Checking in...

Rock painting of Hapi

Well it certainly has been a while since I last posted here, seems like the longer you go the longer you go. Hard to get back into it. 

Hapi, summer 2020

Heat wave, second one this month. Heat waves are like rainy days, I just want to stay indoors. With my new windows and cellular blinds it stays a bit cooler, but not a lot. Last year I used the air conditioning on the heat pump and ended up with mould growing inside it, so this year I want to keep that to a minimum. Just the really bad days. But so far the new windows and blinds seem to be doing the job I hoped they would. So now heat wave days are like rainy days, I just want to hide indoors till it passes.

Nothing terribly exciting or upsetting these past couple of weeks, other than getting my second Covid shot. Knocked me sideways for a couple of days, but I'd heard that was possible so I planned for it. 

Got all my firewood stacked away, I should be good for a couple of winters now, if the weight of the wood doesn't collapse the woodshed, LOL. They delivered wood that was 2" longer than what I requested, so hopefully that won't be a problem. Although I think that some of the thicker pieces might be. My woodstove is not that big.

Garden is progressing, the squash and cucumber took forever to germinate and the romaine lettuce never did. I'll try again in a couple of months, I think it is too hot now. I got a flat of really ripe strawberries (8 quarts) from a local farm market really cheap ($24) and have processed them all into frozen berries, except for a quart for eating fresh. Strawberry season is still going so I'll probably buy another couple of quarts for eating. I have some frozen berries left over from last year so I think I'll turn them into jam, if and when the weather cools.

I've been swimming a couple of times a week, kayaking the odd time or two, and walking with friends and their dogs. One Friday I noticed that Hapi's ornament at the Reservoir had disappeared and that threw me into a weekend of mourning. I had debated taking her ornament down and bringing it home, but it didn't seem like a great memento so I didn't. Then it disappeared. I found out later that someone had vandalized it and left it lying on the ground in the parking area; some other dog owners saw it and decided to get rid of it because they didn't want me to see it like that.

After that weekend a neighbour stopped by to give me a rock painting she had done of Hapi (see above). She said she had hung on to it for awhile, making improvements, but finally a friend told her, "Enough, just give it to her." Her timing was impeccable, it cheered me up enormously.

Am reading an Elizabeth Kolbert book called Under a White Sky which is kind of interesting. She talks about several human attempts to save various endangered species or control invasive species and in every case there is the problem of unintended consequences. Then she talks about geoengineering solutions to climate change and the concomitant danger of unintended consequences. But she likens it to chemotherapy: no one in their right mind would consent to chemo if there was something better. Geoengineering is like chemo for climate. 

Another fact she points out is that what they have learned from Greenland glacier ice cores is that the last 10,000 years have been unusually stable climate-wise, and that is probably the reason human civilization developed. Humans have certainly had the intelligence and ingenuity to create agriculture and various other civilizing technologies long before that, but the climate was way too unstable for a sedentary way of life to be of lasting value. Better to just hang out as hunter-gatherers and take whatever the planet dishes out. While current climate change and species' extinctions are largely human-created, sooner or later that 10,000-year stable period would have ended anyway. But with all of our technology, great cities and huge population, that climate change is almost certainly going to be devastating. Makes climate-chemo look like a chance worth taking.

And speaking of heat waves, here's a link to a video for constructing a cheap DIY air conditioner...

Solar eclipse and window blinds

There was a solar eclipse early this morning, I made a pinhole camera to view it but it didn't work. However I photographed some shadows on nearby houses that sort of display the eclipse: the sunlight filtering through leafy trees that serve as excellent natural pinhole cameras.

I've spent the last week on a rampage of cleaning, painting and installing window blinds, and am now in the midst of moving furniture. The energy ran out yesterday, so I may not accomplish anything today. By late afternoon I just could not get enough air, I felt quite oxygen-deprived. But I got a lot done.

I used to have a lovely maple tree in front of my house that cast excellent shade on the large west-facing windows of my living room, but the tree had to be cut down and the last couple of summers have been murderously hot in that room. So I determined to try to fix that artificially with new windows that blocked some of the heat and new cellular blinds that cut some more of the heat without blocking the light. Otherwise I would have to use the thermal curtains which leave the room in darkness all afternoon and early evening. 

As I described in a previous post the windows got replaced a few weeks ago. Then I went to Home Depot and picked out the cellular blinds I wanted. I decided to get new regular blinds for the rest of the windows at the same time. Money is cascading through my fingers and down the road like a waterfall! But before I could install the blinds I needed to paint the new window frames and touch up the old ones: two coats of primer and another two of the semi-gloss finish paint. Oh my!

Installing window blinds involves screwing a lot of hardware to the upper surfaces of the window frames, that means a lot of standing on various stools and step ladders holding a screwdriver over my head. The wood of the new windows is relatively soft but the old window frame wood is not, so pressure needs to be applied. I have an electric drill but I thought that holding it steady overhead was going to be more than I could manage so I screwed all the hardware in manually. I was in a race against time, a heatwave was coming and I wanted at the very least to get the west-facing cellular blinds up before it started. I did that, but only just barely. I spent the two-day heatwave (30C+) installing the rest of the blinds, moving around the house just ahead of or behind the sun. 

The new paint on the window frames made the baseboards of my house look terrible; they have not been painted let alone washed since I moved in over ten years ago, and they look it. So I determined that they needed cleaning at the very least and maybe if I had the energy I would paint them too. And then I had the brilliant (not) idea of moving my bedroom from the west to the east side of the house. Fortunately, I am now sleeping in the basement bedroom (cool and dark for the summer) so the chaos of moving furniture is confined to rooms I am not currently using on a regular basis. So I can take my time about it. But once I get started it's hard to stop, I keep thinking, just one more thing. Hence the utter exhaustion yesterday afternoon.

My winter firewood arrived and is blocking my driveway; I have a young friend who has offered to help stack it and I need to contact her about dates and times. My garden is all planted and mulched, but the straw mulch is full of seeds (oat or wheat, not sure which) that are now sprouting and all of the promised rain has never materialized, so weeding and watering are now required. Not to mention weekly lawn-mowing.

My son's father-in-law died suddenly last week, I wanted to send condolences to my daughter-in-law and her stepmother, now a widow. He died as he had lived, helping out a neighbour. It was one of those freak accidents that probably could have been prevented but when you've been doing this stuff for years sooner or later it catches up with you. Hopefully his death was quick and painless, but it was surely devastating for all of his family. 

These things were weighing on my mind, I really must stop moving furniture and attend to them! And the Reservoir ponds have warmed up enormously and everyone is swimming, I badly want to go swimming too. I have no doubt that all of this contributed to the exhaustion, the frustration of putting off stuff I either needed or wanted to do was mounting.

Finally, I have been invited on an afternoon kayak trip on Friday (tomorrow) and I think I have to rest up a bit before I can go, so today no work is scheduled. Last night I dreamed that I smashed up the bow of my kayak and it sank, I was tremendously relieved to wake up to the realization that it was only a dream, the kayak is safe and sound.

Genocide

I listened to discussion of the mass burial of children at a Kamloops residential school on CBC Radio's The Current yesterday and it really hit home. The pivotal moment for me was when one speaker said that they weren't really schools they were detention centres; children were held there until they were broken in or had died in the process. The schooling they received did not do them any favours or prepare them for the world they were to be released into. They lost their parents, they lost their communities, their language, their native skills, their culture. And it goes without saying that their parents lost their kids and their own futures. I can't imagine the pain they felt.

The residential school system was started by our dear founding father, Sir John A, to "assimilate" the native peoples of our new country into colonial culture. It destroyed them. The Americans had the Indian Wars, we had the residential schools. It was a kind of genocide that we politely refer to as cultural genocide. The word "cultural" makes it seem less violent, less murderous than the real thing, but it's not. Nowadays we decry the separation of children from their parents at the southern American border, this was far more horrific in that it went on for generations. It started soon after Confederation (1867) and the last school was closed in 1996. Those children were really never released, the ones that made it back to their home communities were forever cut off from them by virtue of their lost abilities to communicate with their families or even support themselves. Not to mention the emotional trauma they survived but never resolved.

Until relatively recently we all approved of violence toward children in the name of education, I was lucky enough to go to an elementary school where the principal at the time was the first in Toronto to ban corporal punishment of pupils, just the year before I started there. So it would not have been unusual to use violence to "educate" the children of residential schools. But those kids did not get to go home at the end of the day, they lived day in and day out in the school with the perpetrators of the violence. When those children died, they simply disappeared from their family's lives, very few were even informed of the death of their child. CBC has published the names of all the children known to have died at those schools, but those names are many fewer than the number who actually died and were buried there.

The schools were run mostly by religious groups, predominantly Roman Catholic monks, priests and nuns, but some Protestant religious groups were involved also. The Roman Catholic Church has consistently refused to release the written records of those schools to anyone, not the families of the children, not the First Nations communities, not even the Canadian government. No one knows the true extent of the horror. First Nations are determined to use ground-penetrating radar at all residential school sites, whether publicly or privately owned, to find the bodies of their lost children.

My mind just boggles at the damage done in the name of Canadian civilization. This is a horror that First Nations have known all along but the rest of us have not taken seriously. The result of the residential school system decimation of First Nation culture is right up there with the Jewish Holocaust of World War II, in  my opinion. Maybe worse. I remember that when I was a teenager a representative of the South African government told a group of us that we were in no position to criticize his government's treatment of the Black peoples of his country, after all apartheid was based on the Indian reservation system of Canada. And China has admonished our government for criticizing the Chinese government treatment of the Uighurs, after all we did the same to our First Nations.

Presently over a hundred First Nations are suing the Canadian government for reparations. This is an action that has been in the works for awhile, but in light of what was discovered in Kamloops has suddenly gained some traction. My grandson goes to a university named for the man who essentially designed the residential school system, my grandson and many of his peers now refer to that school as X University. Commemoration of the founders of our great nation and the enablers of "cultural" genocide is hard to stomach.