On Fixing A Generator

We live in a forest which during high winds sheds branches onto the electrical lifeline which threads through it  to our houses from a box on a pole up by the highway ... It also drops limbs on calm days and snowy days and on freezing-rain days. I have a large, bright red generator waiting patiently in the garage for just such moments.

The power went out not too long ago and I, having already having gone down to switch over the 'specially "ganged" breakers in the specially installed standby electrical panel, hustled key-in-hand to the garage to start the generator. Done by the book. A practiced response, superbly executed.

Ten minutes later the lights went out !

With a scurry back to the silent garage I discovered that I hadn't the foggiest understanding of what was wrong. The gas gauge showed the tank to be half full, yet no amount of effort would resuscitate my recalcitrant machine.

Plan 'B' ..... candles and lanterns and the wood-burning masonry heater carried us through the twenty-one hour outage.

I pondered this failure over the next while, but didn't do anything until last week when the power went off again for an hour or so.

Out to the garage ..... back to the house for a flashlight. I had been thinking and my gut kept telling me that the engine wasn't getting gas. The gas gauge, even under the flashlight, supported the original story ... lots of gas. This time I chose to disbelieve the material evidence and filled the tank ..... and filled the tank .... until a new brighter red bar appeared in the gas gauge window and crept up to tell me the tank was full again.

Operational normalcy has been fully restored.

Legacy By The Book

For Christmas 2008 my son's family presented me with 'Hugh's Book of Matt and Eva" ...  a slim coffee-table volume offering 20 pages of beautiful photos of Mike, Lisa, and Eva and the boys. They called it   "Photo-journal of Mike and his family  -  especially the kids".   It was the start of something modestly big.

What I had been given was a photo book created on Mike's Mac and subsequently published and delivered to him by Apple. The notion of self-publishing caught my fancy, which should not surprise anyone to whom I am even slightly well known.

I tried my own hand, publishing a 20-page book of wonderful images of Beverley's family at an aerial park deep in a Gatineau forest, with grandchildren appearing here and there among the tree branches ...  and following up with a particularly fine gift for the Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, congratulating him on his remarkable summer with the Liberal Express, and letting him know just what I thought he might do next to make Canada a better place for Canadians ... while saving the world.

Success! Beautiful volumes that brought me both both critical family acclaim and a letter of appreciation from Michael Ignatieff (which resides beneath the cover of my personal copy of his book, awaiting the unwary).

My objective now is to create a series of 'legacy' books for the family from several boxes of old photographs that I have inherited from my mother and acquired from my sister (who in turn etc. etc.) and which date as far back as the Boer War in South Africa ... Let the scanning begin!

Whither Away ?

Each month over the winter season we drive up to Ottawa, put ourselves up in the condominium for one, two or three nights and then head back to Deep River. It is a lovely drive most times, unless the weather turns on us. We will attend four or five plays at the Great Canadian Theatre Company plus a number of performances at the National Arts Centre and, this season, nine Met Opera Live in HD performances at the Coliseum Theatre. We visit friends and museums and enjoy seasonal outdoor markets and concerts..

There has been a dawning realization that it would be less costly and less hassle to put up in a comfortable hotel on those occasions when we needed a place to rest our weary bones in the city. So the decision was made ... the condo will go on the market, sooner rather than later.

The next realization came logically enough .... if we actually lived in Ottawa we wouldn't be obliged to rely on the hotels. Admittedly, this was but the last of several realizations which we'd accumulated in our wandering passage thru the summer and past autumn. Winter is here now and I am almost ready. I expect it will be the last we see on the lane.

Burke's Bluff Lane has been good to all of us.  Soon the time will come to leave.

A Message From Romeo Dallaire

Remembering is a duty, but how we remember is a choice.

This duty and these choices mean that as Canadians we face the world with open eyes, whether as individuals, or as a nation.

This Remembrance Day I choose to honour the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform, past and present, and their families, by imagining the world they’ve fought to make possible.

It is a world without child soldiers; where cluster munitions and landmines no longer litter countrysides. It is a world where the threat of nuclear proliferation and future genocides have ceased to exist.

These ideas may seem bold. Even unbelievable. But consider this.

Until 1957, the soldier was known only as an instrument of war. That year, a Canadian, Lester B. Pearson, imagined a soldier could be an instrument of peacekeeping, too.

One bold idea, one cause, and one nation had the power to change how peace is kept.

This Remembrance Day, we can choose to honour our men and women in uniform, and their families, by recognizing their sacrifice. But we can also do more than that.

We can imagine that the world our soldiers fight and die to protect is possible.

And we can build it to honour their sacrifice. Because that, too, is a choice.

Sincerely,

LGen the Honourable Roméo Dallaire, (ret’d), Senator (Quebec)

The Eleventh Hour

11:00  ... This morning Beverley and I joined a circle of people surrounding Deep River's Cenotaph ...  There, positioned at each corner, soldiers stood motionless with hands resting on inverted weapons while, close by, their comrades paraded with the Legion colour party.

We found a place with Leslie and Lauren and Bruno an exchange student from Brazil ... and when the moment came, Lauren and I, as we do each year ( today accompanied by a young soldier ) laid a wreath bearing the names and images of Donald Taylor (WWII), Frank Little (WWI) and Duncan Matheson (Lebanon & Gulf War)  ... Uncle, Father-in-law, Nephew ... or .... Great Grand Uncle, Great Grandfather, First Cousin once removed.

These were the loved, known and unknown, chosen to represent the men from our family who went to war ..... and the one who never returned.

The Problem With Twitter Is You Have To Tweet

Oddoldguy has for some time now had a Twitter account and two followers (son Mike and daughter Andrea) who rarely bothered with it, since he never had anything to say ...... literally. Believe that or not as you will, but it was actually true. I was not much taken with Twitter, until I recently started following the cartoonist Cam Cardow and began to see Twitter as a resource.

My disaffection with the current government is large, but my only outlet for expression of it has been on Facebook sites such as  'Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament' and 'Radio Free Amigoville'. CAPP was a pro-active site which grew to 250,000 and and for a while was an interesting and effective non-partisan forum ...... but its very openness led it into unpleasant disarray and decline. Amigoville is a sort of civilized spin-off which blocks bad behaviour while maintaining an open stance on dialogue, ideas, music and humour. I avoid the first, but periodically engage companionably with the latter.

So, Oddoldguy took up blogging .... still  ignoring Twitter.

Today I returned with new a Twitter strategy as 'Boondoggletweet', where I am able to put down observations and links about my reactions to the actions and inactions of the government of Canada. I have donned the robe of political activism ....... except I actually did that back in January when we attended the CAPP rally on Parliament Hill .... This stuff is contagious.

Harper is as Harper Does

Going several years back in my mind I recall with great clarity Annabel's visceral first impression of Stephen Harper. Glancing at his image on the TV screen she observed "That man cannot be trusted". She never wavered from that view, adding only later her opinion that "His eyes are too close together".

I had some undefined misgivings at the time, but in watching how Harper triumphed in melding  the PC Party and the Alliance into the new Conservative Party of Canada I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. What he'd managed to do was unquestionably impressive, in a tricky way.

That was then and this is now.

These days I always look past what Mr. Harper says into what he does or ofttimes doesn't  .... or, more likely, at what he obliges some unfortunate Minister to do .... only to leave the poor soul hung out to dry. This summer of stupidities and blunders has seen our Prime Minister push the envelope on unaccountability. Minister after Minister has lost personal credibility over actions ostensibly his or her own, while speaking from ridiculous scripting foisted on the unfortunate by the PMO ..... while the Prime Minister ? ..... He conveniently and without a blush has stepped out of the line fire every time.

Annabel was right. She was always right. I should'a knowed

Misperceptions And Reality

I'd expect reality to appear real at the very least ....  not just a little bit real or largely real or sometimes real and sometimes not. This came to mind for no discernible reason other than that I had recently encountered another unenlightening fiction from a Minister of the Crown while surfing www.news.google.ca.

Wondering if in politics there is any measure for real? .... or in life outside of politics for that matter?

Curious question .... since so many of our accepted realities appear to be derived from misperceptions of some sort of something which is not of itself necessarily real and likely inherently unmeasurable in any event.

Today's reality has me finishing off a blog to myself which began with a wandering thought that I hoped to capture. Well ... I sort of caught it, with not much gained! Last evening's wandering thought impinges upon my day.....

The roaring outer edge of a so-called 'storm bomb' (high winds, blasts of thunder, lightning, and falling trees) cut off our electricity for 21 hours Wednesday-into-Thursday (my auxiliary power generator ran for five minutes and then quit) .... all of which was quantifiably the reality of the moment.  A wakeup call for the winter and a demonstration of the real virtue of equipment maintenance.

Cartoon Junkie

Political cartoons can be downright nasty and mean-spirited, but the wit and satire that mark the best of them are like my really great curling shot in the Tuesday Senior's curling draw that ensures I will be back on Thursday.

Cam Cardow in the Ottawa Citizen has those moments more frequently than I do, but I do not begrudge him that, for it is his living and my real gain. Were I to admit to a private passion, it would be for the ubiquitous works of Cardow and his colleagues and their forerunners / Jim Borgman / Roy Peterson / Daryl Cagle ..... numerous others. They have been there throughout my life and really underpin the particularly skewed, bemused and bruised view of politics that I hold to today.

John Diefenbaker collected numerous originals of cartoons portraying him in the most unflattering ways ... which, perversely he enjoyed displaying prominently among the large, eclectic collection of artifacts in the basement of his Ottawa home*. I encountered them down there on a rough-framed wall just across from a large bronze bust of Laurier supported for the moment on a severely sagging 1x8 board directly above a beautiful big ivory model of the Taj Mahal. But that's a tale for another day. For me, the moment lay in touching a Roy Peterson drawing .... and seeing the white-out that spoke to our common humanity.

*Dief's cartoons are now in the collection of The John G. Diefenbaker Centre at the University of saskatchewan.

The Expert Chimpanzee

Chimpanzees with darts as experts is an interesting proposition, since being chimpanzees with darts they could predict on any subject with the same probability of accuracy as expert opinion might provide, but without the weight of opinion cum knowledge that handicaps expert prognostication.

An Afternoon With Larry

 I continue to struggle in amazement not merely with the concept and the depth and breadth of the internet, but with my inability to remember which email address and password I must use to sign in to view or post a blog.

About Larry. Today the turntable on our microwave stopped its turning and, having realized the accumulated costs to date of a Sears maintenance contract and having not renewed it, I turned to the internet ... and discovered Larry. Google search turned up Answer.appliance where I filled some blanks and authorized PayPal and was introduced to Larry. We engaged in a flurry of email questions and answers leading to a Larry prognosis that I must replace the turntable motor with part #W10143959, and a simple description of how I might go about it. I ordered the part on line from Sears within minutes and early next week the new motor will be delivered to the Sears' pick up here.

A few minutes ago Beverley put some parsnips in the microwave and pushed start, which it did, rotating quite nicely. The next time .... it gets the new motor if I can remember where I put it after it arrives, unless maybe Sears doesn't have the part in stock. I'll be informed by email within 24 hours.

A Good Thing To Have

I'm thinking that a blog might be a good thing to have ,,,, a convenient place to mould randomly wandering thoughts into some semblance of cognitive reasoning. A blog, after all,  can be held on standby all day if need be, grabbing thoughts as they pass by ....

Oddly Old ?

Life is funny. Here am I, odd and old enough to be likely to have some perspective on life, committing a full morning to creating a blog space essentially for the purpose of writing to myself. The why and when and what are presently left in the hands of the gods, but this is the where; the place where my good intentions of the past two years may or may not bear fruit. We/I shall see.