A very good food day

Still life with Fruit and Veg­eta­bles from Granville Market

Hav­ing a farmer’s mar­ket nearby (in our case, Granville Island) means that we not only get pretty ‘still life’ pic­tures like this one, but some days are par­tic­u­larly good, food-wise.
Break­fast today was a big bowl of fresh peaches, rasp­ber­ries, blue­ber­ries and straw­ber­ries, toast, and scram­bled organic eggs. Lunch was mixed greens and the last of those cherry toma­toes, brie, but­terkäse, coun­try paté and french bread. For din­ner, we had locally grown roasted pota­toes and rose­mary, steamed patty-pan squash with car­rots and pork chops with sautéed onions, fresh chopped sage and olives. Not too shabby.

Fol­lowup:
The next day wasn’t bad either, espe­cially din­ner: Filets of Sole with lemon, but­ter and pars­ley, Cous­cous with shred­ded parme­san and fresh Swiss Chard (from the farmer him­self this morn­ing — Thurs­day is when the truck mar­ket sets up just out­side Granville Mar­ket and you get to meet and deal with the farm­ers face-to-face. I make it a point to make it to Granville Island that day — it reminds me of the won­der­ful Farmer’s mar­kets we used to go to in Wait­s­field, Vermont.)

Meeting People and Asking (or Giving) Directions

I’ve been get­ting out and meet­ing new friends. There are the Weblog­gers Meet-Ups, where I recently met Jan Karls­b­jerg (who was kind enough to blog about me), Heather, and Will Pate, as well as Ianiv Schwe­ber and his fiance, Arieanna. I’ve also met sev­eral peo­ple though the BC Game­lan, as well as the VanUE (Van­cou­ver User Expe­ri­ence group), who also hold monthly meet­ings, begin­ning this month. Pam con­tin­ues to meet peo­ple through the STC (Soci­ety for Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions).
My gen­eral impres­sion is that there are lots of new­com­ers to Van­cou­ver — a good sign, I think. When peo­ple want to move to a place, for what­ever rea­son, it usu­ally means that it’s a good place to be. We always felt that way when we were in Ver­mont (I remem­ber our times in Wait­s­field, where we were sur­prised when we actu­ally did meet a native Ver­mon­ter). For Canada, it has such a high rate of immi­gra­tion that there’s actu­ally a mag­a­zine for new immi­grants to Canada (mostly from Asia, as one would expect, but also from Africa, Europe and Aus­tralia).
When there are lots of peo­ple mov­ing to a place, peo­ple and orga­ni­za­tions (and even pub­lic venues) tend to be a bit bet­ter about not assum­ing you know what to do or where to go. In Boston, sig­nage was seen as a silly add-on, or maybe even an admis­sion of weak­ness. After all, why point out what every­body should already know, haven’t you been here long enough? Or as they say in the ver­nac­u­lar, ‘Whad­daya retAHded?’ Here in Van­cou­ver, one not only has signs and maps, but also ori­en­ta­tion guides, brochures and tons of infor­ma­tion booths and peo­ple offer­ing help and direc­tions (the bus dri­vers are even polite about offer­ing advice about where to trans­fer to get to a cer­tain area!). Maybe it takes a crit­i­cal mass of new­bies to make soci­ety in gen­eral aware that not every­one knows every­thing about where you live and how to get from point A to point B. I’ve taken some plea­sure in giv­ing out direc­tions to a few peo­ple. Must mean I don’t look like I’m a fish out of water here, if ever I did.

A Follow-up Graphic

After that polit­i­cal car­toon, I was inter­ested to find this jux­ta­po­si­tion of Grover Norquist’s quote about shrink­ing the Fed­eral Gov­ern­ment with a photo of the New Orleans dis­as­ter. It shows just what hap­pens if you start dis­man­tling the infra­struc­ture you may need some day to pro­tect and help your pop­u­la­tion. Sooner or later, it catches up with you. Bush and his peo­ple made two gam­bles. One was in the first sum­mer of his first term regard­ing whether or not he should pay atten­tion to reports that read ‘Bin Laden Deter­mined to Attack the US’. The other gam­ble was that he ignore sim­i­lar warn­ings regard­ing the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of the US coast­line along the Gulf of Mex­ico to Hur­ri­canes. As we all can see, both of those gam­bles didn’t pay off.

One thing we’ve learned about Canada is some­thing I’ve felt in my gut, but now can tell in my wal­let and every­day life. Just like any­thing else, Gov­ern­ment fol­lows the gen­eral prin­ci­pal that ‘You get what you pay for.’ Sure, taxes are higher here. In fact, they’re painfully high at times. I keep hav­ing to remind myself when we eat out, that besides the tip, there’s PST and GST (Provin­cial Sales Tax and Goods and Ser­vices Tax) to the bill that often pushes it far higher than I’d have expected. But, there are many things you get for those high taxes; Every­body gets health care at a frac­tion the cost of the US. There’s good mass tran­sit. There are well-maintained pub­lic parks, roads and bridges.Kids get schools, no mat­ter where they are. There’s no bud­get deficit. And this past week there’s been a fire in a bog to the south of here, and smoke has been cloud­ing the skies on a daily basis, but there’s been no dis­as­ter, because prompt and well-managed teams of fire­fight­ers and heli­copters have been bat­tling the fire back. No fiasco, no recrim­i­na­tions, no ‘blame game’, etc. Just com­pe­tence, and our tax dol­lars insur­ing that the gov­ern­ment is doing what it’s sup­posed to do first and fore­most, keep us safe. I won’t say that every­thing is per­fect here, but we sure aren’t see­ing the same level of neglect, and I, unlike Mr. Norquist, want my gov­ern­ment larger than a ham­ster or kitten.

A Nation Secure...

A Nation Secure…
Orig­i­nally uploaded by andyi.

My friend Andy back in Boston got this from a Sun-Times polit­i­cal cartoonist.

I fear that if Bush and Cheney are in charge for 3 more years, there won’t be a US to the south of us any more. Pam and I escaped, but what is going to hap­pen to every­body down there?

So sad about New Orleans. I never did get to visit there, despite talk­ing about it sev­eral times. Now it’s gone. Prob­a­bly for good.