The Joys of January

I rode my bike to work every day last week. It's been six weeks or more since I've been able to say that, what with holidays around Christmas, and the Vancouver black ice. I think I'm a little more chicken after my crash last February so I might have missed a few days that I would have ridden last year.

The problem with winter cycling in Vancouver is that we have so many days that are right on the edge of freezing. For example, last week we had two days with snow on the ground overnight at my house, but down the hill on Commercial Drive (maybe 25m lower) there was only rain.

This translates into conditions that are hard to guess. The day I crashed last year I had ridden about 10 kms already, over a range of elevations, and had pretty good traction. Then suddenly in one roundabout I'm sliding along the pavement on my hip and shoulder.

We get days where the fog off the ocean touches the pavement and freezes. Now that I'm getting too old to crash I'm trying to talk myself out of riding when there might be ice. But it's frustrating because the freezing nights are usually because the sky is clear, so those are the days where the afternoon might nice.

The last couple of weeks have been less icy, but only because we're going through the typical Vancouver rainfest. So one rides every day, with water streaming off one's face...

The Tooth Fairy

The Tooth Fairy dropped by on Friday, January 4. Marc lost his first tooth at daycare, just a few minutes before I came by to pick him up.

In his mind, Marc understands that the Tooth Fairy and el Ratoncito Peréz are the same person, but like superheros, it's a person with two identities.

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.