03.27.21

Pandemic staycation

Posted in Canadian life, Health, Married life, Random thoughts, Travel at 3:15 pm by ducky

My beloved and I, at my instigation, took a little vacation on Friday. I wanted to celebrate finishing our taxes, the weather had been beautiful and sunny (although still slightly cool, c’mon, it’s British Columbia in March), and we hadn’t been out at all together in a very long time.

So we rented a carshare, ostensibly to cruise around and look at cherry blossoms.

But of course there was scope creep. Oh hey, if we look at cherry blossoms out at UBC, then we should get takeout from my fave campus restaurant and eat at the little park next door. And of course get ice cream from my fave ice cream shop. Oh, and if we have a car, we should go visit J&A (distanced, in their back yard), who my beloved hasn’t seen in person for a year. And because they can’t invite us in, let’s get takeout on our way home! Oh, except beloved as a doctor’s appointment at 3pm, so we’ll need to add that in. Oh, and as long as we have a car, we should pick up bulk kidney beans and yellow raisins at the Punjab Food Centre.

We are still in a pandemic, so there were a few things that we knew would be different, even in the planning stage. In Before Times, maybe we would have stayed at J&A’s for dinner. In Before Times, we would have eaten at the restaurant. I also carefully checked fave restaurant’s web site to make sure they were still open.

I gave a passing thought to toilets. We should probably pee at fave restaurant at lunch. I considered whether that was safe, and decided it was. Their washroom was relatively large and lightly used even when in Before Times.

Well. When we got to fave restaurant, there was a sign which said that it had closed on 7 Dec. Grrrr, thanks for keeping your website updated, not.

And I needed to pee!

The UBC hospital is very close, so we headed over there. I felt a little bad about sneaking in, but I had been a patient there before, and I really did need to go. But a sign which said, “NON-ESSENTIAL VISITS PROHIBITED.” While finding a toilet was essential for me right then, I was pretty sure they wouldn’t find it essential. I could not enter in good conscience, even though I was wearing a good mask.

So instead, we went to the UBC Health Clinic, where we are both current patients. They have big washrooms with low usage, so I felt pretty sure it was safe. Success!

That gave us enough breathing room to find a fast food joint near the ice cream shop. We ate a leisurely lunch outside, had ice cream outside, and then… I needed to pee again. After a little bit of discussion, we decided to swing past home and pee there. (It also let my beloved pick up his wallet, which he had forgotten at home because he doesn’t go out that much because pandemic.)

I thought about staying home and having him swing around afterwards and pick me up, but then decided that if I went with him and waited in the car (because pandemic), then we could head straight over to J&A’s.

Did I mention that my beloved got the food at the restaurant? And so when I asked for a cola, dutifully got me a cola? Which came in a 591ml bottle instead of the 222ml mini-cans which I usually drink?

Yep, after Jim got done with his doctor’s appointment, I had to pee again. And since J&A couldn’t let us in their house…. yep, we swung past home again.

After we left J&A, I was able to hold it until we got home, but I was definitely paying attention to my bladder.

“You have to plan potty breaks really carefully” is not the pandemic advice I ever expected during Before Times.

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02.02.21

Masking

Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts, Too Much Information at 10:06 pm by ducky

I know we are having a pandemic, but I am getting tired of masking. I will take it out on you, Dear Reader, because, well, I can.

A few years ago, when there were really bad wildfires, my spouse and I bought eight N95 masks for particulates (i.e. with vents in them).

When the pandemic hit, I taped up the vents and used them in particularly scary situations (like when I went to the doctor for something).

Even reusing the N95s for a while, we used up most of our stock of N95s. I didn’t want to use them all up, so I researched alternatives, and found that a simple cheap surgical mask was allegedly as good as an N95 if you wore a mask brace over it. Awesome.

I bought a mask brace, put it over a surgical mask, and went for a long walk to test it. The brace did a great job of eliminating gaps, and it made my glasses fog less, but the brace also held the mask so close to my mouth that I couldn’t avoid getting my lips on it. At the end of a 90-min walk, it was wet. I hear that they are less effective after you get them wet.

I still had one of my old N95s, so I pulled the tape off and now wear it under my surgical mask under the brace, purely for structural reasons, to keep the surgical mask away from my mouth. Great!

Well, except that if it’s raining, as it does frequently in the Pacific Northwest in the winter (aka “always”), the N95 keeps the mask far enough from my mouth that it sticks out farther than my hat can shield it, and the rain gets on it. So if it starts to rain, I need to take the mask off.

(I am not too worried about being outdoors in the rain without a mask. First, the outdoors is very well-ventilated. Second, when it’s raining, there are fewer people out and about. Third, I figure that the rain will hit some of the virus particles and knock them down.)

So anyway, that’s the context.

Here’s what I did today.

1. Got ready to leave the apartment and get into a small, poorly-ventilated enclosed space (the elevator). Took off glasses, put on N95/mask/brace/glasses/hat.
2. Got outside the apartment building. It was raining. Took off hat/glasses/brace/mask/N95, replaces glasses and hat.
3. Walked to hospital, prepared to enter hospital. Took off glasses/hat, put on N95/mask/brace/glasses/hat.
4. Sinus doctor wanted to stick things in my nose. Took off hat/glasses/brace/mask/N95, replaced glasses.
5. Sinus doctor removed nasal truffles (but that’s a whole different story). Doc said that he didn’t think he got them all but he thought that to get the rest he’d have to anesthetize me. Took off glasses, put on N95/mask/brace/glasses/hat.
6. Went outside. No longer raining. Stifled a massive sneeze, and somehow a nasal truffle ended up in my mouth. Took off glasses/hat/N95/mask/brace. Replaced glasses.
7. Spat out the nasal truffle, examined it, took photo. Took off glasses, put on N95/mask/brace/glasses/hat.
8. Walked over to cell phone store to get my cracked phone screen replaced. They told me to wait an hour. Went outside and wandered around for a little bit before deciding to grab some lunch. It started raining again. Took off hat/glasses/brace/mask/N95, replaced glasses/hat.
9. Decided on pizza. Under the pizzeria’s awning, took off glasses/hat, put on N95/mask/brace/glasses/hat.
10. Got my slice, went and sat at a table outside under the awning. (Yes, it is cold but I’ve got good gear on.) Took off hat/glasses/brace/mask/N95, replaced glasses/hat.
11. Finished my lunch. Went back to phone store. Took off glasses/hat, put on N95/mask/brace/hat/glasses.
12. Got my phone, left shop. Still raining. Took off hat/glasses/brace/mask/N95, replaced glasses/hat.
13. Walked to drug store. Took off glasses/hat, put on N95/mask/brace/hat/glasses.
14. Left drug store, disappointed that they did not have face shields in stock which would protect the mask from rain. Still raining. Took off hat/glasses/brace/mask/N95, replaced glasses/hat.
15. Walked to apartment building. Took off glasses/hat, put on N95/mask/brace/hat/glasses.
16. Entered our apartment. Took off hat/glasses/brace/mask/N95, replaced glasses.

I realize that putting on/taking off masks is a minor inconvenience compared to, say, not breathing, but it’s still annoying. I am ready for the rain to stop.

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03.13.20

Watching the beginnings of COVID-19

Posted in Canadian life, Politics, Random thoughts at 6:50 pm by ducky

On 22 Oct 1987, when the stock market crashed hard, I happened to be on the UCSB campus. I was surprised that the sun was out and people were smiling and laughing. I immediately realized that it was stupid to expect the world to turn black&white and bread lines to form immediately.

Still, that’s the place my brain jumped to.

I am having a similar odd disconnect right now. COVID-19 has been going for several months now, and yesterday there was widespread and somewhat sudden action in both the US and Canada.

Everything is going to be vastly changed for weeks, or months, maybe even a few years, and yet I see people walking blithely down the street, cars driving across the bridges, and joggers running on the seawall. Acting normal.

Meanwhile, I think about the last global pandemic, the Spanish Flu. When I was growing up (born in the 60s), I never heard about the Spanish Flu. It really wasn’t until the Web came along that I got the full story. Why didn’t anyone (like my grandparents, who were teenagers in 1918) talk about it before?

Maybe it was boring to them because everyone they knew had talked about it forever. I bet, however, it was because it was too traumatic. I know that I don’t like to discuss Trump’s election or the Iraq war because it is so painful for me.

And I wonder where that switch gets flipped. How does that transition happen? How will we go from today’s blitheness to it being too painful to talk about it?

I suspect the answer is “lots of trauma”. I’m not looking forward to that.

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03.11.18

Refugee sponsorship

Posted in Canadian life, Politics at 7:39 pm by ducky

I lead a group which is sponsoring a refugee family.  Enough people have asked me how that works that I am compiling the answers here.

Legal Background

In Canada, there are three ways refugees come into the country:

• Government sponsored, where the federal government provides all of the financial support for the first year and contracts with organizations called settlement agencies to provide the logistical support and hopefully some emotional support as well.  In BC, the main settlement agencies are MOSAIC and ISSBC.
• Blended Visa Office Referral, where a charitable organization (frequently churches) bring in a family who they don’t know.  The organization — called a Sponsorship Agreement Holder or SAH — can do this by themselves or they can partner with a group of individuals (the sponsorship group), but the onus of vetting the sponsorship group and the legal liability lies with the SAH.
  • The SAH periodically gets an anonymized list of families approved for resettlement in Canada.  The entries usually give the family size, the ages of the children, sometimes the ages of the parents, their nationality, where they are now, if they have any special needs, and if there is a particular area they would like to go to.  (For example, they might have a cousin in Calgary or might really want to live near the ocean.)  The SAH communicates to the sponsorship group what families are available, and the sponsorship group will indicate if they are interested in sponsoring one of the family on the list.  The SAH will then communicate with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC); IRCC decides who “gets” the family if more than one SAH expressed interest.
  • The SAH is legally responsible for 100% of the logistical and emotional support and slightly more than half of the financial support.
  • If there is a sponsorship group, the sponsorship group is morally responsible for what the SAH is legally responsible for.
  • The government provides 50% of the income support but not the start-up costs — furniture, staples, cleaning supplies, clothes, etc.
• Privately sponsored, where a group of at least five Canadian citizens and permanent residents (a “Group of Five”)  OR a SAH enter into a legal agreement to bring in a family of known people.   Under this sponsorship type, the group is 100% responsible for financial, logistical, and emotional support for the family for one year.  (I call this the “let’s bring in grandma” sponsorship.)

Emotional and Logistical Support

I have mentioned emotional and logistical support multiple times.  What do I mean by that?

As an example, since we got the news of when they were going to arrive, our team has:

• arranged temporary housing;
• gotten them a phone and cell plan;
• stocked their temporary housing with some food;
• found a permanent apartment;
• helped them fill out a massive number of forms (including the childcare tax credit and the medical services plan enrollment form);
• helped them get Social Insurance Numbers (analogous to the US Social Security Number);
• helped them open a bank account;
• gotten them winter coats;
• escorted the father to a medical appointment;
• showed them how to use their debit cards to buy transit cards;
• took them shopping for essentials (like underwear!);
• helped them phone their friends back in the camps;
• drove them to the local branch of their church;
• did a lot of talking, orienting, and many other details too minor to call out explicitly.

In the next few days, we will:

• co-sign the lease on their apartment;
• move donated furniture from at least four different places into the apartment;
• help them buy a small amount of furniture;
• help them buy groceries and cleaning supplies;
• help them register their child for school;
• help them register for English classes;
• show them how to use public transit;
• help them get library cards;
• help them get to eye and dental exams.

Longer-term, we will check in periodically to make sure they are adjusting well and give help as needed (e.g. to help mediate disputes or help them find trauma counseling if required), and help them find jobs.

Our particular experience

At the height of the publicity about the civil war in Syria, in late 2015, there was a huge outpouring of support for Syrian refugees.  I was not immune, and posted quietly on Facebook that I was thinking of sponsoring a family and immediately got a huge response.  Some people pledged money but couldn’t pledge time (because they lived elsewhere and/or had other obligations); some people pledged both.

I researched what was required and discovered that, because we didn’t know anybody personally, BVOR looked like the way to go.  I looked through the list of SAHs and found that the Canadian Unitarian Council (CUC) was a SAH that I thought would be easy for me to work with, so I started working with the Unitarian Church of Vancouver (UCV)’s Refugee Committee.

I had to prove to the UCV Refugee Committee that we were trustworthy, including routing at least 2/3 of the required funds to UCV before they would advise CUC to accept us.  (We put 100% of the amount, which helped show we were trustworthy.)  We also had to fill out some forms for CUC.

Unfortunately, by the time we got our act together in 2016, the Canadian government had let in as many refugees (45,000) as it had decided it was going to let in that year.  In 2017, the government set the BVOR quota very low, reserving most of the spots for private sponsorships, which were mostly for family members of the Syrians who arrived in 2015 and 2016.

(In mid-2017, I happened to be standing next to a TV in a deli where some MP was getting interviewed.  She said, “The number one question I get asked when I go back to my riding is, ‘Where are my Syrian refugees?'”  So we were not the only team waiting.)

2018 was a new year with new quotas, however.  Furthermore, the rest of the world had reminded Canada that Syria wasn’t the only place where things were bad.  So the BVOR list started getting populated again with families from different places.  There still weren’t a lot, but there were some.

So while in 2016 we planned on sponsoring a Syrian family of four, in January 2018 when we spotted an Eritrean family of three, we requested a match with them.  The government confirmed the match, and we sent in our paperwork on 30 Jan 2018.  On 2 Mar 2018, we got word that they would arrive on 7 Mar 2018.  Wheeee!  It was a bit of a scramble.

“Our” family

I don’t want to say much about the family we are sponsoring because there are privacy/security concerns and because refugees are in a very vulnerable position, not knowing the country, culture, or language.

I think I can disclose that the family had been in a camp in country X for EIGHT years.  (I am not clear on the details yet, but I think they might have been in a camp in country Y for a few years.)  They were not allowed to leave the camp, so their child had NO memory of anything except that camp.  There also were no TV or movies in the camp, so he didn’t even have any visual images of other places.  I can’t even imagine what it was like for him to see grassy fields and forests and snow-covered mountains and airplanes and stoplights and microwave ovens.

Mom and Dad don’t produce much English, but they can understand some English.  My husband has run errands with them with no translator, and by speaking slowly, directly, and simply, he can communicate.

Green Hills Welcoming Committee

Our team needed to have a name so that UCV could keep track of it as an entity, and we chose “Green Hills Welcoming Committee”.

Our time-donating team originally had six people on it.  One dropped out because of health issues; one dropped out due to logistical issues.  One husband has become more involved, and I picked up two team members from the UCV Refugee committee (including a former Eritrean refugee, who has contributed an enormous amount).

I have to say, we have an awesome team.  We have worked very well together, encouraged each other, trusted each other, and come through for each other.  We also have spread the load out so that no one person is overwhelmed.

• Person A has an infant, so is limited in how much she can do hands-on.  She’s our researcher.  She figured out which forms we needed and filled out as much as possible before the family got here (and documented everything she found).  She’s made calls to figure out what we need to do to get the child enrolled in school and the parents enrolled in language classes.
• Person B and Person C are hosting them in their house.  They have been taking care of hospitality things: feeding them, making them feel welcome, entertaining the child, etc.
• Person D, the former refugee, has been doing the translating and introducing them to the local community.  (For example, he went to church with them.)   He’s also been doing the lion’s share of ferrying them from one place to another and helped a lot in the housing search.
• Person E has been doing the bulk of the housing search, with significant help from Person D.
• Person F has been doing a lot of the helping and coaching for things involving bureaucracy.  Person A got the forms ready and Person D can translate, but Person F is the one who has done the follow-through and gotten the forms signed and in the mail, and negotiated with the bureaucrats.   He’s also taken the family on errands when Person D wasn’t available.
• Person G — the treasurer of the UCV refugee committee — has been the advisor.  She’s always been there to give advice on how to handle things or explain how something has to be done.

The timing is also really really fortunate: only one team member has a day job.  One has a night job, one is retired, one is on maternity leave, and three are between jobs/contracts.  (Myself, I got laid off on 15 Feb.)

So far, so good.

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05.22.11

Novice paragliding

Posted in Canadian life, Family at 7:36 pm by ducky

Note: Dion, my instructor read this and was concerned that it painted an overly negative, overly scary picture of the sport.  I toned my language down slightly, but my main objective was to tell my family and friends about how I felt, not to evangelize for how fun (or safe) the sport is!.  Paragliding is actually quite safe when done right; my next post will be on paragliding safety.

My husband Jim flies powered aircraft; I find flying in small planes dull, noisy, cold, and a waste of fossil fuel.  Jim sings; I don’t.  Jim runs; I have bad knees.  I do artwork; Jim doesn’t.  I like to skate; Jim doesn’t.  I like to read and write, which are inherently solitary activities.  From time to time, one of us will try to do something that the other likes: I sang in one opera; Jim has gone skating a few times; Jim and I took a sketching class together; I have flown in small planes with Jim a few times.  Unfortunately, those efforts have not worked really well.  (For example, I threw up on one of my small plane rides with Jim.)  Despite us really liking each other, we don’t do much together.

When we were in Turkey with the nephews, I got a chance to take a ride in a tandem paraglider.  Despite throwing up twice due to motion sickness (I am sensitive, and didn’t take meds in time), it was one of the high points of the trip for me.  (Figuratively as well as literally.)  So I seized on paragliding as something we could maybe enjoy together.

We signed up for and are now mostly done with the P1 introductory class at iParaglide.  In the rest of this post, I’m going to talk about our experiences.

We started out with two theory classes.  We learned intellectually what we were supposed to do on launch and landing, about the gear, a little on the aerodynamics of the wings, how the controls affected the wing, how wind strength and weight affected ground speed and sink rate (which are the components of the glide ratio), and a bit about weather in BC.

Jim preparing to do a reverse launch kite; our apartment tower is in the background.

We next had a gratis session of kiting practice.  (This wasn’t on the class agenda, but Dion Vuk, our instructor, said that the weather was great for it and it would make us better fliers.)  Kiting is done on a flat piece of ground and the exercise is to get the glider (aka “the wing”) aloft over our heads for as long as we could.

It was difficult, and hard work for my out-of-shape 47 year-old body.  I was exhausted at the end of it.  I said to myself that my enjoyment of this sport would be lower if I didn’t get myself into better shape, so I started carrying water in my backpack on my walk to work.  Four or five days per week, I would walk 3km to work carrying five litres of water in my backpack; two or three days per week I would also walk home with it.  If there had been an earthquake, I would have been prepared!

The day after our kiting session, the class of about seven students practiced what is called “slope soaring”.  We got up at 5 AM to go out to a city park about an hour away which has about a 30′ hill. That hill  is just steep enough that you can launch off of it, but not steep enough that you can get very high above it.

Jim catching air at slope soaring

The wing needs a relative airspeed of 20 km/hr (12.5 mph, or 4:48 minutes per mile).  This would be really really hard on a flat surface with no headwind if your name isn’t Usain Bolt, but running downhill with a little bit of a headwind (which drops the groundspeed you have to achieve) makes it more possible.  It is still a little bit of a challenge: when the wing isn’t fully up, it’s like you are pulling a parachute — because you are!  As soon as the wing gets up, it is easier, but if you don’t haul posterior, worst case the wing’s momentum can bring it over and in front of you and you run into the wing, oops.  More likely is that you run run run and just don’t get enough speed to lift off the ground, which is unsatisfying.

There is no jumping: if you jump up, that reduces your airspeed and you just come right back down.  (Hubby Jim also points out that it reduces tension in the lines, which is counterproductive: the tension in the lines is part of what gives it the shape you need.)

The weather that day was suboptimal: the winds were coming from the west instead of the east, which meant we needed to launch from a less-optimal hill; it was a bit gusty, so hard to keep the wing from rolling off to one side. Because the weather was worse than forecast,  Dion decided to not take us up to the mountain that same day, but to give us another morning of slope soaring.  I was glad, because I was wiped out.  (See above about being 47 years old.)

Thus the next day, we got up at 5 AM to get to the park at 6 AM, for another three hours or so of slope soaring.  It was much easier due to much better winds, and we had fun running up and down the hill in a friendly competition to see whic pair of people could get the most flights-with-air in a specified time. (Note: it is really helpful to have a “buddy” when learning.  Once you are clipped in to your harness, you are connected to your wing so can’t do a good job of laying the wing out by hand if the wind moves it.  We were taught how to better adjust our wing on the ground using our lines, but it is helpful to have an extra pair of hands.  We were paired with a buddy in kiting and slope soaring.)

We then drove 2 hrs up to the mountain site, walked around the Landing Zone (LZ), and then went to lunch.  The weather in the Lower Mainland of BC is such that almost always, the winds will pick up significantly at mid-day, too much for novices to handle.  We pretty much can’t fly between 1300h and 1700h, so lunch tends to be from 1400h-1600h or so (with the rest of the time spent packing or unpacking and getting up from or down to the restaurant).

After lunch, Dion (slowly and deliberately) launched the students, one by one.  The winds died down as the day progressed, so Dion launched the students in reverse order of weight, which put me in the penultimate spot.

A note: I ? Dion.  Dion is extremely safety conscious, attentive, and supportive.  Not only did he give Jim and I kiting practice plus two days of slope soaring practice before the Big Launch, he spent a long time with each student on launch to make sure that they had a good launch: checking the lines (the cables that attach to the glider), checking our harness (the thing that attaches us to the lines), laying out the glider so that it would be maximally easy to launch, reassuring us, etc.  All of Dion’s students had perfect launches the first time that day; this was not true of all the student pilots with other teachers.

I had a totally unremarkable launch and then… I was in the air!  “Was it cool?  Were you excited?” I hear you ask.  Well, yes and no.  Mostly I was focusing on not killing myself; following Dion’s instructions on the radios (we each had radios clipped to our harness; two for redundancy) to sit back in the harness, do a left turn, a right turn, a 180, etc. as he made sure that I had some modicum of competency.  Next, I was focusing on aiming at my target: three tall trees at the far, upwind side of the LZ.  I was distracted for a minute by some bumps in the ride: I apparently had gone through a thermal: one bump for going in, one bump for coming out.

The landing sequence goes like this: go to above the far, upwind corner of the LZ (a rectangular grassy field bounded by tall trees).  Do one or more figure-8s along the short side (cross wind) to burn altitude; then turn and go downwind along the long axis of the field on the far (i.e. farther from the launch area) side of the field.  At the other end of the field (“the base”), optionally burn some more altitude with one or more figure-8s; turn into the wind (to help slow the groundspeed); at the last minute, flare (i.e. stall the wing) to give a slight bit of lift and a lot of decrease in ground speed; run like hell to keep up with the glider as it comes down.

We were told to always always always turn towards the instructor, never ever away (which meant left turns for this landing spot); to “put our landing gear down” (i.e. stand up in the harness instead of sitting in it) halfway down the downwind leg; and to never ever ever make sharp turns close to the ground.  I blew all three of those.  The LZ instructor (who was new) had the practice of putting legs down much closer to the touchdown so didn’t tell me yet, and I didn’t remember to do it on my own.  On the downwind leg, I misunderstood the LZ instructor telling me to ease up on my right brake as a request for a right turn, which confused me long enough that I didn’t turn left when I should have.  That meant that I was closer to the trees in front of me than I liked, so I made a sharp turn (oops!) to the left.

"my" wing in the briars

Well.  If you do sharp turns, you lose altitude fast, and suddenly I was on the ground.  Also, because I had not turned in time to hit the nice part of the field, I landed in bunch of briars.  I didn’t really panic because I didn’t have time.  One minute I was heading for the trees, the next I knew the ground was really close, the next I was on the ground on my side in the midst of briars.

I thought to myself, “Am I damaged?  Nope: successful landing!”  And I really wasn’t: not a cut, not a scratch.  Later I found what might have been two tiny little puncture wounds, each about the size of a small zit, but I might have easily gotten those during slope soaring.

My heroes!

My stomach felt awful, however.  My stomach is already acid-sensitive, and it turns out that adrenaline dumps a lot of acid into the stomach.  I didn’t know that, however, so thought I had gotten motion sick. “This sucks!”, I thought to myself.  I really wanted this to be something Jim and I could do together, but if I am so sensitive that I will get this motion sick on my first fifteen-minute flight, that wasn’t good.

Given how concerned everyone else was by my well-being after “crash landing” in the briars, and how bad I felt, they let me lie around groaning while they untangled my wing from the briars for me.  Thanks, peeps!

Interestingly, this landing did not make me more scared of flying, it made me less scared.  I am an out-of-shape, not particularly coordinated 47-year-old who did three things that I had been explicitly warned not to do, had an uncontrolled landing into briars, and still was unscratched.  There is more room for error in this sport than I had realized.

Jim and I debriefed, went home, and collapsed into bed.  I was wiped out.

The next two weekends had nasty weather, so we didn’t fly.

Finally, a break in the weather.  On Thursday, Dion offered another evening kiting session that we jumped on.  (The kiting sessions are surprisingly fun.)  While I had trouble getting the wing up, I was not completely exhausted.  Let’s hear it for carrying five litres of water 3 km to work and back for three weeks!

We were scheduled to have class on Sat/Sun, but Thursday evening, after the kiting session, Dion looked at the weather and didn’t like what he saw.  He called around to see who could come to a session on Friday, and managed to get a quorum.  So we got up at 5AM on a Friday morning and drove out to the mountain.

One really big advantage of flying on Friday is that we had almost no company at the top of the mountain.  I think there were only five other people there the whole day.

At the launch site, holding the bag the wing is stored in; you can see Mike setting up behind me.

Me starting to get up from a faceplant; LZ instructor coming to check on my health.

On my first flight of the day, I was a little bit more relaxed, and actually got to look around a little bit.  However, I came in a little bit low and wasn’t able to make my turn onto final.  Instead, I landed crosswind on the downwind short-side of the field.  This meant that I didn’t get any help from a headwind to slow me down.  I couldn’t run fast enough, so stumbled and fell face-first.

The great news was that I was again completely unhurt (again, not even a scratch, bruise, or scrape); the good news is that my stomach wasn’t nearly as upset as it had been after my close encounter with the briars; the bad news is that my stomach was still unhappy; the worse news is that I got motion sick on the bumpy drive up the rutted logging road.  (The great news is that I did not get vomit all over the inside of Jeff’s vehicle!)

I was still feeling queasy when the time came for my next flight.  Dion asked how I was feeling, I shook my head “no”, and he immediately scrubbed my flight with no recriminations of any kind.  The man is extremely supportive.

(Jim and the other students flew, however, and had great fun.  Dion had them ride thermals a little bit to get them used to soaring.  One of the other students, Jeff, is really good at this, in part from experience kiteboarding, and he was aloft forrrreevvvvvverrrrr!)

Then we debriefed, had lunch, and went back up.  We started flying again around 1700h, I believe.  As I said before, the winds are high mid-day and get weaker, so Dion again sorted by decreasing weight, putting me at the end of the line.  When it was just me and Dion at the top, the wind started being a bit erratic and I started getting nervous about the launch.  I was also aware that everyone else was waiting for me at the bottom.  Dion soothed me and calmed me down about the launch.

I was also a bit nervous about the landing.  The stated objective of the last flight was to get us to land on our own.  At this point, I have one landing in the briars and one near-face-plant… and that was with help.  Zero fully correct landings (unlike the others, who have had two or three apiece by this time).  Now I’m supposed to do it on my own?

That tiny speck in the center is me.

But Dion was right, the winds did die down.  I tried to launch — and wasn’t going fast enough.  I tried to abort, fell on my butt, and slid into my wing.  Pick up, try again, wait… wait… wait… and finally, it was a go!  I ran like hell down the slope and was airborne!

This time, everything felt smoother.  I looked around more, and got to go “wow, I am way up in the air and can see all kinds of stuff!”.  Eventually I got over the landing field and started my way down.  First mistake: I did triangles instead of figure-8s to kill altitude on the upwind short side.  No real harm done, but it meant that I ended up way over (inside) the field instead of sticking to the boundary.  Next mistake: I forgot to put my landing gear down halfway through the downwind leg.  Then, when I got to the base (downwind, short-side), I was a bit high.

On the base (downwind, short-side) leg

I did one loop of a figure 8 to kill some height, and started back towards the far side of the field.  I dithered and dithered for an eternity (like, two seconds) about whether I should turn upwind or do another loop.  I wasn’t sure if I had enough height to do another loop of the figure 8 or not, but felt like I was higher than I was supposed to be to land.  I worried that if I was too low, then things would happen so quickly that the instructor (monitoring and on the radio to provide corrections if I got into trouble) might not be able to help me before I got in the trees, and that would be bad.  The landing field is very long, so I figured that the instructor would have enough time to tell me how to recover if I was too high.  I thus decided to go for “final” instead of another figure 8 loop.

I was too high to land in the first third of the field like they like us to.  The orange spot in the lower left of the next photo is the target we were supposed to try to hit, and you can see I am way too high to hit that:

on final approach

As I came in, I flew over the heads of the other students, who gaped up at me.  It became clear that I was in fact going to land well before the trees, which was a relief.  The LZ instructor came on the radio and told me to put my landing gear down when I was about 30 feet off the ground, oops!  Fortunately, it was easy to pop into a “starfish” stance from my sitting position.

But where should I flare?  If you flare too high, then you fall from a height.  If you flare too low, then you don’t lose enough speed and might get pulled by your glider (i.e. face plant).  Fortunately, the instructor came on and told me to when to flare.  I flared hard and got ready to run like the dickens:

getting ready to sprint

I touched down very gently, took two, maybe three dainty little steps, and was, much to my surprise, stopped!  Zero forward velocity, and my wing was just sitting above my head.  It took 15 or 30 seconds to float to the ground as I just stood there with my mouth hanging open.  In the following picture, I am not only stopped dead, I have started to turn around an look behind me at everybody else.  You can if you look very closely that the lines to the right of me are slack and starting to collapse.

cold stop

~1(?) sec later

It was amazing. I literally could not have imagined — it was beyond my imagination — that it was possible for me to have a landing like that.

My stomach was not upset immediately, but it got unhappy a minute or two later.  (Not as bad as the other times.)   I immediately chewed two Tums, and that seemed to make it better.

about 10(?) seconds after landing

We debriefed and went home.  The next day, I was really lethargic and spent basically the whole day in bed.  Note, however, that I was merely lethargic after one day of flying plus one evening of kiting (and two days of getting up way way early) instead of being totally wiped out after one day of either.  Now if you will excuse me, I need to go carry six litres of water down to the beach!

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10.26.09

Canadian stimulus infrastructure leaving Québec out

Posted in Canadian life, Politics at 1:29 pm by ducky

Update: Some of the ridings were assigned to neighbouring ridings due to losing some precision in the input lat/lng.  This did not make a big difference in the overall picture, as only 2.7% of the projects were classified incorrectly.  I’ve updated this blog posting and the map; we probably won’t update the spreadsheet unless we have strong requests to do so.

There has been a fair amount of press lately on the distribution of Canadian stimulus money, with most of what we’d heard saying that Conservative ridings were getting more than their fair share of stimulus money e.g.  The Globe and Mail’s Stimulus Program favours Tory ridings.  Conservatives countered that it was important to look at the big picture, and that there were multiple stimulus programs. The National Post’s Liberal, NDP ridings getting more than fair share of infrastructure money: analysis reported that non-conservative ridings were getting more than their fair share of the Knowledge Infrastructure Program grants.

My husband and I kind of looked at each other and said, “We can analyze that data!”, so we did.  We saw a bias in Conservative/non-Conservative ridings, but it wasn’t huge.  We found that Conservative ridings got 51% of the projects, while only 46% of the ridings are Conservative.  NDP ridings got 15% of the projects, despite only having 12% of the ridings, and even liberals got slightly more than “their fair share”, with 27% of the projects and only 25% of the ridings.

So who is getting less?  The Bloc Québécois.  With 15% of the ridings, the Bloc only got 6% of the projects.

If you look at the breakdown by province, it looks like Ontario is getting way, WAY more than its fair share, with some other provinces — especially Québec — getting less than their fair share.

Dollar values are much harder to estimate because the value of each of the projects is given as a range — “under $100K”, “between $100K and $1M”, etc.  We made our best guesses at how to calculate that, and our best estimate gives Québec 12% of the dollars for 23% of the population — better, but still way less than they should be getting.

Now, there might be some errors in the data, as described below.  However, we think that this is worth investigation, and soon.

If you would like to look at the data yourself, Jim put together a spreadsheet in Open Office format, a slightly less-powerful spreadsheet in Excel format, and a PDF showing information from the spreadsheet, available on his writeup of the data. I of course made a map of the data.

Caveats:

• We are in no way affiliated with the Government of Canda or Statistics Canada.  This analysis does not represent government policy.
• There are multiple parts to the stimulus package, and this analysis only covers the infrastructure component.  Other money in the stimulus plan is going towards improving the financial system (which I think means “bank bailouts”, but I’m not sure), extending unemployment benefits, etc.
• I assigned ridings based on the latitudes and longitudes that were given in the Economic Action Plan’s data (which Jim pulled down using their API).  We have some doubts about the integrity of those lat/long pairs, especially since two of the stimulus projects have lat/longs that are unquestionably in the United States.
• My software truncated the latitude and longitude used to assign ridings down to two digits, which means the points can appear a little bit to the east and/or south of their actual location.  In cases where a point is very near a riding border, that could mean that it would be assigned to the neighbouring riding.  I expect this would only affect a very few ridings, and would not significantly affect the by-province counts.  This made absolutely no difference in the riding assignment. Update: 174 ridings were mis-assigned, but this did not make a huge difference in the aggregate numbers.  It meant that Conservative ridings got 51.1% of the projects instead of 52%, and Quebec got 8.2% instead of 8.6%.  The message stays the same: there is inequity here.
• It might be that some national projects are assigned a lat/lng in Ontario because there wasn’t an obvious locus for the project.  However, if that were the case, then I would expect that Ottawa would have the biggest number of projects.  In fact, the most projects (144) are in the Vaughn riding in Toronto, represented by MP Hon. Maurizio Bevilacqua (L).  The Ottawa Centre riding does have the second-highest, but only 101 projects out of the 6424 projects — not enough to explain why QC has so few projects.

Copyrights:

• Information on the stimulus project information came from Canada’s Economic Action Plan
• Canadian federal riding geometries came from Elections Canada, which requires this notice: © The federal Electoral Districts Boundaries (Representation Order 2003), Elections Canada. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Elections Canada, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0M6 Canada (2007).
• Information on Canadian MPs came from the House of Commons Web site and were produced by the Government of Canada.  The right to reproduce for non-commercial use is given here.
• Provincial population figures came from Statistics Canada.

Update: I looked at per-capita figures, and that makes things look even more skewed. Five of the top ten ridings in projects per hundred thousand people are in Ontario:

The top riding in Quebec, by comparison, ranks 82th out of 308 ridings (at 29.9 projects per hundred thousand people).

(Note that ridings have roughly between 25 and 125 thousand people, with the average right around one hundred thousand.)

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04.21.09

UBC programming team takes 34th in the world!

Posted in Canadian life, Hacking, University life at 11:47 am by ducky

The UBC programming team took 34th place at the 2009 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals in Stockholm!  W00t!!

This marks the sixth year in a row that UBC has gone to the World Finals, despite being entirely undergraduates and entirely without World Finals experience.  (We have information on past teams, but don’t know the seniority of the 2004 team.)

Congratulations, team!

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03.14.09

Sovereignty of the people

Posted in Canadian life, Gay rights, Politics at 9:40 am by ducky

Recently, the California Supreme Court heard arguments in a case designed to overturn California’s Proposition 8, which overturned the judicial decision that gay and lesbian people had the right to marry.  While I didn’t watch the hearings myself, I understand that Ken Starr (the defending attorney) basically put forth the belief that a majority vote could strip rights of  minority.

People who are better than I at guessing what the outcome will be by examining the questions, tone, and body language of the justices think that they will rule against overturning Proposition 8, in part because they think that the California Domestic Partnership gives all of the same rights as marriage.  Essentially, they are fighting over a word, with Starr’s side saying that a bare majority of the citizens can take away gay and lesbian people’s right to use the word “marriage”.

There was a Canadian political figure, Stockwell Day, who seemed to have similar beliefs in the rights of the majority over the rights of a minority.  He pushed for a law that would have required a referendum on any proposal supported by a petition signed by 3% of Canadian voters.  He stopped talking about this when Rick Mercer (sort of Canada’s Jon Stewart) called for a national petition forcing Stockwell Day to change his first name to “Doris”.

Perhaps the correct response to Proposition 8 is to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot requiring Ken Starr to change his first name to “Brenda”.

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03.05.09

The view from our Canadian window

Posted in Canadian life, Random thoughts at 2:08 am by ducky

If you know us, you know we have raved about the view from our apartment.  It’s not the absolute best view in the world, but it is pretty stunning to a gal from the flat lands and buildings of Champaign, IL.

That picture (and an absolutely ginormous version) were taken and stitched together by Randy Stewart from Seattle.

Randy apparently walked into our apartment, said, “Oh my god!” or something such, and dashed into our bedroom to take pictures.   Our other dinner guest, from metropolitan Canada, was slightly perplexed/bemused by his reaction.  It is completely ordinary for people in cities in Canada to live in high-rise apartments.

Randy (and Jim and I) are from the US.  It is very uncommon for people to live in high-rises in the US.  If I think really hard, of all the thousands and thousands of people I have known, I can only think of six households who I know ever lived above the sixth floor, and one more who I think might have had a high-rise condo a few years ago.  (And three of those households were in the same building in Mountain View.)  That is it, period, total, everybody, and I had to think pretty hard to come up with that meagre ration.

Why are there so few high-rise residences in the US?  There are many factors.  I am by no means an expert, but these are a few:

• The American Dream of owning your own house is cliche for a reason.  It is assumed that if you don’t own your own house, at least you aspire to owning your own house.  To not aspire to have your own house is sort of like not wanting to own a TV.
• When renting, you generally get more square feet per dollar in a shared house than in an apartment, especially a shared apartment.  Even I, through all my moves, have only lived in four apartments in the US, and two of those were while I was a student.
• In some places, the only high-rises around were “the projects” — government-built and -run publicly-subsidized housing.  Thus high-rises were decidedly un-sexy.
• In California, where one-eighth of the US lives, cities can’t afford dense housing.
• California has earthquakes, which makes people nervous about high-rises, even though high-rises constructed to modern codes are much safer in earthquakes than older houses on landfill or alluvial floodplains.
• Traditionally, cheap gas has meant that it was feasible to live quite a ways from work.
• In the US, not having a car can have a significant negative impact on the quality of your life, parking is difficult in cities, and very few US cities have good public transportation systems.  The poor transportation is due partly to density, but also part to the easy availability of guns.  Many people in the US are afraid of taking public transportation.

You should also note that Vancouver has worked very hard to develop its downtown.  The fact that it has a vibrant and vertical downtown was the result of very deliberate and careful urban planning, not an accident of fate.

UPDATE: I realized that several of the dorms at my US university were high-rises.  I’m not sure that counts.

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12.09.08

Canadians worrying about US water appropriation, wtf?

Posted in Canadian life, Politics at 11:35 pm by ducky

I am baffled by a concern that seems endemic in Canada: that the US is going to steal Canadian water.  The way they talk about it, it’s almost like they think there are already secret contingency plans drawn up that one more dry season in California will trigger.

This seems totally preposterous to me:

• I have never heard anyone in the US talk about routing Canadian water to the US.  I remember about ten or twenty years ago, hearing people talk about a canal to Oregon, to the Columbia river, but it wasn’t something that people were taking seriously.  It was sort of like how in the late seventies there were people talking about building space colonies.  There were a few people thinking about the theoretical possibility, but there wasn’t any real thought that they were practical.
• Which states might run out of water?  Let’s suggest California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.  States in the South.   Where is Canada?  Way way north.  Where is the closest water to California?  Oregon.  Don’t need to go any farther.  Where is the closest water to Texas?  The Mississippi.  Don’t need to go any farther.  What is the easiest water to get to from Arizona and New Mexico?  Probably the Mississippi again.  Maybe you’d object that the Mississippi water isn’t very nice by the time it gets to Louisiana.  Maybe it is, but if they are out of water, they can’t be that choosy.  The next place they could look would be Lake Michigan; you don’t have to go over any mountains and you don’t have to cross any international borders.
• Why should the Canadians worry about water when they could worry about oil instead?  The US has a history of belligerency related to oil; I don’t know of any US belligerency related to water.
  • One Canadian, in response to that question, said “Yeah, but we already sell the oil.” Yeah, but Canada could sell the water, too. And Canada has a lot more water than it has oil.

So I find it a very odd concern. I am not suggesting that Canadians should think of the US as an entirely and always consistently benevolent country. I’m sure there are things Canadians should be nervous about. But water? That is so far down on the list of things that I would worry about that I find it very odd.

To be fair, I also have heard a man from Michigan be concerned about California stealing Michigan’s water.  (He went on an extended rant about how people shouldn’t live in places that required importing large quantities of natural resources.  I wonder how he would enjoy winter in Michigan without large imports of fossil fuels.)  Maybe they got this idea from the Canadians.

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