It’s not quite “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” level decorating and I really should’ve gotten my butt up a ladder and extended the lights in that cedar tree in the front of our house right to the top.
But I’ve always liked coming home to a snow-filled yard, some green and red floodlights, a blow-up decoration (at least until the motor seized last year) and a glimpse of our Christmas tree through the front blinds.
Man, I love the Beatles!
The most ironic (and frustrating and hypocritical) thing in this entire election is Liberal supporters who are saying a vote for Jagmeet Singh and the NDP is somehow a vote for Andrew Scheer – as if they hadn’t made electoral reform a *major* plank of their last platform (a platform that got them elected because millions of Canadians – across the political spectrum – hate that their vote doesn’t count or they feel like they have to try to vote strategically.)
I hope Andrew Scheer doesn’t get in but if he does, I blame Justin Trudeau and the Liberals, *not* anyone who votes for the NDP (or Greens or PPC.)
And if Justin Trudeau ends up with a minority government, I hope the NDP ends up with the balance of power to help “remind” Trudeau to finish what he started!
“Country House” – Blur
Nothing too surprising on this list but here you go…
1. Although my mother-in-law battled a serious form of cancer for most of last year, she’s doing much better and, knock on wood, everyone else in our immediate family is doing well healthwise from Sasha who’s six years old to my dad who’s seventy years older than her! (Okay, sixty nine.)
2. That I was born in Canada with everything that includes – universal healthcare, high standard of living, generally stable government and relatively low inequality.
3. I lead a relatively privileged life, partly from the things beyond my control (born male, white, middle class) and things that I was able to control or influence to a large degree (obtaining advanced education, finding a career that I think I’m very suited to, who I married.)
4. That I often feel like I’m living at the apex of civilization – air travel! The internet! Advanced surgeries and medical knowledge! (although I also sometimes worry that the future will get worse due to climate change or rising inequality or some other unforeseen disaster instead of the upward path society followed for most of human history.)
5. It’s a minor one but that I have a relatively large amount of leisure time to enjoy various hobbies – watching hockey and reading books and playing guitar and stuff like that.
6. Shea and I are a great couple – we are very similar in our views on the “controversial” things in relationships (money, politics, child rearing) and our differences complement each other well.
7. Shea and I have had fifteen wonderful years in a great house we bought just before the Sask economy boomed (so it’s value has gone up by 2.5x what we paid for it), which was built by a cooperative of half a dozen tradespeople who banded together to build each other’s homes in the late 1970’s (so we know our home is solidly built and, if we ever doubt it, go next door to the carpenter who still lives next door!) and it’s given us the opportunity (with generous help from both sets of parents) to learn a lot about everything from installing tubs to building fences to unclogging drains! 🙂
8. Our kids are not only healthy as I mentioned earlier but both are intelligent, funny, amazing human beings.
9. That I have the honour of working in a public library where I have daily reminders of all the reasons I am so fortunate – from comforting grieving widows to working with new Canadians who have only a fraction of what I do to people suffering from mental illness, addictions and worse.
10. There’s one more very recent development that I’m incredibly thankful for which is not quite public yet but which I’ll probably blog about soon. 🙂
A bit nerve wracking to notice a police car pulled up right beside your own car while at work…
Usually Tiny Desk gets Americana-style artists but this is a pretty fun…
Shea and I are *very* lucky that we decided to keep the house we bought when we moved back to Regina in 2004 rather than sell it and buy something else when I went to library school in 2006 and came back in 2007, just as the Regina real estate market was booming.
There have been some slow years but it’s also hard to believe there have only been a couple years of decreases in the past fifteen years (though last year was pretty brutal with houses losing 4% of their value on average.)
Interesting question on r/saskatchewan today – what’s the difference between a “family farm” and a “corporate farm” with a wide range of opinions being shared.
For me, the main indicator of a “family farm” is any farm that has an owner who is a single individual (often including extended family members – a spouse, a parent, children, siblings). Frequently but not always, it’s a family that’s farmed the same land for decades if not centuries. To me, that criteria alone means it’s a “family farm” whether it’s incorporated or not, whether they also employee non-family hired hands, whether they still farm the section great-great grandpa got for ten bucks in 1885 or if they’ve grown to 10,000 acres.
In comparison, corporate farms are often owned by companies without a single identifiable owner or, if they do have one, it’s someone who has no long-standing connection the land (or the community nearest the land) – maybe someone recently arrived from another part of Canada or overseas, often backed by investors rather than using their own money (borrowed or not.)
What makes the question unanswerable is that farms can, and often do, have elements of both at the same time – family farms can have many characteristics of a corporate farm (if they’ve incorporated or have grown to a massive size) and corporate farms can have elements of a family farm (perhaps a single family from Germany or England or China buys a huge parcel of land, sets up shop, hires a bunch of workers while never setting foot in a tractor themselves) and operating like that.
So yeah, is there a difference? Maybe it’s one of those “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” situations?
So instead, I’ll leave you with this…
