A Sea of Flowers

Since my move to Victoria, I have tried out and adopted some appliances and discarded others.

I started with a new set of Paderno stainless steel pots - purchased cheaply in 2006 when Canadian Tire dropped the Royale sets. I have added another sauce pan and the steamer and double boiler (not Royale but who cares). Capital Iron carries Paderno in Victoria. I expect the saucepans and the dutch oven to last for a while. The coated frying pans are standing up well although I think the coating in those pans will break down long before the pans wear out.

I bought a larger enameled cast iron dutch oven at Capital Iron which has become one of my favorite pots.

I started with some decent knives - some with the Superstore house brand and some of the midrange Wusthof Tridents.. I bought a couple new knives last year - I went to Mac for a 6 and a half inch Santoku and a 10 inch chef's knife. The steel is superb - it stays sharp enough for ripe tomatoes with a few strokes of a chef's steel.

This year I broke off with dragon-boating. It was initially a conflict with the manager of the Club program over a protocol and has become a longer break. Some paddlers paddle dragon boats every summer from May to August. I have enjoyed the evening practices and the frantic transformation of couch potatoes into weekend warriors, but I have let it go.

I paddled Outrigger canoes (OC) through the winter, one or twice a week. In the spring, I paddled in some spring races and some longer races. It has helped me to stay active but I have not trained enough to consider myself a fit or strong paddler. I had hoped to paddle more this summer but many paddlers give up OC for dragon boat or to take canoe or kayak trips. There are a few diehards so we have been getting out about once a week. Dragon boat is winding up and there are going to be some races this fall, so I might get on a team and get into some tougher training.

I have been cycling more this year than last year. I haven't done many evening rides, but I have been getting some long rides in on weekends. I have had some work done on one of my bikes. I had upgraded some components on the Giant in 2004 but made the serious mistake of putting on 175 mm cranks. This may have been contributing to strain on joints, pain and fatigue. It may play a part in the stiffness in my right hip. We will see.

In December last year I agreed to travel to Winnipeg to accompany my dad to the hospital for his surgery for hernia. He had the operation in January. It disrupted his routine of visiting mother in the nursing home for a few days, but he was back at it. He realized that his needs to visit and be with her had been putting a strain on his family - specifically my sisters, who had been picking him or taking him home. He agreed to apply to be placed in a nursing home - on strict condition that it would be the same home as mother. He was surprised when his application was approved quickly. He had been underestimating his frailties.

He moved when a room became available. He is on the same floor in a different wing. He visits mother and tries to anticipate her needs and wants, and to provide care that the staff can't provide. This tires him out, because his ideas of what she needs and deserves are not the same as everyone else's, and he reacts to her smallest gestures. As her behavior is impulsive, this can be frustrating for him.

He says he is happy. He is busy with his efforts to help mother. He turned 80 in June. I visited at the end of June.

My story about my musical year starts with a short term obsession about a song.

The CBC broadcast a story about the popularity of Leonard Cohen's song Hallelujah in Britain on the National (TV news) on the Friday night before Christmas. The CBC was interested because the writer was a Canadian. The story was that two different versions of the song were topping the British charts in the week before Christmas. For the last few years, some kind of Christmas themed piece has topped the charts. There is no Christmas list as such, and the charts continue to track the popularity of modern popular music in Britain, on sales.

The milestones of life ...

Over the last 6 weeks I spent more time than I want to think about trying to get a new Satellite (Model A200, or A200-03V, specifically PSAE3C-03V08C) to run an alternative OS to its pre-installed Windows Vista. The laptop was attractively priced, perhaps because it was pre-loaded with Vista, as much as the fact that it was being cleared out for newer models. I think these models were engineered for XP and thrown on to the market with Vista drivers when Microsoft terminated its OEM licencing for XP installations, forcing computer manufactures to pre-install Vista.

Given the resources of the system - processor and memory - it falls short of what it seems to take to run Vista, and running Vista has other drawbacks.I wasn't sure about changing to XP although that is the route I took in the end. One problem, for me and many users is having to buy XP off the shelf. There is a cost factor, and even if I had owned a valid working copy of XP, I needed to get working drivers for the hardware in the Satellite to complement the install set and complete the installation. Another potential problem is losing the recovery functions that Toshiba builds in with its HDD Recovery Utility.

Back in January, I ran the upgrade to Movable Type 4.1. The developers made a number of moves to make MT more attractive to personal users including changes to let personal users migrate from Word Press and to port Word Press Styles to MT. The management of pictures and content has become easier with the ability to upload and manage "assets" and then use the assets in the blog.

I haven't used it much. I have been busy at work, and spent more my personal time reading and pursuing other things.

Jennie Bristow, reviewing Sarah Moore's Ribbon Culture for Spiked, nails the self-obsessed culture of advertising one's moral quality by fashion accessories. Her review is called Untying the 'ribbon culture'. The moral virtue of wearing ribbons is to show awareness or solidarity with a group of victims. Being a victim has become a way of attracting attention, building political support, explaining the lack of joy in one's life, and selling media product. Cry, cry, cry. Frank Furedi's column about faked victim memoirs, History-as-Therapy, complements the ribbon piece.

Reuters Science News has a new story today reporting that the genome of maize has been sequenced, which reminds me that corn is a grain. It is a starchy carbohydrate. Like rice and wheat it could be cultivated to produce an abundant harvest that would feed villages and cities. It was a miracle food. It has been developed into a fertile, abundant and cheap, food resource. This has presented a business dilemma and challenge for farmers, food processors, distillers, and business people. How much corn can people be led to purchase and consume?

It turns up as an ingredient in processed goods. Michael Pollan provides an interesting and informative explanation of modern corn, corn farming and industrial food processing in The Omnivore's Dilemna.

In the grocery store, it is presented identifiably in ground corn flour (grits, meal, polenta), as the main ingredient in corn chips, and as a fresh, frozen or canned product. In its raw forms, it is a nutritious and tasty item. It is a starchy grain, though, not a vegetable. Corn chips are fried or baked flat breads or croutons, made of starch and fat, just like potato chips.

A meal of meat, potatoes or rice, and corn, has protein and two kinds of carbs. I was looking at the labels on the (Green Giant) frozen foods in my freezer. Corn has over 150 calories in a 3/4 cup serving. Peas have about 90 calories for that size serving. Beans have about 35 calories. Mixed vegetables with corn, peas, beans and carrots are marked at about 70 calories.

I like corn. I plan to keep using corn as a occasional treat - corn on the cob is wonderful. I think it is a staple, but I have to think of it as a starch course like bread, pasta, potatoes and rice.

In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manifesto has received favourable reviews in the LA Times and the Sunday Times (of London), and is a bestseller at this point in time.

Michael Pollan is an experienced journalist and writer. He reviews a fair amount of history and science in a short book. He tries to talk about food from a common sense perspective. He is cautious about food science, which is often bad science. He is skeptical about anything the food industry, nutritionists and journalists say about food. All too often, claims about food are made to sell new kinds of processed foods, or to sell books, diet plans, supplements and fads.

His advice for eating well, to avoid malnutrition and obesity is: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." His idea of food is something pretty close to the original plant or animal - fresh, dried, frozen - cooked at home, not processed at a factory. Don't buy or eat processed and packaged things that claim to produce health benefits or weight loss. If you want to avoid obesity, eat less.

Pollan is an advocate of a natural diet, organic produce and Slow Food. He described the Western diet as a disaster, and cites the studies of people who return to a traditional diet from a Western diet. He says that there are many traditional diets incorporating indigenous resources and cultural traditions - and all of them are healthier than the Western diet, which manages to produce malnutrition and obesity at the same time.