Just Musing...

The offspring called yesterday for advice.  It is blizzarding at her end of the country and she had a door that had stopped latching properly  "What is a quick fix?" she asked me.  We discussed the problem and I had her look at the door to see just what was and was not happening.  The answer for the moment  was just to move the strike plate.  It might have been necessary to shim the hinges too.

I began to wonder about the ways I could help people with that kind of thing - not doing people's odd jobs, but teaching them how to do them  themselves.  I also wondered why I hadn't thought about it before.

I grew up with mechanically inclined parents.  They just did stuff.  My dad is a carpenter, and there was a wood shop in the basement all my life.  He wired and plumbed the house he built and he always let us help with whatever was going on.  My mom sewed and she could design clothes at the drop of a hat and while she never actually did any kind of art herself, she filled the house with art supplies and she encouraged all kinds of sculpture and papier mache and what have you.  She was a great designer of dioramas for school. For 17 years I lived with a man who was a mechanic, auto body restorer and welder.  He taught me bits and pieces of all those things. It never occurred to me that I couldn't learn to do things.

It took me a long time to discover what a gift this was.

A few years ago I was going to a knitting group and one of the members was learning to sew. I remember one of them showing me a pattern for a bag she wanted to make.  She was utterly baffled by the pattern.  How on earth were those pieces going together?  As we talked about it, I realized that the ability to see how things go together, and to look at an object and understand how its components are shaped was not something that came to all of us naturally.

Shortly after the conversation with the offspring, I mentioned the idea of helping people learn this stuff to a co-worker.  He is a handy guy.  He is trained as a welder, and he does his own repairs and maintenance at home too.  He grew up with parents, grandparents and aunts and uncles like mine. He was the kind of kid who took his bike apart just to see how it went together.  He has a girlfriend who has never had that kind of experience;  she thinks she can't do "that stuff." He is flummoxed by this because he is quite in love with her, and he thinks she is really wonderful and remarkable, but he has always thought of people who can't do "that stuff" as stupid.  He doesn't think his girlfriend is stupid, and he is wrestling with this dissonance.  We talked about the ability to see things in their components and to understand the way objects can come to be, and how not all people can see this.  "Its physics!" he said to me, "everyone has to take some physics in school! How can they not see how things work?" My answer was that not everyone can translate basic high school physics from the boring (to some) basics into real world applications.  I personally had a few teachers who presented their subject in a vacuum, as if it had no other reason for existence.  My co-worker said he could not get his head around the idea that there were different ways of seeing.  (I argue with this guy about politics all the time.  He is a bootstrap kind of dude and thinks the Canadian dream is the same and equally attainable for all.)  Except that by the end of the conversation, he had said the word empathy and was looking thoughtful.

Over at Sooey Says, there is a conversation going on in the comments about whether homelessness is a choice and about the closing of mental health facilities.  Someone said the homeless are sick and should be institutionalized, and someone else asked if sociopaths shouldn't be institutionalized too?  Mike Harris, Gordon Campbell and Ralph Klein were all mentioned as having done more to marginalize people.

(Aside:  I am sick of the words left and right wing, liberal, progressive and conservative.  I don't think any of those words is big enough to contain anyone and they have come to be mainly insults from each direction.  They are words that allow us to dismiss one another.)

I have been thinking all night about different vision.  I have always thought this planet is Babel, that we all speak a slightly different language and that the point of our existence is to learn to speak to one another and to be understood.  (I don't mean language as in English or French or Swahili - I mean the way that we individually express ourselves.  I can speak English to my English-speaking partner and have him not understand a word I am saying ) I have always wondered about the relationship of language and thought. Do different languages cause us to think differently?  Now I wonder about the relationship of vision (is perception a better word?) and language.  If we all perceive the world slightly differently and we express ourselves and behave according to that perception, could part of  the difficulty be an inability to understand this difference.  Could it be that we don't realize there is a difference?

I'm still thinking about this.


Oh! Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas

RossK and the fine folks at Payday are doing wonderfully with the Christmas carols. I encourage you to visit both blogs for some musical cheer.
 Various societal, political and environmental events have made me alternately too maudlin and furious to post nicely. But I do want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a happy season full of love and kindness and hopefully, some peace.

Thank you all for being part of my life.  You improve it vastly and I am more grateful than you can know.  I wish you all good things for the season and the new year.  

Here is my favourite carol on one of my favourite instruments:

The video doesn't load on some iPads for some reason , I think you can see it here.

Yes, Virginia, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

So.  That time of year again.  This year I received a copy of this:

        It was taken in about 1970.  That's my mom and dad.  Every year my dad would buy a couple of extra boxes of mandarin oranges and a big bag of ribbon mix candy, and on December 24 he would get into that suit.  One of the other dads in the neighbourhood would take him all over the neighbourhood on a snowmobile (I grew up in Almost The Middle of Nowhere, where a snowmobile was a common method of winter transportation, not just a recreational vehicle.)  At all the houses with kids there would be a gift for each child at the foot of the front porch.  Dad would pick it up on his way in, stuff it into his sack of gifts and Ho! Ho! Ho! into the living room of all the wide-eyed kids I grew up with.  Everyone got a gift, an orange and a bagful of hard candy.  I grew up with the notion that Santa Claus was my father. 

      
         I learned to read at 4.  I am quite certain I could not read well enough at 4 to read that famous editorial,  but I remember reading it in ATMON's local paper when I was a little girl.  I vividly remember sitting on our forest green living room carpet, with the paper spread out before me, and reading these words:

"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.  He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.  Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus."

and knowing how right Francis Pharcellus Church was.  My father was Santa Claus.  He was (and is) kind and knowing and generous and helpful to a fault.  I knew that the workshop at the North Pole was a fiction, but I understood with every fibre of my being that Santa Claus was a state of mind. 

          It's a state of mind that is easy to lose.   Obligations and expectations and commercial manipulation conspire to make it easily the most disappointing and difficult season of all.   Today was our annual union Christmas party for the carpenter's children.  There is food and music and crafts to keep the kids busy till Santa arrives to hand out gifts and candy.  There are about 10 of us that put the thing on, and we can't seem to get anyone else to help.  But Santa said today, before he put on his suit, that it doesn't matter.  The 10 of us care.  We are the ones who organize and participate in all the stuff in our lives, and we like each other and its really for the kids, so who the hell cares if its always just the 10 of us? Today's Santa is a man who has been my foreman on many a scaffold job and I was thrilled to attend his wedding this summer.  He and his wife have the Santa Claus state of mind.  Today, his grandson recognized him in that suit, and his daughter didn't know how to deal with it, so she told him he can't do it next year.  Which is dreary and  kind of breaks my heart, because growing up with a Santa Claus dad (or grandpa) is a special kind of security.  But it's okay, too, because my partner happens to have a Santa Claus state of mind.  So he is going to wear the suit next year.  And I am going to get to be Mrs Claus.

I never could figure out what the big deal was with that song.  Who else would he kiss?

Autumn

Remember the picture of the snowy tree I posted in April?  Here it is in October.  

This is the prettiest I have ever seen it.  I have lived behind this tree now for 24 years.  As I said in April, all the seasons are different.  Last fall, it turned an odd milky brown.  This past spring, right after it bloomed (and I put off taking a picture too long) it was attacked by tent caterpillars.  It took a terrible thrashing.  All of its leaves were eaten and the caterpillars were spinning long, strong threads to parachute out of the tree again.  It looked like something out of a horror film.  It recovered.  

We had a hot summer.  I don't like the heat; at over 30 degrees I get lethargic and a  heatwave makes me disoriented.  If I remember correctly we had about 8 days all summer with rain. We spent as much of the summer at the lake as possible, and I tried to pretend that all was right with the world, at which I mostly failed on account of I am addicted to newspapers and the CBC.

We had company from New Bruswick for a few weeks in August and we took them to Jasper for a week.   I love seeing people seeing the mountains for the first time.

So now summer is over and everything is back to normal.  The Sea to Sands Conservation Alliance took a bit of a hiatus over the summer, and now is back to showing films and responding to Enbridge and Joe Oliver.

Have you seen that Enbridge is writing poetry these days?  And that they and their government spokesthingies are promising all kinds of advanced technological spill response procedures?

Newspeak.  Don't believe a word of it.

Here is my response to their world-class spill response, which you may have seen me posting elsewhere  as a comment:  

I teach fall protection, scaffold inspection and construction and forklift operation.  The main component of all of our courses is safety. We hammer hazard awareness.  While I was researching the curriculum for my scaffold courses, I learned that in the last 20 years, the rate of on the job safety incidents has not decreased.  We have more safety regulations, more policies and processes, more and better safety equipment than we had 20 years ago.  Every industry has a morning safety meeting and everyone in all trades knows what a job hazard analysis is because we all fill one out at least every day, and sometimes several a day.  And yet the rate of on-the-job safety incidents has not decreased.  The one thing that has not changed is people.  We still all go around in our own little bubbles of awareness (or not as the case may be) and we still have myriad things to distract our attention, especially the things we do by rote.  The Enbridge oil spill in Michigan was signalled by their spill response technology, but human error misread the signal, and turned up the pressure, allowing dilbit to spill into the Kalamazoo for 17 hours.  The Exxon Valdez ran aground because the captain of the ship was distracted.  The Queen of the North ferry  sunk near Hartley Bay because someone did not attend to warning signals.  The MM&A train rolled down a hill and blew up Lac Megantic's downtown because humans decided to have fewer engineers responsible for the train and mislabeled the contents of the tank cars.  Stupidity, personal problems, inability to pay attention, greed: none of these things are going to be solved by a world class spill response.

I think the Northern Gateway is a bad idea. I think Line 9 and Keystone XL are bad ideas.  I think expanding the tarsands is not just a bad idea; I think it is a monstrous, disastrous idea.   I have no idea whether we have passed a climate tipping point or not, but evidence seems to suggest we have, and evidence suggests that spewing more carbons into the atmosphere by burning more fossil fuels is going to turn up the heat even more.  If we can invent the technology for a world class spill response, we can invent the technology that doesn't need such a thing.

It was an unusual summer in Atmon.  It was an unusual summer  all over the globe.  Unusual is probably the new normal.  How I wish I could pretend that all is right with the world.

My Blackberry Has a Mind of Its Own

Or:

It is NOW time to listen to RossK.

I have a two year old blackberry.  It has no music, no funky ringtones.  I don't use any apps on it.  It sends and receives phone calls and text messages.  I use its browser, and it has an RSS feed with about two dozen blogs on it.

I was just blackening chicken (cajun, not burning, smarty pants) and my blackberry, across the room began to spontaneously play the first playlist from the link above.  I have no idea why.  I do listen to the music on that post quite a bit, so I recognized RossK's voice covering the Lumineers immediately, but I have never used the phone for that purpose.  On inspection, I also could not find any of the phone's programs open.  Just RossK's voice and guitar.   It is a mystery.  

But a very fine idea for music by which to blacken chicken, toss a salad and drink wine.  Cheers!

Knitting

There!

I just finished a bunch of slippers for my east coast family.

Pardon me?  They look a little large?  Why, yes, as a matter of fact, big red noses do run the family!

Actually, you wash them in hot water and agitate them quite hard and they turn into this:

I agitated these by reading Stephen Harper's Canada Day address to them.  

Jobs and Prosperity (or Round Holes, Square Pegs)

I am in the skills training business.  I work for a growing scaffold company.  I research, write manuals and teach scaffolding.  Scaffold is part of the carpentry trade (except when it is part of the boilermaker's trade, but that is another story), and it is covered in the classroom time in a carpenter's apprenticeship.  It gets a whopping 2 days-max.

This is the kind of thing that scaffolders do routinely these days:

I think it takes more than 2 days to learn how to do this safely.  Of course, my job kind of depends on me believing that, so feel free comment on cognitive dissonance and give me hell...

So we do more extensive training than two days.  Mostly we offer it through the carpenter's union.  But we have recently been approached by some First Nations training providers.  Now, the provider that called us here in BC and offered courses was a private outfit.  They do all kinds of extensive training, including something called life skills and work readiness.  They really screen the applicants for the scaffold training to make sure they have a good shot at success.  We ran a class for them in 2011.  All the students passed and were immediately hired for a local shutdown.  Several of them were called back for subsequent shutdowns. (Generally and historically scaffolding is not continuous employment.  Like all construction projects, the job eventually gets finished and you have to find something else.  Scaffolding is even more short term than framing houses or pouring concrete high-rises.)    Not all of them kept their memberships in the union.  One or two had other trades and work back and forth.  But three of them  have been continuously employed ever since.

Now a First Nations training provider has called from Saskatchewan.  This one has direct involvement with the provincial government and twice we have talked to someone from the Saskatchewan government about what we offer and what they need.  This is my take and my concerns on what we have heard.  There is a lot of potash to mine in Saskatchewan.  I don't know just what scaffolding goes on in mines, but it does because we have a good number of employees working in mines at any given time.  And Saskatchewan apparently has a shortage of people to put scaffold up in mines. But an abundance of unemployed First Nations, also apparently.  So this government rep tells us about a program they had where they screened candidates, sent them to live in a mine camp for some number of weeks, put them in training in the mornings and had them working on the mine site in the afternoons.  In the end I think 3 or 4 of 12 kept at it.  Some quit early, and some finished but didn't carry on.  

Personally, I think work camps are a sociological nightmare.  I have never lived in a camp, but I have been a carpenter since 1994, and I have worked with hundreds of men - many of whom have lived in camps and been broken by them in one way or another.  Deep, soul destroying boredom breaks them.  Substances break them.  Marriages break.  Relationships with children suffer.  I don't know a single man who worked in camps, has good relationships with his kids with an intact marriage who didn't have to fight like hell to come back from the brink of disaster. 

So I am not surprised at all that this program lost such a lot of its participants.  When you take people away from their home and support, I don't think you are doing them any favours.  But the person we talked to is surprised.  It is good paying work.  Period.  That's it.  

I wonder how long we can labour away at this from this precise mindset?  Here is some earth-raping that some far-removed corporation can make money from.  Lets build some kind of huge industrial earth-raping process that will require a lot of man-power (although significantly less manpower than we might use if we did the job in a less mechanical/technical/earth-raping way) and then train people to do these industrial processes, in artificial and simulated communities. And then wonder why society is unwell.  

What if it's not the workers who won't behave?  What if the hole we are trying to hammer them into is absolutely the wrong shape and toxic to boot?  

Here is a blasphemous statement: I don't really want a job.  I want a purpose. I want to contribute.  But not to someone's stupid abstract economy.  I want to contribute to your life. And to the earth.  What if I am not alone?