility, rendering both the coal plant and carbon sequestration deal obsolete. Since this wasn't real life, I easily shouldered the broken deal and sold the coal plant back to the market.

Thursday's simulation was part of a day-long training session put on by the Ivey business school. The 35-year-old Senior Vice President was a featured player in a case study. 

The class bashed around the case study for about a half an hour. The senior VP needed to choose between two candidates, Jamie, the star, and Michael. 

I held firm to the position that Jamie was the best candidate. Others in the class switched over to Michael because he seemed less risky. The class did finally agree that Jamie, even if she was the better choice, had room to develop.

Then the trainer asked the question, "who would like to coach Jamie?" 

I said I would, because I thought the question was rhetorical.

Turns out not. After about a minute to prepare, I was seated at the front of the room and the trainer brought Jamie in.

Jamie was smartly dressed, in her mid-to-late thirties and looked every inch like the person in the case study. 

After some animated small talk, I started with what felt to me like neutral questions about where she thought she needed to develop.

Things went badly after that.

I can't disclose the details without edging onto Ivey's intellectual property, but, leadership skills other than coaching got tested that day.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Hallowe'en at the Ministry:
Emma's a Spice Girl.