/travel/canada/I love snow!
The way it billows and blusters. Hits the window and dies against the warm glass. Collects on window sills, and in troughs, and on pipes.
I have no idea why, but it's one of the few things that makes me respond with what can only be described as "glee."
There's about an inch on the ground now, enough to cover the horrible ice that necessarily underlies any southern Ontario snowfall.
In other news, things are well. I mostly work from home now, since I have no immediate coworkers in the office so there's not a lot of point in commuting.
I'm taking Hapkido, and enjoying it. They're making me be flexible and grow some muscles. Clare's into a photography course. I'm trying to figure out what to do with my upcoming leave. Our flat is great. Seeing people I haven't seen in a long time is good too.
We kitted out the flat from Freecycle, Craigslist, Ikea, a bit of Canadian Tire, and a finishing touch of Walmart. I'm pretty happy with the end result. I refinished a table that my landlord gave us, and it looks pretty good. Clare spraypainted a TV table she got for $2, and it looks good too. We've had two rides to grocery stores (from Josh & Katie the first time, for $675 of groceries, and Deirdre the second, at a measly $300.)
Clare and I went to a "GreenTOpia" book launch about greening up Toronto a couple weeks ago. There seems to be a tonne of work in that area, and the city council seems very supportive, which is great. I got a couple contacts and ideas there, and they ran two pretty good panels. I was surprised that in the discussion about the merits and effectiveness (or lack thereof) of individual actions like recycling, nobody even mentioned the potential for amplifying things at work -- maybe because the panelists all work in green organizations. To me, that's totally the biggest scope for making a difference as an individual. Leaning on your bosses to do things more greenly, and applying resistance (no matter how slight, if job security is at risk from it) to wasteful practices (even if they're cost-effective, though there's plenty of evidence that, not surprisingly, there's plent of scope for efficiency improvements that are both profitable and green) can be amplified by the millions of widgets a company makes, or the thousands of computers it runs, or the tonnes of carbon it emits. Especially once you've carved out the big things in your own life (i.e. household & transport efficiency) this seems to me to be what's left.
There was also a general confusion from the panel about sacrifice. Some people said we wouldn't have to sacrifice anything. Many people said anything predicated on individual sacrifice was doomed. Some people said "sacrificing stuff isn't bad, it's great, you'll love it. Therefore we won't be sacrificing anything." All are sentiments I agree with, to some degree. I think the problem is, as a society, we're going to have to sacrifice some things. But as individuals, I don't feel like I'm "sacrificing" a trip to Japan just because it's more than I want to pay for it. If "sacrifice" is higher prices to reflect the real costs of certain goes, it won't "feel" like personal sacrifice.
I also went to a forum at the St Lawrence Center on "The Politics of Food". It was pretty good, though a little lefty in general. One of the questioners from the Ontario Farmer's Association said that instead of international trade rules saying we shouldn't be able to export for more than selling locally, we should have it that we can't import for less than selling locally. Yeah, 'cause I want to pay $25 for a pineapple grown in a greenhouse. That's efficient. In general, it was surprising to me that nobody raised carbon fees ("taxes") as a way of fixing some of the efficiencies. He (or maybe another OFA guy) said that factory farming was the cleanest, safest, etc., kind of farming available, and got booed a bit. He didn't actually say anything about how humane it was -- I'm not sure if that's 'cause he got cut off, or 'cause he wasn't worried about it.
I'm working on a secret, slightly nerdy, slightly activist project. Hopefully it ends up pretty cool, and makes a teeny tiny difference in the world.
