Soggy Sunday

 

Most of our leaves are down – fall for certain. And today is chill, dark and rainy. With almost all the colour gone, the yard and field look dreary. Only the rock garden shows blocks of rust and red, the seed heads of the sedum flowers mostly. Deer and turkeys are wandering through at intervals and I missed, through sleeping in, a fine turkey battle yesterday morning, I am informed, when two groups of large and territorial males met while heading for the feeding rock. I did hear, though, a few faint swearwords in turkey-speak from the woods later on.

I could add a few choice swearwords in me-speak, were I so inclined. And I guess I am. My least favourite time of year is now here. And all the ills the flesh is heir to, not to mention the bones, seem to have descended on the family. JG is creaking and his head won’t swivel, he says. My back is swearing at me, let me do something so simple as make the bed. We have a serious, serious illness in the extended family. Luckily the next two generations down seem to be holding up. So far, anyway. What with the weather, a real mood changer for me, can tragic drama be far away?

Enter ten turkeys, gobbling.

JG lured me into reading Conrad Black’s column in the Post yesterday. I am still annoyed. In his usual bombastic manner, Black animadverts on how he has to uphold Canadian politics when among his, no doubt superior, British acquaintance. I feel like sending him a quick message begging him not to admit to being Canadian at all. If we could disown the man, I would be very pleased. Even if he is, for once, right about something, that something being the fact that the flags should be back up for November 11^th. I suspect Trudeau junior has got himself mired into this awkward apology with the flags and has no idea how to get out of it. It can’t snow soon enough for him to take a walk in it.*

Not that I can see a good choice of leader coming along behind him. Too many lightweights. Too many inexperienced ministers; I guess to get the sex and region mix right, they had to make other compromises. And booting Garneau was Just Plain Dumb.

Yeah, it’s almost November and I am just as dank and cranky as the weather and the turkeys. Also, I was convinced we stopped Daylight Savings Time this weekend and we don’t. Next Saturday. Duh.

I have just ordered a winter coat, sight unseen, on line. My friend and I had planned a trip into the city to the bright lights and coats for sale, but she got nailed with medical appointments and it is my busy week of the month anyway and we had to cancel. Sniff. At least we can now go to a coffee shop and, mirable dictu, sit down, take off our masks and gossip happily over our steaming cups. Thank you, Health Unit! Now, about those booster shots? Hello, provincial government, are you there? I think I hear the turkeys. Squabbling.

*American Friends. About the walk in the snow. 

The rock garden. From the deck.

The white thing? Not an attenuated ghost. JG's weather station - bolted into the rock. Why the colour values turned out so different in these photos is beyond me. The Nikon with a mind of its own, I guess. The real colour is closer to the first photo than to the second.

Sustainability, Science and Society sort of.

 

“Students in the Sustainability, Science, and Society Program will....

Gain a critical understanding of the concept of sustainability, its contested meanings, multiple dimensions, perspectives and scales.

Gain an in-depth understanding of a specific set of sustainability challenges, including the interconnection between the three pillars of SSS, scales of those challenges, and relationship to personal choices.

Acquire hands-on experience with a suite of analytical tools used to address sustainability challenges.

Recognize that, while analysis is useful, it has limits, and avoid “analysis paralysis”

Gain an understanding of institutional approaches to inform effective policy making and implementation

Will learn to shine a light, instead of cursing the darkness, and offer feasible alternatives to the status-quo.

Appreciate the role of science in society and also that societal decision making involves multiple perspectives and factors that go beyond science.

Be able to persuasively communicate ideas, orally and in writing, to multiple audiences.”

 The outline above is taken from the course description of the four-year university program in which my granddaughter is enrolled. Somewhat more than slightly ambitious, hmm?

 I enrolled in an Arts course at my university in 1960. My aim was to become a high-school teacher and I therefore chose a four-year English Honours major. I think, although I am vague on this, that to earn the Type A Certificate I was aiming for, I had to select a teachable minor. I applied to History and was turned down. I knew my French was abysmal, and that left Latin, which was taught in most academic high schools at that time, although smaller numbers of students were taking it each year - some when they could not select something more relevant and a few from genuine interest.

 I had very little genuine interest in the language as such although Roman history fascinated me. And so I slogged through four years of increasingly difficult Latin authors, with one marvellous course in mostly Roman history as a lagniappe. And taught it for one year. My present claim to fame is that I can translate the Latin mottos on shields and such. Very useful.

 It seems as if, providing the course is as advertised, the granddaughter’s study field might be very useful indeed. It amused me no end that our Thanksgiving Dinner table (and thanks be we could gather as a family) was enlivened by a discussion of grandkid’s Biology experiment, an analysis of ant behaviour. (Both of her parents are Biology professors and her grandfather is an engineer.) Great enjoyment was had by all. A step up, in my opinion, from De Rerum Natura.

There must be an infinite variety of ways in which our interests shape what we learn and what we learn shapes our subsequent interests and occupations. I got into a discussion of how our parliament functions the other day and recognised the truth in the comment that in the past lawyers were, perhaps, overrepresented and that this bias contributed to the adversarial nature of the debate.

 I did a considerable amount of formal debating as a teen and young woman, both in set topic discussion and model parliaments. The key, as I was taught and as I found, was to define your terms. There is certainly a degree of persuasion and sheer stubborn reiteration necessary to making your definition of the terms the accepted base of the dialogue. “Be able to persuasively communicate ideas” is how the Program description presents it. Sadly, what often happens in our modern political discourse is that there is in fact no ‘idea’ as such and we are fed slogans like ‘sunny days’ and ‘build back better’ but not offered substantive actions to choose among nor even any expansion on what is to be built and what will be better. If I have to hear about ‘reconciliation’ one more time, I swear I may end up banging my head on the nearest hard object. Just after asking what the speaker is actually planning to do.

 If anything.

 I feel, some days, an awful lot like the elephant whose photo I took many years ago during a sojourn in Zimbabwe. We were established in a blind above a water hole and there were a lot of species and ages of animals tearing about and generally looking a bit like Aberdeen Street in Kingston last Saturday. And this stolid and stalwart gentleman stood back and surveyed it all.

 Please envision me draping my trunk over a tusk and enjoying the sunshine.