Going electric: the arrival of the Bolt

  Last July the Bayerische Motoren Werke car company (BMW) made an announcement that set the business pages of the English-speaking Press alight: it announced that in Britain BMW owners, for only £10 per month, could purchase a heated seat subscription. 

Of course every BMW sold already has heating coils in the front seats; the subscription would merely activate them for customers who hadn’t initially bought the option.

(https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/index.html)

Almost every article I read on the subject at the time pointed out the slippery slope, the likely popularity, and the potential cash cow this ‘option’ represents. So yesterday I wasn’t surprised when I read an article on a possible culmination of the trend, featuring a brand new entrant in the electric car market, VinFast from Viet Nam, described as a “Tesla Challenger”. It promises to have a battery subscription as one option: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/vinfast-vf8-vf9-battery-subscription-vehicle-pricing-explained/

A trend coming to an automobile showroom near you? Count on it!

I believe we’ve just had a small exposure to the phenomenon ourselves.

When we bought our Golf Wagon TDI in 2011 we were presented with only two options: the “customline” or the “highline”. We chose the less expensive version; our 11 years and 200,000 km of trouble-free experience make a convincing case that for our purposes we had made the right choice. I believe all we had to add were snow tires and a roof rack. VW never once tried to pressure us into adding to the initial package.

And of course, VW’s financial apology for failing to acknowledge that it had cheated on emission tests ultimately made it a very good deal financially as well.

Last November, when we started to see proof that our “solar roof” really was going to reduce our electricity bill to almost nothing we started to get serious about an electric car. After considerable online research, we decided that the Chevrolet Bolt, some writers’ “Electric Car of the Year” in 2017, would probably suit us very well, even though critics were not particularly enamoured of the build and trim. The clincher for me was that the dealer is in downtown Campbell River: I relished the thought of no more time in the waiting room of the dealer in Courtenay which is where I, an owner of two VW vehicles, spent too many hours after my dad, who had lived in Courtenay, died. 

So I sent an email, got an immediate response including a spec sheet, went to see the salesman, and put a hold on the first Bolt through the dealer’s doors.

It had a fairly-extensive option list, so not the basic model we had imagined, but it was available when most relatively-affordable electrics weren’t.

We took delivery on August 31, 2022.

Of course after only 2 weeks we already love our Bolt, though there are some significant things to master: 314 pages of “Owner’s Manual” and the steep learning curve dealing with innumerable –– and to us foreign –– systems. But then we remember that we managed to come to terms with our first and subsequent computers, making them do what we wanted, so this does not seem an insurmountable challenge. Already we’ve established that mostly it drives just like a car with an automatic transmission, and we’ve owned a couple of those. And “one pedal” driving is pretty intuitive. So far the hardest lesson has been that you must keep off the accelerator pedal or you’ll be well over the speed limit before you realize there’s a problem.

But this piece really wasn’t supposed to be about the delights of driving Bolts. I started it because I was annoyed by the daily emails from OnStar, GM’s subscription service for most advertised add-ons. 

So far we’ve managed to ignore them, and as they will apparently end in a month, they are not a serious impediment to our enjoyment of the car. 

Nonetheless.

We signed on to the OnStar system because getting us on was one of our salesman’s jobs, and we liked him. On reading the details, however, we realized we are definitely not interested in being monitored by our car, and all the useful attributes of the OnStar system are adequately covered by a smartphone with the BC Hydro EV app and a BCAA membership. 

And no, we cannot do without our BCAA membership. We own a 1992 Volkswagen camper van. It would be madness to have that vehicle and no BCAA membership, as we have discovered on more than one occasion! 

(You know what cynics say about VW camper vans: comfortable place to await the arrival of the tow truck. They’re not entirely wrong.)

We don’t either need or want the monitoring either, as today’s example of redundant OnStar monitoring demonstrates: this morning after I got back from ‘Thursday morning coffee with Geoff’ I got two emails, both pointing out that the tire pressures in the car needed attention. Of course they did: the car had been in the OK Tire shop, having the issued summer tires swapped for 4-season radials. 

(In fairness, the email did point out that we should ignore the message if the problem was being attended to.)

Some people would be happy to get that message; I find myself decidedly not among them.

Anyway, in our situation that notification doesn’t make much of a case for the program: we can probably tell if a tire needs attention as we have, between us, some 120 years of experience of car operation! We are frankly more concerned by the lack of a spare, replaced by a can of goop to plug the hole and enough pressure to re-inflate the tire. Apparently it’s the contemporary way.

One of the carrots GM Canada advertises for buyers of their electric vehicles is up to $1000 to apply towards the installation of a “2^nd level” home charger. Given how slow the charge is on standard 110 house current, that charger, which is 4 or 5 times faster, is pretty-much essential equipment. We clearly needed a charger, so decided to pursue the offer.

But there’s a catch. Turns out that charger must be installed by a “Q merit Electrician” for GM Canada to honour its promise. So I asked Mike of Snowdon Electric, our electrician, who BC Hydro thinks is qualified to install chargers and who has installed at least one other for a Ford product, if he knew what that was. He had no idea. 

Mohammed, representing GM Canada, told me that GM has a deal with the “Q merit” organization and that the closest such electrician is in Nanaimo. Mike would only qualify if he became one. 

Mike is our son-in-law. He did the wiring for our two mini-split heat pumps several years ago, installed our solar roof and replaced our original electrical panel last fall, and is consequently entirely familiar with our electrical setup. We were determined that he would install the charger, even if that meant more cost to us. 

(Of course it wouldn’t actually cost more, because Mike lives in Willow Point so doesn’t have to charge travel time to and from Nanaimo.)

GM Canada eventually and reluctantly sort of conceded our point, and Mike was able to arrange a credit at Tyee Chevrolet for us.  A small consideration to make us feel better about being unwilling to access the advertised rebate. 

That should complete this phase of the adventure. Time to essay a small voyage at speed to Courtenay and back!

Further adventures with technology

 When our weeds/grass started to grow again after the winter, I dragged our lawn mower –– inert since October –– from the shed, shot some “starter fluid” on the filter, pulled the starter cord, and fired it up: first pull.

I was chuffed, especially when it kept going; when I put it away last year, it had started to become recalcitrant: sometimes difficult to start, sometimes running, but poorly.

So I wasn’t astonished when, after about 15 minutes, it just quit. 

I filtered and replaced the fuel, replaced the oil, and restarted it. This time it ran again, but raggedly. I didn’t run it long enough to discover if it would refuse again.

Already last summer I’d begun to think about replacing it, or at least adding another to our stable. We’re generally edging into all-electric, so off to C&L, where they sold me a very nice battery-operated mower for about three times what I had paid for the gas mower about ten years ago.

As expected, it works a treat, and although our yard has enough “mow-able” area that two batteries don’t quite do the trick, I’m old and retired, so I can wait for the recharge.

Anyway, yesterday I took the old mower into a repair shop for them to tell me whether it was fixable. 

The mechanic assured me it wasn’t, not for an acceptable price. So there’s that. 

Good thing we have a gas-powered van which can use the 10 litres of fresh gas!

Then there’s the chain saw.

I bought it years ago when I was still allowed to climb to the top of our hedge. At the time I needed to take the top two feet off. It’s a long hedge, and there are a lot of cedars that needed their heads lopped.

So the saw is small, and light, and altogether delightful. An Echo. I’ve used it a lot, considering most of our “forest” consists of rhododendrons, and most of them have turned into trees which need regular trimming. And we have a number of fruit trees which also need regular trimming.

(And haven’t the rhodos been absolutely gorgeous this year? The best ever!)

Last fall we had three apple trees and two pear trees. Two of the apples and one of the pears developed so many worms that the fruit was pretty-much unusable. 

I’m not really into spraying any longer, not even with lime sulphur, which rhodos don't like.

Also, they were starting to interfere with the rhodos.

In short, my saw got to talk to those trees this spring.

I was well into the largest of the apples, a full-sized golden reinett, when the saw quit. I started it, and it quit again. And then I couldn’t turn the engine over any longer.

So off to the shop where I’d originally bought the saw and where they couldn’t turn it over either. They took the plug out to have a look: “But it’s dry! You’ve been using the wrong gas!”

That initially seemed really unlikely, as I have a dedicated fuel tank for my saw and hedge trimmer, and I was entirely confident that was the fuel I’d used.

But then I realized: Oh no! serious seniors’ moment! When I’d filled up that gas tank in the fall I’d put in the fuel stabilizer to get the fuel through the winter, but had almost certainly forgotten to also add the oil.

Result one dead saw.

They were most sympathetic; told me they see this all the time...

Somehow that just didn’t take the sting out.

What did, finally, was when one of the service guys remembered that, although they no longer handle Echo saws, they still had some old inventory filed away. And one of the boxes contained a dead ringer for my saw.

I bought it for considerably less than a contemporary saw would have cost, went home, put oil in the gas tank, and finished the job.

The tree never knew the difference.

Letter to the Globe

 Re Canada’s Health Data Are In A Shambles (Dec. 8): 

I couldn’t agree more, based on an experience I had a few years ago in the emergency department.

“And what drugs have you been prescribed, Mr. Havelaar?” I was disoriented and hadn’t a clue.

It subsequently occurred to me that we carry driver’s licences and health cards which contain chips carrying useful data. Why don’t we employ that to also carry our relevant health information? It could be updated every time we have a medical intervention, and could be read by anyone with the appropriate reader. Furthermore, there would be no privacy issues, as each person would be in charge of sharing their own data.

My doctor, like most of his colleagues, is already fully computerized, so such a plan would also be quite inexpensive to implement.

published December 10, 2021

Globe and Mail letter

 Re Calendar Reminder (Letters, Oct. 19): 

Many of us are starting to get really annoyed by the pundits, reporters and letter-writers who complain that, because Parliament will not reconvene until late November, politicians cannot “get back to work.” 

Do these people not know any politicians? Do they not understand the work habits of someone who must also deliver services to their constituency? 

Parliamentary debate is, or should be, a small part of any MP’s workload. I find that Question Period, the only debate that is regularly reported, has become the least important, most bumptious aspect. 

Let’s save our criticism for those MPs who aren’t available to do their real jobs: Representing their constituents in dealings with the government. 

Justus Havelaar 

Campbell River, B.C. 

published October 21, 2021

Election 2021: the view from here

Signs

People who have read my previous election posts will not be surprised that I want to start by talking about political signs.

The operatives of most political parties apparently believe that signs, preferably lots of signs, influence people to vote for their candidate. So they place them in bursts on the verges beside the highway and at prominent intersections. I believe this practice seriously underestimates the intelligence of voters, so whenever I had input into NDP campaigns I argued that signs should go on lawns, showing who was voting for the candidate and party. And that was (mostly) what we did and continue to do.

One time we even placed a sticker on the candidate sign,”This family votes for...”

Of course most of us don’t know the people who have taken the sign. No matter. Because what the sign actually shows is organization: this party has identified who many of its supporters are and has a crew who will erect their sign for them. That’s a powerful message, one that smart politics doesn’t dilute by placing random signage just anywhere.

The local NDP sign campaign, led by Wayne Youde as usual, didn’t disappoint.

In the past federal elections in Campbell River the NDP sign campaign left all the others behind.  Not so much this time, because the Conservatives had Downey signs all over our neighbourhood, very shortly after the election was called: it’s almost as if they were entirely prepared well in advance!

Of course, they had help: there has been a “Forestry feeds My Family” campaign involving lawn signs and bumper stickers here for some time, recently amplified by the Fairy Creek blockade, especially since it morphed from a campaign to protect one valley into one that calls for the end to most logging on the Island. So it wasn’t much of a surprise to those of us who have been paying attention that when the election was called these issue signs were replaced by Conservative signs.

The other issue that played into Conservative hands here erupted when the Liberal Fisheries and Oceans Minister announced an end to open-net fish pens in the Discovery Islands. That decision was supported by our NDP MP, and it became a plank in Ms Downey’s campaign to point out that MP Blaney was married to Darren Blaney, Chief of the Homalco Band, who was one of the architects of the ban. Campbell River is home to many fish farmers and their families; Campbell River City Council even made a point of being outraged on their behalf.

In fact, they were so outraged that they voted to install an enormous sign at the corner of Hilchey and Dogwood. I’m assuming that Council made this decision well before the election call, and that they had no partisan-political intention beyond supporting forestry and fisheries, but it was installed about two weeks into the campaign, neatly echoing –– probably inadvertently but possibly not, and how were we to know –– Conservative literature.

The very worst verge warrior this time was “Dr Jennifer Grenz” of the Liberals. The signs looked good, easily visible from a distance, but I didn’t see any on lawns. This of course leads to the conclusion that they had far more signs than organization, and her final vote of just over 7,000, compared to nearly 22,000 for Rachel Blaney and just over 20,000 for Shelley Downey, rather proved that point.

The other note I would have is that the Liberal campaign didn’t understand the riding. Yes, it’s good to have an indigenous candidate, and we applaud her PhD accomplishment, but neither of those is a winning attribute in North Island-Powell River; rather, they’re more likely to be hurdles to be overcome. MP Blaney never talks about being married to Chief Blaney for a reason: she has read the room! (and of course commands an organization, so she doesn’t need to).

Jody

On my Twitter feed the GlobeandMail took a good deal of stick for printing three excerpts from Jody Wilson’s new book, curiously released in advance of its original publication date to coincide with the election campaign. Robert Fife particularly took pains to try and find something scandalous to report. In the end, the only new accusation they could find was that she claimed the Prime Minister wanted her to lie, which is pretty thin gruel without any evidence.

David Olive of the Star wrote a particularly insightful piece on the controversy that ended Ms Wilson’s Liberal career. His conclusion: “Wilson-Raybould is an interesting example of bringing narcissism and absolutism together in the lab” As it’s behind a paywall, I’ll include just a few highlights:

  "Wilson-Raybould became obsessed with refusing to overrule the decision by the head of her ministry’s Public Prosecution Service of Canada (PPSC) that SNC did not deserve a DPA.

Wilson-Raybould was, and remains, self-righteous in depicting herself as a lone defender of legal principle, though she has yet to spell out what exactly that principle is.

DPAs are widely used in major economies, including the U.S., the U.K. and much of Europe. Canada added the DPA process to its judicial system in 2018.

A DPA is an out-of-court settlement in which an accused company pays a large fine, cleanses its corporate culture of every last vestige of unethical practices, and submits to a probationary period to ensure it is adhering to the highest standards of corporate governance.

DPAs give prosecutors an additional tool to resolve cases, in an expeditious way that also reduces costs in the judicial system.

As it turned out, SNC quietly reached a negotiated settlement with federal prosecutors in December 2019, with no involvement from the Trudeau government.

SNC pleaded guilty to a single charge of fraud, rather than a potentially more damaging bribery charge. It agreed to pay a sizable $280-million fine, roughly equal to the company’s average annual profits over five years. And it submitted to three years of court-monitored probation.

.....

Wilson-Raybould’s actions were and remain quixotic.

She evinced little interest in SNC or DPAs to understand the larger context of her actions.

Not knowing better, Wilson-Raybould staked her political career on defending a nascent PPSC, created by the Harper government, that is disdained by some top Liberals as a clique of impractical legal purists. They have a point, given the PPSC’s obstinance on the SNC file.

.....

Wilson-Raybould has little to say about the accomplishments of the Trudeau government in which she served. On Trudeau’s Canada Child Benefit, for instance, which has lifted about 300,000 children from poverty.

Wilson-Raybould did, however, trouble to disseminate a lengthy list of her own achievements as justice minister on being demoted from that post.

Wilson-Raybould knows she is an important person. She expected Trudeau to fire advisers in his PMO more seasoned than herself who had communicated with her about SNC. She has equated her treatment by the PMO to the “Saturday Night Massacre,” a shocking episode in Richard Nixon’s manoeuvres to subvert the U.S. Constitution.

Trudeau’s reminder to Wilson-Raybould that “there are differences between pressure and direction” went over her head. (Pressure is guidance; direction is an order.) Wilson-Raybould still doesn’t   grasp that she was insubordinate and was getting away with it."

        I’m not in the footsteps of my Twitter people when I say I think the Globe ultimately did us a service by publishing the excerpts, even though it was pretty clearly a political decision designed to hamper Liberals. I thought the last excerpt, in which Ms Wilson describes her relationships with her cabinet colleagues, particularly enlightening. In it she complains that she frequently told other ministers what to do when confronted with an indigenous file or issue, only to be rebuffed! Imagine!

Clearly she imagines that as an indigenous person she innately had a better grasp of the file than a person whose job it actually was. No wonder she was unhappy, and no wonder she was fired.

I guess we could make excuses if she actually did the job she was assigned. But no, critical files stayed on her desk and didn’t get done. She went through 3(?) Executive Assistants in her brief tenure. As for her handling of the Justice file, she didn’t advance the agenda at all: ask any defence lawyer who has indigenous clients...

Nonetheless, she has her fans in North Island. She apparently has a home on Quadra, although she lives in Vancouver and represented a Vancouver riding (just reclaimed by the Liberals, by the way) She endorsed MP Blaney, and the former BC Minister of Highways, our former MLA, Claire Trevena, lauded her on Facebook for “telling truth to power”.

I don’t have the stomach to read the book, though.

Justus

We’ve been involved in local NDP politics since we lived in Quesnel when I was a beginning teacher. Sometimes very involved. Consequently we always have an NDP sign on the lawn; our neighbours would certainly wonder if we didn’t. So by now everyone knows that when we vote, we vote NDP.

Except that’s not true, and that fact came home dramatically when I discussed the election with my brother on Saltspring, who really does (I believe) always vote NDP. 

I hated our federal campaign largely because Singh was unable to expound on even one plank of the platform without bringing up “Justin Trudeau” and his record of talking a good game but never doing anything. 

(According to Singh; not my opinion at all.)

Anyway, I realized that if I had to vote in Saanich-the-Islands, as my brother does, I’d vote for Elizabeth May to avoid electing the Conservative. I’m very much not a fan of the Greens (although May is a remarkable retail politician, and I do admire that). In other words, I wouldn’t vote Green except to avoid a Conservative.

That’s the penalty we pay in Canada for our “first-past-the-post” electoral system.

I realized that the first time I voted I was actually living in Saanich. The MP was a Progressive Conservative of the old school, called George Chatterton. I don’t remember an NDP candidate; whoever it was would not have been a contender. But the Liberal candidate, the one I voted for, was David Anderson, who not only beat Chatterton, but later became an exemplary Environment Minister in a Liberal government.

I’ve always been proud of that vote, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. 

Happily, I live in North Island, and the candidate to beat the Conservative has always been an NDPer, for almost as long as I can remember.

  

A story

I downloaded our vaccine certificates this morning without issue. After one false start in which I pressed "done" and the certificate promptly vanished into the ether, I downloaded the certificate, took a screen shot, and saved that to my computer desktop. 

Now how to get them on our phones, so they would actually be useful? I researched using Dr Google and sweated for about 2 hours, trying to reverse a very simple process I use all the time, to wit, download photos from the iPhone to the iMac. 

Dr Google had lots of suggestions, many of which I tried. None of them was useful.

After I had tried everything I could think of without any glimmer of success Mike arrived to put the finishing touches on our solar array. I explained the problem, more to look at the possibilities one more time than expecting a result because, as he explained and as we know, he's not really either a computer guy or a Mac guy.
Finally he said, "Why don't you just take a photo?"
Which of course was the exact solution, and really, not to take anything away from Mike's intuition, in retrospect kind of obvious! 

After I sent her the story, Enid said, "You could email it to yourself". Which is an excellent suggestion, but not so useful if you're kind of old school and don't get email on your phone...

Letter to the Globe

 Dear Sir,

The world is burning up and here on Vancouver Island a significant proportion of our climate activists are obsessing about a relatively-insignificant valley in the hills above Port Renfrew whose chief attributes appear to be that it is close to Victoria, hasn't been logged, and has been given a beguiling name.
They want the organizations that own the timber rights to leave it to them.
That's not going to happen.
As an alternative, I give you the example of West Kootenay's Darkwoods, a larger, much more significant property bought and managed by the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
So here's my suggestion to the preservationists: negotiate a sale of the timber rights with the logging company and the bands on whose territorial claim this is, raise the money, and pass the management to one of the Conservancies. I'm confident the Province would not only agree but help, and judging from election talk, so would any future federal government.
The only losers in this scenario are, as usual, the loggers, who are experiencing the slow death, on Vancouver Island, of a foundational industry. 

published in the Globe, September 9, 2021

Election 2021

 It’s no secret that I think Rachel Blaney has been a fine MP, so that when I vote in the advance poll...
(Hint: there’s only one political sign on Marina Boulevard. It’s for Rachel Blaney NDP, and it’s in front of our house.)

Not that there’s an actual choice: the runner-up will be the same Conservative as last time and she and her party are electoral poison. 

The Greens ran 3^rd last election, with fewer than half the votes of the Con. They’ll be lucky to do as well this outing.

The Liberals, running the same good candidate as in the Trudeau Surprise of 2015 actually lost a significant percentage and ran 4^th in 2019, just a few hundred votes behind the Greens. This election’s candidate is only just in the field, and has no riding profile...

And the rest don’t count at all.

In this election, however, my vote for Rachel won’t be a vote for the federal NDP. I’ve never been more disappointed in the party. The details of my disillusionment don’t matter much; suffice it to say that all they’ve given Canada over the last two years is behaviour, seeking headlines by aping Con talking points about a mirage of “scandals” and accusing the Prime Minister of failing to do all manner of things no Prime Minister of Canada could do without provincial agreement: dental care? Provincial. Pharmacare? Provincial. Long Term Care? Provincial. Etc.

Anyway, for me there’s really only one issue this election: reducing Canada’s greenhouse gasses before the planet burns up. (Yes, I’m all for the $10/day childcare proposal, and jobs and the economy and Covid are extremely important, but none except climate change is #1.)

As António Guterres says,

“The evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions are choking our planet & placing billions of people in danger. Global heating is affecting every region on Earth, with many of the changes becoming irreversible. We must act decisively now to avert a climate catastrophe.”

In Canada, that means getting a handle on our use and extraction of fossil fuels. 

The Liberals have actually put us on the path to improvement, with and without the assistance of the provinces (the same path Gordon Campbell put BC on 15 years ago, Christy tried to eviscerate, and John Horgan improved on) by putting the entire country on a plan to slowly increase the cost of carbon dioxide and methane emissions, the so-called “carbon tax”.

But the carbon tax doesn’t address the single biggest contributor to Canada’s global warming, which is greenhouse gasses released by bitumen extraction in the tar/oil sands. So Prime Minister Trudeau called the bluff of the other parties on this file: (from Mitchell Beer’s energy mix.com)

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s promise yesterday to cap oil and gas sector emissions at today’s levels and set five-year targets to reduce them beginning in 2025 amounts to the end of fossil fuel expansion in Canada, the country’s leading climate advocacy network told The Energy Mix Sunday evening.

The Liberals are essentially planning to end fossil fuel expansion,” said Caroline Brouillette, domestic policy manager at Climate Action Network-Canada. “It’s really good to see them finally name that elephant in the Canadian climate policy room.”

The details of the Liberals’ plan will make all the difference, and will be the key to a 1.5°C-compliant future, Brouillette said, stressing that a real phasedown aimed at bringing the country’s emissions to net-zero by 2050 will mean reducing oil and gas production and exports.

And the other parties? What are they proposing? The Conservatives promise to resurrect Northern Gateway, implying increased tar sand activity and more tankers off the BC coast, not to mention an enhanced chance of spills. Their "carbon tax proposal" actually rewards people for using more gasoline and never gets large enough to make a difference.

The NDP, if I read that policy statement correctly, dislike tar sands, dislike pipelines (except for the natural gas one to Kitimat) and thinks Trudeau just talks and never acts and doesn’t deserve to be Prime Minister. Bottom line: they’re in no position to actually do anything, because they cannot form government. Consequently, Mr Singh’s refusal to say he wouldn’t prop up a minority Con government is chilling, to say the least.

The Greens? Irrelevant.

It’s really difficult to be a third party in Canada with our “first past the post” electoral system but other iterations of the federal NDP caucus have managed to manoeuvre that fine line between support for government initiatives we can agree on and criticism of things we cannot. 

Not this one. This one apparently decided early in the last mandate that aggression would lead to electoral success, and the NDP hounds haven’t stopped baying their uncivil bile since. From this vantage point that looks indistinguishable from the CPC and their tactics, which in turn look very Republican. (I give you Charley Angus, on the WE charity file, or the recent comments on Afghanistan, which entirely ignore the fact that we haven’t been involved there since 2014 and that Afghanis have been coming to Canada ever since.)

Not my kind of NDP at all, and I blame the leader. (full disclosure. I was never a fan: https://occasionaljustus.blogspot.com/2018/03/letter-to-my-mp.html)

If the consequence of the NDP attacks are that the Liberals are diminished by the piling-on and the Conservatives take our riding, which is a real possibility, some of us are going to be very pissed indeed.

Two notes

Dangerous wildlife.

Yesterday I was walking the Millenium Trail above the Campbell River. Arriving at the junction with the suspension bridge parking lot, there was a family, peering intently at the map.

So I pointed down the trail and said, “that’s the way to the suspension bridge”.

The father thanked me and said, “How do we see the cougar? Is it dangerous?”

Taken aback, I responded, “Cougar? What cougar?”

He pointed at the yellow sign: “Cougar sighted in area. August 25, 2021”.

So I told him about cougars, how in 40 years of walking, running, and hiking on the North Island I’ve seen a cougar exactly twice, once at Cape Scott, years ago, on the beach, and once more recently, near the airport. Both times they were young, and had no interest in making my acquaintance. I explained that since they have enormous hunting territories, if one had been seen two days before, it was long gone.

But that experience did trigger the obvious question: why post the sign at all?

I suspect it’s to remind visitors to the area that there are wild creatures around, so it behooves one to be careful.

When Eli (our granddog) and I walked logging roads I always carried a can of bear spray, just in case. He was a dedicated hunter, and flushed, for our mutual amusement, any number of deer, rabbits, vultures, eagles, elk, and bears, but if he ever encountered a cougar, he kept the information to himself.

Still, there are cougars in the area around Campbell River. People don't see them often, but their tracks can be seen in the mud or sand  of the trails in the area, or when it snows.

So I’m bemused by occasionally meeting a person with one of those toy dogs on a long leash, walking in the bush behind the airport. “Trolling for cougars”, I suppose.

The entrances to the Beaver Lodge Lands frequently have similar warning signs posted, warning about bears.

Well, of course there are! They’re resident, and those of us who walk there regularly often see them. The last time I did, I was walking the “Butterfly” trail, near the beaver pond. A group of people was peering intently into the bush, and there he was, just ambling along. “Is he dangerous?” one of them wanted to know, so I got to fill them in from my store of co-existence information: don’t get near, avoid a mother and cubs, and don’t pick the berries if the bear wants them. That’s about it.

The City improved our park

A couple of weeks ago we got to watch a City crew at work on the little park across the road.

First they dug ditches to lay drainage pipes, presumably to solve the water collecting in the playground during our monsoon season. They removed all the sand from the playground and spread it over the grass in the park.  Then they re-filled the concrete surround of the playground with chips.

It looks lovely, and when the grass starts to grow again after our unusually dry summer the grassy areas will undoubtedly be much improved.

Thing is, the neighbourhood kids have stopped frequenting the improved park. Parents still bring their little one, of course, and they climb and slide as instructed. But nobody hangs out there anymore.

Maybe it’s the sandy grass and the heat, but I think there’s more to it.

What do our own grandkids do there? Yes, they climb, and swing, and slide. But they also dig holes and throw sand and in season jump in the puddles and create water courses and get muddy.

The park is much improved, but I suspect we may have lost something.

The case of the vanishing lettuce

 At the beginning of April I put some lettuce seed into a pot filled with potting soil. I’ve been doing this for a few years, after many years of seeding directly into the garden, and then not thinning adequately when the plants inevitably came up: fewer plants, more widely spaced, leads to better yields. 

But you knew that.

Anyway, other pots and flats with other seeds started to produce plants –– leeks, tomatoes, beans, squash –– but I noticed not one of them was lettuce. That pot had vanished entirely.

Confession: I’m not much of a gardener. I know this for a fact, because we have friends and neighbours who are superb managers of their gardens. It’s one of the reasons why we’re heavily into rhododendrons, which, once you plant them, pretty much look after themselves. I suspect it’s why our excellent neighbour once observed, “You should have been a farmer”, almost certainly obliquely noting the piles of potentially-useful stuff and compost piles scattered in strategic places around the yard, where he would have tended immaculate grass. 

Anyway. I understand my limitations, and that usually I would rather read yet another newspaper than tend to the vegetables.

I’m always amused by the people who, upon hearing that I was born in Holland, exclaim, “You must have inherited the Dutch gardening gene!” because little could be further from the truth. It’s true my maternal grandfather was descended from a long line of farmers in the Dutch province of Zeeland. But when it came time for him to make his way in the world he put that firmly behind him and joined the army. There he became a Physical Training instructor, which he subsequently exploited to become the Physical Training Instructor at the gymnasium (high school) both my parents attended. And my paternal grandfather, the one after whom I’m named, came from considerable money. He was modestly-successful as an artist and made a considerable career of writing: art criticism for a newspaper and a number of books on art and philosophy. 

(I read Dutch the way a 7-year-old beginning reader reads Dutch, so I cannot tell you how good these are, but you can still google his name, and if you don’t get my dad or me, that’s him.)

I have always assumed my paternal grandfather’s family employed a gardener because they didn’t even do their own laundry or cooking, but I know for a fact that at least two of his relatives, who owned large estates in Rotterdam, had live-in gardeners. Because I met them.

Back to the lettuce.

When Sandy’s flowers started to grow in their little pods, I noticed some of them looked suspiciously like lettuce so I asked her. No, they were gazenias, because that’s what she’d planted, and, unlike me, she keeps track. She even planted a number in what was to be their summer home, a large decorative pot on our new stairs.

And then it became obvious that her gazenias were, in fact, my lettuce. She had obviously found a pot of unclaimed potting soil, conveniently close to her tray, and used that soil, just like anyone else would. (Did I mention that I don’t usually bother to label my vegetable starts?) 

So that mystery has been solved. The lettuce has been reclaimed and planted. And, just for a little bonus, some of the lettuce plants were actually sharing a pod with a very small gazenia plant, so Sandy wasn’t altogether wrong!