I'm on You Tube!

And I don't even know, exactly, how to spell that place's name.  One word?  Hyphenated?  Got me.  But there I am anyway.

The Sunshine Coast is remarkably filled with artists.  Not that much of a surprise, I guess, because it is a beautiful place and a bit off the beaten path and exactly what artists would like to see every morning when they get out of bed.  These are the kind of artists who aren't pushing hard for a New York or Toronto show.  Which doesn't mean they are less talented, but just ambitious in a different way.

Anyway, one of them, Paula O'Brien, who operates in most media, is now in the You Tube slideshow mode, and has put together a very nice collection of work from 125 Sunshine Coast artists, including moi (which was very kind of her because I'm only a part-timer there on the Coast).  The work ranges from ice floor design (the kind you are going to be seeing very soon at the Olympics opening ceremonies: Gordon Halloran, who is from the Sunshine Coast, specializes in this work) to painting, pottery, photography, jewelry, metalwork, cabinetmaking, woodwork, weaving, and wall quilts, and some other media I've overlooked at this moment. 

You can see it here.  Brightens a gray day certainly.

Best Little Town in the World

Not, alas, Point Roberts.  But I also live half the time if not in, at least next door to/a mile down the road from, the best little town in the world.  Really.  Last month, while we were up on the Sunshine Coast, it was announced that the town of Gibsons, B.C. had been named ‘The Most Liveable Town in the World’ in the 'Communities Under 20,000' category.  The Mayor and a pair of Most Liveable Town Officials went to the Czech Republic to get what appeared in the photo of the event as one of those medieval necklaces of heavy golden chain that European City Mayors used to sport (like Dick Whittington, who if I recall correctly was ‘twice Lord Mayor of London Town’).

There is, however, something faintly suspicious about this whole drama.  The award, it is said, is a United Nations-Recognized International Award for Liveable Communities.  What does that ‘recognized’ mean?  (And why does 'liveable' have that first e?)  Further, according to the Coast Reporter, the local newspaper, the award was received largely because Gibsons has developed a neighborhood plan with a ‘geoexchange system’ (got me), which system will ‘be used to heat local homes and businesses with minimal carbon emissions and provide a source of revenue for the town.’  Now exactly how that makes Gibsons the ‘most liveable town in the world’ is pretty mysterious, I’d think.  The plan and the geoexchange, whatever it is, do not yet exist other than on paper. 

Much of the credit for the award should go to the Parks and Culture Director, said the Mayor, because it was her idea to apply for the award.  Next year, perhaps, she could nominate the town to receive a Nobel Award of some sort.  Then they could all go to Sweden to receive it.  It all seems a little goofy and a little risky.  This is an area which only a few years ago unelected pretty much all the Regional District Directors who thought it was a cool idea to have the District pay for them all to go to Central America to visit the District’s sister city. 

Nevertheless, the hard-working, dutifully-traveling Gibson’s Planning Director reported that the experience was ‘very rewarding,’ and concluded, ‘ I think it’s validation of everything that we’ve done and we’re on the right track in terms of the work that we’re doing.’

This story was on the top half of the front page of the weekly paper.  On the bottom half of the front page, the story was about the immediate resignation of a Gibsons (‘Most Liveable Town under 20,000 in the World’) Council Member (who didn’t go on the trip to the Czech Republic).  He’s leaving because  of his ‘frustration with how the current Council works.’  Apparently everyone doesn’t agree about the award and what it’s validating.  Maybe an award for most entertaining small town politics in a town under 20,000?

Eating Local

We could do it, but it means that we would be having fruit salad and a limited supply of vegetables (kale, lettuce, and zucchini) three meals a day.  Low on protein, of course, but awfully good food.  Fresh, full of taste. 

Here on the Sunshine Coast, people have apples and plums, especially, coming off the trees right now, and blueberry bushes are coming to the end, but still shedding ripe fruit.  Many kinds of apples are around us and either golden or Italian prune plums, for the most part.  The bears, of course, are out scouting their own meals and it would be okay to share if they weren’t so prone to breaking the tree down in the process.

Each year, the Okanagan Fruit Man shows up here on the Coast.  He comes from the Okanagan Valley, east and north of Vancouver, where they have towns that have names like Fruitland.  And the Fruit Man brings the fruit over to us on a Wednesday morning, setting up his truck by the side of the road and staying until it is all sold or until it is Friday afternoon.  I never quite figure out why it is that the Okanagan Fruit Man with his relatively small operation is able to bring us spectacularly fresh fruit from 150 miles away (I’m guessing at the distance), but the local supermarket has to store whatever fruits it has 3 or 4 weeks somewhere before it shows up on the store’s shelves.  The economies of scale surely do lead to low quality.

This week, while the Okanagan Fruit Man is providing us, for the last time this year, with several varieties of pears and apples, as well as peaches and nectarines, the local (Canadian) supermarket is, instead, offering us the same varieties of fruits, but only from the U.S. and from New Zealand.  They haven’t been picking apples in New Zealand for several months, I’d think, since that country’s farmers are now going into spring.  And how is it that the U.S. apples get up here but the B.C. apples can’t?  In the store yesterday, there were maybe 8 varieties of U.S. apples, not all of them even new crop, and only one B.C. apple, a small bin of Galas.  The U.S. and New Zealand apples were up around $2.00/pound; the B.C. galas: 78 cents.  And they were fresh and juicy and great.  Something about this business doesn’t make sense. 

Maybe the work of Archer-Daniels-Midland?  (here and here.)

Point Roberts Rules!

What we are festivating right now on the Sunshine Coast is Fibre Arts. This past week was the tenth annual Fibre Arts Festival, which includes classes, exhibits, merchandising, and evening parties to celebrate all things fibrous. And this would include the arts/crafts of woodworking, paper arts, quilting, art quilting, knitting, spinning, weaving, needlework, felting, crocheting, wearable arts, and rugmaking. Except for the woodworking, it is largely a lady activity, I’m afraid. I’m sorry I won’t live long enough to see such work not considered women’s work, hobby activities. It is possible that no one will ever live long enough, I suppose.

I’m not sure whether it’s the ‘women’s work’ category that drives the sponsors/organizers to need to have prizes for all those categories of work, but whatever it is, if you go to the exhibit, you are urged to fill out a ballot in which you get to designate the one thing in all this panoply of wonders that you think is the very best. How it is that you calculate that an exquisitely built wooden train is more best than an exquisitely felted unicorn and wizard I cannot begin to imagine, so I always throw away this ballot without forcing my little brain to tackle such perplexity.

The Festival does have independent judges, however, whose task is to decide, at least within the categories, which are the best and the almost best and the very nearly almost best and the slightly not as wonderful as the very nearly almost best. Even here, I’m really not all that sure as to how a well-made 8-foot-on-a-side Irish Chain quilt can be determined to be slightly better or slightly worse than a well-made 15”x24” place mat, or how a beautifully made Fair Isle Sweater is better than a beautifully made (and funny) pair of socks. But we can leave that to the judges who, I presume, sleep well at night.

In any case, there were about 70-80 interesting fiber pieces of all descriptions and well-madedness and well-designedness on display. And anyone who was lucky enough to be in town here and had the time to spend an hour or two looking at what these women (and a few men) had wrought, would have had a day well spent. But what makes this time-spending slightly more relevant than the time spent at the showings of all the other shows around at this moment, in one town or another, in one country or another, is that the first prize in the Art Quilt category was given to the quilt in the photo above which is none other than a representation of Point Roberts back in the days, many thousands of eons ago, when Point Roberts was but an island button, with no visible connection to what was to become Richmond and Vancouver, and when Tsawwassen was under the water, which of course prohibited it from having strip malls of any sort. (Also: no border station.)

The maker of the quilt is Rose Momsen of Point Roberts. And further to add to P.R.’s PR, my quilt received an Honorable Mention in the same category. Its photo is at the bottom and actually makes no internal reference to Point Roberts, being a story about a courtroom drama. The thing is, in Point Roberts, we have drama, but no courtrooms.

Congratulations, Rose! You did well by our home town.

Animal Mayhem

In the past two weeks, there’s been considerable animal mayhem up here on the Sunshine Coast. This is the time of year when it usually happens if it’s going to, but this was quite a bit more destruction than usual. The customary bear, messing around with garbage a few miles from us, found itself on the wrong side of a gun and, although he is no longer available for shooting, his pal apparently is, as a second bear has been seen eyeing the same trash can area subsequent to the initial bear removal. (This is, perhaps, a bigger trash problem than that seen down in Point Roberts?)

Then, a few days ago, a cougar was fatally shot after having removed 5 llamas and 5 sheep from the living livestock/pet world inventory of Roberts Creek in three separate incidents/properties (2 llamas, 3 llamas, 5 sheep) over two weeks. The cougar weighed in at 135 pounds and at least some people say they have spotted a second, bigger cougar in the same area.

Llamas are pretty big and have hooves, surely, so I’m sort of surprised that cougars would attack them. But I guess they look like prey and probably have in their native world very little experience with big cats. A lot of loss and a lot of worry from people in the neighborhood. My first thought was that a llama probably looks about the same size as me to a cougar. Not a pleasing thought. They have also had trouble with cougars over in Squamish (near Whistler) this summer. Maybe the dry spell? Maybe more construction of houses and loss of cougar habitat? Well, whatever the reason, the outcome is not likely to be a boost for the ‘live and let live’ ethic. And not likely to be an improvement in the quality of life of cougars, either.

Our bear is around, according to my neighbors who had him strolling through their back yard this week. I’ve given up composting anything but plant stuff so as not to encourage him to be dealing with food in our yard but the trees all round are beginning to fill up with ripe apples so it’s hard to discourage the bears from coming round with that attraction. And cougars? I don’t know what they want (other than livestock), but I’m definitely hoping that we don’t have any of it.

Meadow Rue

Lavender clouds. Yet another flower that we should have more of but that we don't see very many of. This photo was taken earlier this year (at the end of June). The close-up is by Ed and it is the truer color. I've grown these for about five years and they don't seem to be much in the business of self-multiplication. Usually, they don't even set much seed, but this year they seem to be setting a lot. I have previously tried to grow them from seed with no success, but I usually had about 2 seeds. Maybe better luck this next spring?

I originally bought two plants from a neighbor on the Sunshine Coast who sells extras from her ever-expanding garden as a home business. I planted one in the shade and one in the sun, and the one in the sun does better, but they have both done well. They get to be about 40 inches tall and the blossoms last about 3 weeks. The foliage is similar to columbine.

Water Iris in the Grass

Why then do we not have more of these away from ponds? I had never seen them until a couple of years ago and now we have them growing in some abundance up on the Sunshine Coast. But they are more or less alongside drainage paths, assuming there were any water to drain anywhere.

Non-Stop Fun in Canada

Here it is Father’s Day, and not a festival in sight. The Sunshine Coast, where I am right now, is a genuine tourist economy. Its largest single employer is a pulp mill, of course, which does provide tours on Thursdays, I believe, but that doesn’t make it a part of the tourist industry. In fact, if it doesn’t stop laying off workers (lower demand for wood pulp, I believe), it may not even continue to be the single largest employer.

Nevertheless, because this is a tourist/resort kind of place--what with the ocean and the mountains and with being about the warmest place in Canada—the Sunshine Coast spends its summer doing festivals. All festivals all the time AND a depressed economy. How festively cool is that?

We are just finishing off a Jazz Festival and a Blues Festival, and are now looking forward to Canada Day on July 1 which really begins the festival season. We are going to be having the Showcase of the Performing Arts, the Sea Cavalcade (the Queen of which is an elderly woman with civic spirit), the Bonfire Music Festival, the Wooden Boat Festival, a Country Fair, Creek Daze, something called ‘Commotion on the Ocean,’ the Arts Festival, the Festival of the Rolling Arts (which seems to be about cars), the Festival of the Written Arts, the Fibre Arts Festival, the Chamber Music Festival, the Salmon Festival, another Jazz Festival and the New Moon Festival. And then there’s B.C. Day, which is not in and of itself a festival, but does usually have fireworks, making it pretty festive. Also, now that I think of it, there’s the Okanagon Fruit Stand Man who comes to town every Wednesday in the summer and brings such wonderful fruits that he himself constitutes a one-person festival spread out over time. And then summer is over and the tourists go away.

Having a very good time? Certainly a festive time. At the Salmon Festival, you can decorate a plywood salmon. Unfortunately, the real salmon are rapidly disappearing from these coastal waters so this festival may soon turn into a Salmon Memorial Festival. At the Written Arts Festival, people who are talented writers come and talk. How about a festival where the talented writers come and write? At the New Moon Festival, you get to eat samosas. I don’t know about the connection between samosas and the new moon. But I do believe that the best thing about a Festive Occasion ought to be its food, so I’ll be going to check them out.

Have All the Workers Gone?

My conversation with the real estate agent on the Sunshine Coast also included a foray into the rental market. I wasn’t interested in renting anything, on either end of a rental transaction, but I was interested in why there suddenly were so many rentals on the market and thought he might have some knowledgeable insight into that question.

To my surprise, he thinks that it largely represents renters leaving the Coast. That is, the rental market here is always tight because there aren’t a lot of rental units, and the ones that are here are quickly re-rented by word of mouth, so you never see them in the papers. But, he adds, workers on the Sunshine Coast are here largely to work to the needs of the retiree population. That is, as in Point Roberts, retirees are the main population driver here on the Coast. The workers come to serve the retirees’ needs, whether those be for new houses, remodeling of houses, landscaping, yardwork, or general house maintenance, as well as non-house, personal needs. When the retirees begin to take a major hit with their investment portfolios, they stop their discretionary spending. Won’t remodel the bathroom just now, or redecorate the living room, or build that little shop out back, or build a water feature in the garden, buy new shoes, etcetera.

When they stop that, the jobs that all the renters were occupying begin to slow down, dry up, or just end. And so the worker/renters move on to someplace else where jobs are more plentiful. Nice to live on the Coast, but it’s possible to live elsewhere. So they pick up and leave, but now there’s not that ready supply of renters to fill their shoes. And rental units begin to be advertised in droves in the papers.

Down south in Vancouver, of course, there’s still a lot of spending going on for the Olympics (they just announced another $700 million need for security, after last month’s $700 million need for finishing the Olympic Village, which latter the Vancouver City Council took on). But construction down there is beginning to slow too, with yesterday the announcement of the end of a planned skyscraper-hotel-shopping complex on Georgia St. Instead of 40+ stories decorating the city, it will be decorated with a big hole in the ground on one of its main streets. And of course, whatever needs to be done for the Olympics will be done a year from now. So, I guess renters move on from there, too, eventually.

So, does this tell me anything about Point Roberts? Probably not, since I’m not sure there’s a large pool of workers/renters serving that retiree population—that is, a large enough pool that one would notice a change if one is one of the retirees rather than one of the workers.

And also, we awoke to about 2-3 inches of snow on the ground this morning. Cold awakenings all around us.

Starting to Say Goodbye

We met today with a real estate agent about selling our house up here in British Columbia. We bought it almost 20 years ago, and we have had a wonderful time living here, even if only part time, but even as all good things must come to an end, so must our transiting back and forth between countries. My simplest way of explaining this is getting out while the getting is good, by which I mean while we still can manage to do it with our wits and bodies reasonably unimpaired and with both of us still here to participate. Another way to put it is that maintaining multiple properties is getting to be too much of a chore. But however it is put, it needs to be put, and thus the meeting.

The agent we called is the same guy who was our agent when we bought the house: he was then in his forties and we were in our fifties; now he is in his sixties and we in our seventies. That’s the nature of time and arithmetic, I guess, but we had not seen one another for maybe 16 years, so it was surprising to find (to our eyes) that he was just as he was then; and he kindly offered us the same assessment. And then we got down to business.

You can pretty much tell how the economy is up here by how carefully, how gently he approached us. Clearly, he is used to having to deliver bad news to people. The kind of bad news that is phrased like, “I know you could have sold your house for a zillion dollars last year, but this year, maybe a trillion less, in any case a lot less. It’s a very bad market right now and we just don’t see it getting better for awhile.” We were not, of course, surprised to hear this, but apparently many people are as he brought us a lot of paper to demonstrate how prices were falling in B.C. generally.

Not being able to get an argument from us about how bad things are (he assured us he’d been through four ups and four downs…but then how much longer do we any of us have to see any more of that roller coast ride?), we progressed to introducing him (again) to the house. Walking around in it, explaining all the things we loved about it—both its inherent qualities and things we had changed to make it even more wonderful (at least to us)—I was struck by how much I admired it as a house, how much I had enjoyed living here, how much I still anticipate, each return trip, seeing the great opening to light that one experiences when entering the house…like walking into the sky through a tree. And also how willing I was to let it go. It has always seemed to me a house that owns itself and that I had been lucky enough to travel with for awhile. Time now to find its next traveling partners. Somewhere out there, some terrifically lucky family are eating dinner without a clue as to what an amazing house is right there in their future. This year, next year, I guess we'll meet them.

Room to Let

I am the kind of person who, if you put a cereal box in front of me, will dutifully read all the text on the cereal box, even though I don’t eat cereal and don’t have any need for whatever passes for information on the cereal box. Similarly, put a newspaper in front of me and I dutifully read it all, page after page, even if I’m only visiting in the town that produces the newspaper. Needless to say, when it comes to local papers, I even read all the ads in the classified section as if somewhere in there the secret life of the town will surprisingly be revealed.

And now and then, it is. Up here on the Sunshine Coast, we get a newspaper every week, so it is somewhat puzzling that I get anything done besides reading the paper, except that it isn’t very long. A front section with local news, an abbreviated ‘culture/events’ section, and an even more abbreviated sports section, where I can follow the travails of the Gibsons' Pigs. And in there with the sports are a few pages of classified ads. In the past few years, the ads have burgeoned, mostly because everyone living here appeared to have decided to sell his/her house. Except that in the spring, there’s always a lot of real estate for sale because it is, after all, a tourist economy for the most part (logging, a little fishing, and providing for the short-term and long-term tourists are about it).

In a tourist/seasonal visitor economy, like the Sunshine Coast as well as Point Roberts, there’s always a lot of real estate for sale but rarely much real estate for rent. Frequently, the rentals section up here was barely a column, and particularly spare were rentals in Roberts Creek, where we live. This is equally true of Point Roberts. But in this week’s paper, I find that rentals have suddenly expanded into a couple of pages, with Roberts Creek alone getting an entire column. Stranger yet, several of the ads mentioned that what was being rented was one floor of the house--not like a guest suite, but just a floor. I’d never seen that before. Some of the ads were for short-term rental (which is to say off season/not the summer/early fall), but mostly they were regular leases.

There’s a secret in there somewhere. I don’t know whether it means that financially-pressed folks are reduced to renting out floors of their house to make their house payments, that people who were in the flipping business got stuck with houses that can’t be sold and now need to be rented, or that the seasonal visitors (those with second houses here) are having second thoughts. In any case, it sounds as if it isn’t good news unless you are somebody looking to rent. And in Point Roberts? Well, we’ll see what it looks like there after the first of March.

Home for Christmas

An Anna’s Hummingbird has made the trip over to Point Roberts in order to be home for our White Christmas. Apparently, she (it’s a she, note the white tip at the end of the tail) is doing her homecoming at Rose’s. Anna’s are not the most frequent of our hummingbirds on the Point. That honor belongs to Rufous Hummingbirds. All our hummingbirds arrive in mid-spring and then disappear sometime around July. I always assumed that they went south, but when I looked up info about them on Google, I found that “Christmas Bird Counts document the presence of Anna's Hummingbird throughout western Washington in the winter.” Apparently, it winters as far up as southern Alaska. Hardy fellows, given that they didn’t come up past California until the second half of the 20th Century.

Certainly surpised me to find they were up here as winter dwellers. I’ve never seen one in Point Roberts much after August, let alone in the winter. Up farther north, here on the Sunshine Coast, we had a Xanthus Hummingbird who showed up about ten years ago around Christmas and then wintered over. Since the Xanthus is a Baja, Mexico, resident and never comes this far north, it was quite an event and people came from all over to look at it. We drove down to look at it and we definitely saw it. But that was about it for me. I can’t imagine coming here from 1,000 miles away to see a bird whose picture is readily available in any bird book as some people did, but I guess that only goes to prove that I’m not really a serious birder. But I knew that already.

Anyway, the householders who had the Xanthus put out a visitors’ book and graciously welcomed this weeks’ long string of visitors. And then come February or so, the Xanthus disappeared. Holiday over. One of the bird scholar people up here speculated that it had been blown up this far on the winds of a winter storm system coming up from the south. Ah, the lives of birds: more unexpected events than I might have thought. I tend to think it’s just food—for themselves and those noisy broods.

Does this Anna’s need a Visitors’ Book? No, probably not. Just needs a lot of sugar solution, for which she can thank Rose. And thanks to Renee for the photos!

Half-Way Through

That is, to next Mid-Summer’s Night, to the Summer Solstice. That’s my idea of Christmas Dreaming. Well the storm roared into Seattle, according to my news sources, but not into the Sunshine Coast. When I quit last night at 11 p.m., it wasn’t snowing and we certainly were not having the promised ‘howling winds.’ This morning around 10 a.m., it did start snowing again and has continued throughout the day, but it is just an ordinary kind of snow storm. Two years ago, we had one like this and the photographic documentation of the 2006 and the 2008 storms are pretty much interchangeable.



The quilt, in between, is of the 2006 storm. No need to repeat making it.

So our power is still on and we can no more get out of the driveway today than we could yesterday. So, I’d say that today is Status Quo.

update: a phone call from a P.R. correspondent brings the news that the Point has about 4 more inches of snow, but has not had terrible wind. Good news, that!

The Bear Comes to the Market

The other bear; the other market. This past week, a bear dropped in on the dumpsters at the back of the supermarket at the mall in Gibsons. It was evening, but not late enough in the evening that everything was closed. There were cars in the parking lot, people in the mall and the parking lots, and now a bear had joined the mix. The bear was just after the food potential in the dumpster, but somebody called the police; the police notified the bear conservation officers. Somehow, that notification got lost and it was the police (in this case, the RCMP) and the bear and the parking lot and the public that wrote the story.

The police were obviously concerned about what the bear might do. At least some of the people in the lot were concerned about what the RCMP might do. And eventually, the police did it. I would have thought that they would have tranquilized the bear and carted him off to sleep it off up in the mountains, but apparently when a bear is hit with a tranquilizer dart, he doesn’t obligingly fall down to the ground in a comatose state. Instead, he runs around with a strong sense of irritation and of having been violated. Not a good idea when there are a lot of people around.

Lots of concern after the fact. The bear conservation people say they wouldn’t have done anything differently; the police say they couldn’t just leave and hope for the best; the unhappy observers felt there must have been some other way to handle this than the way it was handled. The police suggest that it’s the mall businesses’ fault for leaving food in the dumpsters, just as they regularly tell the public that they are at fault for leaving food outside their houses, whether in compost bins, garbage cans, or on trees. I have a vague sense that lots of people think it’s the bears’ fault for not staying up on the mountains. Whoever is at fault, the bears have paid this year for their deeds. According to the local newspaper, 10 of them have been killed for bad behaviors in the face of over 600 calls from the public concerned about bear appearances.

The fact is, we can’t live with them and they don’t see any need to move somewhere else. Or maybe that’s, they can’t live with us and we don’t see any need to move elsewhere. In either case, we always have easy food and much of the time they don’t. And then they want our easy food. And we don’t mind all that much sharing it with them, but we want them to be grateful. And they aren’t.

I’ve never called the police about our bear but our bear has never shown particularly alarming tendencies, although he is not afraid of us, which is not a good thing. I get the fruit off the trees before it ripens, but we have an acre of wild blackberries that both bear and we eat, and there’s no way in the world that I’m going to be able to get rid of all those blackberry bushes, even if I wanted to. He rarely messes with the compost bin, but it does occasionally happen and that is a black mark against me for having failed to get it mixed up enough with leaves and previously composted vegetation. Mostly, I freeze such material and deliver it to the garbage can about 15 minutes before the garbage truck arrives.

That’s not a viable solution for everybody. You've got to have enough freezer space; you've got to be around 15 minutes before the garbage truck comes. The individual public can do more to discourage bears, certainly, but the common public (what we call the local government, I mean) is going to have to make it more possible for individuals to act responsibly. Otherwise, we’ll just be killing the bears one by one until they are all gone. We did it to the buffalo, we did it to the passenger pigeon; we can surely manage to do it to this small population of black bears on the Sunshine Coast. And then we'll be sorry. And then, after awhile, we will have forgotten that there used to be bears here. That's how we tell the story.

Bear Market Expands

All this spring and summer, I’ve been very careful about mixing the fresh compost thoroughly into the older compost. In the past, we have occasionally had trouble with bears tipping the container over but now that we have a resident bear, it seemed greater caution was called for. And it’s been successful. Or maybe I’ve just been lucky.

This morning, I went out, dumped a pail of coffee grounds and apple cores and egg shells and potato peelings into the compost, sifted a little of the old, and shoveled four shovels-full of the old compost on top of the new, then mixed it all round with one of those compost tools that involve a long metal rod with two half arrows at the bottom for thoroughly displacing compost, and returned to the house, ready to get on with my daily tasks. I do this, when I do this, in the morning because bears are nocturnal, I read, and thus there is a greater opportunity to have the bear-appealing scents dissipate before the bear gets there in the middle of the night.

Alas, the bear and I are reading different books. The bear has been all over the financial system these past weeks and now he’s outside our kitchen door well before noon, as well. Not a half hour passed from my outside work until Ed walked out the door, interrupting bear in his work. In the first photo, bear has already knocked the top half of the compost container off and is working—apparently not all that successfully—to find something to eat. That was the good effect of my work, I guess. In the second photo, he has given up on the compost and is trying to eat the tire on the wheel barrow.

We whooped and hollered (after getting the camera), but he proved largely indifferent to our noisiness as well as our nearness (we’re about 12 feet away from him at most). Once, he looked up at us, but with exceeding boredom...kind of like, 'Do I know you? No, I don't think so.' Then, after about five minutes, he wandered off, around the corner of the house and across the front yard, crowning his bearish behavior by walking right through a small hydrangea bush and breaking off the strong stick that supported it.

Well, as Jennifer Lopez once said, ‘The bear is what we all wrestle with. Everybody has their bear in life. It's about conquering that bear and letting him go.’ I don’t know the occasion for this philosophizing by Ms. Lopez--apparently the music business--but I think that I’ll let the bear go but just pass on the conquering.

Vite!

Perhaps Canada has simply succumbed to election fever by proximity. Last week, the Progressive Conservative (read, very conservative) Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, called for a new election, barely two years after the last national election. Or maybe he just became incredibly envious of the Americans' enthusiasm for their upcoming election. Maybe a choice, maybe an echo, maybe a disease: regardless, the federal Canadian politicians are all off their starting blocks because they have only until October 14 before the election is all done. Just think of that. The beginning and the end of a national election in a five week period. Wow! Feel the envy!

At the moment, the Progressive Conservatives are presiding over a minority government because they don’t have a majority in parliament. But they have enough members to cobble together some kind of majority with others, but it hasn’t lasted very long. Things are looking good for the PC’s though as their brand of politics seems to be catching on. The PC are a mix of social conservatives and neocons, from my view, but they may be better (or worse) than that. They are up against the Bloc Quebecois, a sort of center left party that espouses Quebec’s departure from Canada; the Liberals, a sort of center left party that prefers Quebec to stay in Canada and is otherwise noted for its undistinguished leader--a Quebecer whose French is significantly better than his English—and its earlier-in-this-decade financial scandals; the NDP, the most left party, whose leader is a man, following a decade of women as party leaders; and the Greens, the environmental party which holds one seat in Parliament, but only as a result of strange events. The PC's Harper is something of a George Bush fan. To his credit, I should note that Harper, whose native tongue is English, is said to speak better French than the Liberal Leader speaks English. I’ve heard Harper’s French; it’s not that good. We get quite a bit of mail from Mr. Harper, assuring us, in English, that he is going to do the right thing for us and that the liberals are (have I heard this before?) nothing more than ‘tax and spend’ guys. Somehow, I doubt that, but maybe his message is more successful in Quebec.

At the moment, the secessionist Bloc Quebecois is doing poorly in Quebec. Perhaps those folks have grown tired of the idea of secession and have decided just to slog on with the rest of the country, even if in a different language. However, the lagging Bloc support is going not to the liberals, where one might expect it to go but instead to the PC, improving their chances of getting an actual majority. Harper’s French, again, perhaps.

Here in our own riding, we have the one and only Green Party member currently sitting in Parliament. We didn’t elect him, though (that’s the royal We since we at our house do not vote, of course). Two years ago, the Sunshine Coast elected Blair Wilson, who was a member of the Liberal Party. But in the intervening short period of time, Mr. Wilson got in a little bit of scandal himself (election money, not sex) and was thrown out by the Liberals. Still, he had been elected. He sat as an independent for a bit, but then crossed over to the Green Party. This gave the Greens a presence in Parliament, and now gives them the opportunity to have their party leader (not Blair Wilson, of course: he is simply their only Parliamentary member) appear in the national debates that will be occurring in the coming months.

Given all the complexity, I almost wish I could vote, but on the other hand….well…maybe not. The Sunshine Coast has a big Green Party presence; there are lots of very progressive environmentalist types here. But if the Green Party candidate’s most notable commitment to the Green Party’s values and policies is that he came inside when the Greens offered him a place to sit down? Well, other peoples’ elections are probably never very clear to an outsider. But, at least in Canada, they don't drag on forever.

Which Way Up?

B.C. Transit or B.C. Roads or whoever in the B.C. government is responsible for signage on the highways simply never fails to disappoint. The agency seems to have a relatively random policy for highway exits: sometimes the sign is before the exit, sometimes right after, so it is never quite clear where or when you should exit if you don’t already know how it works. Because the Olympics is coming to Vancouver in January of 2010, barely a year from now, there are lots of new roads with new signs, particularly in the area to the north and west that leads to Whistler where much of the snow-based competition will occur. Also in that area is the Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal, which is the place to go if you want to go to the Sunshine Coast and Roberts Creek. And indeed that is where we were heading today.

About a mile from the terminal, there was a standard rectangular metal road sign indicating that there was a new routing for the ferry terminal. Okay, that’s good. And then there was a sign that said something like ‘ferry terminal and village to the right,’ which is also good, and we went right. And then, not so good: there was one of those signs that change, using light bulbs or LED’s or something. It showed the words, ‘Ferry Terminal,’ followed by a new sign that showed a right-pointing arrow. Okay, but that was immediately followed by a new sign that said ‘Village,’ followed by a new sign that features a left-pointing arrow sign. So, logically, you get: Ferry, go right; Village, go left. But it says that logically only if you come in at the right moment. It can equally well say, ‘left-arrow, ferry terminal; right arrow, village.’ Four instructions, but since they are not numbered on the sign, they can be read as 1,2,3,4, or 4,1,2,3, or 2,3,4,1, or 3,4,1,2. You have two choices to go right to the ferry terminal and two to go left. Go, sign designers! So many more opportunities before January 2010.

Mine, All Mine

Another tourist festival here on the sometimes sunny Sunshine Coast. Rain welcomed the 5-day long, Gibson’s Landing Fibre Arts Festival, which has been an August feature in Gibsons for the past eight or so years. It includes classes, an exhibit, a merchant mall, a film evening, a reception evening, and a variety of demonstrations. It focuses on all the ordinary fibre arts (knitting, lacemaking, rug hooking, quilting, ornamental clothing, weaving, felting, crocheting, embroidery, paper-making, fabric jewelry, and wood-working, because wood, too, is a fibre, as the promotional materials inform us.

The exhibit is the part I’m mostly interested in, but it has a checkered record. The goal of the exhibit is to attract high-quality stuff from off the coast, but that has not been easy to achieve. There are no significant prizes, no significant publicity, and no significant ease for getting your work to and from the festival. It is a juried exhibit, but some years the jurying appears to be non-existent with plaintive letters going out to various fibre groups on the coast begging for submissions. Other years, the quality is very good. I’m just one of the tourists they’re attracting so I don’t know much about what’s behind it all, but this year, things took another turn downhill from my perspective.

The exhibit was excellent. I took my camera with me because I have lots of friends who would like to see what was on display, friends who don’t live on the Sunshine Coast, but who might try to get here if they saw the quality of the display. ‘No Photographs,’ I was told. ‘Copyright issues,’ was added vaguely, as if that explained everything, as if there were no such concept as ‘fair use.’ One of the attendants went on to explain that I, personally, could give the Festival permission to use a photograph of my quilt (I had one quilt in the exhibit), and that a professional photographer would take such picture. Hardly a response to my request, I thought. In any case, since I had just sold that quilt, I suppose the ‘copyright’ (whatever that might mean in this situation) would be going to the person who bought the quilt.

Intellectual property is what we were dealing with here. Thoughts, images, ideas: all mine, or all somebody’s, never to be touched, seen, thought, or even imagined without giving that unknown ‘ME’ credit or getting ME’s permission or providing ME with money. I heard that the festival had run into some difficulty earlier when they had used a photograph of a quilt from a previous year’s exhibit in their publicity materials. Apparently, the quilt was made from a copyrighted design (dear lord, you can copyright almost anything, including the simplest quilt design), and the brochure had not given credit to the copyright holder nor, I guess, had anyone asked the copyright holder's permission to use a photograph of a quilt made by somebody else in the festival’s brochure: I mean, why would they? TOO bizarre for me. I take a picture of a deer in someone’s yard. Does the image belong to the person who owns the front yard? Surely not. Maybe we should be getting the deer’s permission to take the photo in the first place, and then pay or give credit to the deer when I put the photo on my blog, in the second? Does the image belong to the deer? Have I captured its soul? Should Dorothea Lange’s estate have ensured payments to the woman whose photograph Lange made famous throughout the world?

I know there’s another side to all this, but I’m not persuaded much by that side, at least not when it's exercised in unreasonable ways. I’m happy to think that images (and information), as the phrasing goes, would like to be free. That’s what is destroying newspapers, I am assured, but it seems to me that newspapers, e.g., have done a very good job of destroying themselves by their mediocre display of journalism. I hope the Fibre Arts Festival doesn’t go the same route. Images are what is on view at an exhibit. Surely, the purpose of an image is to be seen?

Signs of the Times

Signs are getting ever more peculiar, as if we were quickly losing touch with the English language and slowly moving into some other related language with a very different grammar. Today, at the super market here on the Sunshine Coast, I am told via a professionally-made sign at the entrance: “Please Use a Basket for Your Convenience.” Now, it seems to me that they may have provided baskets for my convenience, in which case the sign would say ‘Baskets provided for your convenience’ or even ‘Baskets happily provided for your convenience.’ Alternatively, perhaps they think I should be so considerate as to use a basket for their convenience (presumably to keep my purchases from falling out of my hands and onto their floor). Then the sign would say, ' Please use a basket for our convenience.' But in no case could I reasonably be thought to be pleasing them by using a basket which serves my convenience. I just have a hard time thinking of a bunch of grocery executives sitting around talking about how to get customers to recognize that using a basket serves the customers’ own convenience. ‘Maybe,’ says one well-mannered executive, ‘we just need to say, Please!?’


Not a mile away, I was greeted on the highway by a sign that said ‘Skilled Carpenter, Large or Small,” followed by a phone number. I’m thinking about the jobs that I would need a small skilled carpenter for as opposed to jobs that definitely require a large one. Or the jobs that really need a medium skilled carpenter, but then would a ‘medium skilled’ carpenter be medium sized or medium skilled? Hard to know. Although it may not matter, because they do not appear to have medium carpenters. In any case, too many choices are required to hire those carpenters, regardless of their size or degree of skill.

My favorite sign on the road home from the supermarket, however, is not ambiguous in anyway. Nevertheless, I have spent a good deal of time thinking about what it implies, if not what it specifically means. There is a modest house with a small, hand-painted sign mounted on a post next to the driveway. The sign says nothing more than ‘BISCOTTI.’ I think I can safely say that the sign means that someone in the house is making and selling biscotti to highway passersby. But what kind of business can this be that sells nothing more than biscotti to drivers?

Biscotti, it seems to me, is a pretty specialized baked item, largely associated with Starbucks and similar coffee places. You buy them WITH a cup of coffee. I like them, but on their own, they don’t seem like that much of a treat, at least not one that would merit the least bit of inconvenience. Would I be driving down the road on a cool morning or a hot one, a rainy day or a sunny day, and say, ‘Wow, I think I’ll just pull off the highway so I can pick up a biscotti to go with the cup of coffee that I just pulled off the highway to buy at Tim Horton's'? It just doesn’t seem likely.

And since the clientele levels seem small, how many biscotti would you have to have on hand as a responsible biscotti proprietor to ensure that the need was met? What would you do with the stale ones that didn’t sell? And would you have to have multiple kinds of biscotti for this small number of customers to choose from? And, although biscotti tend to be pricey, they’re not luxury items, so it’s not like you could make any kind of living from selling the occasional biscotti to the occasional driver who suddenly felt the need. It would seem that one might do much better selling fresh eggs.

But maybe the householder associated with the sign isn’t in it for the money; is instead a dedicated biscotti maker who just likes to make biscotti and doesn’t care whether anybody buys them or not but is willing to sell to the random customer since he/she is going to be making more biscotti than he/she can really use him/herself, anyway. I don’t know; it just seems an inexplicable business. It could be a narrower business: the sign could say ‘Almond Biscotti’, of course. But either way, I’m baffled by that sign.

It’s been there for several years. However, on my last couple of trips by, I didn’t spot the sign (although I was driving rather than riding so I might have missed it because I was actually looking at the road). But if it’s gone, I’ve missed my chance to buy a biscotti, of course, from the former proprietor and get all my questions answered. Maybe these biscotti were incredible. Maybe I’ve missed the best biscotti ever made. Maybe not. Most small businesses don’t turn out well because they’re under-capitalized. But I doubt if that would be true of the roadside biscotti business. If very little gained, at least very little ventured.

Well-Crafted Work

This is the weekend of Sechelt's Hackett Park Craft Fair, sponsored by the Sunshine Coast Arts Council. We have been going to the Fair for as long as we have been here and have watched it grow and change, ever better in its presentation. There have been very few years when the weekend had rain or drizzle but as far as I can remember it has never been cancelled for bad weather and today was full-blue-sky. It is held in a park in Sechelt, is juried, and features maybe 60-70 different booths of many wonders. It has no food to speak of, unlike some craft fairs and any county or state fair in historical memory. In this way, it keeps its focus on the art of craft, which seems appropriate for something sponsored by an arts council as opposed to a good times council.

I did a quick Google on the history of craft fairs and came up with very little. Few of the individual craft fairs list their dates of origin, but those that do seem to come from the mid-70’s. I certainly remember no craft fair in Idaho in the early 50’s, or in upstate New York in the late 50’s, or in California in the early 60’s. I do know from personal experience that, as an aspect of the great hippy movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s involving dropping out, there was a sudden and new interest in craft of various sorts including beading, jewelry making, stained glass, decorative pieces generally, and hand-made clothing. I would guess that the first, albeit small, craft fair I ever saw was in the late 60’s in Los Angeles and involved those kinds of goods. In some ways, the 60’s craft fair seems to have been an outgrowth of head shops, those odd little places that sold marijuana paraphernalia.

Whatever their origins (and I imagine there was a history before the 60’s, but that it was an interrupted one), they are big deals nowadays. My visiting children had last week attended a big craft fair in Sebastopol, California, and now were here for the big craft fair in Sechelt, B.C. They were in a position to tell me that the crafts here in B.C. were superior in quality to the crafts there in CA, but that the food in CA was definitely vastly superior to that of the B.C. event. So, there is one piece of data, I guess.

Because the Sunshine Coast is increasingly about tourists, we have more than one craft fair each year but no more than one craft fair each week. Last week was Sechelt’s 5th Annual Arts and Craft event, not to be confused with this week’s even longer ago annual event. There are several more during the summer, and there are many of them in the fall and around Christmas. No shortage of crafts here. And, apparently, no shortage of customers for crafts or, I’d guess, they’d stop holding the fairs.

I wish (and this is a frequent wish about all kinds of phenomena) that I’d taken notes all along about the kinds of things that are sold at the Hackett Park Craft Fair so I could systematically trace the changes over time. I do know that there used to be several hat sellers and this year there were none; that there used to be a lot more sellers of clothing more generally than was the case this year; that potters are regulars but that each year they seem to be a different group of potters; and that jewelry sellers are always numerous. I think there were fewer wood workers in this year’s fair than has previously been the case, and I know that there were many more sellers of items that are intended as decorative features for gardens than ever before. So I would guess that we have now moved on from adorning ourselves (except for jewelry) to adorning our gardens.

This year’s Best of Show award (at least from my family) goes to Douglas Walker, who is from Black Creek, B.C. He is a former photographer who, in his 50’s, ended that career and went on to become a maker of metal/water sculptures. His metal sculptures are fountains, but they are made largely of recycled metal pieces, such as trombones or flutes, e.g. In some pieces, the pump actually moves a visible wheel that somehow then causes all the water to flow beautifully. These pieces are large (2 or 3 feet high at a minimum) and exquisite. They start at around $400, as I recall, and the largest one he had on display was $2,200. His web site shows many more of the fountains than he had in his booth and they are well worth seeing. Walker has been doing this work for only a few years and, he said, has been very successful so far. He manages to be one of the lucky few crafters whose work is not only endlessly interesting to the crafter him/herself, but is also so remarkable that the fair attenders are willing to pay substantial amounts for the pleasure of having his work in their own life.

The essence of a successful craft fair lies in its ability to show you something not only well-made, interesting and beautiful, but also surprising. Mr. Walker’s fountains certainly filled that bill for me. A very good day!