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 

Impact

Three totems: my work companions.

I don't know if anyone cares about what public servants do during an election, except, perhaps, the public servants themselves.

When the election is called and officially there is no government, public servants go into "caretaker mode" so that, even though there is no one in charge, welfare cheques get issued, public infrastructure gets built and the Ontario Provincial Police issue speeding tickets on 400 series highways, among many other important things.

Before the election, there is the frenzy of activity called "transition" where shops like mine frantically prepare briefing materials in anticipation of the new government. 

This is also the time when public servants fret about whether or not they will have a job after the election.

I went for lunch this week with the two other Directors that work in my Division and it was all they could talk about. They have young families. They are terrified.

Also terrifying was the "Yonge Street Incident" this past week, where a clearly disturbed individual used a rented truck as a weapon to mow down innocent pedestrians. 

Maybe he was inspired by the incels, but I wonder if the driver had anything so rational as a motive; rather, an overloaded sense of grievance and a lot of bottled rage.

These days, the combination of these two things seems like the most powerful force in the universe.  

The people killed and injured by the deranged driver did not have the benefit of foreknowledge that they were going to be the targets of this force. 

People working in the public service, on the other hand, do. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen 

Rare Sightings

Last in the series: 
the kit had fifty pieces, 403 points to glue and took eight hours to put together.
The legs, especially the back ones, were a lot of tucking frouble. 

This past week I retired from doing Low Poly crafts.

I also attended a Ministry of Energy "town hall", the first to be held in at least six years.

Those attending fit easily into the small chapel at Victoria College on the University of Toronto campus. The whole ministry has less than 200 people. In contrast, the Environment Ministry has almost 2000.

Never before seen together in public: the Ministry of Energy senior management team.
My boss is second from the left. The person holding the mic is the Deputy Minister.

Science and religion used to be friends:
Sir Isaac Newton in stained glass on hallowed ground,
Victoria College Chapel.

You used to be able, in April, to see patio stones in my back yard.

Finally, at a rate of better than a million dollars a day, more than 140,000 people (including me) from more than 80 countries donated more than $15,000,000 in support of the families affected by the tragedy that befell the Humbolt Broncos hockey team. 

It is so exquisitely rare that this kind of common cause arises that of course it could not last. Even before the Gofundme site stopped taking donations, people started to complain. Nancy Kane, for example, said: 

"Do not understand why a few more days were not given to accept very sincere donations, rather churlish after everyone's efforts."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Marching

Puffin: Fifteen fewer pieces; three fewer hours, 
but the legs were more than a little bit tricky.

I've mentioned the Toronto construction boom in this blog before. Just about any neighbourhood near a major transit line in Toronto is seeing big changes. 

I have illustrated this before in bits and pieces: construction hoarding and notice signs.

Here's another way to show the change underway.

In 2013, nothing showed above the Allan Gardens greenhouse except the palmhouse dome, the stack of the long-decommissioned incinerator and the stalk of a blooming yucca plant. 

In 2015, something else appeared, a condominium tower under construction at the corner of Dundas and Jarvis.

Now, in 2018, there are two more being built at the same corner. 

The march of the fifty-storey towers.

You can see the construction crane for the second new tower just peeking above the greenhouse roof. 

There is another fifty-storey tower slated to be built just east of these.

If all goes as planned (and nothing does) we will be in this neighbourhood for another five years. 

By then, we won't recognize the place.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen