Archives for April, 2008
Homeless kids should be housed in poor accommodations
Some thoughts from two of Saskatoon’s city councilors
The total cost of the two homes, including landscaping and furnishings, is about $869,000. Most of that has been covered by the federal and provincial governments under various health, social services and homelessness initiatives.
That’s too much to spend on high-risk youth, the homeowners told the committee.
“How do we know we’re getting value for our money?” asked Heidt, whose son Trent is one of the homeowners opposed to the two care homes.
“These homes are top-drawer. I believe it’s too much money to put in for this type of program,” Neault said.
Heidt and Neault are not members of the planning and operations committee, but they attended Tuesday’s meeting and took part in the discussion anyway, along with Mayor Don Atchison. Both councillors have argued in the past that the concentration of care homes in their wards is too high, though civic officials say the homes are spread evenly throughout the city.
A rebuttal from Egadz Don Meikle.
A key purpose of the My Homes is to give at-risk youth “an opportunity to live in a neighbourhood where it’s normal, where they’re middle-class people,” Meikle said.
“We are trying to show them that, yeah, people care about you and people want you. What kind of message are these homeowners sending back to them - that poor people can’t live in a nice neighbourhood? That they don’t deserve to live there?”
Sadly I think that is the message that is being sent. I have seen the MyHome’s and they are not “top drawer” but basic housing for kids who are overcoming a tough situation. The two councilors are modeling the “We believe in it but not in our backyard” world view.
Back from Calgary
I am back from Calgary. I was traveling with another manager from the Centre. As we were in a meeting last night he got a call from his kid who was being rushed to the hospital. After waiting for more information, we packed up, checked out and left Calgary at 10:30 p.m. and started to drive home. It wasn’t my favorite drive ever (my record isn’t on the record) and we rolled into Saskatoon around 4:00 a.m. I drove most of the trip and I discovered Amp Energy drink. I was in a convenience store in Drumheller looking at what drink to get and I actually thought, “If it is good enough for Dale Earnhardt Jr., it is good enough for me.” Amp Energy gave me a boost was a lot better tasting than Red Bull. While driving through the night isn’t that much fun, it was nice to get home 18 hours earlier than expected.
The conference was a good one. I took some classes on disaster relief and I know more about the Incident Command System than I ever thought possible. Hopefully I will never have to put into practice what I have learned but if I do, I should be a bit more prepared. I also managed to get downtown and connect with Karen/OneHouse and also Dave King who returned my coffee mug Wendy gave him when he was in Saskatoon.
Mark is quite sick this afternoon and I am exhausted. The plan is to watch the Canadiens lose to the Philadelphia Flyers and then call it an early night.
The Rustic Cabin
Over the years Wendy and I have thought about how we want to spend our vacations. There are amazingly cool cabins like this cabin in Minnesota but land in Saskatchewan is a hot commodity, do we want to get a Boler and pull it around the world? While I wish I did like camping more, I really don’t and neither does Wendy. That being said, getting away to a big city can be a little costly as well.
While I was in Calgary, I heard about this cabin at Arlington Beach which is 180 kms from Saskatoon. It is an over glorified garden shed with one bedroom and no bathroom which makes it completely inappropriate for our growing family. On top of that there is a BIG bill owing for it’s share of a new water treatment plant. If that isn’t enough, there is no heat and no insulation (at least you don’t have to worry about asbestos) Wendy and I chatted via e-mail and on Skype and we decided that it was an absurd purchase that meets none of our family needs. Anyone who would be buying it would have an insane about of work ahead of them. Let’s not forget the price of rising gas which makes getting away to the lake really expensive. After deciding that this was a really BAD idea, we decided the best course of action would be to see if we make a deal work out for it.
We will see if it all works out. We are heading out there on Saturday.
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Wendy has some photos of Arlington Beach from 2005.
Mobilize 2008
I am in Calgary until Wednesday to attend Mobilize 2008. It seems a little outside my normal interests but when there is an emergency in Saskatoon, I am one of the guys that is called to respond. The ones we have been a part of in the past have been good learning experiences and if I can learn some more on how to make them better for the victims, it is worth my time. Of course this is a big paradigm shift as usually I am the one causing the disasters, not helping with them…
Outside the hotel is a big display of emergency response vehicles from all over western Canada which means that if there is an emergency anywhere except for Calgary, there is no one around to respond.
A Moving Faithmaps
Stephen Shields is moving Faithmaps back to Blogger. The new (old) address is faithmaps.blogspot.com.
Mobilize 2008
Am off to Calgary tomorrow to attend Mobilize 2008. The original plan was for another manager from the Centre and I to be gone until Friday but we are coming back Wednesday night. We have a couple of projects that we need to take care of in addition to all of the other work we have to do. It’s nice to get away but eventually you have to come back to all that paper collecting on your desk.
The conference is about emergency disaster relief. While we aren’t exactly in a earthquake or hurricane zone, we have been a part of evacuations of northern communities in the past and I imagine we will be doing it again. Also the fire department requests our assistance from time to time when they are putting out larger fires.
Wendy seems utterly devastated that I am leaving home for a couple of days. Tonight she was out getting some movies to watch, making plans with friends, and making a list of fun things to do while I am gone. Apparently I can be replaced by a bunch of Meg Ryan movies, chocolate, and the dog sleeping in my spot on the bed.
Photo Friday: Electricity
Today’s submission for the Photo Friday Challenge. I am not sure why I chose this one over all of the other ones I have posted on Flickr but maybe because it is going to snow 10 cm more over the next 24 hours and the idea of a green Saskatoon with a river with no ice on it is an appealing image to me.
Multi-year sea ice being flushed into the Arctic Ocean
Thomas Homer-Dixon has this graphic of years of sea ice just melting into the Arctic Ocean over just six months.
Our Wishlist
I am always being asked what kind of things the guys can use at the Community Centre. Instead of posting the information here, there is now a wishlist of items online. You can drop by these items any time of day or night and we appreciate them all. Thanks!
Choked
Well, hockey season is over for me. I’d rather not talk about it. It could be worse, I could be a Toronto Maple Leafs fan I guess. Could Mikka Kiprusoff be this generation’s Pete Peeters?
Why Bother?
Michael Pollan wonders why bother to care about climate change?
Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?
Of course he answers it with a quote by Wendell Berry
“Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.”
There is another reason for caring
You begin to see that growing even a little of your own food is, as Wendell Berry pointed out 30 years ago, one of those solutions that, instead of begetting a new set of problems — the way “solutions” like ethanol or nuclear power inevitably do — actually beget other solutions, and not only of the kind that save carbon. Still more valuable are the habits of mind that growing a little of your own food can yield. You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.
But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. The garden’s season-long transit from seed to ripe fruit — will you get a load of that zucchini?! — suggests that the operations of addition and multiplication still obtain, that the abundance of nature is not exhausted. The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
Wendy and I at home
From the New Yorker
The Sub Prime Crisis
I was working on something else this afternoon when I got distracted by an article on the mortgage crisis in the U.S. Some light reading for you below if you are interested.
- A great video of a roller coaster riding the housing market from 1890 to 2007 (pre-crash)
- Wikipedia has an exhaustive page on the sub prime lending crisis
- The Financial Post tries to explain what the crisis is all about
- Apparently some of the Fed officials saw this coming
- The Economist has a depressing PDF on what this means for the world economy
- The BBC has a timeline of events
- Wikipedia has another page on the U.S.A. mortgage meltdown
The Bed Bug Registry for Saskatchewan
A website where people post their encounters with bed bugs.
The rustic re-use cabin
I live this a lot and it only cost $15,000.00
You can order your own from Hive Modular
Our Cabin Weblog- Recently listened to music
- David Gray – Be Mine October 19, 2008
- David Gray – December October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Knowhere October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Real Love October 19, 2008
- David Gray – Last Boat To America October 19, 2008
- Recently additions to my library
- Rediscovering Church: The Story and Vision of Willow Creek Community Church by Lynne Hybels October 26, 2008
- The Teeth of the Tiger, A Novel by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
- The Agenda Inside the Clinton White House by Woodward Bob October 26, 2008
- The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You by John C. Maxwell October 26, 2008
- The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy October 26, 2008
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