February 5, 2012 – …when the tree gets the sweater and the human is sleeping on the bench…

We saw this park with its sweater clothed trees when we came down to Seattle in December. It seems like it must have been quite a feat to knit these pieces of art and sew them onto the trees. But the colours are wonderful. What makes me sad though, is that they stand in a park occupied by homeless people sleeping on benches. But what really amazed me, was the friendliness of the residents. As we walked though and took photos, one of the homeless men smiled and wished us a wonderful day.

You have to admire human fortitude. Some people really can find the best in any situation.

Anyway, the rest of today. We pretty much just walked and took in a beautiful day, and didn’t really take all that many interesting shots.

February 4, 2012 – The Seattle Boat Show is enough of an excuse for a train trip to Seattle for the weekend. At this time of year it is dark when you board, and the sun comes up as you head across the river and towards the Pacific Ocean. It’s always a beautiful trip. I love Seattle, almost as much as Vancouver. If you told me that I had to move to the US, this is about the only place you could convince me to settle. I like that the climate is almost identical, it is a sister city to Vancouver. In so many ways it is so similar, and in so many others it is still foreign.

We arrived, headed for our hotel, and then went into a panic as Kirk left his iPad on the train and it was now headed for Portland. As luck would have it, the staff on the train found it and we did get it back late that evening. The boat show was fun, but nothing we “needed” to buy. We wandered out and found a crazy little pub – The Triangle Pub – which apparently used to be a brothel, but I have no idea how since it held only a maximum of 20 seats and three tables. It was tiny, and there was a female bartender and four very drunk, but friendly, patrons, one of whom was very chatty with us.

We walked the waterfront, had a coffee at the original Starbucks, watched the sun set, and then spent a lot of time trying to find the wine bar we’d been to last month. FInally found Purple and spent a few hours there at the bar watching the amazing bartenders work their magic. We tried two new “flights” of wine, one with three whites that I wasn’t overly impressed with, and one with four reds that were all worthy of buying.

Then back to the train station to rescue Kirk’s iPad, and a bottle of wine back at the hotel to celebrate it’s return.

February 4th, 2012 – The sails at Canada Place in Vancouver’s Inner Harbour always look so fabulous against a clear blue sky. It was such a gorgeous day that I made an effort to try and get out, at least for a little bit, to enjoy the sun and warmth. At this time of year you have to really appreciate it when the rain stops.

I love this place!

February 2, 2012 – Acronyms are funny things. Every field has its own language, and they don’t always cross translational boundaries well. Yesterday I was asked if I was going to the Town Hall meeting for DFO because the ADM was speaking. DFO is Department of Fisheries and Oceans, I know that one obviously, but ADM was new to me. Associate Deputy Minister was the long version of that one. Then I received an email telling me that there were some IT issues with the TVP, but that the issue was within DFO. I work for SEP (Salmon Enhancement Program) which falls under EMB (Ecosystem management Branch) of DFO, the hatcheries fall into two categories, EOS (Enhancement Operations) and CIP (Community Involvement Programs). The CIPs are made up of CEDPs (Community Economic Development Programs, DIPs (Designated Public Involvement Programs) and PIPs (Public Involvement Programs). It used to be OHEB (Oceans, Habitat, Enhancement Branch), but then AMD (Aquaculture Management Division) came along and they split some things up and changed names to reflect the differences between EMB and FAM (Fisheries and Aquaculture Management). AFS used to mean American Fisheries Society to me, but now I have to remember that it also means Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy within the government of Canada. You get the idea.

The other day I received an email that used a whole lot of acronyms that I was trying to sort through, one of them was something to do with translation services and NLP, so I looked it up with a quick Google search and decided pretty quickly that I had come across the wrong translation. The first thing to come up was “Neuro-Lingusitic Programming”. But the linguistic part sounded right so I clicked on the link for a definition, but oh was this not what I was looking for, this was definitely not what I was looking for. Not only was this new to me, it was downright silly.

And that got me off on a mental tangent about irrational things that people grasp onto, absurd pseudo-sciences. This NLP thing set off my skeptic radar full tilt and had me astounded that anyone could actually buy into such nonsense.

Let me lay this one out here…

NLP is a crazy approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created in the 1970s.

“The title refers to a stated connection between the neurological processes (“neuro”), language (“linguistic”) and behavioral patterns that have been learned through experience (“programming”) and can be organized to achieve specific goals in life (Wikipedia). NLP practitioners claim to be able to “track another’s eye movements and language, thereby shaping the person’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions.”

“As human beings, we can never know reality. We can only know our perceptions of reality. We experience and respond to the world around us primarily through our sensory representational systems. It is our ‘neuro-linguistic’ maps of reality that determine how we behave and that give those behaviors meaning, not reality itself. It is generally not reality that limits us or empowers us, but rather our map of reality.”

Uhh, yeah, ok, sure. (Looney alert!). It’s nonsense like this that lets people down. Humans are always looking for meaning, a sense of place, for purpose. I suppose that’s why religion is so popular. But this kind of unfounded pseudo-science, regardless of its stated goal of “finding ways to help people have better, fuller and richer lives” is just another irrational religion, but one that has no deity attached. It’s high on the “quack-factor” list.

And that got me thinking about other ridiculous things that people buy into, because they “want to believe”. Pyramid schemes and other ‘get-rich-quick’ notions, astrology, horoscopes, psychic readings, the Bermuda Triangle, levitation, crop circles, seances, channeling, Tutankhamun’s curse, biorhthyms, magnet therapy, laundry balls, Intelligent Design, etc. I lump them all together.

Another one that amazes me is the movie and book that followed: The Secret. Who buys (and buys into) this stuff?

“The Secret describes the law of attraction as a natural law that determines the complete order of the universe and of our personal lives through the process of “like attracts like.” That is, as we think and feel, a corresponding frequency is sent out into the universe that attracts back to us events and circumstances on that same frequency. For example, if you think angry thoughts and feel angry, you will attract back events and circumstances that cause you to feel more anger. Conversely, if you think and feel positively, you will attract back positive events and circumstances.”

“The Secret states that desirable outcomes such as health, wealth, and happiness can be attracted simply by changing one’s thoughts and feelings. For example, if a person wanted a new car, by thinking about the new car, having positive and thankful feelings about the car as if it were already attained and opening one’s life in tangible ways for a new car to be acquired (for example, test driving the new car, or making sure no one parks in the space where the new car would arrive) and the law of attraction would rearrange events to make it possible for the car to manifest in the person’s life.”

“The law is a magnetic power emitted through your thoughts. The power of thoughts are likened to a transmission tower that sends out a frequency to the universe and then returns the same frequency in a physical or experiential form. Next, a three-step creative process for manifesting dreams is introduced: Ask, Believe, and Receive. This creative process is based on a quote from the Bible: “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” (Matthew 21:22) The Secret highlights gratitude and visualization as the two most powerful processes to help manifest one’s desires. It asserts that being grateful both lifts your frequency higher and affirms that you believe you will receive your desire. Visualization is said to help focus the mind to send out the clearest message to the universe. Several techniques are given for the visualization process, as well as examples of people claimed to have used it successfully to manifest their dreams.”

Can anyone actually read that and not see that it is complete gibberish? Of course when we think happy thoughts we attract good things. And of course when we think unhappy thoughts we don’t. It’s simple, if you are happy you smile, smiling people make other people smile, happy smiley-faced people talk to each other, and when you are happy the world seems like a brighter place, you focus on happy things. When you are unhappy you frown, frowns repel people, when you are unhappy and frowny-faced you can’t see the happy things because all you focus on are unhappy things that add further fuel to your unhappiness. How do I know this? Because I was a very unhappy kid in right around when I entered my early teens. My parents were getting a divorce and I was miserable. Eventually I noticed that I didn’t have as many friends around me and I thought “hmmm, I’m unhappy so no one wants to be around me…maybe I should find my happy place..” Pretty straight-forward connection. It’s so friggin’ simple it amazes me that people actually need to buy self-help books and seek “help” from people that only see their misunderstanding, of something so simple, as a source of income. But honestly, are there people out there who really think a car is going to just materialize in their parking spot because they think happy positive thoughts? I really hope not….

I think it’s easier to believe than to not believe, and that’s what gets us into these silly fixations. We are programmed to believe unbelievable things because, in a fundamental cost-benefit analysis, it’s “safer” (sometimes) to believe than it is to be a skeptic. For example, believing in religion is safer than not believing. Why? Consider the arguments. If it’s true that there is a life after this and that I must believe to gain entrance or forever be damned to some purgatory, well, it’s safer to believe and the cost is very low. If there is no life after this, then I have lost nothing except some time and rational thought. But if I don’t believe and there is truth to the argument, then the cost is very high. See? Safer to believe. Call it calculated risk taking, except in most of the cases above (with the exception of get-rich-quick schemes and pyramid schemes) there is no real personal risk beyond disappointment. And that very logic is why I simply cannot believe. Belief without proof is blind faith, and blind faith is action without rational thought. I question nearly everything and I am anything but irrational in my thinking, reasoning must be grounded in reality for me to accept something as holding a probablility of truth.

Religion will probably always be with us, but these other silly fascinations with “cure-alls”, ridiculous fixes, and pseudo-explanations usually are discredited relatively quickly, because the need to believe is (usually) eventually overruled by the disappointment of failure to deliver, and often with the involvement of some degree of fiscal loss.

And all that came from an accidental acronym mistranslation.

WTF? It’s FUBAR – you can look that one up yourself if you aren’t familiar with it.

I’ve always loved the saying that “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, is the very definition of insanity” and yet, in daily life, so many try to fit recurring personal expectations into everything new, and are unwittingly setting up for repeated failure.

I think to truly be open to new things, we have to be able to let go of our own expectations and allow ourselves to see the values that don’t match our own, rather than try to change them to conform. We need to accept the fact that we are just as fallible as the next person, that we aren’t somehow better or worse because of education, intelligence, abilities. I always think it’s a bit sad that so many have the need to compare themselves against some model, have the need to assess a sense of place against that of others, have a need to achieve so much so that they can think of themself as “just that little bit better”. I also think it’s sad that we spend so much time focusing on how everything affects us that we forget to think about how we affect other people, how our words and actions, or inactions, can make things worse rather than better.

Sometimes when we think we understand and we try to empathize, we aren’t really understanding because we are too busy making assumptions that we are the one with the “right answer”, that we know how to “fix” things. The person we are trying to empathize with is obviously therefore “not right” or “needs fixing”. Obviously the other person needs to change somehow to meet our expectations of what would make make things work “better”, or for them to reach some new “level”, based on a different, possibly faulty, set of assumptions and biases.

I like how the narrator highlights the fact that humans are famous for trying to fit old ideas, ones they won’t let go of, into a new context, and that it doesn’t usually work. It’s hard to let go of control and certainty, what little most of us have. As he says, (paraphrased) we can ignore it and plow along, or choose to acknowledge that current perspectives aren’t working. It takes humility to put aside our own biases and assumptions, to put aside the need to control, to try and force things work the way we want them to, to listen to a different perspective and manage to empathize, but doing so will surprise you because you will wonder why you hadn’t seen such a simple logical way of thinking before. By shifting our thinking and our point of view, putting ourself in the other person’s shoes and try to see our own failings, and how those have impacted those around us, it can provide a resonance, a better understanding of people and place, and it can change the meaning of perspective. (He started to sound a little crazy there for a bit – with the whole ‘resonance’ thing, but I’ll go with it, because we all experience things differently.)

I agree that we are infatuated with creativity, innovation, transformation, – our own usually – but, being too obsessed with the ideas we hold close means we get stuck, we miss the big picture because we become too obsessed with our own ideals and forget the validity of those of others. That much I totally agree with him on.

February 1, 2012 – Oh yes, I am most definitely a fish nerd. A fellow in my volunteer group arrived last night and handed me this as a gift. Isn’t it just totally and wonderfully geeky?

I love it!

What a fabulous and totally unexpected gift!

January 31, 2012 – Garlic is not only good, it’s darned good FOR you too. Protection against colds, and of course, it keeps those pesky vampires at bay

January 30, 2012 – Once upon a time I didn’t like pistachios. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. But tastes change, times change.

January 29, 2012 – You will have to forgive the less than stellar shots for today. We spent more time driving than anything else. And the time we weren’t driving, we were in a memorial service, alternating between laughing and crying. Visiting Salmon Arm always hits me like a wave of emotion for so many reasons. Sunburns and skinned knees. First love, cherry trees, lying under the stars, and a teenage broken heart. The place where I learned to swim, where I waved to the man in the caboose as the long trains went by, and after which I searched for the pennies I’d laid on the tracks. Where I learned to milk a cow, collect eggs, bake cookies, preserve to fresh harvests of summer. Summer picnics, Thanksgiving and Christmas turkeys. Singing songs, playing the piano. Hiding in the attics, creeping through the root cellar, rolling around in the hay loft. Wheelbarrows and tractors, hitchhiking to the beach, pheasants in the fields. Horseback riding, fresh cut alfalfa, and violent summer storms. Friends remembered, family lost.

We drove up to Kamloops last night, then on to Salmon Arm this morning for an afternoon memorial for Auntie Clara. A relative in every way except for blood, not that it ever mattered. She and Uncle Norman moved to Salmon Arm from Rorketon, Manitoba decades ago followed closely by my Granny (Helen) and Granddad (Bert), close lifelong friends. Neither Auntie Clara nor Uncle Norman had any brothers or sisters, and so they asked my grandparents if they could be Aunt and Uncle to their children, and thus, when my brother and I came along, they were our Great Aunt and Uncle.

I have a few memories of Uncle Norman, one or two hazy ones around the fireplace in the old farm house. But Clara, she was a force in the family. Colourful, feisty, with an intelligence and an insatiable curiosity about people, politics, pets, and places. She was heavily involved in charities, the community, the SPCA – I learned today that she was one of the founding members in Salmon Arm. And, as someone recalled, she had an amazing “crap detector”. She had a memory like no other I have ever encountered. She knew details that even you wouldn’t recall you’d shared, and she made the connections between generations of your family that even you might not have made.

My earliest memories of Auntie Clara involved cats, siamese cats, and she infected me with that love instantly.

How many people do you know who were so determined to not be left behind by technology, that in their 90′s would learn how to use a computer so they could communicate by email? Personally, I know of one, and her name was Clara Johnston.

She was pragmatic, practical, spoke her mind honestly, but respectfully. One wonderful quote that her son relayed today was that Clara once said that “Many people climb Fool’s Mountain, some just spend more time at the top than others do.”

She was animated, dynamic, and so involved with her community. She was part of my education in self honesty, in charity, in curiosity. And when she spoke, her words spun stories and as her hands wove magic to the tales, her bracelets rattling on her wrists.

She traveled the world, was proud to have kissed the Blarney Stone (though that was never even remotely necessary). She visited countries that most of us only dream of. She was down to earth and grounded in reality, but had a vivid grasp of the arts. She was like no one I else I have ever met, nor likely will ever meet again. Her life was a gift to the rest of us. I think what makes her passing so poignant for me is that she was the last link of the same generation of my grandparents. All of my grandparents have been lost, and all of my great aunts and uncles, all of that generation that I had a connection to, who I recall from my childhood in Salmon Arm, have left this world. Clara outlived them all, and now that last thread has been cut. I still have an aunt there, but that is it.

It’s hard to say goodbye, but the wonderful thing about going to a memorial is the stories you hear, the stories you never knew, and the voices that those stories bring to your mind. Clara was one of a kind and she touched everyone she met, that was so apparent in the 200-300 people who filled the seats in the gymnasium at South Broadview School, the school that she taught grade 1 in, the gymnasium that held many people she taught grade 1 to, some of them now in their 60′s. In some ways it was a replay of Granny’s service, also standing room only, 6 years ago. Both foundations of this small community, so many lives did they touch.

Clara was born in 1910 – can you just imagine the things she saw? And the day before her collapse, at 101 and a half years of age, she had been having a conversation on world politics, world economies, the arts, and fine food, with a friend, and was on her walk to get her newspaper at the mall, to get her daily dose of information to further her conversations on these and other topics.

River’s Product Celebrates 100th Birthday

City loses pioneering citizen

Clara’s Memory Leaf

The world is a little dimmer with her gone.

Goodbye Auntie Clara, I’ll miss you. Many people will miss you.

January 28, 2012 – At least as far as the Coquihalla highway in January is concerned.

As a general statement, I hate this highway. No matter what time of year, its only redeeming quality is the ability to get into the Thompson-Shuswap-Okanagan region fast. As much as fast means when you start out in clear weather, then head into fog, followed by rain, then snow. When the road goes from dry, to wet, to compact snow, to slush and slop, back to ice, then dry, then more ice…. you get the picture.

The Coquihalla is a crapshoot in the winter. You hope for the best, but expect the worst.

This is a great commute, all things considered. We’ve seen much, much worse….

We were supposed to be in Seattle today and tomorrow, instead, we are here, driving a mountain highway, in the dark, in the winter, to get to Auntie Clara’s Celebration of Life. And a celebration it will be. There will be sadness at her passing, but there will be a wonderful celebration at the wonderful gift to all of us there, the gift of her presence in our lives. Because she truly was a gift to this world.