Saturday Photo: Skating, Finally

All's right with the world, more or less.  At least winter seems to have settled in, and the skating rinks are in operation.  Jeanne apparently has had a great time on the rink in the park across the street from Elin's.  Lukas hasn't had a chance to take Thomas out yet, but the small snowshoes that Sophie ordered came on Thursday and they're planning an outing to a park near them tomorrow,

Today I doubt if we'll get any skating done, but there is new snow to shovel in the backyard, so I'm sure they'll have a good time.

Saturday Photo: More Grey Weather...

When people have asked how we could have chosen Montreal over California when we made our great move decades ago, I always have said that I thought white, cold winters were a lot nicer than grey, not-so-cold ones.

My opinion certainly hasn't changed this winter.  We have temperatures above freezing today, with even higher ones forecast for tomorrow with lots of rain.  This means that the snow, which fell in abundance before New Year's, is likely to melt and leave grey sidewalks as well as  grey skies.

So this is climate change? Don't like it.

Saturday Photo: Sil, or Pickled Herring

As the holiday season ebbs, we have begun once again to eat sil, or Swedish pickled herring.  Our consumption was interrupted by bouts of stomach flu or some such.  Seems there's a nasty version going around: Lukas and family had it two weeks ago, Jeanne the week following and this week Lee and I succumbed.  This meant that the sil I made from 20 salt herring got pushed to the back of the refrigerator, as I cooked and we ate rice.

Thankfully that seems past and now we can take up where we left off a week ago, eating delicious things.  So tonight there will be sill and rye crisp bread on the table, beer to go with them, and the prospect of a nice white wine for the endives wrapped in ham and smothered in béchamel.

Oh, how I love to eat!  It's so nice to feel good!

Saturday Photo: A Little Snow for the After Party

We barbecued on Christmas Eve and went to the park with the kids on Christmas Day, but on Sunday, December 27 it actually snowed. 

Nice to to see the ground white.  Seems more normal.  But unless things get a lot colder, we're not likely to have a White New Year's.

Stand by, I'll keep you informed.

Saturday Photo: Melting Snow, or No Snow at All

The photo was taken in March when the snow was melting, but this year it looks like there may be no snow at all.

After a bit in October, we've had buckets of precipitation, but all of it fell as rain. Things are rather grey, as you might imagine.

If you'd like more about my thoughts on climate change and the world in general (plus some cheerfulness too), check out my holiday blog here

Saturday Photo: Red Flowers....

Just a bit of colour for a grey day.

Saturday Photo: Holly, No Ivy, No Snow

Don't know where this photo came from.  Since holly doesn't survive in this climate, I doubt if I took it here.  Nevertheless it currently is my computer wallpaper, and I think it's a great shot for the beginning of December.

A December that is unusually mild, I might add.  Perhaps it is appropriate that the bigwigs in Paris are talking climate change with a certain amount of seriousness.  If the trend continues, we may have very few white Christmases in the future, although in the past Montreal has almost always had them.

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...