Peaceful in P.A.

Its hard to believe we have been here a whole week. We spent the weekend and the first part of the week painting trim on the rental house. It has easily been our best investment over the last 10 years so we need to look after it. When Weyerhauser closed their P.A. pulp mill we thought it was all over and we had missed our chance to ever sell the house. Its still a great mystery to me why that wasn't the case but it certainly hasn't turned out that way. Property values have climbed along with the Saskaboom and don't appear to be levelling off. Marilyn attributes it to the mill filling up with workers close to 40 years ago and most of those workers now being ready to retire and willing to stay in P.A. She may be right - whatever the reason we aren't in any rush to get rid of the house. Right now we're doubly blessed because we have property appreciation happening and excellent tenants in the house. That hasn't always been the case but it sure is nice while it lasts.

This week I went out to Shellbrook for a visit with Ken, Meriam and Reg Miners. I've often described a trip to the Miners farm as a trip back in time. I don't think anybody is milking there since Ken's mother died but otherwise life goes on much as it did forty years ago when we still lived in Shellbrook. And the life that the family lived in 1970 wasn't a whole lot different than what the Harsneys had lived since they settled there after the first world war. There's a few concessions to modernity - I saw some empty 5020 canola bags lying on the shop floor but Ken clearly thought that his brother was wasting his money on that stuff.

Late in the week I went down to Saskatoon for a meeting with a client. Marilyn has some meetings here in P.A. early this coming week and then we are going to move first to Saskatoon and then to Regina. On Monday we'll drive to Regina for an appointment with father's social worker. Apparently they have figured out where they are going to warehouse house father. It sounds like he is going to be stored at the Pasqua hospital until somebody dies at one of the facilities and then we will have the option of moving him to the open room or waiting until a more acceptable facility comes open. Not surprisingly there are big differences in the quality of care between the various facilities.

So once again we'll be moving father. Years ago I remember him telling me about visiting Ted Eide who was living in a care home in Saskatoon. I don't remember all the details but Ted had lived out in the hills east of Kenaston. He told father that moving from the farm into Kenaston wasn't too bad because at least he wasn't living in Saskatoon. Then when he moved from Kenaston into an apartment in Saskatoon it could have been worse because at least he wasn't in a care home. But when he finally moved into the care home he told father that was the worst because there was only one move left from there. That story had a profound effect on father and I'm sure it is weighing on his mind now.

A royal hissy fit

What a miserable old bitch. If QE2 really gave one good damn for the feelings of the vets who will be meeting in France she would have done whatever was necessary to make sure her miserable royal ass was there. If that meant making a phone call to the forgetful French then so be it. If there was ever a reason for turfing her useless ass along with her assinine spawn this has to be it.

OTOH I've had to rethink my opinion of her royal representative in Canada. I was pretty skeptical of Michaelle Jean at first and I still think the position is an anachronism that is no longer relevant or needed. If we have to have one though I'm glad its the one we've got. She's got chutzpah.

Planned insolvency

Has nobody else noticed the travesty of justice that is playing out in the financial press over the "bankruptcy" of Chrysler and GM? If you or I did even 1/4 of what they are doing we'd be spending time next door to Conrad Black.

You can't decide you are going to declare bankruptcy and then divvy up the good assets before you call in the trustee. That's the whole point of a trustee - to ensure that all the creditors get a fair crack at all the assets. Yet the pre-bankruptcy fire sale is exactly what is happening. These guys have been talking about going broke for months now and meanwhile using the time to sell off anything that they can. Eventually North American taxpayers are going to end up on the hook for whatever happens to be left over.

I'm happy for Frank Stronach. He's the local guy who made good and he has likely made another good deal which will eventually enable him to sell European made Chevvies into Russia. I'm not so happy if there was some additional value there that could have been captured by a trustee because ultimately my taxes are going to support whatever remains of GM once they get done selling all the easy to sell stuff.

The rule has always been:

• If you owe the bank a million dollars and can't pay then YOU have a big problem.
• If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars and can't pay then THE BANK has a big problem.

To that I guess we now have to add:

• If you owe one hundred billion dollars then the taxpayers have got a big problem.

Loaded up, hooked up and moving on

I had to take two shots to get all our vehicles in the picture this morning before we left Nipawin. Its 23 years since I arrived in Nipawin a little bit earlier in the spring. Something about towing a truck must appeal to me though because that's how we arrived. We had my rusty little '72 Toyota hooked behind the Big 10 chebbie and both of them loaded down with furniture. The Toyota was really just a collection of rusty sheet metal travelling more or less in close formation and herded along by remnants of blue paint. I bought it to use as a trailer during the move and so that I would have something suitable for a commuter vehicle to take to work. My regular driver at that time was an '83 Towncar and Terry had already made it pretty clear that it wasn't going to be acceptable parked in front of the shop.

As I recall the Toyota was reasonably reliable mechanically - it must have been because I drove it for close to a year after we arrived in Nipawin. But it was a rolling disaster in the body department. One day when I was driving out to the acreage on the flats east of White Fox I hit a huge puddle (more like a small lake) in what the RM jokingly called our road at that time. I got wet almost to the waist because it turned out that the several layers of indoor-outdoor carpet which I had previously assumed were resting on the floorboards actually WERE the floorboards.

Today we barely got out of Nipawin in time to say we left in the morning. The cubevan performed flawlessly all the way to Prince Albert and we got settled in at our favorite little campground on the south side of town. Then we hustled ourselves over to the rental house and got busy slobbering paint onto the window frames. That took about 4 hours and its going to take another coat tomorrow but it is already looking much better. The old shutter boards likely haven't been painted since Marilyn built the house 20 some years ago. They slurped up the paint like a dry sponge.

Tonight we discovered that we have either packed the tripod for the internet satellite dish in the cube van (unlikely) or lost it somewhere. Its hard to imagine how we could have lost it but we certainly don't know where it is at this instant so I guess that qualifies as lost. Fortunately this campground provides substantial picnic tables so the dish is now vice-gripped to the edge of a picnic table. I need to make a run back to Carrot River this week so I will stop and check the barn at the old yard but we're both virtually certain its not there.

On Thursday I got a call from the nurse at Victoria Park. As is usually the case with those calls it wasn't good news. They had shipped father off to Pasqua Hospital and they are not prepared to have him return to Vic Park. This didn't come as a complete surprise to Marilyn and me. When we were there last week moving him to his new suite we noticed a dramatic deterioration in his condition compared with when we were in Regina two weeks earlier. The pattern of his Parkinsons has always been wavelike with the lows always lower and the highs never as high. Clearly he is in a low now but if or when he recovers he will be in worse condition than he was and at some point he will be beyond the ability of Vic Park to handle. He is falling regularly now and he appears incable of learning that he can't do the things he once could.

Two years ago now when he first started needing to use a wheelchair we got him a manual chair and attempted to teach him how to use it. As long as I walked behind him and told him "put your hands at the top of the wheels, push forward" he could run the wheelchair just fine. However the instant that I stopped telling him to put his hands on the wheels and move them he would stop doing it and he was simply incapable of learning that most basic of new tasks.

I believe the same congnitive disfunction is now preventing him from learning how to ask for help. I think his days now consist of him blundering about trying to live his life and regularly tipping over. The staff at Vic Park do their best but they clearly can't be with him 24 hours of the day. And he clearly can't learn that all he needs to do is press his button to get assistance. Which leaves us in the horrible position of having to consign him to that which he has always feared namely some kind of institutional care where he will likely be strapped into a bed. Fortunately Cara at Vic Park has taken the initiative and responsibility for the decision because it is a decision that my sister and I were incapable of making for father. I'm not sure that he needs the change in care immediately but Cara has made it clear that he can't come back to Vic Park so that effectively means that he needs the increased care immediately.

Meanwhile Marilyn's antique aunt isn't doing well either. She is incredibly weak and in constant pain from her surgery last winter. There is a line in Masonic ritual which says, referring to Mother Nature, "until in our final hour she instructs us how to die." Unfortunately in Anne's case, despite her being well past ready for the instructions, they just aren't forthcoming.

Getting old sucks. I'm still convinced that, for the most part, getting old is preferable to the alternative but there comes a point ..............

Unbelievable!

I'm not going to name names but I know the Nipawin readers will be able to identify the guilty parties in the following anecdote.

As I have written about already, I have our generator tightly enclosed in a plywood box. The box is perilously close to the manifold on the 8-92 but I have it protected there with a heat shield made of of tin wrapped with manifold heat tape. I think that is safe and I think the genset inside the box is safe as well. It doesn't hurt to be super safe though so I have been investigating automatic fire suppression systems. Both spaces are small and well confined so it wouldn't take much of a blast of fire suppression to quickly extinguish a fire IF THE REACTION WAS QUICK ENOUGH. On the other hand, if a fire started while we were going down the highway the massive airflow available to fan the blaze could quickly put it out of control before we even realized that anything bad was happening.

So today I stopped in at the local fire extinguisher shop. I had left a message on another guy's home phone number because I can't remember what name he operates under but I was in town anyway so I decided to visit XXX. I explained my concern and asked if they had any automatic systems. "Why would you be concerned about that?" was the response. Now I have thought this guy was a fool for pretty well as long as I have known him. His wife has always struck me as the brains of the organization with the caveat that she married him but apparently she wasn't there today. And he's in even bigger trouble if the one sitting at the reception desk is supposed to be her replacement - but I digress.

I just wasn't in the mood for an argument so I simply said "I'm not in the mood to argue with you and it sounds like you don't have anything." He said "no" and I left but I have to think that maybe I should have argued just a little bit. I mean really - I've got 3 heat sources (the Kubota diesel engine, the 8-92 diesel engine and the generator head), a couple of fuel sources (diesel fuel and plywood, not to mention the fibreglass panels in the coach) and a confined space that I can't easily monitor. What could possibly go wrong in that situation?

Unbelievable - this clown claims to be in the fire protection business. So I phoned P.A. and got a guy there who instantly understood what I was trying to do, said he had a couple of ideas and would get back to me.

An accident of birth

There are still only a million people in Saskatchewan, give or take a few thousand. A large part of the reason for that is that the majority of those people insist on voting socialist. Its hard to say which is chicken and which is egg - do people leave Saskatchewan because it is a socialist haven or is Saskatchewan doomed to socialism because all the brightest and best keep leaving?

This spring it has become apparent to me that there is another reason why people leave this province. The weather sucks. Sure - we get a couple of nice weeks of weather every summer. The long days in June can be really nice and there's usually a week or so in July where the wind isn't blowing constantly and the ground hasn't completely dried up so most of the country is still more or less green. But by and large the weather here sucks big time and I haven't even touched on the BS that happens here between August and April.

This morning we woke up to frozen water lines after hearing the wind howl steadily all night. At least it wasn't snowing - again. But its the long weekend in May fer chrisake.

So the big painting plans for the house in P.A. are on hold again. We blasted the window sills with the pressure washer on the way through P.A about 3 weeks ago now. So far we haven't had two good days in a row so we haven't got back to paint the frames. Yesterday we got done all the tasks we had to do here. Marilyn loaded the van all by herself while I did the other maintenance and construction tasks that needed to be done. I took the van into town last night to fuel it and nothing moved even when I went offroading to get to Millsap's fuel island. We're still not certain that the van will hang together for the trip to B.C. but it looks like our worldly possessions will stay in place inside of it.

Footnote to history

It is somehow fitting that Lorne Calvert's last day in the legislature should be completely overshadowed by Dwayne Lingenfelter's membership forgery scandal. Calvert may have been well meaning but his name is synonymous with inefectual.

And you gotta love those new attack ads that the Conservatives are running. Its about time Iggy got some dirt on him. Nobody even knew who he was a year ago and now he's the putative Prime Minister? Gimme a break. I suppose he would fit right in with Obi Wan - we could call them the teflon twins - two nobodies in charge of North America. Surely we're not all that stupid.

On second thought - - maybe we are.