Mary Soderstrom's Blog, page 103

We are recovering from one of the best holiday of the year.  For some time now, we've been having a Canadian Thanksgiving buffet for family and friends.  This year the final count was 38 adults and 14 children, with the age range from 85 to 4 weeks.  Lots of delicious food--and much turkey left over--plus the company of some very dear people.

Several things of note this year: visiting parents of friends of the kids came along too, which suggests that people really enjoy the occasion, Grandpapa Marc (Sophie's Dad) carved the turkey most skillfully, pitching in  because Emmanuel was off in Williamsburg VA playing Lafayette's interpretor in a historical re-enactment, and Jeanne who spent the night here with Elin, woke up about 5 a.m. shouting "Je veux la fête" or "I want the party."

Little Thomas, who was passed from welcoming arms to welcoming arms, almost smiled at all the attention.  Pretty good for not quite a month! 

And now that things are cleaned up (we rented the dishes and cutlery, but, my, there were a lot of pots and pans) I have no energy for another sort of post!

This weekend--Thanksgiving in Canada, Columbus Day in the US--always marks the end of summer in my books.  The weather, even in these days of climate change, is cooling, and the opportunity to sit outside is becoming rare.

So here are two tributes to the pleasures of a small garden in the middle of the city.  Both of these pictures were taken one block over about a week ago.  They are on the sunny side of the street, so the owners should be able to eke out a few more pleasant afternoons in the next couple of weeks.


They're probably inside today though: we're getting rain which is much needed after a summe when I'm sure these little oases got a lot of use.

What do you do in the middle of the night when your toddler starts vomiting and won't stop?  Probably it's just a messy nothing, but you never know.  A lot of serious diseases start that way.

Jeanne had that problem last night, and after a half dozen episodes of throwing up, in between which she kept asking for water, toward morning her mother called 811,  Quebec's free 24/7 health hot line, InfoSanté.  Christian, the nurse on call, walked Elin through the necessary steps.  Did Jeanne have a fever? How high? Could she move her head without complaiing? Did she have a headache? And so on. 

Then he gave some excellent advice.  In effect he said, I see you live a few blocks away from a drugstore that will be open in half an hour.  Go there, get some pediatric rehydrating fluid and give it to her by the teaspoon ever five minutes.  If she stops vomiting, wait an hour and then give her a cup.  If she continues to vomit or if her fever goes about 38.5 C (slightly more than 101 F) take her to an emergency room.

Glad to say that Jeanne quit vomiting by 8 a.m., and seemed to be her usual self by mid-day, if quite ready to take a nap. 

This is great front line health service.  Bravo![image error]

I woke up this morning to a delightful story about the city of Montreal planting trees. It's not particularly new news: the city announced last summer that it was planning on putting in 300,000 trees over the next 10 years.  The aim is increase the urban canopy of leaves in order to cut down on hot spots in the city.  

If I had any doubt that trees do make things cooler, I would have had them allayed this summer.  The picture at the right was taken in a nearby park about 7:30 a.m. on a day when it was frightfully hot and humid.  Yet in the shade of the trees it was delightful, and this couple had escaped their hot apartment to have breakfast on the grass.  As it happened I spent quite  a bit of time in this park this summer later in the day when I'd take Jeanne over a for a swing, and I can vouch for the fact that, while it was hot there, it was much less hot than it was a few streets over where there were smaller trees.



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More new cases of E.coli infections in Alberta and Sasketchwan and Stephen Harper insists that Canadians are better protected than ever !  Talk about double talk!

If you let an industry regulate itself, you're not going to have real regulation.  Disaster in the Making , a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, outlined what was in store 18 months ago.  This short but trenchant report is free for downloading and is an excellent backgrounder for anyone concerned about what is happening to our food, water and environment. [image error]

Justinn Trudeau is supposed to announce his candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada today. This is bad news for the Libs, and good news for the NDP, I think. The young man is personable, goodlooking and what the French call a bon parleur. But that's about all he is. The following video from a Quebec TV show has him talking about how he likes to shake things up at a party by doing a prat fall. It starts with shots of his father, the famous Pierre, doing a couple of his light-hearted turns and ends with Justin falling down stairs on purpose. What Justin does not mention is that his father had a solid initellectual base, and his hijinks were there to show a human side, the 1960s equivalent of having a beer with the boys. Justin does not have that, he is all attention-getting silliness and very little substance. It's highly likely he'll be elected on a wave of hype. Can you imagine how Tom Mulcair--who's pretty good with the quip--will run circles around The Boy in a debate, to say nothing about in the House of Commons? that One last thing: to day would have been Justin's brother Michel's 37th birthday. I know that because our Elin was born the same day. Michel, of course, was killed in an avalanche in his 20s. Their father, it is said, never recovered from the loss. It will be interesting to see whether Justin mentions this, or rather if he lets it pass as just a private family memory, a quiet wink toweard whereever Pierre and Michel now rest.[image error]

I was glad to see that most of the news outlets and newspapers are making a big thing out of the return to Canada of Omar Khadr, the child soldier.  The way the Harper government announced the decision on a Saturday morning suggested that they really hoped nobody would notice. 

That's the way this government does things: when it might get bad press and stir up things, it just plays it low.  But when it wants to send a message, you can be sure that all the flags will be out waving.  Take the closing of Canada's embassy to Iran and the expelling of Iranian diplomats here earlier this month.  That was done very early on a Friday morning (the announcement was made when Foreign Affairs Minister James Baird was in Russia at a conference that was well covered by foreign and Canadian media.  The lead time allowed comments on Friday here, and analysis in the weekend newspapers.

But perhaps the shame of letting a young man (who was a boy when the story began) rot in Guantanmo will be properly considered after all.   (The photo is of Khadr at 14, a year before he went to Afghanistan.)[image error]

For reasons that aren't clear to me, the owners of an apartment building near us recently chopped down all the plantings around it.  Not that it was elaborately landscaped, but there were a few large rose bushes and a maple which probably cast some pleasant shadows on the lower, western apartments.  The place looks scalped and thre seems to be no move to replace what was there with anything at all.

But nature is strange and what Dylan Thomas called "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower" is strong.  Within days, these leaves sprouted from the stump of the maple.  Resistance, in the best sense of the term!

Coming up: selling off Crown lands and Canada's National Parks?  Could be if the Harperites follow what Mitt Romney and friends plan on doing in the States, should they get elected. 

Down there Romney says he sees no reason to hold on to federal lands.  In a most interesting analysis in The New York Times, "The Geography of Nope" Timothy Egan points out that "no major-party presidential nominee has ever taken a stance as radical as Romney’s. At a wide-ranging public lands conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder earlier this month, veteran public lands users — ranchers, hikers, managers — from all facets of the political spectrum expressed astonishment that Romney had sided with his party’s most extreme fringe."

That's really too bad, but for Canadians perhaps the worst of it is the example that it would give the Stephen Harper's Conservatives.  Already  Parks Canada has been gutted, and selling off unused land could well be next. 

It is instructive, BTW, to remember that the reason why Tom Mulcair left the Quebec Liberal Party nearly a decade ago was because he couldn't countenance a plan to sell of a part of a Quebec provincial park to developers.  For the background, check out the fascinating look at Mulcair in the Sept. 19 Maclean's "Stephen Harper Has Met His Match."

I, for one, sure hope so.

A fascinating look at Quebec voters done during the recent election campaign. There are 30 of them, one for each day that Le Devoir published during the campaign.  It's an exercise that's worth doing elsewhere, it seems to me.

That's Evan to the left, who lives in Berthierville, a small town on the north shore of the St. Lawrence about 100 km from Montreal.  To access his explanation of who he would vote for, you have to guess.  I thought it would be the right of centre Coalition pour l'avenir du Québec.  My reasons were that he just looked too straight arrow and came from such a small place, that he probably would tip to the right.  But to my delight he says at the end of his little interview that he voted from the left wing Québec Solidaire!