A Winter's Day

I live in 905. 905 refers to the area code assigned to the suburbs when the 416 area code (Toronto) was split over 10 years ago. Toronto (then known as Metropolitan Toronto, in those pre-amalgamation days) kept 416, and all the 'burbs got 905.

To me, 905 has been synonymous with plazas, big box stores, housing developments and highways for so long that I never pictured myself living anywhere near it. Well, just goes to show you that I should eat my words!

It always amused me, the perception that Germany was nothing but pavement and industry from those who had never been there. That image had nothing to do with the pastoral beauty of my childhood - or the German cities that I'd lived in, which had a much more accessible countryside than most Canadian cities I know. And here, I just did the same thing with 905. It's all housing developments and strip-malls and...

...and this. Within less than a half hour's drive from the airport, I live in the middle of rolling hills, a woodlot with a swamp, and a sort of pastoral beauty that I appreciate more every day.

Yesterday was one of those days, when the sun pours in my windows (I even sat outside for a bit, on the protected south side of the barn). I have a little disco ball in the window, and bits of light danced on my walls and ceiling when it caught the sun.
I'd been to the gym (and the Milton version of my gym is way nicer than Guelph!) and feeling lazy - but I couldn't totally waste such brilliant weather. So, taking advantage of this new lifestyle, I strapped on my snowshoes and within 2 minutes was in the middle of fun.

It's not wilderness, not even close. At any given time, I can turn and see an estate home development through the trees. It's not remote, or isolated, or physically challenging. But it's the backyard of where I live right now, and it's beautiful. Furthermore, it's taken away some of my drive to go somewhere that is wild most every weekend. I'm proving my own theory, that my need for backcountry travel is directly related to my urbanized lifestyle.

That being said, I miss going into the bush as much as I did for a while. Partly, it's time; partly, it's the headache my car has been giving me of late - but mostly, it's a lack of good adventure buddies of late. People get busy, me included - but I think I need to make more time to do the things I love to do again.

And some sterotypes about 905 do hold true: I've never been as car-dependent as I am now. I drive everywhere. Default exercise doesn't happen as much as it used to. I have to rethink that part of my life somehow. But then, once the snow melts, I can bike to work, and the last reservation of living here will perhaps vanish!

Backyard Igloo

This is "sugar snow". If you take a handful of sugar and look at it, you'll see granules. That's what this snow is like, too. There are no snowflakes in it, just round little pellets. Old snow is often sugar snow, especially snow that has been through a number of freeze-thaw cycles. That's pretty much what it's been like around here.

Sugar snow is not good igloo building snow. Actually, it's crappy igloo building snow. Igloo building works best when you have fresh powder, and the snowflakes can lock together. I've built igloos out of powder, and I've made an igloo with sticky snow, but sugar snow is a challenge. The igloo building project on the weekend at Silent Lake never got past level 2.

The IceBox Igloo kit makers, however, claim that you can build an igloo in any kind of conditions, even in sugar snow. Well, time to put that one to the doubting Thomas test - as in, show me! And since Igloo Ed is around and I happen to have had him hostage at the farm, I got him to build me an igloo.

I, of course, had to go to work. So, being the delegator that I am, I suggested to Ed that HP would be happy to help (fortunately, HP is as easygoing as everyone else who hangs out at that farm...). Then I invited Stef and Nick over, and Fraser too when I ran into him on campus. By the time I got home from work, the igloo was well underway.

It takes a long time with sugar snow, though. The igloo builders (of which I was not one, I was in charge of dinner) worked well into the night with the use of Lorenz's utility light. The sugar snow requires a lot of "working up" - HP and Stef were using metal shovels to break up all the chunks with a combination of bashing and scraping. The idea is, apparently, to use friction to melt the very outside of the snow crystals. Then it can be packed. By Igloo Ed, sure, by me, probably not. But then, I wasn't helping. Fraser and I stood around while Ed packed, Nick held the utility light, and Boris the dog dug in the snow.

Sloooowly, the igloo neared completion. There was much talking (because Ed had to keep teaching new people as different people helped), goofing off (because, if Fraser and I were to stand around and do nothing, we had to at least make smart-mouth remarks), and a bit of Ed fuelling (at which time Fraser found his niche as the beer holder).

The igloo did get finished, though it was well past Malcolm's bedtime. He did, however, declare that his room is now for rent, since he is moving into the igloo. And he was out there checking it out before school this morning. So Igloo Ed proved his point - it may take a long time, but it's possible to build an igloo even with really terrible snow. Of course, he has to now go and do it all over again, this time in Waterloo for Adventure Guide's snowshoe demo.

Heh. The Tom Sawyer principle really works!

I fail winter

I failed my driver's test the first time I took it. I was in my dad's old blue truck (a 78 Chevy that used to be a diesel but wasn't by the time we bought it). It had an automatic transmission with an idle speed of about 60. The very first time I went driving (before I even got my Beginner's Permit), I went with my dad in that truck. The whole brake left, gas right thing was not intuitive. I started feeling too fast on the gravel road, and the truck started fishtailing a bit. My dad said to step on the brake. I stepped on the gas. I went into the ditch, out the ditch on the other side, and through the fence. When we stopped, there was a big dent in the bumper, and my dad got out of the cab to retrieve the tailgate. I flat-out refused to drive home after that. The worst part was that our neighbour had witnessed the whole thing, and there were years of teasing (fortunately, he never could keep Marlene and me straight a few years after that, and she got the brunt of the teasing for something she never did).

So, the driver's test. I think two of my bigger sins were an illegal lane change (on, I might point out, a road with no median, never mind lanes - I was told to pretend) and a rolling stop at a stop sign. I didn't go home with a driver's licence. For the weeks after that, while waiting for a re-test (in the city, with a driver's ed car that didn't zoom along if you didn't keep your foot firmly anchored on the brake, thankyouverymuch), I spent my breaks at work watching the traffic on Highway 17. It seemed that every frickin' idiot could get a driver's license, but not me! Clearly, there was something incredibly stupid about me! Obviously, the mouth-breather who can't open his mouth without cuss words erupting from it was much smarter than I was, since *he* had his license!

Yeah, well, needless to say, I got over it. To this day, I would never call myself a "good" driver. I drive. I've done so accident-free for the 15 or so years that I have been driving. My driving concerns Lorenz, who claims to be a nervous passenger, so little that he fell asleep on the way to the Sault last summer - he thinks I suck so little, he can sleep while I'm in control of the van that has both his and his kids' lives in it. But I still think the mouth-breather (who probably cleaned up his language by now) is probably a better driver than I am.

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That's what cross-country skiing feels like to me. Why don't I get it? Where is the magic that I am missing?

Over the past week, I've learned an awful lot about waxing my skis. I have an assortment of grip waxes, I have glide wax, a cork, a scraper, and these things that look exactly like kitchen scrubbies but cost about 10 times as much. I can wax my damn skis. But I can't fly along the trails...

Ok, my trail sucks. It would have been ok, but we had that whole freezing rain, thaw, hard freeze cycle last week, and now there's this massive crust on top of everything. This massive icy crust - so in order for me to be able to grip at all, I put on my stickiest wax (this might be the time to learn a new word: klister). Within about 20 minutes, the wax has worn off - and no wonder, the ice feels as hard as the fancy plexi-glass scraper I have. Before the wax wears off, I shuffle along - until I come to a hill. At which point I do an agonizing combination of herringbone, pushing against my poles, and stomping hard enough to break through the crust every now and then to anchor myself. If I come to a downward slope, panic ensues.

I made it to the top of the hill, and was actually having a bit of fun with my shuffle scrape shuffle routine. Then I thought, maybe the crust will hold me - and lo and behold, I skated along it for a few steps (my flat learning curve did not extend to skate-skiing the one time I went - I had fun with that from the get-go). It was great! Until, of course - don't tell me you didn't see this one coming - I broke through the crust and did a face plant. I wriggled, and I writhed - but I couldn't get up again. If I managed to get my skis under me, they flew out in two different directions on the ice when I tried to get up. I finally, after doing a creditable impression of the cuss-emitting mouth-breather, managed to get out of the bindings. It was only about 25 meters to the packed top part of the hill, which also marked the slope of death that I'd planned to walk down anyway (even Simon, who can actually ski well, wipes out on the hill of death). So I picked up my skis and walked.

Ow. If I had my camera here, I'd take a picture of the bruises on my calves. The crust was not enough to carry my weight, but it was a thick enough crust that it slammed into the part where my leg gets wider - aka my calf - with painful force. 25 very agonizing meters, with the cussing soundtrack. I suck at this skiing thing.

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While I was illustrating my lack of competence at skiing, I really should have done something about the toboggan run on the hill of death. But I procrastinated on that until Sunday morning, at which time I realized that the crust made for a very fast and out of control ride down. This would have been fun, except the run is between two fences. One of them is a high tension wire fence. The kind that can slice parts of your anatomy off if you hit it with enough force. I bailed on the sled a couple of times to avoid such a fate, and then stomped back to the yard to get a metal shovel. My plan was to break the crust and build a slower trench. And between that and the fence of doom, I would use the crust to build a small wall. This way, if you were zooming on the fast crust on the side with the painful but not dangerous wooden fence and you started going over to the dangerous side (which you do, because that hill slopes that way a bit) you would hit the wall and riccochet back. If you were a chicken, you could do the slower ride in the trench. I did about a third of the hill, and that technique worked well.

HP saw what I was doing, and decided to help out with the tractor. At which point I figured my services weren't needed, and wandered to the house. An hour later, with the 13 kiddies about to go out, I realized that HP and the tractor were stuck, the hill was nowhere near safe, and there would be carnage. HP and I worked like fiends with the shovels, but for safety reasons the whole tobogganing party got moved to one of the horse paddocks. They kids could safely careen on top of the crust, and it is thick enough to carry their weight.

As already established, it is not thick enough to carry mine in most places. After I gave up on working on the run I'd spent so much time on, I got a kick out of watching them whiz around on the crust. Then I banged up my shins some more, and that was that. I failed the tobogganing test too.

--

It's a good thing I have such a great relationship with my snowshoes.

And I haven't given up on the skiing thing. I'm hoping for fresh snow...

ScrewUp Ready

This is how you spend the evening after you drive your friend, landlord and resident organic farmer to the airport.
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I want more information on the Schmeiser case. It stymies my ability to think critically, because here’s what I distil it down to:

1. Monsanto has a patent on a particular cultivar – one engineered to work with their herbicide.
2. Percy Schmeiser had canola growing in his fields that bore the hallmarks of the patented crop.
3. Percy Schmeiser neither purchased the seed from Monsanto, nor paid a licensing fee.

So there’s conclusion 1: Percy Schmeiser owes Monsanto a licensing fee. At $15/acre, with over 1,000 acres, that’s close to $16,000. Net returns on those acres were about $19,000 (and as Ian Binnie, supreme court judge, pointed out – that’s a lot of work for $3,000). So even if I were to accept conclusion 1 without reservations, my questions:
What the hell is the point of buying into something where the lion’s share of your profit goes to Monsanto?

Except it’s not quite as straightforward to me:
1. The chief “advantage” of the GM canola is its tolerance to the company’s own glyphosate herbicide.
2. Schmeiser never sprayed said herbicide.
3. Schmeiser had no advantage from growing the crop.
4. Release of the crop and attendant higher herbicide use – whether by Schmeiser or anyone else – has led to “superweeds”, necessitating ever stronger herbicides.

So there’s conclusion 2: Even without the lawsuit, Schmeiser got screwed. Percy Schmeiser didn’t take advantage of the special qualities of the GM crop in his fields. Not only that, he – inadvertently or otherwise – helped the company make the conditions of growing crops more difficult overall. Now, I don’t understand the motive – I can, somehow, see the motivation behind growing a crop that requires licensing and skipping out on paying the license fee. I don’t understand why someone would take that risk for no reason at all.
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I don’t care whether or not Schmeiser somehow managed to save a seed he shouldn’t have as per the “should” of an agrichemical giant who expects more than 75% of your profit for using the seed. I don’t even want, so much, to get into the point of patenting living matter. What I care about is a court judgment that rules that if you are found with the patented crop on your fields – regardless of how it got there – the crop belongs to Monsanto. And, apparently, if they have to sue your ass off to get it, you have to pay their court costs too.

Pollen doesn’t respect property boundaries, and weeds evolve. So shouldn’t the agrichemical giants be sued by all of us for creating an environment which essentially makes Canadian canola unmarketable in some of our most lucrative markets as well as giving us a bigger weed problem than ever before?

Doesn’t this remind me of StarLink? Why is the word contamination accepted there, but not here?
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What am I missing?
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I’m not convinced that eating a genetically modified organism is going to have immediate or even intermediate effects on my personal health status. I have a resilient system. In many cases, I think genetic modification achieves what can be done with years of breeding. That’s where my problems begin, though.

1. We do in the space of a year what used to take generations.
2. We are only focused on the genetics in our lab, not on all the other inadvertent impacts we may have on non-food crops and organisms.
3. The year then becomes the generation, in terms of other organisms stepping up their evolution to build resistance. The case of corn borers and Bt-corn comes to mind.
4. We are now doing the exact same thing we’ve always done, breeding – just at a different pace, with a licensing fee attached.
5. Even if you do manage to get those super yields for a year or two, the prices fall – do you really make more money? I accept that you’d make less money if you continued to stick to the other way while your peers went the new way.

Conclusion: it’s not for my good, or the good of the planet, or the good of the farmer, that the genetic modification I’ve seen takes place. My quality of life will not increase with increased shelf life of tomatoes, increased cold tolerance in corn, or herbicide tolerance of wheat. My quality of life may decrease with herbicide residue in the food supply, human-induced evolution at unprecedented speed, and the like.
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This whole mess challenges my critical thinking skills. I know where I stand. But I also hear the arguments of the proponents of this, and they’re not always easy to dismiss. People need to make a living. An individual can only do so much – and may end up in massive debt with a lien on his farm, like Percy Schmeiser.
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Ever since I got a new computer at work, I’ve spent far more money than I’d like to on the software budget. I have to buy new legal copies of stuff that I already had legal copies of – but it won’t work with the latest software. I was happy with my computer two computers ago, except that every time there was a software upgrade, it got relatively slower. I was happy with dial-up internet until everybody went high speed and nobody designed pages with bandwidth as a crucial factor anymore. I got high speed, for a while it made me happy, then it just changed my lifestyle. Not for the better.

Microsoft and Monsanto (and the rest of them, let’s not just vilify Monsanto) have a similar approach to selling product.
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I have a t-shirt, I think of it as my naïve idealist t-shirt because it has a catchy slogan that I doubt was thought out all that well:
“Monsanto: playing god like only the devil can”.
The shirt amuses me, because it’s symptomatic of the vilification of one particular company with perhaps a not-quite-competent PR department. The issues, as far as I’m concerned, are much deeper than one company, and silk-screening that slogan is akin to protesting globalization without being able to tell me what said globalization is. Monsanto has become discourse to some.

But reading through Percy Schmeiser’s website, I’m tempted to buy into the slogan.

And it’s going to be months before we hear a judgment from the Supreme Court on Monsanto vs. Schmeiser.

Moving: Over

I spent a part of the weekend on my snowshoes, stomping up and down the hill on the farm. There is a children's tobogganing party in the works, and the drifts are too big for toboggans to barrel through without some pre-packing, so stomp stomp stomp I went. Now I'm tempted to take my shovel and put in curves and embankments, and then I want to build an igloo at the top. But let's be realistic, shall we? There is not enough time.

I also got myself some nordic skis, though I don't have them yet - all the boots in stock at the store I went to in Milton were too big, so they have to order some in. I can't wait. I stomped out a trail around a few of the fields, again on snowshoes, which I can hopefully trackset when the skis come in. Dog-walkers from the subdivision (I think, it's nobody who lives here anyway) have been barreling through that field, so I have a sad suspicion that, by the time I get back to it, my evenly and lightly packed snowshoe trail will have bootholes punched all along it and won't be any good for tracksetting.

The dog came with me when I worked on the toboggan run and snowshoe trail yesterday. He helped by pooping in the middle of the steepest part of the slide, but he was having a good time and so was I, so I just picked it up with the shovel and tossed it over the fence. He valiantly tried to come along on the snowshoe trail packing, but it was a bit too much for him. After about 500m, he stayed put and barked his little head off for a while, before skulking back to the farmyard.
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I went to Ikea yesterday. The irritating quotient went way high. People go there to spend entire days wandering around pre-packaged low-end but fun style. After 20 minutes, I wanted out, desperately. This of course meant that I ignored the arrows on the floor that funnel you through all the showrooms and did an unfortunate second loop of the couches. But I now have a laundry storage solution, a full-length mirror and a new bedside lamp that doesn't require stripping the fingerprints from my fingers to turn on and off. But I can wait another five to ten years before I revisit Ikea.

And I had my first real company in my place on the weekend. I've had people drop in a few times now, but they all live here. And Phil drove out last weekend, but I wasn't ready to entertain in my little place and he came to the house and we just did a quick tour here. But with Rebecca, Nick, Stef and Bob over for drinks, it was truly cosy in the cutest apartment in the region. But given that I only have two chairs and I wasn't in the mood for eating perched on couches, I took advantage of the most tolerant landlord in the world and made dinner in the house. The house not only has a great kitchen and gigantic table to eat at, but it has the handy feature that I can put leftovers in the fridge, and they stop being my problem! They always get eaten up there.
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Speaking of eating, moving must burn some serious calories. I've been eating like a farmer (ok, not quite - but bacon, eggs, pasta, pork roast and apple pie have all featured in my diet in the past week!), and this morning I braved the scale, thinking I must now do penance for the eating habits I'd cultivated. Ha! Not only did I get away with it, I actually lost a pound or two in the past week! This now officially undoes the Christmas Pudge, though there is plenty of other pudge I'm not happy about these days...

But I can't help but suspect that there's a pound or five just hiding in my closet, waiting to leap onto my body when I get dressed one day. My body does that.