Rob Ewaschuk's Blog : /life/sabbatical Rob Ewaschuk

/life/sabbatical/Six Months; Two Months; a Train Ride

Quietly, we passed the six-months-in-Toronto mark on March 18th. A week later, I passed the two-months-on-leave mark. Easter happened -- ending Lent, and my associated restriction on durable purchases, and presently I'm on a train to Halifax. The rest is just details and thoughts.

I like this part of Nova Scotia, that the train is rumbling through. This is my fourth or fifth time through it by rail, and for a while I'm pretty sure the rail line was twinned with the highway I cycled on for my first distance cycling trip. With a rented cell phone, home-made energybars and a low-ball estimate of 90km/day, I ended up clearing 500km two days early, and catching the train home from Bathurst.

Mostly the train is going through a 6m-wide clearway sliced out of empty wilderness, with the occasional cluster of houses wizzing by. We're an hour behind schedule, which is about two hours ahead of schedule from past experience.

The trainmuffins are terrible -- in ingredients, texture, flavour, excessive packaging (a plastic package wrapped in shrinkwrap!) -- but they were on special for 75 cents since they were day-olds. Actually, probably more like 10-day-olds given the preservatives. I ate breakfast with a fellow named Ken who did cable installing near Kingston before retiring to PEI. I'm not sure if it was cable-as-in-TV or cable-as-in-industrial-wiring. He had some good stories about driving across the southern US as a "long-hair" in the 70s and taking a lot of intimidation and threats for it, and about getting caught on the open seas while sailing. The oatmeal portion was too small, but there was lots of good fresh fruit.

I woke up yesterday feeling nauseous and generally a little under the weather, uncertain about whether I was going to go ahead with the journey I'd decided on only the night before. Around 10:15, after some mini-wheats and OJ went down okay, I decided to run with it; by 11:30 I had rush-packed, caught a subway to Union Station, bought a one-way ticket, and boarded the train. One-way tickets are so much more dramatic than the return kind. Running on not much food, with a headache and general malaise on top of my post-by-election lassitude, I spent a couple hours feeling claustrophobic, unmotivated, and vaguely regretting the commitment of 28-hoour train journey. I wondered drearily if that's comparable to what some unlucky people feel like all the time: slightly unhealthy and unmotivated. (I've been reading Matthew Good's blog, which is an interesting mix of tough health and happiness problems with a lot of motivation; makes me glad I have both, most of the time.) The last two weeks have given weight to the implied warnings of the people who remarked about my leave that they didn't think they'd have the motivation to do get up every day and be productive. After a long but wakeful sleep in the too-cold train ("I thought I was riding a train, not a freezer," lamented an elderly man at breakfast this morning. "Never again!") I feel much better today.

Six months in Toronto. 5 of them winter. Bring on the spring! 'nuf said.

Two months of leave -- if I had internet access on the train, I'd check my objectives list, panic about how many of them were unstarted, and take immediate action. Good thing there's no internet!

Okay, so the six months of Torontonianism hasn't been so bad as to be summarized in one whingy sentence -- I think we've settled in fairly well, with some community involvement, a few gigs, lots of restaurants, some exploring, one play, and some germinating friendships. In fact both Clare and I have already met "friend-potentials" who are leaving Toronto soon; it seems a very transitory place for people our age. But yes, bring on the spring; even I'm growing weary of winter. Poor Clare.

The end of Lent ended my somewhat-successful embargo on purchases of durables. One of the policy decisions was what to about gifts; for outgoing gifts they were counted in my three material purchases (two gifts, one corn-plastic filled duvet) and for incoming I just ignored it, not wanting to unduly expand the intent of the project. But then since this period included my birthday, which included gifts of cash since I'm so hard to buy for, I ended up stretching things a bit, and buying some CDs, some cloths, and a replacement iPod. All within the budget of the cash I'd been given for my birthday, but it certainly seems like a cop-out. (Though to be fair I didn't realize the period included my birthday until I was rather well into it.) Maybe next year I'll do it again with more buy-in from those that might give me stuff. I don't think it actually made a huge difference, which is mostly what I wanted to find out; most of my consumption is..err..consumables.

To that end, I also did one shopping trip with a meal plan, after reading someone somewhere saying how much it cut down on their food waste; we got pretty good results too, I think. Just the process of working out roughly how many nights would actually involve cooking, rather than going out, grabbing a sub before a night course, or eating something quick from the freezer. It feels very hyper-organized to have a list of what to eat, but it seemed pretty effective. We'll see if it continues.

In blog news, I now use Google Reader pretty heavily to read too many repetitive, redundant, duplicative blogs about stuff I'm interested in -- there will be a cull soon -- and I've integrated into the blog the stream of items I've found and shared for interest, humour or perspective. Go, web 2.0!

New Albums from the Gallery

/life/sabbatical/Finding Leverage

One of my goals for my leave was to find leverage: places where I could make a disproportionate impact, by helping the right group of people with the right goals at the right time, where they needed the things I could bring to the table.

I think I found it. Yesterday's by-election put the Green Party nearly tied with the NDP in three of the ridings. It probably squished expectations for an imminent election. And it looks like it helped push the Liberals towards Green Tax Shift.

The campaign was a blast: I met a tonne of people, knocked on many hundreds of doors, said "Chris Tindal" twelve zillion times, and jumped in on election day to help repair a logistical problem. Elections Canada was beta-testing a new system for reporting who had voted to the campaigns (I didn't even know this happened) and it caused a knock-on effect on the paperwork required for scrutineers to get that information.

The whole thing was hugely educational, both as a citizen and as a partisan. I learned how elections work from the inside, which is great -- this was one of the best-run Green Party of Canada campaigns ever, as I understand it, and differed in scale but not kind from the Liberal campaign, at least as far as I could see: they had organized lunches for scrutineers, and plenty more of them, and we ordered pizza and didn't have as many volunteers heading out, but it was a full-blown election machine, and that was great to see.

Here are some photos from the Victory Party. There's some good neutral analysis over here. And there's some good commentary on the campaign machine.

I feel like I have a second lease on my leave -- the last few weeks have been pretty campaign focussed, though "full time" isn't quite accurate, since I've been keeping up with some other stuff. But now my time is suddenly re-freed, which is nice.

/life/sabbatical/Got a Gig!

Yesterday I had a chat with someone from the Toronto office of the Pembina Institute. I'll be ramping up slowly with them, by mutual agreement. It's a one-person office, and she's very busy, while I'm spending a lot of free time working to get Chris Tindal elected, or at least record-setting vote numbers.

Though I don't think they're secretive about what they're doing, I don't want to go into detail -- it's related to the Renewable is Doable campaign. And electricity grids. And things that are not entirely dissimilar to my work at Google. And they want me to be a Combinatorist and Optimizationist, per my degree title -- better bust out those linear algebra textbooks. woop woop.

After a few weeks, I'll hopefully be going in two days a week, which should suit me just fine. Then I will design in a tiny component of the system that shaves a rounding error from every power transmission and diverting it to my private lair, where I will use the power to build an army of monsters.

Please don't tell anyone.

/life/sabbatical/Chili Garlic Eggplant

I've been working on a vegetarian version of this spicy eggplant (aka Eggplant With Yu-Xiang Sauce; Yu-Xiang Qie-Zi) recipe.

Here's my recipe:

• If you're going to serve it on brown rice, start that cooking. Vermicelli or jasmine or other rices are also good.
• 6 chinese eggplants -- the normal kind don't taste the same. Slice them into fingers (cut the length in four and the circle in four), fry them in ~1/4 cup oil in a non-stick pan until soft. Do this ahead, or at the same time as the next step.
• 1 block extra-firm tofu. Cut into cubes -- 4x4x2 is my usual slice. Fry in a non-stick pan in ~2 tsbp oil. Turn regularly, try to brown each side.
• Add to tofu: ~one zillion cloves garlic (I'm trying about 10 right now); ~2-3 tbsp grated ginger; 1 tbsp+ hot bean sauce. This is "Toban Djan" from Lee Kum Kee or other suppliers. It is not "chili garlic sauce" or anything like that. It's very distinctive and makes my kitchen smell of awesome. Cook a bit.
• Mix together, then add to tofu: 2 tbsp soy sauce, < 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp sugar, 1/2 cup water, 1 veggie stock cube crushed up.
• Cook a bit, then add in the eggplant strips, cook until the liquid starts disappearing.
• Add two or three chopped green onions, stir, then add 1 tbsp cornstarch mixed with 2 tbsp water. Stir to thicken. If it gets dry, add more water at any time.
• Add 2 tsp sesame oil. More is tasty and good for you.
• Make sure everything is hot and mixed, maybe give it another minute, then serve.
• Optionally, chop with topped cilantro.

/life/sabbatical/Deryk King Reponse

The Mop & Pail, in all its infinite wisdom, neglected to print my brilliant reply to Deryk King's opinion article, "Carbon tax or cap and trade?". So I've decided to print my reply where it will get even more readers -- yes, right here, on my blog.

In "Carbon tax or cap and trade?" (Business, Feb 8 2008) Deryk King expresses several fallacies in the carbon tax vs. cap and trade debate. First, he says that setting a carbon price is a game of "not too high...not too low". Both cap and trade and carbon taxes require a careful policy choice; only a few paragraphs later, Mr. King mentions the disastrous fall-out of the European Carbon Trading System (ETS) because the cap was set too high.

Mr. King later alludes to the income problem: with both auctioned credits (the flavour he rightly proposes as the best variety of cap and trade) and taxes, the government has a new stream of revenue. With both, this money must be either spent, or used to reduce other income sources. In both cases, a revenue neutral solution is best.

Mr. King's comparison to the highly effective sulfur cap and trade markets of the 1980s is also dubious: sulfur is an incidental side-effect of many industrial processes (mostly coal burning); carbon dioxide is a chemically necessary result of energy extraction from fossil fuels.

Finally, the business case. Carbon markets set an unpredictable price on carbon. In times of economic downturn, the price will plummet and the incentive to reduce pollution will disappear. If the government sets the cap too low, the price could shoot sky-high, and require careful policy intervention. Carbon taxes provide a steady schedule for the price on carbon, and a steady, predictable incentive towards reducing emissions.

Since writing this, I've decided that the implication of feature-equivalence between auctioned cap and trade and carbon taxes is incorrect. There is one important place where carbon taxes differ: pure sequestration projects, like the recently defunct Planktos, who plan(ned) to seed the ocean with iron filings -- which happen to be the limiting reagent in algae growth -- so that an algae bloom would form, and then sink to the bottom, allegedly safely sequestering the carbon. There are many other, less zany possibilities, and they would go unfunded under carbon taxes, unless you either subsidized them out of band, or allowed them to offset taxes, in a sort of "tax and trade" system.

Yes, I just coined a term. Even though I stole it from a private email with Fergal.

In other news, Clare and I are off to NYC for the (long) weekend. Overnight bus there, should be fun. Hopefully we can sleep. If you're one of my New York readers, let me know so I can come say hi. Not that I have any New York readers, but I figure the possibility might be self-fulfilling. Toodles.

/life/sabbatical/Giving Up For Lent

I'm not going to buy this tshirt, despite its high awesomeness quotient.

I've been mulling over a moratorium on purchases; despite writing about this idea on Pancake Tuesday, I didn't make the Lenten connection. The Church of England pulled it together for me with their Carbon Fast. I'm pretty up on my carbon, but I can take the hint: I'm giving up purchases of durables for lent. This, at a time when I've just lost my iPod, heaven forbid. (Though given my loss-and-destroy rate for iPods, calling them "durables" and not "consumables" is suspect.)

Here are the consumables on the white-list: soaps and cleaners, food (including restaurant food), toiletries.

Lent lets you skip Sundays, as I understand it, but that's no good for durables purchases. So instead I'm going to give myself three (3) exceptions for exigent circumstances. I have an interview-ish-things to do volunteer research/advocacy work with Pembina Institute, and have to match the office dress code, which is slightly higher than I'm used to. Okay. More than slightly. Not quite bowties and cumberbunds, but still far from jeans and a tshirt. I think I can make it go without anything new, though it may take one or two remaining exceptions. I also have an Economist subscription that I'm not going to cancel.

So yeah. It's a couple days late, but retroactive from Feb 6 to Mar 22. I don't think it'll be that hard, but we'll see. The trickiest thing will be to remember the rules every time I bust out my wallet.

Also, this is blog number 200. Woo.

Oh right, aalllso, in other news, I went out canvassing for the first time, last night with Chris Tindal. We did several floors of a large apartment building. Of perhaps 100 knocks, maybe 50% were absent, one guy was moderately hostile, a few doors were closed promptly, but most people were friendly. I was surprised how many people positively indicated who they were voting for, one way or the other. People seemed receptive, and Chris was good at what he does, including playing friendly with dogs, despite mild allergies. Oh, the things politicians do!

/life/sabbatical/Painting Ourselves Red

This image shows the contributions to atmospheric CO₂ including land use changes over the period from 1950 to 2000.

The only countries that get a brighter shade are those that are extracting oil for us to burn (itself a carbon-intensive process), or slashing their rainforests to grow beef for us, or, in the height of irony, burning peat bogs to make the way to grow palm oil...for "environmentally friendly" biofuels.. (I'm not actually sure why Guyana is so red. I assume it's dominated by clearcutting and land-use changes, but I can't find anything to back that up.)

/life/sabbatical/Objectives and an Interview

I've finally published my objectives -- this is a living document, and I invite feedback on it. It's basically continuing the quarterly organization I grew used to at Google, though simpler.

I also had a chat with someone at the Pembina Institute. He pronounced it Pem'-bin-ah, not Pem-been'-ah, so I will too. It sounds like there's a good possibility that I'll be able to do some form of structured volunteer work on their advocacy side, which is very exciting. He proposed two possibilities, both of which sound great -- one that sounds roughly like the kind of work I thought I might get, and one that sounds like a much larger, more nebulous but far-reaching goal. Did I mention that both are very exciting? Good.

This week has suddenly seen a bit of a slow-down. Yesterday was lost to an addictive flash game reminiscent of Jezzball and some Linux/Debian/Etch/Sarge upgrade SNAFUs on our webserver. Also reading a tonne of blah blah blah about the YHOO+MSFT>^?GOOG question. And blogs and stuff.

In addition to my current moratorium on flying, and on seeing movies I've already seen, I'm considering sanctions against myself -- a sort of targetted "buy nothing" month. I'm reading Natural Capitalism and the first bit is all about the collosal amounts of waste everything generates. It's not the TV. It's not even the box, the styrofoam. Nor the lighting in the shop, the receipts and paperwork. It's the large (more than 10-to-1 in many cases, and even more for electronics) waste from manufacturing, not even counting effluent water. It's the tailings from the mining of the various metals, and the wasted runs of moulded plastic from parts manufacturing. And, of course, it is the TV, and it is the lighting in the shop, and all the things you can see, but there's so much more that you can't see. No, I'm not going to make an iceberg analogy.

Last night I had the second installment of my media course, which was every bit as good as the first -- full of things I have no idea about, but aren't particularly difficult. It turns out we actually have to do some work, which somehow caught me off-guard, but it's not actually that much. She also gave us a free copy of her book.

Tomorrow I'm going to go to the Green Party office again, and hopefully start kicking a bit more ass there. I've also gotten in touch with their tech guy, who seems quite keen to harness my energy for his nefarious purposes.

/life/sabbatical/My First Day On The Job

Today, I woke up early, and awake. I had breakfast, saw Clare off for the day, and started...

..wait, where's all my email? I've started the day for the last 3 or so years reading anywhere between one and a bazillion hours' worth of email. And it's gone. It's like a free hour in my day. Along with the other 8 hours that are also now free.

After I didn't read my email, I proceeded to not go to work. Admittedly, this wasn't my most productive morning -- I spent it getting my address book in order. I'm quite happy to have time to do this sort of thing. I'd like to write Christmas cards this year, since I got enough last year that I can't really continue with this laissez-faire approach. But, to send Christmas cards, I need two things: A list of people to send them to, and those people's addresses. I've decided to build the list based on frequency of flattering blog comments, so get your considered thoughts in below.

I'm sitting in a Quizno's sub place. That wasn't my plan -- I was supposed to be at Chris Tindal's campaign office helping them set up. On my way, I went to file for a new passport, so I can go to New York sometime soon. Turns out that takes like an hour and a half -- twenty minutes in a pre-queue, then being told to go to Quizno's an come back in an hour. Who am I to disobey the fascist passport office people? ("Excuse me ma'am, please step outside or turn off your phone." "Excuse me sir, please don't use that perfectly good pen right now; it's attached to a desk that nobody is at, and your use of idle resources offends us.")

Tonight I have my first day of my media course. I hope it's good. The first lecture in the Friday Lecture Series was about the evolution of man. You'd think that would be a fascinating subject, and it was when I read about it in Guns, Germs and Steel. The audience was mostly older folks, and the lecture was very accessible. Which is obviously good, bt I coulda dealt with something more meaty as it were. Hopefully further lectures are better.

It's almost time for me to go back to passportlandia. Hopefully they didn't lie to me about how long I could go away for.

/life/sabbatical/The First Day of the Rest of My Leave

Today was the first day. Of course, it's a Saturday, and so it felt like any other Saturday. Presumably Monday will be rather more distinctive.

Last night I went out for pints with my office cohorts, and had a good time. After that, Clare and I went to Steamwhistle Unsigned and saw some live music. Some of the bands were okay, but overall I wasn't a fan of the music. It was a cool venue, though.

I had my minor "oh man, what have I set in motion?" freakout on Thursday, but it passed quickly. I dealt with it by writing a giant list of things to do on Monday. Normally when one writes a list, the goal is to keep it reasonable, and perhaps try and have it be feasible to accomplish it all -- in the case I wanted the opposite: a big list of things to make sure I couldn't possibly get them done, so I knew this whole thing wasn't a mistake. Fortunately such a list wasn't hard to come up with.

At work, we divide things up into quarters, and set objectives on a quarter-long timeline. I've decided I'll do the same, and so I also started figuring out what those things might be -- life stuff, like going to the dentist for the first time in a while and cooking some new things; learning stuff, like my courses, and reading; and of course the more focused stuff like Green Party participation, and that sort of thing.

I bought a new laptop today -- a mid-range Macbook -- since I don't actually own any computer right now. I've been using my work laptop for quite a while. It's kinda nice to have my own computer again.

So, not hugely eventful. I'll post my quarterly objectives sometime soon, for comment. And maybe I'll even take it all the way, and score them and take feeback on that, too.