Relearning Old Lessons

I've just left the board of REACH after four years. REACH is a community health centre that's been providing team-based health care to people in East Vancouver for over 35 years. As you might expect from an organization formed in the early seventies, it has a lot of notions of democratic decision making in the workplace.

I don't think you have to be a seventies-era alternative health care provider to share management challenges with REACH. Lots of workplaces these days think they've "empowered" their employees, or spend a lot of effort trying to build consensus around new initiatives.

Over the last few months I've had cause to drag up my old, battered photocopy of an essay that someone gave me way back in my political days in Saskatoon: The Tyranny of Structurelessness by Joreen. It has so much to say about social organizations and power relationships. It's well worth reading if you're a health care administrator, or any kind of manager for that matter. What it has to say is right on, even if the language is a bit dated. (I'd forgotten that "rap group" used to mean something quite different from Snoop Dogg.)

One person to whom I sent the link recently said, "I'm only on page three, and my head is nodding in agreement so much my neck hurts."

As a humorous aside, I was complaining about how hard it was to e-mail the scanned version that I had meticulously made when Angela pointed out that if you Google the title you get over 8,000 hits. And on the interesting side, as I was poking around Jo Freeman's ("Joreen's") site, I discovered an amazing article she wrote about the poor white southerners who fought for the North in the U.S. Civil War.

The Cat

Marc drew a picture of his cat Juanita:

Thomas the Tank Engine

In June we went to Squamish to see Thomas the Tank Engine. It was an opportunity to take a ride in a real train, with Thomas at the front "pulling". Squamish used to be BC Rail's main maintenance site, and after BC Rail was sold the area was taken over by a historical railway society, so they actually have enough rail for a half hour ride there and back.

There was of course lots of promotions to buy Thomas stuff. Fortunately Marc's need to acquire Thomas stuff has waned. We bought a large Thomas helium balloon, but that was more because of the novelty of a balloon that floated, not that it was Thomas.

For me the most interesting part are all the old trains. They've finished the restoration of the Royal Hudson. When we first moved to Vancouver I saw the Royal Hudson steaming up to Whistler a few times when I was riding my bike on the north shore. I wonder if they're ever going to take it out for regular runs again?

Marc´s Eagles

Marc lives surrounded by bald eagles. This one is in the park adjacent to his pre-school. The tree is a few metres from Hastings Street, the main street in this part of town, and a few hundred metres from the Trans-Canada Highway. We've walked around the base of the tree and found the remains of their meals, including the carcass of a salmon that must have weighed 10 pounds when it was alive. Usually this poor eagle is being attacked by crows, who obviously don't like having an eagle for a neighbour.

The other eagle lives in a tree in the yard of a house between our place and Marc's babysitter's house. The yard isn't particularly big or anything, but there's the tree with an eagle in it. Today the eagle was just standing on a limb. I asked it to look my way buy it didn't pay attention.

Yet Another Route

Here's another ride. If you want flats around here you go to Richmond or Delta, which for me means going over the top of Vancouver. Then it's flat like Saskatchewan, or flatter, since you're on the delta for the Fraser River. There're no great routes going north-south in Vancouver, so I often end up on rather busy streets. Here's the map.

Drooling into the Blanket Spread Over My Lap Can't Be Far Behind

Last weekend while cleaning up for Marc's play dates, I realized I couldn't find my new cheque books, the ones we need because the cheque format is changing. After spending significant time searching -- eventually everything was clean but I kept looking -- Angela said, "Are you sure you weren't supposed to go pick them up at the credit union?" A quick call confirmed that they'd been waiting for me at the branch since December. Doh!

Feminist Conspiracy Theories

My sister Diane says blogs are a feminist conspiracy to get men to communicate. I like that. It reminds my of how when laptops first came out, men suddenly wanted to take minutes at meetings, because it meant they got to use the cool technology. Now that laptops are everyday, men have gone back to avoiding taking minutes.

Them Old Bones Did Something They've Never Done Before

I found a new two-hour workout, but this one is a different from the others: 55 minutes of continuous climb. I don't think I've done that since perhaps my trip from Banff to Jasper about 25 years ago.
The climb was to the parking lot for the ski area at Mt. Seymour -- about 1,023 metres above sea level. The 55 minutes started at about 120 metres above sea level. There's quite a bit of uphill just to get to the entrance to the park.
Coming back down took 14 minutes, with a top speed of 64 kph.
I probably could have gone a bit faster, but I was too scared. One thing I've really noticed about me relatively new bike is that it feels way more stable on the downhills. I used to always buy the cheapest bike a bike store would sell. I now have a Surly Cross-Check, which is a cyclocross frame because I mostly commute.
Here's the Google map. These maps are most interesting to look at in hybrid mode.

Them Old Bones

Today I did my "Three Laps of Stanley Park" workout. I take it easy down to the park, then try to do three laps at the same speed, or ideally faster each lap. Two weeks ago I did the classic silly trick of burning up the first lap and then having nothing left for lap three. Today I still did the first lap a bit faster than the other two, but at least the third lap was faster than the second.

Unfortunately, I'm paying the price. My knee is sore -- actually the back of the knee. I discovered on the weekend that it's the digging I'm doing in the yard that wrecks it. I'm doing a lot of digging these days as we remodel the garden. Unfortunately, once the digging wrecks my knee, the cycling aggravates it. Maybe I need to stop pretending I'm 25.

The ride in the park is great for variety. It's up and down and has almost no straight bits. I find it a challenge to put together the lessons I'm learning about spinning the pedals in the park environment. I can spin when it's a longer flat stretch, but it's harder when you're constantly rolling up and down.

We're already into the time of year when an afternoon, even a weekday afternoon, means lots of tourist traffic. Today it was worth waiting for the afternoon, as it was sunny and 15 degrees or so.

I'm almost used to all the new views in the park. Last year's windstorms really changed the face of the park. Maybe that's why there were so many tourists wandering on the road: many parts of the seawall are closed, so people can't walk around the park like they used to.

There's no Google map for the route today. At least not yet. The road around the park is too twisty to map in the amount of time I have.

Irritants from the Lower Mainland

People who live in the Lower Mainland (Vancouver, etc.) can be irritants, and this post aims to prove it.

Last Friday we had our first asparagus of the year out of our own garden. We'd already finished off the first rhubarb crisp of the year from our garden. Yesterday we left a rhubarb pie with Karen and Brad. The tulips have died off already, as have the cherry blossoms.

Of course, people in the rest of Canada haven't been mowing their lawn for the past two months, either...

Another Bike Route

Here's another two-hour bike route. This one has some parts that go through a lot of traffic but none of it is particularly conflictive. The hills are near the start and end, with some nice long flat bits to practice spinning in the middle. There are some great views once you get out past Burnaby and into the valley. Yesterday Mount Baker, the big volcano in Washington State, was quite clearly looming over the Fraser Valley.

Here's the Google map of the route.

Yesterday I was still averaging over 33 kph when I got to the top of the big hill about 15 minutes from the end. Around Ottawa I used to often do rides at 33+ kph, but since coming to Vancouver I haven't been able to go that fast. It must be the hills.

Sunday on the Beach

Sunday we went to Sunset Beach in downtown Vancouver. Marc still fits in his trailer, but just barely. The headwind on the way to the beach was quite cold, despite the bright sun. It's nice to have urban beaches; if only it were warm enough to enjoy them more than a few weekends per year.

Biking in Vancouver

I just got back from two hours on the bike in the pouring rain. Sure, you have a great variety of roads here and beautiful scenery in the Lower Mainland, but you need to be able to see it to enjoy it. When it rains here, you can't see much more than the trees or houses on either side of the road. Such is cycling in Vancouver.

Since I'm between contracts, I'm not commuting on my bike. So I'm doing some of the longer rides that I haven't done in about seven years. I had found a bunch of nice routes that I can do in about two hours. It's more of a struggle to do them in two hours now. They must have made the hills steeper or something. It can't have anything to do with the fact that I'm almost fifty now.

Following Andrew's lead, as I do on most things, I created a Google map of the route I did today.

Marc's First Soccer Game

Marc played his first soccer game yesterday. He had lots of fun in the warm-ups.

When he wasn't picked to play in the first shift, he got upset and didn't want to play anymore. Of course, he didn't tell me why he didn't want to play until almost half time.Once we figured out why he didn't want to play, he had fun. He played goal for the first part of the second half and made several good saves.

At the end of the game he was very upset because he didn't score any goals. I have no idea where this came from. I finally told Marc that I almost never scored goals when I played hockey as a kid. He said, "Why not?" I said, "I was a terrible hockey player." This seemed to make him happier.