Current Events

In the Victoria area there are more than a dozen easily accesible golf courses — a few more if you broaden the search to the entire CRD. They range from the ridiculously affordable (and relatively un-challenging) Henderson 9-hole course — just $8.50 for 9 holes, $14.60 if you want to do two rounds as your 18 — to the rather pricey Royal Colwood course where 18 holes will set you back $165 in peak season. I was actually stunned by the range in green fees but that’s nothing compared to club membership, required at about half the local courses. Membership at the world-famous Victoria Golf Club (thanks in part to Bob Hope) will run you $35K plus monthly dues around $250 — and don’t imagine that price earns you the right to wear what’s comfortable.

So it’s no surprise that regulars are up in arms about the Cedar Hill Golf Course scaling back operations in the restaurant. There’s no talk yet of green fee changes but I would suspect that is under consideration (they were dropped for 2011-2012, from $40 to $35 for 18 holes).  If you missed the news (or aren’t local), the Cedar Hill Golf Course & Restaurant are collectively running a huge deficit  (and have been since 2007); in 2012, they are expected to hit $1M in the red.

Oddly, one of the biggest costs is paying back $187K annually to the Municipality of Saanich (who also operate the golf course) to pay for a $2M irrigation system, installed in 2006. (Here, I’ll make the math easy for you: costly irrigation installed in 2006. In the red since 2007. Hmmmm.) [source, see last bullet point.] A big part of the deficit for the restaurant is projected repairs;  but rather than raise food prices (a grilled cheese with fries will cost you only $8 right now) and/or court more use of its banquet room, the knee-jerk reaction is to close the community hangout, popular with seniors.

For seniors, staying active is critical and golf is a popular activity. There’s easily 600 to 700 hectares dedicated to golf courses in the region — this is dwarfed by the 11,500 hectares of parks and trails managed by the CRD alone (municipal, provincial and national parks add even more to the total) and yet golf courses do require an abundance of irrigation and other maintenance, far more than the average park or trail. We also have many recreation centres and other sporting facilities, and a climate that allows for year-round outdoor activity — including, but not limited to golf.

There’s lots of reasons that people pick on golf courses though. They are single-purpose large tracts of land that eschew native vegetation for invasive grasses; they tend toward the elitist (see above dress code link); and they take up some valuable real estate in a market where housing is stupidly expensive.

However, the Cedar Hill Golf Course in particular is special to me.

My grandfather, after retirement, golfed a round there every morning. It was the last thing he did before he had the aneurysm that would put him in hospital and ultimately end his life. The course and its clubhouse/restaurant were his community.

There’s no easy fix for a bill this big. Saanich Municipality is going to have to find a way out of it and unless they have access to a windfall, or some anonymous donors (the membership and monthly fees of just 26 members of the Victoria Golf course would erase Cedar Hill’s deficit), or a Time Lord willing to sort things out, they are going to have to make some tough choices and I doubt they will be popular.

The next step in the current urban homesteading trend is raising animals for meat. Several cities and towns have started to look at bylaws surrounding the issue as urban farmers want to step up from eggs to something more — whether chickens, geese, rabbits, goats, or other smaller food animals. Locally, one former city counsellor expressed an interest in amending our bylaws to include a provision for keeping goats for dairy, but not food. It is still illegal to slaughter any animal in the City of Victoria1.

A recent Slate article, “Farmer Groupies and Chicken Coddlers,” that frames urban homesteading as a nostalgia-inspired movement2, has an interesting take on slaughtering those animals,

These unsettled DIYers are operating in a particularly weird moral environment, caught between ideal and reality. On the one hand, there’s the locavore lust for authenticity that promises that slaughtering your own food will be an adventure in self-discovery. On the other hand, we have developed a complex ethical and emotional connection with animals that makes us really uncomfortable with their pain, even if we tell ourselves it’s less than if the animal had spent its life in a factory farm.

That “weird moral environment” is why I’ve said flat out to Mike that in the post-apocalyptic world, I will be a vegetarian because I cannot imagine killing, let alone preparing the animal for food. Even now, I can’t eat food that has a face (e.g. fish with the head still attached) or even resembles its original form too closely (e.g. cornish game hens).  I also have trouble getting past the cultural bias against insects/larvae and similar. Other than that, I’m much more flexible than I was as a child. I would say without hesitation that among family (parents & sibling) I have the broadest palate but it pales in comparison to Mike’s. Still, I consider myself an omnivore. Plus I really like meat.

Recently, a friend announced she would be learning how to slaughter chickens because “feeding ourselves as naturally and in as few industrial steps as possible” is a priority for her and her family. I reacted almost vicerally — just reading it made my stomach lurch as I thought back to my childhood. We had backyard chickens for many years when I was a kid but after successive raccoon attacks the remainder were stressed and no longer producing so my father slaughtered them. I watched from what I thought was a safe distance but the image of the legendary headless chicken is etched permanently on my brain.

Of course, I didn’t have the option of choosing to be a vegetarian, like my daughter has — as a kid, we ate what was in front of us or we didn’t eat. It’s been frustrating at times to accomodate Kiddo’s choice because while she is unwilling to eat meat, she looks the other way with things like gravy and soup stock. She is also picky about vegetables and legumes so she ends up with a lot more soy in her diet than I’d like. At least she eats fish… but not with heads attached.

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1 See City of Victoria ByLaw 11-044: Animal Control; while it does not specifically outlaw slaughtering, it requires care and veterinary intervention where necessary. I have heard from several urban chicken keepers that they take their chickens to other municipalities when it is time for them to be killed.

2 This suggestion deserves it’s own retort in a separate post.

Ego can be a fragile thing, as easily built up as it is crushed, often with just a few words or these days a few clicks of a social media button. Being a writer and putting one’s words out there — be they fiction or fact — requires a certain amount of ego protection — a thick outer skin.

In a world where anyone who has access to a computer can publish their work, stories of feuds with critics have become all too common. In part because in this same world, the recommendation engine needs to be constantly stoked by new critics and everyone’s a critic. Moreover, critics and creators are separated only by bandwidth; there is no built-in buffer between publication of a review and a letter written to the reviewer; and with the popularity of self-publishing, there is no editor to talk a writer down before he or she says something they will regret later.

On the flip side, the easier it is to publish, the harder it becomes to find an audience. Even finding someone willing to critique works is a challenge in this flooded market. Readers have more choice than ever but writers need to fight for eyes more than ever.

This does nothing for the fragile ego of the writer. While it can be a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don’t predicament, it is almost always worth getting work critiqued. In the past, that was the job of the editor, now we have to brand ourselves and rely on our fans, friends & family, and hope for an honest review.

Other options? Writers’ groups (which one friend recently referred to bluntly as “public masturbation”), content-for-comment (where a free copy is given to a blogger willing to promote or review it), or hustle-hustle-hustle and hope for some starred reviews on your bookseller page.

So, if you know a writer and are willing and able to offer some feedback, talk to them. Most writers are happy to offer free reading copies and if you get into the game early enough, you may find your own name in print in the acknowledgements or even the dedication.

Time management and its big brother Project Management are key to any business but they also apply to families and other groups too. Directly related to both, scheduling has become a four letter word in our house.

In any week we may have to juggle: meetings with clients, meetings with other freelancers, medical appointments, birthday parties, gaming sessions, Purpose Party check-ins, vehicle maintenance, business mixers, parent-teacher consultations, classes, plus the usual household management tasks (cooking/laundry/housework).

This past week we’ve had the added circus of dealing with financial institutions and credit agencies after my employer, thanks to a lack of both physical security and also data encryption, put the personal and financial information of approximately 11,000 people into the hands of thieves following a break-in.1

People ask me, “How do you do so much?” My answer is almost always a variation on, “Juggling; I keep several balls in the air at any given time.”

In reality, they aren’t all nice standard juggling balls with even weight and the same texture. Instead, some manifest as cats (who really don’t like to be thrown) and some as chainsaws (that have to be caught just so, in order to avoid injury). Others morph while in the air, presenting suddenly as bricks that require the juggler to adjust their balance or as feathers that simply blow off course and disappear. Once in a while a ball gets out of sync and either falls/drops or must be batted away.

Once I look at it through the visual I just painted, I can’t believe I get anything done, and yet I do. Here’s how:

1. Goals. — again, I come back to the Purpose Party. Once I set some long-term Big Goals, prioritizing got a little easier; saying “no” to stuff that wasn’t going to get me closer to my goal also got easier. If I find myself making excuses, I have to examine whether the task/event is important. My motto has become, “If it’s important, you’ll find a way. If it isn’t, you’ll find an excuse.”

2. Calendar(s) — I use Google Calendar but separate my events into multiple calendar feeds: one for personal stuff, one for Those DeWolfes Creative stuff, one for Kiddo’s events/appointments. I also import my UVic appointments, and committed Meetup.com events. Mike has access to add events, too. Knowing what’s on the horizon makes it easier to manage what-happens-next.

3. Automation — sometimes, tech can be an amazing help. From setting the dishwasher to run overnight to scheduling social media and blog posts, when timing matters, it’s nice to have some microchips at one’s beck and call.

4. Productive Procrastination — sometimes, I can’t (for whatever reason) focus on the task at hand, I will go do something else and about 70% of the time, it is something else on The List — whether that’s filing papers, washing dishes, writing a future blog post or article, or knitting a few rows of a project. Anything on The List is keeping the balls, chainsaws and cats in the air.

5. Balance — while tricky, I have been aiming for a better balance between the mental and the physical and also between the solitary and the social. As an introvert, I do struggle with the social engagements but being mindful of the need for balance keeps me “honest.” Gardening and walking help me balance the physical with the mental, as does crafting. I may not break out in a sweat when I knit but it exercises different muscles and different parts of my brain.

6. Support — I cannot stress enough how important it is that Mike knows and supports my goals, reminds me as deadlines approach or when my balance is significantly off, and doesn’t give me (too much) grief when I procrastinate, productively or otherwise.

That’s how I get things done but sometimes things go off the rails, thanks to those bricks, and fumbled chainsaws. Trying to schedule more than a couple of people (cats!) is usually a good way to throw things off; and that’s when one more thing can be of use:

7. Flexibility — I still need a lot of work with this one, but it is a big part of what has been helping to get stuff done in the last year; being able to change direction, roll with it, pick up the fumbled chainsaw and get the balls back in the air.

1Read Mike’s thoughts on the situation – they’re not far from my own — or read an early CTV news account.

Found via Scribd

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While I am getting ready for WordCamp and trying to keep all the other balls in the air, I have been trying to procrastinate in a creative way — still producing stuff that is useful. Here’s what I did while avoiding other stuff this weekend:

After watching Hobo with a Shotgun late Friday night, I was reminded of Machine Girl which we found thanks to Netflix last fall. I wrote a combined review for both, since they fall into the same category of “splatter films”

Where do you go when over the top isn’t far enough? I’m not sure, but when you get there, you’ll find the team behind the 2011 Canadian grindcore/splatter film, Hobo with a Shotgun. [Read full review at the MediaNook]

Today, as part of the preparation for WordCamp and after my musing last week, I started a new podcast: Grid Memories. The first episode is up now.

“Beginnings” looks back on the first five years of the Victoria Grid Project, a community photography project documenting Victoria, BC one square kilometre at a time. Cheryl DeWolfe is one of the photographers who has been on board since the first month; here she looks back at where the project came from and where it’s going. [Read the rest or download the audio over on Around InnerHarbour]

Now, back to Prezi so I can get the presentation ready for Saturday!!