A Story of Christmas Eve Past

    In 2012 Beloved and I went east for Christmas (no, no. Not that far east).  His whole family lives in New Brunswick and the Offspring was still in university in Halifax, so we went to the Maritimes for the holidays. We spent a few days in Saint John and then Beloved and his best uncle drove me to Halifax. Offspring and I were going to spend a few days together in Halifax and then drive back to Saint John on Christmas Eve so we would all be together at the best aunt and uncle's house.  

    The Offspring is good and kind and her M.O. at Christmas and Thanksgiving is to gather up all the orphans she knows and feed them. 2012 had a real orphan, a girl in Offspring's program at school who had only the Offspring and one other friend, so the Kid decided to get a few friends together and have a Christmas Eve lunch.
   
 By the time the leftovers were cleared up and the dishes done and we took the orphan to the other friend's house, we finally left Halifax at around 6PM. Offspring drove and I navigated the first while.  It was cold, but the roads were mostly bare and dry. As we approached Truro, which is where you turn left towards New Brunswick, there was a sign for the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton, and the Kid said, "while I am living out here I would like to see Cape Breton."  We talked and laughed and I fiddled with her iPhone containing music and a gps.  I found it confusing and it took much of my attention. (Now, this is is a curious point.  I am very good at navigation.  I can read a map and get myself oriented in no time at all. The first thing I do in any new place is get a map and work out where I am and I am fine. For some reason when I go east with Beloved, I do not get a map, I do not figure out where we are and I am lost from the moment we arrive until we get to the Toronto Airport.)

At some point, about a half hour past the sign for the Cabot Trail, I noticed that we were on a two lane highway. This was weird, because I was pretty sure that the highway from Saint John to Halifax had been a four lane divided highway.  But, I had napped for a bit before Truro, so, maybe?  Anyway, I failed to say anything. Around about 8:30 we passed a gas station, and then a sign that said Antigonish. In case that fails to mean anything to you, Antigonish is really the long way to Saint John, by which I mean, you can't really get there in the direction we were going. My grasp of Maritime geography being almost non-existant, I did not actually know this.  The Kid stopped the car and said, "Mom, we are going the wrong direction!" She was kind of mad at me as we turned around, stopped to fill the car at the closing-early-for-Christmas-Eve gas station and bought snacks.
 
We made it back to Truro and carried on in the right direction.  The Offspring eventually warmed back up and we chatted and laughed again.  An hour from Truro, as you are heading west, is Sackville, New Brunswick. Before you get there, there are signs advertising Prince Edward Island and the Confederation Bridge.
  When we encountered the first one, Offspring said, "I have to go to PEI, while I am out here, too."
    "Not tonight," I said, "we are expected in Saint John."
    "Yeah,"said the kid, "if I find myself on a bridge before we get to Saint John, we are staying wherever we are headed."
   Also before Sackville is a wind farm, and, coincidentally, a bridge.  We began to cross said bridge, and the Offspring stopped the car.  (It was late on Christmas Eve, we were alone on the road)
     "Mom, we are on a bridge.  Where the fuck are we?!" We knew where we were, and we laughed.
 
 After Sackville, about a half an hour, is Moncton.  We decided to find a bathroom and another snack there.  It was ten o clock on a cold Christmas Eve.  Several stops right on the highway were closed. And then I missed an exit for a big truck stop area - fast food restaurants and gas stations - all appearing to be open.  We looked for a place to turn around and couldn't find one, and so we turned off the highway about 15 km after the missed exit, hoping to find a way to get back.  Somehow we found a cute little country inn with (appropriately enough) a huge NO Vacancy sign and a closed sign in its cute little restaurant window.  Offspring turned off the car and said, "okay, give me the gps, you drive, I am tired of this,"  and we changed seats.  We travelled along a quiet little road in the woods for a bit, not really sure where we were (and me getting a little close to panic because I REALLY needed a bathroom).  A police car approached and passed and then in the rear view mirror I noticed him make a U-turn.  He came up behind us, and turned on his lights. No, I did not take off like a bat out of hell.  I stopped.  And turned off the car  And tried to open the window in the rental car, at which I failed, because the car was off, and because I didn't know my way around the controls. (More panic)  The police officer, disconcertingly enough, looked to be about twelve.  I opened the door and  said good evening officer, and explained that I couldn't figure out the window in this godforsaken rental car. He laughed and asked if my inability to figure out the controls was why I was driving around the back roads of Moncton with no lights on.  I guess my face must have been something to see because he laughed again, not unkindly, and coached me through turning the car back on and finding the window controls.  Then he asked where we were going and if we had been drinking. I told him the tale of being lost and having to go to the bathroom, to the (I later learned)  mortification of the Offspring.  After ascertaining that we both had valid driver's licences and agreeing that a drink when we finally found our way to Saint John was indeed in order, and giving us perfect directions to a gas station and the highway to Saint John, he sent us on our way.  I still wonder why he wasn't tucked in and waiting for Santa Claus.  Now that I think of it, maybe he was our Christmas angel.
   We made it to Saint John a bit past midnight. Beloved, Best Aunt and Uncle and the cousins were all waiting up. The Offspring still hasn't quite forgiven me, but all I have to do is say the word Antigonish to any of Beloved's family and they are quite helpless with laughter.

Merry Christmas.

Halloween Dogs

Yes I know its late.  This is going to be my new thing. I am going to post on everything after the fact.

We had 26 trick or treaters this year, which is 25 more than last year. We had minions and zombies and Iron Man. We had kindergarteners and teenagers.  Everyone said thank you.  It was fun while it lasted.

It made me think of Bandit.

Bandit was a husky/heeler cross, which meant he was smart but oh so stubborn.  He was also gentle and he loved children. But he was terrified of fireworks, which made Halloween a terrible mixed blessing.  He loved to go to the door to inspect the costumes of the trick or treaters, which if he was allowed also included tasting ears. He must have found ears delicious, because he licked everyone's ears he could get near.  

Bandit's best friend was a shepherd/rottweiler named Kodi, who also liked to see little kids but he also thought there should be treats for dogs, if we were doling out stuff, thank you.   

One particular Halloween, there had been a lot of fireworks really nearby, and they had started early in the evening.  Poor Bandit was practically attached to my knee.  I couldn't make him go away, because he was so frightened but I was getting kind of exasperated.  And then the baby bear arrived at the door. He was three or four, and he had the sweetest round brown eyes I have ever seen on a little boy.  He was with his dad, who was just a man in a ski jacket - not a bear,  and he loved dogs. He saw Bandit just behind me, waiting to check things out and exclaimed, "Oh! A Puppy!" Which Bandit took as his cue to muscle by me to do an ear examination. Kodi danced around behind me, wanting to get in on any fun activity or treat that happened to be going on.  I told the little boy, in my exasperation with all the dogdom going on in the small space and poor Bandit's mental health that evening, "That is not a puppy. That is a chicken in a dog costume."  The baby bear stopped giggling and petting Bandit and eyed him critically. "Really?....Then.....Is that a dog?" he asked, pointing doubtfully at Kodi, behind us.  I don't remember any of the rest of the exchange, but I often wonder what kind of conversation that boy and his dad had after they left my house.  

Nothing fun like that happened this year, but that's okay.  It was fun anyway.  

Wednesday Work Post

So I have only been semi-employed since last February.

Six years ago my scaffold employer asked me to write a training program for the company.  There had been a bad accident in the company and during the investigation the question, "what training did this employee have?" was asked.  The answer was none, because at the time none was being done in the province.  My boss had been bugging and bugging the union to get some training together and the union had been dragging its feet, so the boss went looking for someone else to do it.  I wrote a 2 week program that turned into 3- 2 week courses for carpenter/scaffolders, a one day inspection course for people who work ON but do not build scaffolds, and a 2 to 5 day course offered to mills and mines and such for their employees to build small, tightly configured scaffolds.  I wrote an in-house fall protection course too. Two years ago the training department was run by me and a department head and we had two other instructors and an administrative assistant.  We had trained over 400 scaffolders and supplied the inspection and in house training to over 200 workers in dozens of companies in the three western provinces. 

 A year and a half ago, the scaffold company dissolved its training department and sold the training to the union.   The union hired the department head full time to get their training division off the ground and me for 24 hours a week to do curriculum development and teach.  Last February they decided the department head could do everything and I was laid off.  

While I was at the scaffold company, I also taught forklift operation, which they offered externally too.  One of our clients was the City.  I began going to their worksites to do the training and I developed a good relationship with their training department, and so when I left the scaffold company, they asked me to continue to do their training through the union.  When I was laid off at the union,  my guy at the City told me he'd continue to use me if I wanted to do my own thing, which I did.  

When I went from 40 to 24 hours a week I found I had too much time on my hands and I was whining about boredom one day to a friend.  She happens to own a yarn store, and she offered me some hours in it.  (Beloved, when I told him I was going to work in the store said, "Oh no. We cannot afford for you to work in a yarn store!") 

So  for nine months I have been teaching forklift, selling yarn and teaching people to knit, and doing the occasional scaffold course for either the union or the scaffold company when they are overwhelmed.  None of it is full time and some weeks all I work are a few shifts in the yarn store.    

I am looking for something else.  In the next few weeks I will submit the last assignment for my provincial instructor's diploma.  I have 15 miscellaneous first and second year courses, mostly in psychology, biology and sociology.  I am a Red Seal carpenter.  I am 49.  

I am feeling quite freaked out, to be honest.  There has not been a great deal of heavy construction in my area for several years now, and there is no word that anything is going to start before spring.  I hate framing and would rather do anything else than build houses. There are currently no jobs available for carpentry/scaffolding, etc instructors anywhere in my area.  Further, I feel quite strongly that I have given enough effort to this construction thing anyway.  It's time to do something else, but I really don't know what the hell that is.  

All I Have to Say About That

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin

How neatly spreads his claws

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws!

Joey Bats #19

I know, I know. It was three days ago now.  This was a great moment for a Blue Jays fan (not to mention Bautista and the team!) and that is all there is to it.

My mom, at 72, is perhaps the best and most faithful Blue Jays fan in Canada.  She has been watching them since before they won a World Series and has stuck through all the trials and disappointments.  She knows and remembers all the statistics on all the players - and keeps track of most of the rest of the American League.  If you go to mom's house on game day the conversation will have to keep pausing while we catch the action. If you invite mom over to your house on game day, she will go where the tv is, (even if, like my house, it  is in the basement). She may not stay with the tv the whole time she is over, but she will go and look at it fairly often.

My mom's brother is a court reporter. He works for an international company and the last few years he has been working in Singapore and Hong Kong.  He amasses a lot of airline and hotel points.  This past August he gave her a trip to Toronto and a room in a nice hotel.  My dad doesn't fly.  Mom would never have gone alone, so I went with her.

Our hotel was far enough out of downtown that it was about a 50 minute train ride to Union Station.  The first day we went up to Dundas Square - Mom needed to get a Hard Rock Toronto t-shirt for my uncle.  We had a late lunch and then walked to the Stadium.  When we got within sight of the Dome, she said she thought she might cry. Once inside, as we crossed the concourse and the field, bright and green and lovely under the open roof, came into view, she clutched at my arm and really did cry. She was so excited I thought  her knees might actually give out.   That was August 28.  Mom's 72nd birthday.

We saw the whole series with the Detroit Tigers.  On the Friday night the Jays had just finished a fabulous road trip and the fans were overjoyed to have them home.  That might have been the funnest thing I have ever done in my life, spending three hours with 46,000 happy people.  It was definitely the highlight of my mom's decade.  She was excited almost to tears dozens of other times that weekend, but the last and best was when her all time favourite Blue Jay, Mark Buehrle, took the mound on Sunday.  

I remember watching baseball when I was a kid. (I had a rebellious crush on George Brett when I was  10? 12?)  I was never as interested as my mom, but I like a good game and I cheer on the Jays because they are mom's team.  Mom's been on the bandwagon for as long as I can remember, but she has always held seats for the rest of us.  I haven't missed a game since she invited me to go to Toronto, and every game I see on tv now is so much better because I can conjure up that Friday night in Toronto.  

I love watching the Blue Jays this last half season.  They seem absolutely connected to each other.  Every great bullet Bautista throws in to third, or Donaldson fires to first, every lightning quick play by some combination of Goins, Tulo, Colabello, Smoak and Pennington, every great diving catch made by Pillar (2/3 of the planet is covered by water; the other 1/3 is covered by Pillar!) and every great at bat (Encarnacion hat trick anyone?) just looks like choreography.  Having been in that crowd of 46,000 happy fans, I am happy for them that this is happening.  I am happy for these Jays, who also seem like genuinely nice guys (R.A. Dickey diving into the stands to hug the fans).  And I am happy for my mom, who is able to just really enjoy great ball playing - and this time for a longer season!

PS.  Read my friend Ken's great post on the Blue Jays from a few weeks ago - complete with George Carlin's wonderful take on why Baseball is better than Football!

So Much Ado

All right, I suppose I will wade into the fray on this one.  I don't really get the problem.

How is this

more problematic than this?

One is a fashion accessory and the other is a religious statement. Except, apparently the other is not necessarily a religious statement.  It is a convention, a tradition.  It has not really been a fact in my lifetime, but there was a time when western women and men covered their heads as a matter of convention and tradition.  

Oh, but the other up there, that is more than just a matter of tradition and convention.  There is a reverence in that.  When a woman dons that other bit of fabric, she is expressing a kind of obedience, of preserving something of herself.  Huh. You mean like this? 

It really is about The Other, though, isn't it? 

I hope to god that the stupid conservatives step in it again before the election, because I'm scared of the kind of country they seem to want.  I'm pretty sure history has seen this before, and it has never turned out all that well.  

I Do Love Blue Rodeo

Feeling Small and Helpless These Days

      There was an article in the Washington Post on Friday written by a man who fled Kosovo when he was 16 years old. It contained quote that I Immediately understood and have been trying to convey in my real life, which sadly, seems to contain a few (thankfully only a few)  fearful, hateful racists.  It was this:

        "Abandoning your home during wartime is not a choice or a political opportunity. It’s a survival instinct, a frantic attempt to protect yourself and your children from violence, starvation or death. "

      I am tired of people with such small imaginations and such luxurious lives that they cannot fathom what suffering must be like, and worse, cannot even consider helping. I am furious that harper's first response was that continuing the war effort in Syria was the most helpful thing Canada can do. I wondered why no one commented on the fact that we had just agreed to sell a whole bunch of arms to Saudi Arabia. (I hate Stephen Harper and his supporters with the heat of a thousand suns.  He is a small, small nasty man with no heart and I will never forgive him for the social damage he has done to this country.)

      I can go to meetings to get 2 freaking years worth of paperwork started to be able to bring a family to my community.  I can give money to the Red Cross.  What I want is to do this:

        I want to get between all those people and those bullets.  I want to shout "STOP!" And what real use would that be? How can I get between a whole neighbourhood and a barrel bomb?  

     When I read about people who think the refugees are a bunch of jihadists and that North America is in some kind of peril I think it is nothing but a self fulfilling prophecy.  I think the more we react to this situation with hate and fear and unkindness, the more reason we give them to fear and hate us. There has been  a great deal of war and destruction throughout history in Europe, Asia and Africa. I often wonder how long it will be before it comes here. Because it will come here.  

      Climate change is a huge factor in what is going on in Syria.  Climate change is driving great masses of people out of their homes. No nation is addressing its contributions to climate change quickly or thoroughly enough that we will ever stop that. When our homes become utterly hostile to our existence, we have no choice but to leave.  And when we in the north who have NOTHING BUT SPACE! for Christ's sake choose to turn the fleeing away, I think we are only ensuring that we will eventually be met with violence.  

     The right thing to do is feed and shelter and care for our fellow persons. 

     The whole history of humans is about subjugation to some small, hateful group.  It is always a struggle for some kind of freedom.  I doubt that its going to change.  Maybe I'm an idiot, but when I don't know what to do, I ask myself, "what would love do?" And then I just do that.  Today I just feel so monstrously impotent.  Some day I hope I will figure out which tank I need to stand in front of.  

     Last weekend Michael Enright played a reading of Warsan Shire's poem "Home."  I knew two lines of it, but I had never heard the whole thing.  

Home - by Warsan Shire

no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you

breath bloody in their throats

the boy you went to school with

who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory

is holding a gun bigger than his body

you only leave home

when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you

fire under feet

hot blood in your belly

it’s not something you ever thought of doing

until the blade burnt threats into

your neck

and even then you carried the anthem under

your breath

only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets

sobbing as each mouthful of paper

made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,

that no one puts their children in a boat

unless the water is safer than the land

no one burns their palms

under trains

beneath carriages

no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck

feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled

means something more than journey.

no one crawls under fences

no one wants to be beaten

pitied

no one chooses refugee camps

or strip searches where your

body is left aching

or prison,

because prison is safer

than a city of fire

and one prison guard

in the night

is better than a truckload

of men who look like your father

no one could take it

no one could stomach it

no one skin would be tough enough

the

go home blacks

refugees

dirty immigrants

asylum seekers

sucking our country dry

niggers with their hands out

they smell strange

savage

messed up their country and now they want

to mess ours up

how do the words

the dirty looks

roll off your backs

maybe because the blow is softer

than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender

than fourteen men between

your legs

or the insults are easier

to swallow

than rubble

than bone

than your child body

in pieces.

i want to go home,

but home is the mouth of a shark

home is the barrel of the gun

and no one would leave home

unless home chased you to the shore

unless home told you

to quicken your legs

leave your clothes behind

crawl through the desert

wade through the oceans

drown

save

be hunger

beg

forget pride

your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear

saying-

leave,

run away from me now

i dont know what i’ve become

but i know that anywhere

is safer than here

The Summer Post

Hey! I kind of survived my move, and I have a new tree, as promised.  Two, in fact.  There will be pictures.  I seem to have lost my cursing (cursed) cat, though.  We only moved 4 blocks.  The cat thinks the new place has too many cat neighbours and not enough raspberry bushes and if we let him out he beelines for the old place.  We are growing weary of dragging him home and listening to his misery.

The Offspring was home all summer.  Well, kind of home. She cooked for a tree planting company *and she was only really home every 4 to 10 days.  But I did get to see her!

My Beloved's beloved uncle and aunt are here from  New Brunswick and we are trying to show them all the beautiful things we can in BC.

I am annoyed about this doubleplus long election campaign. I hate election campaigns. Mostly they serve to remind me how many morons live here. We**have always been conservative country around here, which was not so bad when I was a teenager and the conservative here was actually a good guy who bothered to listen to his constituents.  We used to reject the Reformatypes of various kinds, but apparently we don't read the fine print around here and no one noticed both the federal and provincial co-opting of Conservative and Liberal names.

Anyway, I hate election campaigns. No one ever says what they really mean, for fear of causing a scandal, and now we have this bunch of ratfuckers to whom words seem to mean nothing at all.  If you want to know who to vote for you should have been paying attention for the last two years.  What they have DONE in the last two years is their real agenda.  What they SAY to get attention (or get out from under that attention) matters not one single whit.

AND  I am extra annoyed this time because there are NO DECLARED CANDIDATES YET IN ANY RIDING IN ATMON EXCEPT THE FUCKING CONSERVATIVES.

Over and out to drink beer with my Eastern relatives.  I'm drinking a little extra, because I am annoyed.




*Remind me sometime to tell you about the two weeks I worked as the Offspring's cooking assistant in a tree planting camp. It is hard work!  She is a good cook!

**By the by, when I say we, I am not actually talking about me.  Remind me someday to tell you about the time my grandfather made Tommy Douglas climb up on the roof of my grandfather's barn to talk to him.  I have deep socialist roots and strong anarchist leanings.  Furthermore, I have been paying attention to the Orwellization of BC and Canada.  Just call me Winston. And pass me a beer.

The Irony

There was a bit of excitement around here this week.  Prince George changed the name of one of its parks yesterday.

Yesterday morning, the park was called Fort George Park.  It's a very pretty park quite near the confluence of the Nechako and Fraser Rivers.  It's a good sized park with picnic tables and walking paths and gardens and a band shell.  There is also a very small fenced off area that is a First Nations graveyard.  The park is called Fort George Park because it stands partly on the site of the old Fort George, a white trading post.  Fort George was established at the site of a First Nations village called Lheidli T'enneh, which means "people of the confluence." The Lheidli T'enneh were removed to a reserve to the east, but they didn't particularly want to go and didn't hurry about it, so the Fort George founding fathers burnt the village to the ground.  This is a crappy bit of local history I did not learn until just a few months ago and it makes me feel a little sick.

Yesterday evening, though, the park recieved a new name: Lheidli T'enneh Memorial Park.  This name was suggested by the nation of the Lheidli T'enneh, on whose traditional territory Prince George stands.

It was a bit of excitement because a whole lot of racism raised its ugly head.  The protests were variously, "I can't pronounce that!" (You can learn to pronounce Tchaikovsky and fucking Kardashian, I bet you can learn to pronounce Lheidli T'enneh.) "Changing the signs will be expensive! Think of the taxpayers!" (Last week, city council changed the name of another park - The Hudson's Bay Slough - to The Hudson's Bay Wetlands with absolutely no fanfare or protest regarding costs.) "It's been Fort George Park all my life!" (So?  When I was a kid, Myanmar was called Burma. We managed to get our heads around that. We can get our heads around this.)  And finally, "They're trying to erase 100 years of white history!"

Dear god.  If only we could erase 100 years of white history as easily as just changing names...

The Earth Does Not Need Us

Old House, New House

My Beloved and I have bought a house.

This is the first time in my life I have owned property.  I feel a bit hyper-ventilative about it.  I am a commitment-phobe.
The evidence in my life for this is practically nil - I have never been at a job for less than 2 years.  My long jobs have been 6,7 and 14 years, plus I have stuck with the carpentry trade for 21 years, sometimes concurrently with other jobs.  My first long term relationship was 17 years.  I raised a child - she'll be 26 this year.  Nevertheless, the idea of settling down for some long term future freaks the hell out of me and makes me want to bolt.

We don't get to move into the house for another 8 weeks.

I have lived in the too small, closet challenged, shopless house we are currently in for 25 years.  It is too small. It has no closets.  It has no shop or garage or facsimile thereof.  It has no spare bedroom.  (No, I don't want to talk about all the books and yarn that are taking up inordinate real estate in my little house, thank you very much.) My bedroom is so small that we actually have to leave it to get dressed.  But I lived here for 25 years and raised the Offspring here, so now I feel sad to leave.  I'll get over it I'm sure.

My little house actually belongs to my grandmother.  She had a bit of money and she bought it when the Offspring was a baby.  The deal was I would pay the mortgage and she would leave it to me.  Who thinks to get grandma to sign a contract like that?  Not me, that's who.  Grandma lived 3 blocks away.  She watched the Offspring when I went to work, I shovelled her driveway in the winter, she taught me to knit.  Now Grandma is 94 and spry as a 60 year old, but doesn't recognize anyone anymore and can't take care of herself.  Grandma's kids are already having nastiness over the whole thing, and the best I can hope for is that they'll sell it to me. But I've already paid the mortgage on this house twice, and it would be considerably higher now.

My dad and I built a deck on the front of it.  We gutted and rebuilt the kitchen and the bathroom together.  My first partner and I worked on the roof and built the fence together and we painted cars and did mechanics together in the driveway.   My Beloved and I renovated the basement to make a sunny office and a bedroom for an orphan we adopted, and we gutted and rebuilt the Offspring's bedroom.  We planted trees.

But it is very small. It has one bathroom.  It has no shop-type space. In order to make things we have to drag a bunch of tools out of the shed and set up in the back yard or the driveway.  We can't accomodate out of town company if the Offspring is here.  And it is in part the subject of nastiness in my mother's family.

The new house has closets. It has a garage (which will be a shop).  It has three bathrooms.  It is advertised as having six bedrooms, but two of those bedrooms are only a little bigger than a large closet.  It will have two spare bedrooms, so that our families and out of town friends can all stay at the same time. It is big enough to have parties and the yard is laid out so that we can have garden parties.  I don't have any pictures of it that I want to share yet, because at the moment it is someone else's home.   The things that made my little house my home are the things I did to it and in it, alone or with someone I loved.  Once I have done some things in the new house it will be our home.  One of the first things I am going to do is plant trees.  I want to look out my front AND back windows to see something like this every day:

"You Win Some...

And some you don't do so good."

Was a thing a friend of mine used to say.

Omar Khadr may not have been granted bail on Monday, but he was today and I am happy for him.  I am glad his lawyers, David Edney and Nathan Whitling fought so hard for him and I was pleased to learn today of all the people who have visited Mr Khadr and helped him all this time.  I know there are really great, kind people in the world (the blogosphere is full of them, as is my real life!), but I love reading about them in the mainstream media.

The NDP pulled off a nice majority in Alberta, which floored me a bit.  I continue to be guardedly hopeful.  I remember some business group musing during a BC election that they were willing to let their businesses go fallow indefinitely in order to thwart an NDP government.  I'm sorry, I don't have a link for that. I noticed on DeSmog Blog the other day that Licia Corbella tweeted that “The oil patch will pack up and leave."  Surely she was kidding?  Isn't that pretty much what they've been doing and trying to ramp up besides?  I hope the NDP in Alberta stick to their platform and are able to sort out the mess.  

Harper is still an asshole.  Now I might get targeted by some security agency for saying so, but not saying it doesn't make it any less true.  

Justin Trudeau has confirmed that he is just a conservative in liberal clothes by voting with the cons for bill C-51.  Honestly, what was he thinking?  I suspect he is more interested in power than in good governance.  

So, those are the big things.  In local things, I'm semi-unemployed, the Offspring is home from the east coast for the summer and my Beloved and I have bought a house.  There was a fire in downtown Prince George last night that destroyed two nice businesses and damaged a nice restaurant, but I hear they have all been getting plenty of offers of help and they are feeling more like beloved members of the community than tragic victims.

 The world is not an entirely horrible place.

For The Record

I think Omar Khadr should have been granted bail today.
I still think Harper is an asshole.
I am looking forward to the Alberta election results with a bit of trepidation.  I would love to see a big political reversal, but having lived through the last polling/election debacle here in BC I am afraid to be hopeful.

It is spring in Atmon, but I am knitting mittens.