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…
“Call It Democracy” – Bruce Cockburn
Shea and I got around to a *long* overdue task of decluttering our garage this weekend.
Strangely, it reminded me of when I was in my first librarian job and (purposely?) my boss assigned me a major weeding project. They just kept bringing me packed cart after overloaded cart of books and I had to go through and manually review each one for all the usual (condition, age, circs) plus we had a system at the time where I also had to check a database to see if it was the last copy in the province and if so, send it to our Provincial Library to be archived.
Not all but many librarians tend to be hoarders by nature and I think we also tend to be pretty precious about books so that’s why I suspect that this was a purposeful assignment to try to “break” me of either of those characteristics early in my career.
As we decluttered, I kept thinking back to those lessons – how I had to not be sentimental about the books in front of me (especially ones I’d read or authors I liked or whatever) and how I had to think about the implications of the stuff I was getting rid of and the same applied to our accumulated “stuff” over the past two decades.
In fact, nothing captured this balance better than the bin pictured above – a tub of stuff we’d had since we got married fifteen years and which had even moved to and from Calgary once – a bin originally labeled “Wedding Gifts” which held all the various towels and kitchen items and various other dust collectors we’d received but never used, with those words now crossed out and replaced by the words “Garage Sale”.
It was a long tough day as we threw a ton of stuff into a dumpster, created a large “donate” pile (that we still have to deal with) and, since we still had some room in the dumpster, we even did a weeding of our books and threw out some of the ones that likely wouldn’t find a home anywhere else – twenty year old nursing textbooks, well-worn paperbacks and all sorts of other outdated books (although that 2006 Consumer Reports Guide might be a collectible by now!)
I’ve been trying to greatly reduce my beer drinking from summer camping levels (essentially down to one per week instead of one per hour!) and I’m also trying to drink only terrible tasting low-carb beer (fuck, I’m old.)
But I made a special exception for one last beer I had left from our Calgary trip in August that I thought was appropriate for the start of the hockey season – Go Flames Go!
Are fowl suppers a Saskatchewan tradition or a Prairie tradition or a Canadian tradition?
At any rate, my friend Deron, has once again posted his annual Fowl/Fall Super Guide.
I’m hungry already!
We only went once before, for my birthday last year, but were sad to show up at a local restaurant called the Neighbourhood Pour House yesterday to find the doors locked.
Shea did some digging when we got home and found an announcement that they’d closed their doors very recently but their flagship restaurant, Jack Keaton’s BBQ, would remain open.
Good article from The National Post about the changing nature of the debate around Freedom of Expression.
What remains is that challenges still come from all sides of the political spectrum.
…the bulk of work on freedom of expression is shifting from people who fruitlessly complain about books to attacks on journalists and bloggers. Also on the table are concerns about the shady, hard-to-discern role Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and other social-media outlets have in policing and suppressing speech by “deplatforming” people without any kind of clear public process — often using algorithms that work in undisclosed ways.
The camping season’s over but I can’t help but share this funny video…