Earth day, my day

One year older, no I don't mean Mother Earth since in geological time one year is nothing. (Mind you at the rate we are abusing our poor mother, a year might not be all that long.) No I'm a year older (56 if you want to know). Am I a wiser person? Nope I don't think so, greyer perhaps but not really wiser.
This has been a year of changes and movement.  I travelled with and without my students (see Ecuador trip), I am leaving for another class trip to Washington on Monday and going trekking with students later in May, and all this doesn't include teaching, coaching student teachers and all the other minutiae of my profession. On the home front, Mrs. BB is taking a well deserved retirement (yours truly still has a way to go but that isn't so bad since I like my job) and there are also my two grand-daughters, Zoé and Allsion, who being two year olds, have a lot more energy that poor old grand-dad. But what a wonder it is, exploring the world through their wondering eyes. So as you can see, my life has been rather busy.
I think that that is all we can really expect from life, to do whatever we can, the best we can and try to be a decent human being while doing it. That is about all  the wisdom I have. I know that I'm far from being enlightened and sainthood would sit rather badly on my shoulders (I get rather grumpy with life's stupidities and usually don't suffer fools gladly), but I do my best and that's all I can ask of myself. So here's to another year and may it be as well filled as the last.

Ecuador, Cotopaxi

Ok guys, after some distractions from Kindles and spring, I'll continue with the trip to Ecuador. After having shopped in Otavalo,  went on to Cotopaxi province which is named after the world's highest active volcano. We stayed at a really nice hostel called the "Puerto de Corezon" or in English the door to the heart. It was a really nice place, quite luxurious, with good food. The hostel is at 3600 meters which means that we went to bed exhausted.
The next day off we went to climb Cotopaxi. The bus wheezed up to 4500 meters and from there we hoofed it up to the glacier at 5000 meters. Believe me when I tell you that at 5000 meters (16400 feet) the old engine really pumps oil. ;o) At that a height you are only breathing in 50% of the oxygen you get at sea level, so the only way to go is slow but sure by just putting one foot in front of the other.

Cotopaxi

Spring has sprung

Here in the Great White North, winter seems to be rapidly losing its grip on our land and lakes. The lakes are melting and the maple sap is running already. Jazz will be particularly happy that it's over. ;o)

My Kindle has arrived

On another note I received my Kindle today and I am now playing around with it. The principal reason I bought it, beside the fact that it’s a nice guy toy, is that every time Mrs. BB and I travel we carry around a ton of books that we finally leave behind where ever we are going. With the Kindle I can carry all my books with me in a small convenient package that is way lighter than a dozen books.
On another note I am trying out MacJournal as a as a blogging writer, hopefully it’ll work out. So if there are any problems, let me know.

Good karma no less... travel to Ecuador part 2

While we were in the village, it was not always work, work, work. We were also invited to many festivities where we participated whole heartedly. They shared their culture with us and we shared our Québecois culture with them. One night, it was singing and dancing and another it was our "Souper Québecois" where we initiated the village to the good old sugar shack menu of eggs, beans and maple syrup. At first they were a little leery of beans and eggs soaked in maple syrup, but once they tasted it they were fans. We fed over 100 people that night and left them with a dozen cans of maple syrup that we had left over. We also visited their preschool and were treated to a native dance by the little ones to thank us for the donation of clothing and shoes we had made to them. (One of the things that we do each year is collect and buy school supplies, good serviceable clothing and shoes throughout  the year and each of us brings an extra suitcase crammed with 50 lbs of stuff we collected and bought.)

 Here are some pictures of where we stayed in the village.

After leaving the village, the first place we went to was Lake Cuicocha. This lake is in the caldera of an extinct volcano. We walked around the lake on the rim of the the caldera, a 3 hour walk along steep cliffs dropping down to the water below.

After our invigorating march around the lake, which by the way is at 3900 metres, we went down tho the restaurant by the lake and had a really good meal.
Then on to Otavalo to visit the artisans and do some souvenir shopping. We mostly bought directly from those who produced rather than from the stores, fair trade at its best, but we did, the next day, visit the market to finish shopping. We had already shopped for things in the small local market of Chicapamba but the market at Otavalo is much bigger and has a much more diverse products. I bought some really nice jewelry for Mrs. BB, some beautiful wool knit sweaters for my grand-daughters, a beautiful woven wool pull over for my son's birthday. Needless to say that we did our part for the local economy. ;o) I know it's materialistic but the things there are really beautiful and the price they ask is ridiculously low. Since we mostly bought directly from the producers, it eases our conscience a little. ;o)
So the next post will be onto the Cotopaxi, the highest volcano in the world.

Good karma no less... travel to Ecuador

I've been pretty much out of touch for the last two weeks since I have travelling with twenty three of my students. We left February 12th and returned today February 25th at midnight. Where did we go you ask? We went to Ecuador to help a small native village called Chilcapamba fix up their local church.
Each year in our school sends students from the International Education Program on a humanitarian trip. This year my colleague Lyne and I organized it with 23 Secondary 4 and 5 students, and off we went. The trip is organized so that we do the work at the beginning and then we get to play tourist so the kids can visit Ecuador's natural beauty.
This trip is not an easy cultural jaunt since we live in rather primitive (a least by our standards) but comfortable accommodations and it includes a lot of hard work. For example, a hot shower was almost impossible to get, usually we had to content ourselves with an ice cold shower that dribbled rather than showered. But there were compensations, the food was abundant and nutritious and the villagers quickly adopted us. When we left there were tears all around, we were family.
The village had built a new community centre which was attached to the church, but the church was in poor repair and there was the bathroom to finish between the two buildings. So we scrapped all of the walls inside and out, then put on a coat of resin primer over the brick and finally we repainted it with two coats of white paint with blue trim.  Then we cleaned everything up and we were in business. We also helped put the roof on the toilets and paint the interior. Besides our hard work, a part of the cost of the trip went directly to the villagers which permitted them to buy all the material needed for the renovations.
Here are some pictures of the work that we did.

 Before we started.

 

Sanding the walls

 

Painting the inside

 

Painting the outside

 

Finishing the blue trim with the help of the local children.

After we had finished.

I'll write about the rest of the trip in the next post. So hasta la proxima.

The mouse that roared

I found this on the Internet and found it hilarious. It is by the animator John Nolan and so no actual mice were hurt by the making of it. Enjoy.

 

Weird winter

Well my cross country skiing will be finished for a while since yesterday's weather was to say the least warm (10 C/50 F) and wet (40 mm / 1.5 in of rain). We are really having a warm winter up here with temperatures way above normal. What is strange is that the south eastern US are freezing their butts off and Europe has been snowed under.
Go figure. Of this keeps up we'll soon
Be sending our winter tires down south.



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Haiku on skis

In a recent post my lil sister Jazz waxed poetic about her life at the moment... quite literally in the form of a poem. Here is my contribution to the poetic form inspired by my cross country skiing this morning.

Swishing of my skis
Shadows of trees barring my trail...
All winter wonder.

Fixed the second picture I hope. Funny It seemed to work for me. Oh well, that's blogger for you.

Sunset on the lake

Here a picture of the sunset I took yesterday while cross country skiing by the Lac des Deux Montagnes. It was rather cold but it was the first sunny day we've had in weeks.





Isn't technology great? Here is the exact place where the preceding picture was taken.

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Winter Solstice

Yesterday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year where darkness is at its height and daylight at its least. From now on the day will gain time as the night gradually shrinks. This day has been important for pretty much all of human history, our ancestors rejoiced on this day because the sun was again on the ascendancy.
When we were in Ireland we visited Newgrange, a neolithic tomb that is 5000 years old, which makes it older than the pyramids at Giza and 1000 years older than Stonehenge. This mega tomb was built completely without metal tools and is really, really huge. In fact we saw other passage tombs that had not been completely cleared away and they resembled hills. What is remarkable is that the passage way to the burial chamber in the depths of the burial mound is perfectly aligned with the rising sun on the winter solstice. As the sun rises over the horizon, the light creeps along the roof of the passage way and just as the sun clears the horizon it illuminates the burial chamber for a brief moment before creeping back down the floor of the passage as the sun climbs higher in the sky. What is remarkable is that our ancestors 5000 years ago were able to figure out precisely the angle and inclination of the passageway to achieve this and were able to build it into their tomb without our modern technology. In fact they didn't even have metal tools but were using stone, bones and wood to build this. This is truly awesome  and is a testament to human ingenuity.

 Newgrange Neolithic Tomb

The passageway in Knowth the sister tomb to Newgrange

The entrance to the tomb, the opening above the entrance permits the light to enter on the winter solstice. Notice the spirals carved on one of the entrance stones, these spirals are found carved on many of the stones used to built the tombs and probably had great spiritual significance.

What's The Difference?

A couple of years ago the then mayor of Montréal came up with a new slogan for the city, "Une Île une Ville" which roughly means one island one city. What he wanted to do was merge all the municipalities into one huge city, which he would be the mayor of. Why would he do that? Well Montréal's finances were a mess, the city was deeply in debt and it was a simple way of making some cash by getting a nice cash cow in the West Island which would never have enough representation to do something about it. Now the PQ provincial government of the time was in a centralizing mode saying that bigger was better.
Needless to say that most of the citizens of the West Island municipalities did not take kindly to this and raised a mega stink. The provincial government being the highly democratic entity that it was, simply overruled everyone and merged the cities. After all they knew that nobody from the West Island would vote for them anyway being separatists, since there was a good percentage of Anglos and immigrants. To make a long story short, finally the Liberals were elected partly on the promise of being willing to demerge the already merged island. Came the big day and most of the West Island communities voted to demerge, but some of them didn't get the percentages to demerge so they stayed a part of Montréal. Now what difference does it make you ask? Well as they say a picture is worth a thousand words. These are pictures I took as I was walking to the pharmacy tonight.The first picture is of Pierrefond's sidewalks The second is a picture of the sidewalks of Kirkland which demerged and the third is a picture of the path through the neighbourhood park. I rest my case, bigger is not better it's just less efficient.









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Ouch the sharp end of pricky things

Our school went in today to get the students vaccinated against the H1N1 flu and I accompanied them. Since I was already there, I finally gave in and got the shot. (It's hard not to when you've been telling the kids that there is nothing to worry about, that it doesn't hurt a bit and then turn around and refuse to get it yourself.) Mind you, I think that the whole situation is very highly overrated and is more the product if the media circus than anything approaching reality. But since I have 20 month old twin grand daughters, Allison and Zoé, I won't take the chance because they had yet to be vaccinated because of a cold the last time I saw them. I really wouldn't want them to catch it from me.
This means that in the last couple of weeks I've had more sharp objects poked into me than I've had in a very long time. Let's see, I gave blood then I got four vaccinations for the Ecuador Humanitarian trip in February (The yellow fever is a real bitch, it hurts like hell) and now the H1N1 vaccine. Hopefully my hide won't be punctured again for a while. ;o)

First snow

Woke up this morning and it's snowing. Jazz will be in a foul mood for the day at least. Hopefully soon there will be enough to cross country ski. On the other hand we'll be stuck shoveling, wearing winter coats and boots. I hope that it'll be a cold dry winter and we won't keep having a mixture of snow, sleet and rain all the time.






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