Red Cedar
More apocalypse, less angst
each day closer
i have been organizing gypsy-style this week, without a real office and from various points in the city using cel phone and laptop with airport card to download, sift, sort and connect. i don’t suspect next week will be any different.
tonight i am on the late ferry, and tomorrow i will be on the early which makes for truncated sleep, but at least i am buoyed by the flow of energy and comraderie of my fellow organizers – if there is anyone who understands this fluid state between work and organizing, it’s those alongside in the same struggle.
next week i give three strike trainings at three different locations, and if all goes according to schedule i will be walking a picket line the week after that. i don’t think i have ever spoke in front of people as often as i have in the past four days, and until this ends each day will follow a similar pattern – phone, email, meeting, speaking.
machine life
a day of mechanical and electrical failures it was…..
i am writing this blog post from my brand new G4 ibook, bought in a hasty moment this afternoon from the macstation in yaletown – an unanticipated purchase brought on by the failure of the hard drive on my G3 which after many repairs (and too much money thrown at it) i finally gave up on. i have left my old machine at the shop in the hopes they can recover the data off the drive that no longer spins – apparently they can’t even tell me that for 5-7 days because they are so backlogged in their repair area.
so, there it is – i got to the union office this morning after a long ferry delay due to mechanical failure (they couldn’t get one of the clutches to engage and so drove the ferry with 2 engines instead of 4 which turned a 2 hour commute into a 3.5 hour commute), took my ibook out, and lo – it did not start up. in fact, the only thing i could get it to do was cough a little, and on one try the monitor flickered. this was not a good start to my day of getting things done, so i switched over to a windows laptop and used that until i had to run downtown to drop strike leafletts off to a few different worksites.
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new! subscribe!
it has been mentioned to me by two different people now – that they wish my blog was an email list rather than on the web because *some* folks don’t remember to check my blog regularly (can you believe it?)
so it turns out it is pretty easy to add a subscriber service to wordpress blogs, which i have fooled around with and got working. to subscribe go here or click on the link underneath the weather icon. once your email is added, you will get an e-mail with the link to each new post i add, constantly reminding you of my presence in real life and on the web – it’s like a small reminder of me.
enjoy!
visitors
i was away overnight on thursday, at union meetings in vancouver and then nanaimo. on friday i returned to roberts creek to the obvious signs a bear had been to visit the yard in my absence.
the scat pile in the middle of the yard was the first indication, noticeable in that it was dead centre in the patch of bare earth of the recently retired septic field. i mentioned this to my friend jess as we sat out on the front steps of my home, wondering aloud what had brought the bear into my yard… when i realized moments later that the grape arbour on the left front of my house was completely ripped to shreds. there are no more bunches of grapes hanging from the vines, and leaves and squashed fruit litter the brick patio below. worst of all, the support posts on one side were all been knocked down, which meant repair work was in short order. it looks as though the bear stood on his hind legs to get at the vine fruit, the weight of him pulling everything down as he went.
i suppose it is my fault for not eating the grapes when they were ripe, for now the bear has got them.
besides the bear, i had other visitors over the weekend – jess on friday night and fraser on saturday night – hooray for old friends 🙂 – fraser and i had a fire on the beach saturday night which lasted until the rain started (and there was amazing lightning across the sea before that took hold).
i spent yesterday (sunday) cleaning up the grape arbour and then split some kindling so i would have lots of dry for starting fires on the cold days. as i said to my friend george on the phone this afternoon – only a month ago bears and firewood were not things i had to deal with as part of my daily existence…
reminders
photo circa 1885 at the place now the corner of georgia and seymour in downtown vancouver
following up from my post of three days ago, photographic reminders do exist of the trees once lining these shores. i was poking around in the online provincial archives yesterday for work-related images, and came across these during some random-browsing moments. one hundred years ago might as well be a thousand when we look around the urban ecosphere today to the meager firs and birches struggling in planter boxes against the concrete – the corporate nod to some absurd aesthetic that sees trees (and ultimately all life) in the context of control.
from the north shore, circa 1890s
Red Cedar 