In 1902, the Picton High School classics master was looking for a way for his staff to entertain themselves on long winter evenings. In a County whose motto is, “Blessed by Nature, Enriched by Man, Loyally Founded, Loyally Built,” the Tennyson Club was just the ticket for such enrichment. After all, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the British Poet Laureate, who penned "The Charge of the Light Brigade,” had just died 10 years earlier in 1892. And Tennyson himself, while at Trinity College in Cambridge, had joined The Apostles, a literary club.
The Picton Tennyson Club was part of a much larger late 19th and early 20th Century explosion of literary societies in rural Ontario. One of the best-known members of the Tennyson Club in Picton was composer Gena Branscombe. Born in Picton to a United Empire Loyalist family, she graduated from Picton High School before going on to study music in Chicago and composition in Berlin. The Macaulay Club in Chatham got its start in 1882; the Twenty Club of Lindsay in 1892; and the Tuesday Reading Club of Woodstock in 1896. Indeed, self-improvement manifested itself in numerous forms during the period. This was also the era of the Chautauqua movement, named after the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly founded in New York State in 1874 as an educational experiment in out-of-school, vacation learning. It was broadened almost immediately beyond courses for Sunday school teachers to include academic subjects, music, art and physical education. Likewise, it was the era of the Carnegie libraries – so named after Scottish-born American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie – including two striking examples extant locally in Wellington and Picton.
The Tennyson Club in Picton has evolved over 105 years from a purely musical and literary group into an eclectic mix covering a spectrum of interests. Today, life-long residents of the County and newcomers may find themselves side to side in the Tennyson Club, although membership is limited to 30 as they meet six evenings a year from September to May on a rotating basis in members’ homes. The 30 members are divided into six groups of five, with each group responsible for putting on a program for one evening a season. The form of the program is up to the presenters: it can be a debate, discussion, theatre, art, music, games, etc. Programs in recent years have included, “The County – Whither Goest Thou?”; “Drama – Mirror of the Age;” and “The Enterprising Mind.”
So, enjoy the nice summer weather by all means, but remember to keep it in the County while improving your mind and spirits when the cold westerly winds again begin to blow off Lake Ontario. For more information on the Tennyson Club you can call their president, Margaret Moore at (613) 393-5771 or reach her by e-mail at: moorejo@reach.net
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Spreading the ‘Good News:’ International Christian media and Prince Edward County
Burlington, Ont. may have Crossroads Christian Communications’ 100 Huntley Street, but Bloomfield has Wesley Acres at West Lake, a 250-acre island camp affiliated with the Free Methodist Church in Canada, with its own share of evangelical media heavy hitters either passing through as guest speakers or summering in tranquility here.
Chris Mitchell, who was raised a Roman Catholic but is now the Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem for the largely Protestant evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), spoke at a tent meeting on “radical Islamist ideology” and the “Battle of the Ages” at the time of last summer’s conflagration in Lebanon. Mitchell also noted there are lots of moderate Muslims who are not jihadists and are working for peace in the Middle East, often at great personal risk if they are seen as Christian collaborators by their co-religionists. Speaking of the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, Mitchell repeated what Derek Prince, the Pentecostal Bible teacher observed years ago: “You don’t choose Jerusalem, Jerusalem chooses you.”
For those County residents who perhaps don’t follow the genre closely, CBN is the CNN equivalent in Christian broadcast media. Founded by Southern Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson, the Virginia Beach, Va. Christian broadcaster has been on-air since 1961 and is best known for The 700 Club talk show. Meanwhile in Canada, David Mainse, a Pentecostal minister who would go onto create 100 Huntley Street and Crossroads Christian Communications, got his start the following year in 1962 with a 15-minute program following the late night news at CBC affiliate CHOV-TV in Pembroke, Ont.
But Crossroads Christian Communications is by no means the only Canadian organization with a stake in Christian broadcasting these days. There’s different broadcasters with different projects for the same mission, which is why if you take a weekend trip to Wesley Acres on West Lake this summer you may just run into Donald Brooker, executive director of the Canadian office of SAT-7, also in Burlington, which produces indigenous Arabic Christian satellite television out of Nicosia, Cyprus for broadcast in the Middle East and North Africa. Around 20 million Arab Christians live in this region. About 11 million are Orthodox Christians, 5.4 million are Catholic and 3.6 million are Protestants. SAT-7’s international chairman is Rev. Habib Badr, senior pastor of the National Evangelical Church of Beirut. Congregational and Presbyterian American missionaries established the church in 1848.
Protestant evangelical Christians, however, by no means have a monopoly on being religious communicators here in the County. Just down the road from Wesley Acres, West Lake and Bloomfield, you may find Rev. Peter Timmins preaching the Sunday sermon at mass at the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Picton. Timmins, a Montreal-born priest most recently serving in Kingston, has been the administrator of the Roman Catholic parish in Picton for some months now while Rev. Brian Hart is on administrative leave. But it’s not Timmins’ sermons that make him remarkable; homilies after all go with the job description. What makes Timmins somewhat unusual is how as a communicator this retired parish priest, as he describes himself, who is certainly be no means a theologian, is not only the author of several well-received adult and children’s books on the Catholic faith (Nothing for Granted, The Candle and the Flame and A Salmon Story), but was also a passionate early adapter among area Catholic clergy of the potential uses for a website on the Internet. But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us completely that Timmins is a fairly hip guy; his niece is Margo Timmins, vocalist for the Cowboy Junkies, whose 1988 album The Trinity Session, recorded live in a single day on a single microphone in a church in Toronto, still receives critical notice almost 20 years later. At Rev. Timmins' website (http://www.nothingforgranted.com) you can check out this and that, including some of his homilies in his Living Our Story section.
Chris Mitchell, who was raised a Roman Catholic but is now the Middle East bureau chief in Jerusalem for the largely Protestant evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), spoke at a tent meeting on “radical Islamist ideology” and the “Battle of the Ages” at the time of last summer’s conflagration in Lebanon. Mitchell also noted there are lots of moderate Muslims who are not jihadists and are working for peace in the Middle East, often at great personal risk if they are seen as Christian collaborators by their co-religionists. Speaking of the Temple Mount and the Mount of Olives, Mitchell repeated what Derek Prince, the Pentecostal Bible teacher observed years ago: “You don’t choose Jerusalem, Jerusalem chooses you.”
For those County residents who perhaps don’t follow the genre closely, CBN is the CNN equivalent in Christian broadcast media. Founded by Southern Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson, the Virginia Beach, Va. Christian broadcaster has been on-air since 1961 and is best known for The 700 Club talk show. Meanwhile in Canada, David Mainse, a Pentecostal minister who would go onto create 100 Huntley Street and Crossroads Christian Communications, got his start the following year in 1962 with a 15-minute program following the late night news at CBC affiliate CHOV-TV in Pembroke, Ont.
But Crossroads Christian Communications is by no means the only Canadian organization with a stake in Christian broadcasting these days. There’s different broadcasters with different projects for the same mission, which is why if you take a weekend trip to Wesley Acres on West Lake this summer you may just run into Donald Brooker, executive director of the Canadian office of SAT-7, also in Burlington, which produces indigenous Arabic Christian satellite television out of Nicosia, Cyprus for broadcast in the Middle East and North Africa. Around 20 million Arab Christians live in this region. About 11 million are Orthodox Christians, 5.4 million are Catholic and 3.6 million are Protestants. SAT-7’s international chairman is Rev. Habib Badr, senior pastor of the National Evangelical Church of Beirut. Congregational and Presbyterian American missionaries established the church in 1848.
Protestant evangelical Christians, however, by no means have a monopoly on being religious communicators here in the County. Just down the road from Wesley Acres, West Lake and Bloomfield, you may find Rev. Peter Timmins preaching the Sunday sermon at mass at the Church of St. Gregory the Great in Picton. Timmins, a Montreal-born priest most recently serving in Kingston, has been the administrator of the Roman Catholic parish in Picton for some months now while Rev. Brian Hart is on administrative leave. But it’s not Timmins’ sermons that make him remarkable; homilies after all go with the job description. What makes Timmins somewhat unusual is how as a communicator this retired parish priest, as he describes himself, who is certainly be no means a theologian, is not only the author of several well-received adult and children’s books on the Catholic faith (Nothing for Granted, The Candle and the Flame and A Salmon Story), but was also a passionate early adapter among area Catholic clergy of the potential uses for a website on the Internet. But perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us completely that Timmins is a fairly hip guy; his niece is Margo Timmins, vocalist for the Cowboy Junkies, whose 1988 album The Trinity Session, recorded live in a single day on a single microphone in a church in Toronto, still receives critical notice almost 20 years later. At Rev. Timmins' website (http://www.nothingforgranted.com) you can check out this and that, including some of his homilies in his Living Our Story section.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Farmgate produce: You may need to live here to get it
Prince Edward County residents are blessed with one of the most pastoral landscapes in Eastern Ontario. Closer to paradise, I sense as I travel several times a week between Wellington and Picton along the Loyalist Parkway with Lake Ontario and West Lake just off to my west. Old red and green barns adjacent to freshly-seeded pasture on both sides of the road. Cows and lambs meandering and milling about. Blue skies and sunshine with a south breeze at 18 km/h blows in off the water today giving us a comfortable 22 C while it is 31 C up the lake farther in Toronto this afternoon. Does it get anymore perfect than this?
Tourism and vineyards may be ascendant here in the popular imagination, but old fashioned cash crop and animal farming haven’t disappeared either. A year ago next week – May 29 to be exact – County council held a special meeting to “show support for our local agricultural community and to help members of council better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” Leona Dombrowsky, minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, attended the meeting and among those offering deputations that evening were John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture (and now a councillor as well); Ken Marisett from the National Farmers Union; Wayne Gyde of the Prince Edward-Hastings-Northumberland Landowners' Association; Andy Margetson, president of the Prince Edward Cattlemen’s Association; and Achim Mohseen-Beyk from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario.
The usual farming woes were cited with the usual suspects named. The gist of the evening, for simplicity’s sake, might be reduced to claims of too few domestic subsidies from the federal and provincial governments (although they wouldn’t be actually called subsidies) and too many (unfair) subsidies (which would be called subsidies) from foreign governments (think American) for their farmers.
None of this is new down here. "Barley Days," as they came to be known, were a heady time for the County, but ended in October 1890, when the U.S. government enacted the ad valorem McKinley Tariff with a rate of 48.4 per cent for imports to give American farmers more protection. Overnight, the price of County barley fell to rock bottom and Barley Days were over. With the end of barley came the rise of the canning industry. The first canning factory was built in the County as early as 1882, but reached its zenith during the Second World War when the “Garden County” shipped a million and a half cases of tomatoes alone in 1941 – 43 per cent of the total produced in all of Canada that year. Corn, peas, pumpkin, beans, and fruit all found their way to the factory, and canning continued as a major County industry until the 1950s until the frozen food industry spelled the gradual end of canning in Prince Edward.
Now, a year after that special council meeting of May 29, 2006, council will be again discussing agriculture Monday night. This time they’ll be voting on whether to accept a $355,000 grant from the Advancing Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food (ACAAF) program to assist in developing markets for Prince Edward County meat and produce in Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa. The ACAAF program, launched in 2004, replaced the Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development (CARD) Fund established in 1995. The money, applied for by economic development officer Dan Taylor, would be used to hire a salesperson to develop sales and distribution channels and build supply relationships with institutions including colleges and universities, hospitals and prisons. An operations staff person would also be hired to manage the office’s administration and finance functions. Under the plan, the grant would subsidize the cost of an office for three years after which local producers will need to fund the plan on their own.
Taking the money at first blush may seem a no-brainer. After all, it was only a year ago council deemed it necessary to hold that special meeting “to better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” But just as there’s no free lunch, there’s no free money either. Under the plan unveiled last week, the county would have to spend $50,000 in the first year, and $25,000 the following two years as their matching funds contribution, although Taylor says a portion of the County’s matching contribution could come in the form of in-kind services and programs already funded through the Harvestin’ the County initiative.
But it seems the even bigger catch is our local primary producers and family farms are despite their “economic crisis” going pretty much flat out and aren’t at all sure they’d have enough produce to meet the demand that might be generated through the ACAAF funding.
The mood going into Monday night’s council meeting might be described as distinctly ambivalent. “I’ve talked to many local producers,” said Coun. John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture, last week at a corporate services committee meeting, “and they’ve established pretty good markets already, whether going to a market or at the door. They don’t see a lot of surplus product. The question then is: Where will product come? I’m not saying it won’t come but in terms of a business case in setting up this collaborative – before we commit money to it. I think we need to have another meeting with producers and find out how much they are going to commit.”
Seems County farmers are pretty much content to sell any farmgate surplus they might have, well, at the farmgate or roadside. Fact is there’s not even a farmers’ market in Picton. Thompson says “producers say they don’t have any excess product to bring to a farmers’ market. And we can’t produce anymore. So unless some new producers to expand production we are not meeting the demand we have already.”
Most of us know by now that eating locally-grown foods makes for common sense. We’ve read Gary Paul Nabhan 2002 memoir, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods; listened to Dombrowsky here earlier this month trumpeting her 'Buy Ontario' homegrown foods message; and embraced Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, which started in Italy in 1986 and arrived in Prince Edward County in November 2005 through the convivium, chaired by Petra Cooper of Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Company near Cressy.
The message Prince Edward County farmers may be poised to send out through council is reminiscent of a famous (at least in the Maritimes) commercial jingle for Saint John-based Moosehead Breweries Alpine Lager: “You’ve got to live here to get it.”
Tourism and vineyards may be ascendant here in the popular imagination, but old fashioned cash crop and animal farming haven’t disappeared either. A year ago next week – May 29 to be exact – County council held a special meeting to “show support for our local agricultural community and to help members of council better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” Leona Dombrowsky, minister of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, attended the meeting and among those offering deputations that evening were John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture (and now a councillor as well); Ken Marisett from the National Farmers Union; Wayne Gyde of the Prince Edward-Hastings-Northumberland Landowners' Association; Andy Margetson, president of the Prince Edward Cattlemen’s Association; and Achim Mohseen-Beyk from the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario.
The usual farming woes were cited with the usual suspects named. The gist of the evening, for simplicity’s sake, might be reduced to claims of too few domestic subsidies from the federal and provincial governments (although they wouldn’t be actually called subsidies) and too many (unfair) subsidies (which would be called subsidies) from foreign governments (think American) for their farmers.
None of this is new down here. "Barley Days," as they came to be known, were a heady time for the County, but ended in October 1890, when the U.S. government enacted the ad valorem McKinley Tariff with a rate of 48.4 per cent for imports to give American farmers more protection. Overnight, the price of County barley fell to rock bottom and Barley Days were over. With the end of barley came the rise of the canning industry. The first canning factory was built in the County as early as 1882, but reached its zenith during the Second World War when the “Garden County” shipped a million and a half cases of tomatoes alone in 1941 – 43 per cent of the total produced in all of Canada that year. Corn, peas, pumpkin, beans, and fruit all found their way to the factory, and canning continued as a major County industry until the 1950s until the frozen food industry spelled the gradual end of canning in Prince Edward.
Now, a year after that special council meeting of May 29, 2006, council will be again discussing agriculture Monday night. This time they’ll be voting on whether to accept a $355,000 grant from the Advancing Canadian Agriculture and Agri-Food (ACAAF) program to assist in developing markets for Prince Edward County meat and produce in Toronto, Kingston and Ottawa. The ACAAF program, launched in 2004, replaced the Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development (CARD) Fund established in 1995. The money, applied for by economic development officer Dan Taylor, would be used to hire a salesperson to develop sales and distribution channels and build supply relationships with institutions including colleges and universities, hospitals and prisons. An operations staff person would also be hired to manage the office’s administration and finance functions. Under the plan, the grant would subsidize the cost of an office for three years after which local producers will need to fund the plan on their own.
Taking the money at first blush may seem a no-brainer. After all, it was only a year ago council deemed it necessary to hold that special meeting “to better understand the impact of the economic crisis in agriculture on our local primary producers, family farms and related businesses.” But just as there’s no free lunch, there’s no free money either. Under the plan unveiled last week, the county would have to spend $50,000 in the first year, and $25,000 the following two years as their matching funds contribution, although Taylor says a portion of the County’s matching contribution could come in the form of in-kind services and programs already funded through the Harvestin’ the County initiative.
But it seems the even bigger catch is our local primary producers and family farms are despite their “economic crisis” going pretty much flat out and aren’t at all sure they’d have enough produce to meet the demand that might be generated through the ACAAF funding.
The mood going into Monday night’s council meeting might be described as distinctly ambivalent. “I’ve talked to many local producers,” said Coun. John Thompson, president of the Prince Edward County Federation of Agriculture, last week at a corporate services committee meeting, “and they’ve established pretty good markets already, whether going to a market or at the door. They don’t see a lot of surplus product. The question then is: Where will product come? I’m not saying it won’t come but in terms of a business case in setting up this collaborative – before we commit money to it. I think we need to have another meeting with producers and find out how much they are going to commit.”
Seems County farmers are pretty much content to sell any farmgate surplus they might have, well, at the farmgate or roadside. Fact is there’s not even a farmers’ market in Picton. Thompson says “producers say they don’t have any excess product to bring to a farmers’ market. And we can’t produce anymore. So unless some new producers to expand production we are not meeting the demand we have already.”
Most of us know by now that eating locally-grown foods makes for common sense. We’ve read Gary Paul Nabhan 2002 memoir, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods; listened to Dombrowsky here earlier this month trumpeting her 'Buy Ontario' homegrown foods message; and embraced Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement, which started in Italy in 1986 and arrived in Prince Edward County in November 2005 through the convivium, chaired by Petra Cooper of Fifth Town Artisan Cheese Company near Cressy.
The message Prince Edward County farmers may be poised to send out through council is reminiscent of a famous (at least in the Maritimes) commercial jingle for Saint John-based Moosehead Breweries Alpine Lager: “You’ve got to live here to get it.”
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Prince Edward County by the numbers: Slim pickings
Eastern Ontario Rural Policy Development Project is a mouthful to say, but it is also a mouthful worth remembering if for no other reason than the sobering numbers coming out of it. A joint effort of the Eastern Ontario Wardens Caucus, the Community Futures Development Corporations (CFDCs) of Eastern Ontario and the Martintown-based Ontario East Economic Development Commission, the project has released two new reports at the end of March which confirms statistically what those of us living here know anecdotally. Both Prince Edward County in particular and Eastern Ontario as a region are facing a bleak future. And even an influx of retirees and weekenders from the GTA; 500,000 summertime beachgoers at Sandbanks; and a dozen or so relatively new wineries along with about three dozen recent vintage vineyards aren’t going to save the day, although all incoming dollars will be more than welcome.
On March 27, the Eastern Ontario Rural Policy Development Project released its optimistically titled 41-page report A Prosperity Plan for Eastern Ontario. Three days later it released the more prosaic sounding 63-page report A Profile of Eastern Ontario. Both are available in their entirety online; the former at http://www.hastingscounty.com/files/IT/ProsperityPlanEasternOntarioMAR2707.pdf and the latter at http://www.eowc.org/Images/Reports/Profile_Eastern_Ont-Regional_Data-Mar3107.pdf
From the sundry graphs, there’s a mother lode of information to be extracted, albeit discomfiting. While the stats from Statistics Canada are six years old, the relationship of the numbers to geography remains interesting. The average personal income in the County was $27,356 in 2001 -- $7,845 below the provincial average. In neighboring Belleville, the average personal income was $28,890; in Quinte West it was $27,841; and in Northumberland County average personal income was $30,030.
The Intelligencer, Belleville’s Osprey-owned daily newspaper, correctly observed of the region in general what is also true of the County in particular: “Eastern Ontarians tend to be poorer, older and have fewer economic opportunities than the rest of the province. The result is less education, poorer health and higher taxes on the backs of households that can't afford them, say local politicians, bureaucrats and health officials.”
On March 27, the Eastern Ontario Rural Policy Development Project released its optimistically titled 41-page report A Prosperity Plan for Eastern Ontario. Three days later it released the more prosaic sounding 63-page report A Profile of Eastern Ontario. Both are available in their entirety online; the former at http://www.hastingscounty.com/files/IT/ProsperityPlanEasternOntarioMAR2707.pdf and the latter at http://www.eowc.org/Images/Reports/Profile_Eastern_Ont-Regional_Data-Mar3107.pdf
From the sundry graphs, there’s a mother lode of information to be extracted, albeit discomfiting. While the stats from Statistics Canada are six years old, the relationship of the numbers to geography remains interesting. The average personal income in the County was $27,356 in 2001 -- $7,845 below the provincial average. In neighboring Belleville, the average personal income was $28,890; in Quinte West it was $27,841; and in Northumberland County average personal income was $30,030.
The Intelligencer, Belleville’s Osprey-owned daily newspaper, correctly observed of the region in general what is also true of the County in particular: “Eastern Ontarians tend to be poorer, older and have fewer economic opportunities than the rest of the province. The result is less education, poorer health and higher taxes on the backs of households that can't afford them, say local politicians, bureaucrats and health officials.”
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, A Lost BlackBerry and the blackberries of Cold Storage Road
The action was heating up across from the County on the other side of the Bay of Quinte last weekend with a group of Tyendinaga Mohawks using an old school bus to blockade the CN Rail crossing at Deseronto Road, effectively shutting down CN freight and Via passenger traffic in a dispute about a Kingston developer’s plans to build condominiums on a 930-acre area known as the Culbertson Land Tract. The tract is on a parcel of land granted to the Six Nations in 1793 and the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte claim that counter to the developer’s position, they never surrendered any part of it as alleged in 1832. At virtually the same time the Mohawks were maintaining their blockade, some nearby County residents were again complaining about a “Mohawk Territory” sign erected on Highway 49, before the Skyway Bridge and south of Green Point Road, otherwise known as County Road 35. The residents have been raising the issue on and off over the duration of at least the last three County councils – including incumbent Mayor Leo Finnegan and his predecessor James Taylor – as the sign itself has undergone several incarnations. The residents argue, quite correctly in a technical sense, that the sign is located on Prince Edward County “soil,” not on the Mohawk Territory across the water. And if it really is Mohawk Territory on this side of the water, some of the Green Point Road area residents say, given their distaste for recent County council budgets and property tax increases, they’re thinking of applying to have the band council of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte become their local governing authority. The sign location argument might hold more water if it was somehow exceptional, but it isn’t. Fact is, many municipalities do it. Such signs are often not located on a surveyor’s actual geographical demarcation line. We suspect a cursory drive along the highways and byways in the area might well reveal Northumberland County signs encroaching on Hastings County or Peterborough County territory or vice-versa. And regardless of signage near the Skyway Bridge, we’re pretty sure some Green Point Road and other County residents can figure out when they’re on Mohawk Territory or not come time for their next cheap smokes run.
In another sign of the times in the County, a hand-written sign can be currently observed on a hydro pole on Main Street in downtown Picton, directly in front of The Armoury: “REWARD: For Return of Lost BlackBerry in leather case. Here on April 19, 2007. Call Doug at 613-476-4427.” The fact the BlackBerry seems to have gone missing right at The Wellington Times newspaper box location there suggests perhaps the owner stopped to pick up a paper and became immediately engrossed in some story or other.
Aside from Doug, it just wasn’t a very good week for BlackBerry owners, otherwise known also as CrackBerry addicts. As virtually everyone knows by now, an insufficiently tested systems cache handling piece of software at Research In Motion’s Waterloo network operations centre, which processes all e-mail messages to or from every BlackBerry in North America, set off a chain reaction that eventually cut off service to more than five million users overnight last Tuesday. And that was two days before Doug lost his BlackBerry in Picton.
My only brush with blackberries last week was also in Picton, but it was a case of taking a gorgeous 19C sunny early spring morning to head down to the County Farm Centre on Cold Storage Road to check out some pretty tempting, albeit frozen, blackberries at $4.99 per bag.
In another sign of the times in the County, a hand-written sign can be currently observed on a hydro pole on Main Street in downtown Picton, directly in front of The Armoury: “REWARD: For Return of Lost BlackBerry in leather case. Here on April 19, 2007. Call Doug at 613-476-4427.” The fact the BlackBerry seems to have gone missing right at The Wellington Times newspaper box location there suggests perhaps the owner stopped to pick up a paper and became immediately engrossed in some story or other.
Aside from Doug, it just wasn’t a very good week for BlackBerry owners, otherwise known also as CrackBerry addicts. As virtually everyone knows by now, an insufficiently tested systems cache handling piece of software at Research In Motion’s Waterloo network operations centre, which processes all e-mail messages to or from every BlackBerry in North America, set off a chain reaction that eventually cut off service to more than five million users overnight last Tuesday. And that was two days before Doug lost his BlackBerry in Picton.
My only brush with blackberries last week was also in Picton, but it was a case of taking a gorgeous 19C sunny early spring morning to head down to the County Farm Centre on Cold Storage Road to check out some pretty tempting, albeit frozen, blackberries at $4.99 per bag.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Want Counterintuitive? Hitchhiking is alive and well in the County in 2007
OK, I admit it. Seeing Theresa Durning last Saturday at the County Cultural Rally in Picton made me feel guilty about being somewhat lackadaisical (or is that just plain lazy) about not updating The County Counterintuitive since March 8. When I started the blog, Theresa told me to keep it fresh by updating it at least once a week. Now, other than meeting her in person just once in passing last June (introduced by my old Loyalist friend and classmate Sue Capon, editor of The County Weekly News) my only dealings with Theresa (who also goes by “Tee the FJB” – ask her if you want to know the story behind that) were the odd e-mail exchange and copy editing and laying out her No Strings On Me column on Page 7 of The Wellington Times for a few months last year. So I thought briefly about doing what all good copy editors do – besides edit copy. Remain anonymous. Theresa’s mug is well-known in the County (No Strings On Me is also the name of her blog as well as her column and can be found at http://inthebag-tee.blogspot.com/), mine isn’t. But seeing her hustle around the Prince Edward County Community Centre in her apron while taking pictures (she’s also proprietor-in-chief of In the Bag Media) made me feel slothfully sheepish enough to go up to her in person and once again re-introduce myself. And offer my latest mea culpa about blog tardiness.
And speaking of the County Cultural Rally, hearing County Boy Bill Ostrander sing a song his daughter wrote about his 4 a.m. snow plowing of County roads in the winter was worth the ten bucks I spent to get in the door (the price never did increase to $15 after March 15.) Good music and ten bucks. That’s the good news. Less reassuring news about Culture in the County and where it fits into the municipality’s budgetary priorities can be found at Theresa’s day-after-the-event blog entry for April 1, Stringing Culture along…. Unfortunately, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.
For something really counterintuitive, remember hitchhiking? A lost travel adventure art that disappeared somewhere circa 1973 (with the odd exception such as Globe and Mail writer John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up in the Conservative County. Right? Wrong. I’m here to tell you hitchhiking is alive and well here in the County and if you want to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, just stick your thumb out. I’ve done it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton route. Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considers to be the two worst winters in the County in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from CFS Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield. In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there are no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owns it, with some help from relatives, he said, returns most every afternoon from her present home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still live there on Highway 33.
Another time a couple of weeks ago, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home has been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she's also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she’s well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps is the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960. As I said, true fact.
And speaking of the County Cultural Rally, hearing County Boy Bill Ostrander sing a song his daughter wrote about his 4 a.m. snow plowing of County roads in the winter was worth the ten bucks I spent to get in the door (the price never did increase to $15 after March 15.) Good music and ten bucks. That’s the good news. Less reassuring news about Culture in the County and where it fits into the municipality’s budgetary priorities can be found at Theresa’s day-after-the-event blog entry for April 1, Stringing Culture along…. Unfortunately, it’s not an April Fool’s joke.
For something really counterintuitive, remember hitchhiking? A lost travel adventure art that disappeared somewhere circa 1973 (with the odd exception such as Globe and Mail writer John Stackhouse’s insightful Notes from the Road cross-Canada series in the Summer of 2000.) Of course, fear reigns supreme now and no one is going to pick you up in the Conservative County. Right? Wrong. I’m here to tell you hitchhiking is alive and well here in the County and if you want to meet some interesting County characters and hear some down-home stories, just stick your thumb out. I’ve done it many a time on the Wellington-Bloomfield-Picton route. Sunday morning a man picked me up in Wellington and drove me to Picton, all the while telling me stories about what he considers to be the two worst winters in the County in his experience – 1946 and 1977. In ’46, he was in school and the snow was so deep, he said, you could touch overhead telephone lines (not that it was advisable to do so) walking on top of snowbanks. But ’77 was even worse, he said, with the County briefly loosing a snow plow in Lake Ontario near Wellington; the military having to bring their big blowers out from CFS Mountain View to clear some areas; a couple of kids with their dad’s car hitting a snowbank on the way home from school in a blizzard and being stranded for several days in Bloomfield. In both 1946 and 1977, my driver said, the County was cut off from the mainland for five days straight. Then passing through Bloomfield, he told me about an-all-but abandoned house on the outskirts of the village toward Picton. Well, not quite abandoned. While there are no longer human inhabitants, the elderly woman who owns it, with some help from relatives, he said, returns most every afternoon from her present home nearby in the village to feed her birds, which still live there on Highway 33.
Another time a couple of weeks ago, I was picked up by a grandmother and her grandson while I was hitchhiking. Her family home has been in Bloomfield for 130 years. But she's also travelled far and wide before her path took her back to the County. While she’s well-known for many things, including being the spouse of a well-known-in-his-own-right Hallowell politician, less well known perhaps is the true fact that she gave Hollywood screen legend Clark Gable his last x-ray in Los Angeles in 1960. As I said, true fact.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
En attendant Godot? No, but spring would be welcome
Down here in the County, we're getting ready for Maple in the County (we tend to affix "in the County" to everything we market here in the County) March 24 and 25. Lots of folks are on board for the event presented by the Waring House Restaurant, Inn, Conference Centre and Cookery School at Warings Corner, including Cliff Foster, and his son, Dean, who’s Fosterholm Farms down near Sandbanks taps 7,000 maple trees. Cliff’s father started making maple syrup in 1924 at the 75-acre Home Farm near Sandbanks. Later, he bought Outlet Farm and now Cliff and Dean runs Fosterholm Farms. You can find them on County Road 11, near the junction with County Road 18, between East Lake and West Lake, just northeast of Sandbanks Provincial Park.
So while Lent doesn’t end until sundown on Holy Thursday, April 5, it’s a pretty safe bet that fasting won’t be part of some folks 40-day season of soul-searching and repentance – at least not on Maple in the County weekend. Seems the sign most folks down here are looking for is some visible tangible sign of spring. Maple sap running would qualify nicely. It’s been dang cold here since Lent started on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 21. Come to think of it, it’s been cold now since the middle of January, almost two months ago. February and the last half of January were colder-than-normal. The first half of March is still undecided, but to date this month is also running colder-than-normal. Winter arrived very late but when it did arrive it stayed, although Environment Canada is now whetting our appetitive for spring by promising 5 and 6 C temperatures a few days hence. I could have sworn the groundhog did not see his shadow Feb. 2, meaning winter should have ended in four weeks by March 2. Lying groundhog.
Our next “in the County” event after the big Maple weekend comes only a week later when “Culture in the County,” also known as the “County Cultural Rally” takes place for one day only March 31 at the Prince Edward County Community Centre in Picton. Organizers are asking, “What’s County Culture to you?”
Well, to me part of the answer to that question is remembering our cultural mosaic includes folks – that would be us and our neighbours – who according to the most recent Statistics Canada figures from 2000, experience culture (right after they eat and put food on their tables) on a median total income of $20,790, compared to the provincial median figure of $24,816. And where “government transfers” equal 15.9 per cent of income compared to 9.8 per cent as a provincial average.
As former U.S. President Bill Clinton put it in his first inaugural address Jan. 21, 1993: “We recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another … tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”
So while Lent doesn’t end until sundown on Holy Thursday, April 5, it’s a pretty safe bet that fasting won’t be part of some folks 40-day season of soul-searching and repentance – at least not on Maple in the County weekend. Seems the sign most folks down here are looking for is some visible tangible sign of spring. Maple sap running would qualify nicely. It’s been dang cold here since Lent started on Ash Wednesday, Feb. 21. Come to think of it, it’s been cold now since the middle of January, almost two months ago. February and the last half of January were colder-than-normal. The first half of March is still undecided, but to date this month is also running colder-than-normal. Winter arrived very late but when it did arrive it stayed, although Environment Canada is now whetting our appetitive for spring by promising 5 and 6 C temperatures a few days hence. I could have sworn the groundhog did not see his shadow Feb. 2, meaning winter should have ended in four weeks by March 2. Lying groundhog.
Our next “in the County” event after the big Maple weekend comes only a week later when “Culture in the County,” also known as the “County Cultural Rally” takes place for one day only March 31 at the Prince Edward County Community Centre in Picton. Organizers are asking, “What’s County Culture to you?”
Well, to me part of the answer to that question is remembering our cultural mosaic includes folks – that would be us and our neighbours – who according to the most recent Statistics Canada figures from 2000, experience culture (right after they eat and put food on their tables) on a median total income of $20,790, compared to the provincial median figure of $24,816. And where “government transfers” equal 15.9 per cent of income compared to 9.8 per cent as a provincial average.
As former U.S. President Bill Clinton put it in his first inaugural address Jan. 21, 1993: “We recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another … tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”
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