Saturday Photo: Ice, Leaves, End of November, Climate Change

Walked up in the cemetery this morning where the ground was white, either from a heavy frost or the little snow that fell on Friday night.  Hard to tell, but it certainly was pretty.

Much talk about the climate change conference in Paris this week.  It's all to the good, would hate to have winter without snow.

Saturday Photo: Fall Bikes...

Bixi is closing down for the year.  Riding conditions continue to be good, but in Montreal the bike-share service doesn't run from about the middle of November until early April.  The opening date varies a bit from year to year, depending on snow conditions, but the ending date is relatively fixed.

I presume that's because we all know that winter can swoop down on us at any moment.  The big storm which apparently has bothered Chicago this weekend is tracking to the south of us so far, it's a rare year when we don't have some accumulation before early December.  Five years ago, when the house next to us burned and we suffered a lot of smoke damage, the bad weather held off until December 6 or 7.  Two years ago when I came back from South America Dec. 1, the first snow was piled at the edge of sidewalks.

Riding bikes in weather like that is crazy, I think, and I guess the Bixi folks think so too.  Time to turn back to the buses and your feet for transport, and to hockey for exercise?

Saturday Photo: I Love Paris

The savage attacks in Paris last night are echoing around the world.  So it seems they were the result of twisted extremist thinking?

Probably, and the great question is how to counter that wicked distortion of Islam.  While I--and many, many others--reflect on that, I offer this photo taken in June 2014 in the Parc Vincennes.  Lovely day, peaceful crowds, faces from all corners of the globe.  That is the Paris I love.

Saturday Photo: The Excellent Adventure

This week I finished the revisions on Road through Time, and sent it off to the University of Regina Press which will publish it in Spring 2017.  The book, about roads as vectors of change and exchange, now has a subtitle: The Story of Humanity on the Move.   I hadn't given it one before because when I started writing I wasn't quite sure where I was going.

Now I know.

It begins with a trip my mother, my younger sister and I took in the mid-1950s from San Diego CA to Walla Walla WA. (The photo is of Laurie and me at about that time.)  It ends with the trip to South America I took two years ago, travelling a newly opened highway across the Andes from Peru to Brazil.  In between I explore where humans have wandered from the time our ancestors stood up through the Great Expansion out of Africa to the Age of the Automobile.

The book will be illustrated with some photos I've taken, some archival images and, I hope, this snapshot of two girls near the beginning of their respective journeys through life.

Last Call for Our Medicare System: Are You Listening, Justin?

An excellent piece in Thursday's Toronto Star about what is happening in Quebec to our system of supposedly universal health care. This should be a wake-up call for the entire country.  It's up to Justin and company to come to the rescue.  He said "we're back" to the world.  Now he needs to go back to the Liberal attitude toward health care that saw Liberal governments in 1957, 1966 and 1984 put in place an excellent system.

Everyone concerned about health care should write his or her MP!

From the story:

"Quebec is likely to be the first province to slip out of the Canadian medicare scheme. In fact, at present, Quebec’s health care laws and practices do not respect the principles set out in the Canada Health Act. The only hope the people of Quebec have to benefit from a universal, free and comprehensive healthcare system in the future is a strong and swift intervention by the new Trudeau government.

"During the past decade, the core principle of medicare – that medically necessary care should be universally covered and free of charge (paid for by public funds) – has gradually eroded in Quebec. The process has been a slow but steady sum of small legislative changes that have benefitted practitioners (and profits) over patients, government tolerance for grey-zone billing practices and impressive fee-charging creativity from medical entrepreneurs."

Saturday Photo: Halloween...

Spent Wednesday afternoon making pumpkins with Jeanne.  It's very nice to have grandchildren since you have license to do all the artsy-craftsy things that you are supposedly too old to do.

Now back to work on Road through Time.  The completed manuscript is promised for the University of Regina Press on Monday.  Almost got it done!

Saturday Photo: Burning Bush, Montreal Style

Justin Trudeau started out his stint as PM by telling the world on behalf of 35 million Canadians: "We're back!"

Those were good words to hear after nearly ten years of Harperite stupidity.  Can't imagine that JT will deliver on half of his promises, but there have been moments this last week when I could dream we were headed for a promised land.

This lovely shrub, whose name I don't know, is at its height right now, and it would be nice to think it was a Sign!  Not very likely, but hope is a good thing...

They Ran from the Left, Will They Govern from the Right?

Canadians' basic decency won yesterday, with the decisive defeat of Stephen Harper's politics of fear and hate.  Thank goodness!

Now, however, Justin Trudeau's Liberals will have to hold to their promises to invest in infrastructure, run deficits and amend the terrible C-51 anti-terrorism law.  As often happens with the Liberals, they ran from the left. It remains to be seen if they govern from there.

The NDP is going to have to do some real soul searching about where they're going and who is their leader.  This time around I, a long NDP militant,  effectively sat on my hands.  Oh, I raised several thousand bucks for various candidates, but that's it, even though Mulcair is my MP and I was chair of his riding association back in 2010-2012.  The party on his watch as moved right, espousing dubious economic policies--he doesn't seem to realize that deficit spending should often be viewed as investment in the future--and not standing up for programs that really matter.  When it comes to the cornerstone of the NDP heritage, he made some noises near the end about  protecting the Canada Health Act which guarantees universal health care with penalties for provinces who allow extra billing. but that's about it.

Mulcair is said to be going to spend the day recuperating.  Good.  So should the folks behind this crushing defeat for him and the party.  Some changes are in order.

Saturday Photo: Even the Leaves Votes Red, Orange or Green

The election is on Monday, and it looks from here like a minority Liberal (red) government.  The NDP (orange) stands to lose much of what it gained in the Orange Wave of 2011 for reasons that I might go into later (has to do with letting the Liberals out flank them on the left, I'm convinced).  The Greens (green, of course) ran an honourable campaign, but if they get more than two or three seats they'll be lucky.

And it is fall of course.  We had our first snow this morning.  It melted as if fell, but still it's clear that time is moving faster than we realize.  The leaves aren't all off the trees, nor off the vines climbing the walls.  The effect is beautiful.  No wonder this is the favourite season of many--particularly when you  see the blue (Conservative, up there on the roofline) being challenged successfully.

Saturday Photo: The Path to Thanksgiving and a New Government

The leaves are beginning to turn colour here, and the sky is the brilliant blue that always makes me think of my mother quoting Helen Hunt Jackson's poem about "October's bright blue weather."

The poem is rather schmaltzy, but the line certainly describes what it's like outside.  This photo also gives an idea of the uphill road we're all travelling in Canada this week, toward an election when we get rid of Stephen Harper and his Cons.  There will be a lot of heated conversation this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend  as tens of thousands of people debate what is the best way to do that.

If you feel the need to retreat from the fray, here's  the poem which is both dated and too sentimental, but can get your mind off the dilemmas of democracy.

 October's Bright Blue Weather

    O SUNS and skies and clouds of June,
        And flowers of June together,
    Ye cannot rival for one hour
        October's bright blue weather;

    When loud the bumble-bee makes haste,
        Belated, thriftless vagrant,
    And Golden-Rod is dying fast,
        And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

    When Gentians roll their fringes tight
        To save them for the morning,
    And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
        Without a sound of warning;

    When on the ground red apples lie
        In piles like jewels shining,
    And redder still on old stone walls
        Are leaves of woodbine twining;

    When all the lovely wayside things
        Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
    And in the fields, still green and fair,
        Late aftermaths are growing;

    When springs run low, and on the brooks,
        In idle golden freighting,
    Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
        Of woods, for winter waiting;

    When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
        By twos and twos together,
    And count like misers, hour by hour,
        October's bright blue weather.

    O suns and skies and flowers of June,
        Count all your boasts together,
    Love loveth best of all the year
        October's bright blue weather.

Saturday Photo: Roman Road and Road through Time

Here's a photo of the Roman road at Conimbriga in central Portugal.  It's only one of the many roads I'm thinking about now, as I go back to the preliminary manuscript just accepted by the University of Regina Press.  Lots of fun in prospect!

Up Next: Road through Time

Pleased to say that I've just signed a contract with the University of Regina Press to publish my next non-fiction book Road through Time, probably in Spring 2017. It's about roads as vectors for change and exchange over time. The photo is of the Andes cordillera that I crossed on a bus just two years ago shortly after the new highway from Cuzco into Brazil was opened.

Saturday Photo: Dancing Grass

Just because it's another nice weekend...

Required Reading for the Election Campaign: The Best Laid Plans by Terri Fallis

In my other life I lead book discussion groups in Montreal-area libraries, and, knowing that a federal election was coming up, I put Terry Fallis's The Best Laid Plans on the reading list for October.  At the time I didn't appreciate just how funny or how prescient the book is.  Now I think every political junkie should read it as this long, long campaign grinds on.

The book was published in 2008, well before the Orange Wave, the Great Recession, even before the flirt with coalition government that occurred in December of that year.  It  starts off with a Liberal political wonk who is trying to get out of the game and who agrees as a swan song to find a candidate in a staunchly Conservative riding in eastern Ontario.  The candidate, a U of Ottawa engineering prof,  agrees only because he's promised he won't win.  But he does, for hilarious reasons .  (Hint: a sex scandal involving his opponent, leather and nipple rings are involved, which actually isn't much worse than the peeing-in-a-coffee cup video that scotched the chances of a Conservative candidate this time around.)

Fallis portrays  the vagaries of public opinion as well as the inner workings of political campaign extremely, but entertainingly well.  (Hint: there's quite a bit about lawn signs, telephone canvassing and door to door.)  I know just how hard that is to do.  In another life I spent far too much time organizing political campaigns and tried in one of my first novels (Endangered Species) to give a taste of the rush a political junkie gets from filling out phone canvass forms. My editor that time around made me cut a lot of the details. Fallis either was smarter than I or had a good editor too, because this novel is mostly fun. 

The accidental MP Angus McClintock turns out embodying all that is good in our political system, and makes a tremendous difference.  Would that all candidates out there were as principled.   Should also add that this is a very Canadian book: I can't imagine what Fallis would do with Donald Trump.

Saturday Photo: Cosmos, the End of Summer, Climate Change

I've always loved these sun-loving flowers.  Cosmos are the stars of many gardens around here at this point in the cycle of the seasons.  I suspect they won't be so gorgeous in a week when the temperatures are supposed to drop, but they are a pleasure now.

So is the lovely temperatures which have made September 2015 perhaps the hottest on record here.  Coming after an uncommonly cool and wet July and August, it has been a treat to have warm and dry days this month.

Of course, all this "unusual weather" is likely the result of climate change.  As someone who grew up in California, I get nervous when it doesn't rain here for a week or so since water shortages were always looming the background then.  To live in the current four-year drought must be awful.  

Saturday Photo: End of Summer and the Spiders are Busy

An

Anyone who's read Charlotte's Web or gone walking early on a September morning knows that spiders are especially busy this time of year.

This web was glowing in the early sunlight a few days ago.  I don't know how long it lasted, but the spider seemed to be sure of a good meal or two.  

The beastie won't survive for long, even with the unseasonably warm weather we've been having.  The way of the world is that spiders must die and new spiders be born.

A lesson there?

Perhaps.

Saturday Photo: Runners and Rainbows

The last long weekend of the summer, and the weather is wonderful here.  No rain in sight, but I did find this rainbow when out walking this morning.

The runners obviously were enjoying the sun and mild temperatures too.  A good way to start a holiday.

Saturday Photo: Back to School

This week Jeanne started kindergarten--hard to believe that she's now five.  Like millions of children in North America, she's said good by to summer, and gone skippingly into a new place to meet new friends and learn new things.

At the same time, teachers and parents in Quebec are protesting budget cuts everywhere.  What short-sightedness!  Our kids need good, public schools where everyone can get a chance to grow and learn. Don't listen to anyone who tells you otherwise.

The New Normal: How Social Networks Make "Migrating" Possible

Last year a photo of African migrants holding cell phones up in Djibouti won the World Press Photo prize.  The men were trying to pick up a good signal in order to communicate back home.  Beautiful photo illustrating something that seemed exotic.

But that's not really the case, it appears.  Having a good smart phone is essential to trying to get out of war zones these days, according to The New York Times.   The price traffickers are charging has dropped, in fact, because of competition from what might be called "self-guided" migration.  Facebook pages also have helped people live through crises: one FB group told of safe water outlets in Aleppo when water mains were broken through during fighting.

Fascinating, and also testimony to the degree of sophistication and education of these displaced people from unstable regions.  They could be you or me, were we unlucky enough to live in one of the hotspots.

Saturday Photo: Tomatoes and the Hundred MIle Diet

August is a month of many pleasures, not the least being the arrival in markets of real tomatoes.  Most of the years I don't buy them because they don't taste like anything.  But now the choice is almost overwhelming and the possible uses for the lovely golden or red fruit/vegetables are legion.

Now, I can't be sure that these beauties were all picked within a hundred miles of the Jean Talon Market in the centre of Montreal where I found them.  But certainly they are from much closer than the tomato-shaped objects usually on sale around here in other seasons.  Worth waiting for...