Author: andrasthehun

Zooming with Cottage Neighbors

April 2, 2024

I push the join button on Zoom and face 18 somber people on the screen, members of our cottagers’ association. Nobody speaks. With a look of expectation on their faces, they appear serious. I ask: can you hear me? Some say yes. I grab my glass of wine while Kathy brings our dinner at 7 pm. We decided to eat our dinner during the Zoom call.

Looking at the Zoom participants, I ask who is from Ottawa. A woman says she is 100 km from Ottawa in Madoc. Then I recognize Kit joining us from Florida, Ry, who lives in New Hampshire, and a few from Toronto. The association’s President lives in Toronto and called the Zoom meeting to discuss issues concerning the group.

A revised constitution and the transfer of land used as pathways from the island’s original owners to our cottagers’ association are on the agenda. These topics leave me cold; I have never been interested in constitutions, and the land transfer has no impact on our enjoyment of the island. We already have legal access to walk on the pathways with all other cottagers, so who owns it is irrelevant.

I would have been more interested in the Zoom call if the agenda had proposed some new activities and developments for the upcoming summer. Bureaucratic matters, especially constitutions, leave me cold, but I looked forward to seeing some cottage neighbors.

After tent camping and trailering, we bought the cottage a few decades ago, envisioning a permanent summer venue we could visit every weekend. It never involved Robert’s Rules and land transfers. It was “getting away” from urbanization and work. It had to do with living on a lakefront with all the lake’s benefits, like swimming, canoeing, kayaking, sailboarding, and even walking on the pathways in the back.

But here we are, having dinner with a glass of wine when the President puts the revised constitution on the screen and explains proposed changes. What a bore, except for a few quirky items. He says we could have more than the current membership class, consisting of property owners on the island.

Less than half of the current cottage owners belong to the association, and the President suggests we could have the non-paying cottagers become another class of members. Huh? What does that mean? Why should you be a member if you do not pay the membership fee and cannot vote? Some people on the island may not even be aware of the association, but we make them members?

But wait. The President also suggests another member class: people who do not even live on the island. Who could these people be? Relatives, potential cottage property buyers? I think we do not need these artificial membership classes.

Another peculiar suggestion the President makes to include in the constitution is that only people with no history of bankruptcy can serve on the association’s executive. Someone asks how we can filter these individuals out of consideration. How can we ascertain that the individual volunteering to serve on the Executive Committee has no bankruptcy history?

Concerning the pathways, I ask: Why transfer the land to the association when we have the legal right to walk on them? What are the benefits? I do not get a response to my question or to the other question, whether owning the land would require liability insurance, which would cost dearly and increase the membership fee.  

However, there seems to be momentum to proceed with the land transfer, mainly from the executive members. There appears to be wind in their sails; I am unsure what drives their motivation. They promise to follow up on suggestions from the 19 members of the association logging in.

I leave the Zoom meeting with mixed feelings. When we bought a cottage on an island, we thought we had left bureaucracy behind in the city. But bureaucracy follows us today and is burgeoning, with big-city people coming to our island and developing big-city organizations with rules and regulations. I may have to reconsider joining the association for next year.

The Men’s Book Club

March 19, 2024

One suggested forming a book club at our monthly luncheon of retired friends. It could have been the spicy food at the Indian restaurant that triggered our brain cells to ponder that our wives belong to book clubs while we do not. We discussed that women have many social networks while men do not. Some argued that men traditionally went to work while women raised children at home, needing social networks to survive, indicating our age more than the current reality. Be it as it may, we decided to form a book club.

We did a quick internet survey on where and when we would meet. The majority agreed to meet at lunchtime; we do not want to compete with rush hour traffic. The options considered for a meeting place were a restaurant that would cost money and force us to share space with loud customers. Or a coffee house like Starbucks, where we may not be welcome to occupy many chairs for hours while buying a single cup of coffee.

As a result, we chose to meet at someone’s house who would also provide a light lunch. Nine people showed up at the first meeting; the original lunch group expanded with friends we thought would be interested. We all proposed a book for our review and picked one for our first meeting. The one suggesting the book would moderate what we envisioned, a free-for-all discussion.

Although I joined the group, I had some misgivings about its future. Monthly meetings are good for socializing, but should we also be voracious readers? I used to read books in my youth and loved thrillers (Agatha Christie, Ken Follett, John Grisham) and westerns (Zane Grey, Louis L’amour, Charles May), but now I read primarily political news and no books. I gathered from talking with my friends that they are not bookworms except a couple who read a book weekly. But I thought, let’s give it a try.

Our recent meeting focused on John Le Carre’s book The Looking Glass War. It is a Cold War story, a spy novel set mainly in the United Kingdom during the 1960s.

Although the discussion flowed, people were cautious in expressing their views, perhaps because of their science, engineering, and finance backgrounds. Some thought the plot was complex without explaining why, while others believed there was too much detail describing a crystal radio with Morse code transmission. Someone else questioned why the author did not conclude the situation, leaving the readers to figure out what happened. Still others characterized the book as British history. With no explanation, someone said he did not like the book. We did not pursue any of these comments; perhaps the group must jell to be mature enough to dive into more detailed discussions without antagonizing each other.

I told them I enjoyed how the first chapter got my attention and hooked me into reading the book in one sitting. And how the plot builds up into a crescendo of excitement towards the end, the chapters becoming shorter and shorter as the actions become more and more dangerous.

Placing an English agent over the Iron Curtain in East Germany is vital to the plot. I thought of my experience with the Cold War, living in Hungary then, and the Iron Curtain’s impact on me. Living near the Iron Curtain, I knew it was a no man’s land, cleared of vegetation and mined, with dogs roaming between the two electrified fences patrolled by soldiers and lighted at night by watchtowers. As a medical doctor, my father patched up many people trying to escape across the Iron Curtain, caught by the dogs, the soldiers, or the electrified wire fence trying to escape using wire-cutters.

Reading about the crystal radio set reminded me of my childhood experience building one. I remember the excitement I felt getting radio signals from the West on my crystal radio; in Hungary, the only reception one had was Hungarian propaganda broadcast on the “people’s” radio with one channel during the Cold War.

After the meeting, I wondered: Did I enjoy the book more than the others? Was it perhaps my experiences that connected in many ways with the story while the others had no similar experiences? That thought made me think that knowing the context of a story makes one more knowledgeable and appreciative of a story than others with no such experiences.

I look forward to our next meeting to see if my theory holds.

How I Accumulated a Lifetime of Pictures and What to do with Them

February 28, 2024

I am sitting in front of three boxes full of a lifetime collection of pictures, trying to figure out what to do with them. But wait! What about the albums on the shelves? There are twenty-four albums chock-full of photos. But there is more: I inherited my father’s twenty-five albums, including duplicates of the images I gave him. His albums also have pictures he brought out from Hungary, containing photographs of my mom when she was young when they married and then of his three boys and grandchildren growing up. Before I forget, there are also hundreds of slides. What should I do with thousands of photographs and slides of family, travel, and events?

I digitized slides and photos that I considered memorable. Those taken with a digital camera are on my computer, on Google Cloud, with duplicates on an external storage device. I even bought a “photostick” that sucked up all my pictures from the computer to have a portable copy, but it did not have enough storage space. And I produced picture books of our travels using Shutterfly software.

So, should I dump the three boxes? When I looked at some of the old pictures in the boxes, I found some that I could not place in my digital collection. We should go through the boxes to make sure we do not dump some memorable pictures!

Although I initially used film cameras with everybody else, I started shooting exponentially more pictures when digital cameras arrived, making it easy and fast to click, edit, and store images. I bought my first digital camera, an Olympus, at Carleton Place, a small town near Ottawa. I paid over C$1500! That camera sold for half this price a year later, but I wanted to buy a digicam for our trip to Asia in 2004.

The Canon G9 was my next digital camera; it looked like a small brick and fit into my hand with a comfortable hold but was a bit larger than fitting easily into a pocket. It was light enough to carry it in my hand or backpack.

Then I moved to what I considered a professional camera, buying a Sony SLT-A55V sold as a special deal one Xmas with many filters, lenses, and other photographic equipment. I thought it was a value deal for C$1000. I used that camera on many travel trips by adding another lens that photographers call the “traveling lens,” combining short and long-distance shooting without changing the lenses. This camera came with its bag, which I had to carry in addition to other suitcases on our travels.

The Sony camera was heavy when we hiked the Camino Santiago in Spain. I was also paranoid about being robbed carrying such fancy equipment (I also took the G9 in my backpack as a backup).

An Epson Multi-Media Storage Viewer added to the weight of the camera gear I carried on our travels. I was trigger-happy snapping pictures, and I thought I needed this device to download and edit the images I snapped daily.

But technology never stops, and I began using my cell phone camera, a Samsung Galaxy, for our trip to Pune, India, in 2018. Taking pictures with the cell phone was just too easy and comfortable. As a backup to my cellphone, I replaced the G9 with a Canon G7X Markll, a tiny “pocket” camera with excellent features. It took fantastic pictures and could wirelessly transmit photos to my cellphone. The cellphone and the pocket camera were light and easily concealed, significantly improving on previous travel with the Sony and the G9.

I remember arriving in Pune and discovering that my Galaxy did not work due to getting wet from my leaking water bottle. It was scary. But I read that if you put rice in a Ziplock bag with the camera, the rice will soak up the liquid. The camera worked after twelve hours.

On our trip to Pune, I took all my pictures with my cellphone, a multi-purpose device with many benefits. For example, when someone wanted to know how much a store item cost in Canadian dollars in Pune, I just looked up the exchange rate on the cellphone (I had internet access) and converted the local price into Canadian dollars in between taking pictures. In the Fall of 2023, I upgraded my cellphone to an iPhone 14, going to Corsica, France.

 This cellphone takes excellent pictures with three lenses, making me wonder whether I would use the Sony or the G9 again. Kathy tells me the Sony Digicam still takes better images than cell phones. That may be true. But how good should pictures be? The underlying question is why do we take photographs, and how often do we look at them? I take pictures to provide memories. But after showing them to interested family and a few friends, the images lose currency. They were uninterested when we visited with family and offered to show them some travel pictures from Africa using my projector and screen.

To me, there is historical and personal value in pictures. When I take a picture, I look for a person, a building, or a landscape, and that process sharpens my mind and renders the image memorable. Storing them for the long run has value primarily for me, the picture-taker, while its value diminishes exponentially for others, in my experience.

Thinking about keeping pictures reminded me of my father’s diplomas, which I have. When he passed away, I was the only one of three sons interested in retaining them and dubious if anyone would keep them after me. The same goes for the pictures I took.

Returning to what to do with all the pictures, the digital ones on Google are always available online without storage problems at home. The ones in the albums and boxes take up space and could be pruned and offered to our family, although I do not think they would be interested. They are snapping their own pictures. It is doubtful that we would take them should we downsize. Let me know if you have encountered the same issues and how you dealt with them.

Too Many Power Outages?

February 23, 2024

Our local hydro company representatives came to present “how to make our network more resilient to power outages.” Close to forty people attended the information session held at the community center.

Sarah, the hydro person responsible for “community outreach,” introduced Joe, who introduced himself as the person responsible for metering and substations. Before he arrived at our community center, he said he drove around our neighborhood to check it out. He said our neighborhood is very nice; I am unsure what he meant by that or his comment’s purpose. Was he trying to butter us up in case he expected some people to be critical and unpleasant?

The slide presentation he attempted to give was interrupted immediately by a booming voice in the back row asking why we still have above-ground wiring: he said twenty years ago, he attended a similar meeting where hydro promised to bury all the lines. Well, the six hydro representatives at the meeting did not have an answer. Some discussion of costs ensued, but it is not quite accurate that the wiring is not underground; in my area, the wires are buried, and perhaps the property developments before our subdivision did not have the benefit of underground wiring. Joe should have had a map showing the wires above and underground in our mixed neighborhood.

Joe had very few slides, and I cannot recall more than half a dozen. The first one showed a geographic map of our area. Following it was a map of the hydro network in the area, with the hydro lines following the streets but without indicating where the lines were buried.  The most interesting for me was the slide showing the number of power outages by year and type since 2019. Unfortunately, it was unclear whether the data was for the entire city or our area alone. According to the data, the most common outages result from equipment failure, followed by trees falling on the wires.

I never thought we had a problem with outages; I remember a storm in July 2023 when we lost power for ten hours and had a fine breakfast at a restaurant with backup power. The derecho was a major storm with power outages when we lost the food in the freezer worth a few hundred dollars in 2022. And before that, we had a major ice storm in 1999 when we lost power for a few days. I cannot recall power outages before the ice storm. So, are outages becoming more frequent? I do not know and did not get an answer at this meeting.

But Joe could not present his slides; the next interruption came from the back row, again, someone demanding: “How come the Loblaws store and Denny’s restaurant kept power while we, the residents, were without power last year?” The answer to me was obvious: a grocery store and a restaurant would have backup power, or maybe those establishments are on different hydro lines from ours. Unfortunately, Joe could not give us the answer or even an explanation.

Another person asked how much capacity he could or should install on his roof via solar panels to avoid relying on hydro in the future. The questions came fast, and at one time, I thought of getting up and asking people to hold their questions to the end of Joe’s presentation. But that was the job of the community outreach person, and Sarah could not control the meeting.

Towards the end of the meeting, I learned that “resilience” will be enhanced by “infrared monitoring” of the power equipment that anticipates and identifies equipment failure before it happens. Hydro also has a “tree pruning” program. Although these initiatives are good, I wondered if Hydro had a planned annual maintenance program funded and completed each year. Or did Hydro practice breakdown maintenance? And, has Hydro not had a tree pruning program before? So, what is new here except the infrared monitoring program?  And more to the point, as far as I was concerned – what are those plans for our neighborhood?  They sounded like system-wide plans to me that may or may not be used in our area soon!

Perhaps Hydro has fallen behind in maintenance in recent years, resulting in power outages. For example, hydro has wiring buried in our backyard on an easement that has not been replaced in fifty years. I do not know the standards for replacing wiring, but ground movements may break the insulation on wires, moisture gets in, and rust ensues. There must be standards for such items, which should be addressed in planned maintenance programs (just like when you get oil changes in your car – you don’t wait for it to break down). But when it comes to saving money, maintenance is the first to go.

I found the meeting disappointing; I learned little of substance. Hydro people did not provide the big picture, outlining that equipment is getting old and needs replacement, that the trees that people planted fifty years ago interfere with the wired infrastructure, and that people use more electricity than ever before, including EVs in the garages -all of which can lead to more frequent power interruptions, regardless of weather. I expected some trend analysis with supporting metrics as they affect our area. Specifically, I expected Hydro’s line-by-line itemization of what substation and line repairs and tree pruning Hydro will perform along specific streets over the next few years. Please provide us with some reassurance that Hydro is actively working towards building resilience via improved equipment, technology, and maintenance. We did not get that.

Climate Change: From X-country Skiing to Urban Walking

February 15, 2024

We have always done x-country skiing in Ottawa for fun and exercise during the winter months. Snow could come as early as December but never later than by Xmas. We have always had up-to-date equipment, and nothing was better than being outdoors in the fresh air on a sunny day. Sometimes, it was cold, but layered clothing did the trick, and when it was frigid, we started skiing uphill to warm up.  

But there has been a massive change in the weather over the last few decades. When we moved to Ottawa in 1971, the temperature never reached zero Fahrenheit in January (in those days, we had the Fahrenheit scale). And we had ten feet of snow that month; I had to shovel snow off the roof to lighten the load. Not anymore!

It was so mild last year that the world’s longest skating rink, the three-mile-long Rideau Canal, did not open in 2023. It was open four days this year, in 2024. Balmy weather created risky skating conditions on the Canal, and the National Capital Commission, the agency maintaining the ice surface, deemed it unsafe for skating.

We had some snow in December, but there has been no precipitation for weeks. A few weeks ago, we started walking on snow-covered paths instead of snowshoeing, which has become difficult because of the lack of fresh snow. The snow on the pathways had become compressed by skiers and walkers. It melted during the days with above-freezing weather and then froze overnight. So, we walked with crampons on our boots to avoid sliding on the icy pathways. But walking on uneven, icy surfaces, even with crampons, is unpleasant. We needed a new plan to go outdoors for fun and exercise.

We discovered the city cleared the sidewalks of snow in urban areas. So, we picked a walk downtown, where we found cleared sidewalks. The plan was to walk for a while and then let serendipity take over by improvising the return route, aiming to visit a coffee shop.

We picked a location on Somerset Street West, parked the car at the Suya Palace African Grill, and walked west on Wellington Street, dodging people on the narrow sidewalk. Tinseltown Christmas Emporium was on our left. Further west, we passed the Ember Hair Retreat and the Crows Nest Barbershop. The Tooth and Nail Brewing Company was across the Les Moulins la Fayette coffee shop at Irving Avenue. On the other side of the street was an LCBO (liquor store) and the Ministry of Coffee (another coffee shop). Next to the Moulin la Fayette, we looked into the windows of the Tokyo Smoke shop (a cannabis store), all of these establishments within two blocks.

Walking and discovering the variety of stores was a refreshing change from walking in our neighborhood, where few people ever walk, and when they do, they walk on the streets because of the lack of sidewalks. Our progress was slow, with our attention focused on the various establishments.

We chose a street parallel to Somerset for our return. The changing character of the old residential area to modern architectural houses and small apartments was striking in design and colors. I took pictures of the evolving residential area. Some people walking by me with young children asked if I was a real estate agent looking for a house.

The area was changing with many renovations demonstrating the area’s attractiveness for living. Unfortunately, I thought the redevelopment would squeeze the small pop-and-mom stores out of existence.

The next day, we decided to pick a quieter area with fewer people on the streets for our walk. We chose to walk along Colonel By Drive, next to the Rideau Canal, which, without skaters, we thought, would be quiet. Instead, we met joggers and cyclists in balmy, above-freezing temperatures.

But Colonel By Drive was so noisy with heavy car traffic that we could not hear each other talking. Like the previous day, we chose a parallel street to return, Echo Drive, bordered by stately and some newly constructed homes. It was quiet with no car traffic, and we enjoyed this older but expensive area, looking at the architectural dwellings.

As we looked at the houses, some Jehovah’s Witnesses approached us, asking how we managed in this complex world. It did not appear they were successful in talking with homeowners on this street, so perhaps signing up people on the road for an interactive Bible course was a good substitute. Although they did not convince us that studying the Bible was our interest, we discussed aspects of our lives in an overcrowded world. After our walk, we ended up in a coffee shop, the Stella Luna Gelato Cafe.

Our Sunday walk took us from Ottawa South, going west on Colonel By Drive to the Bronson Bridge, where we crossed over to Queen Elizabeth Drive. We walked east along the Drive to Lansdowne and checked out the Ottawa Landsdowne Market, open only on Sundays. I have not been in this area for years and was stunned by the massive redevelopment around the stadium. The place reminded me of Granville Island in Vancouver, although on a much smaller scale.

A hundred vendors/farmers within one hundred miles of Ottawa come to this market. We stopped to talk with a vendor selling Kinoko mushrooms, which he grows in his garage, and bought some of these odd-looking “gourmet” mushrooms after he explained how he grows them. And, of course, we had to get some micro-greens from another vendor and buy organic, free-range eggs from a farmer who is a “leader in animal welfare.” Before we loaded up with additional purchases, we decided to walk back to the car, except for a stop at the Happy Goat Coffee shop on Bank Street.

We miss x-country skiing on fresh snow on a sunny day, but urban walking is more than a suitable substitute. It provides exercise outdoors, but more importantly, it is a way to learn about our city, its businesses, its people, and its developments that we do not see or hear about unless we walk around the city.