Author: andrasthehun

A Day at the Cottage. Idle Thoughts.

August 28, 2022

The lake was smooth, and I was sipping my first cup of coffee on the deck early in the morning. The grumble of a starting boat engine woke me from my meditation, which is usually to think of nothing. How inconsiderate, waking everybody up at 7 am. The large inboard/outboard ambled out of the bay and slowly coasted down close to the shore in front of me. I was having my second cup when I saw the boat coming back and then turning direction again, with a young male standing at the wheel but not fishing. That was surprising. What was he doing? Then an aluminum boat appeared and circled the other one and the two boaters talked with each other. I thought that was strange, a meeting early morning on the lake. It appeared to me the first boater was waiting for the other and just coasted on the lake until the other one arrived. The Ozark episodes on Netflix came to my mind where drugs were distributed to boats on a lake while a preacher gave a sermon to the anchored boaters. Oh, shut up. Your imagination is running wild. Probably just two friends from Toronto discovered that both have a place on the same lake and arranged to meet.

We came up to the cottage on Birch Island the night before, to relax after family visits and to eat up the leftovers. We did not have anything to carry over to the cottage and did not use the carts at the marina for moving stuff to the boat. But we saw the weekenders had begun to arrive and fill the parking lot. Disturbing was a couple of young people bringing, what looked like a huge sound system. Sound travels far on the lake and we do not cherish late-night parties. A worse scenario is when we see cases of beer carried onto the boats.

But it was a quiet night, and the morning was relaxing on the deck, punctuated by the two motorboats trolling now along the lake in front of me, with the two young people fishing. I decided to go for a walk on the island.

Walking, I came upon one nice cottage and was confronted by its owner standing on the path and bemoaning the loss of shade trees, providing privacy to her cottage.  She told me: “Ontario Hydro cut down my cedars that I planted fifty years ago”. I looked at the cuts that showed tree trunks of over a foot in diameter. Ontario Hydro maintains the right-of-way of the power line paralleling the path by cutting down vegetation along it. I empathized with her but remarked that at least we have electricity here.

With the heat rising by now, the lake beckoned me, and I returned to ponder a swim. My son-in-law brought me a swimming buddy, a red balloon that you tie onto your waist, so the boats can see you in the water. I blew up the swimming buddy, attached it to my waist, and jumped into the water, avoiding the wannabe water skiers.

Life on the water is, to me, the essence of cottage life on a lake. Kathy grew up in Wales on the waterfront close to Porthmadog in Caernarfonshire and I grew up in Hungary, where we spent our summers on the Danube. We both enjoy water-related activities and getting the cottage was a joint venture.

Another favorite activity is dinners with the family on the deck after a day of playing on and in the water. With long daylight and no mosquitoes until sundown, the deck provides the ideal space for freewheeling discussions on career choices for our grandchildren or how much our healthcare system sucks: wait a minute, we discuss both sides of the healthcare challenges we face today.

Tonight, the grandchildren prepared the meal and the third choice was tacos and burritos. It is interesting to me that although I do not cook much, all my children and grandchildren can and some even enjoy cooking. Quite a change from the old days. After the meal, the grandchildren washed the dishes, and under the threat of missing dessert, it is not democratic at the cottage. Sundown and the arrival of mosquitoes pushed us into the cottage. And we heard the loons on our lake providing the background music before the crickets took over.

One needs money and time for a cottage: cottagers are people, in my experience, with an established career and a family. Limited by the seasons and vacation time, people have cottages on our island that stay vacant most of the time. When I survey all this vacant real estate, I think that this is extravagant or perhaps indecent from a societal point of view. I really enjoy it though.

Mixing of the Races?

August 17, 2022

Viktor Orban, the far-right Hungarian Prime Minister, said “We, Hungarians, are not a mixed race…and we do not want to become a mixed race”, in a speech in Romania, in July 2022. I thought his idea was pathetic nonsense. But wait. Let’s examine what his consequential statement means.

The Huns occupied Hungary over a thousand years ago. Since that time, and also because Hungary is the crossroads between Asia and the west, hordes from the east have invaded and trampled on its land many times. As well, the Germans and Russians occupied it recently. No question that intermarriage has happened, witnessed by the names in Hungary and words borrowed from the Turkish, French, German people, and others. Hungarian people today have a rich ancestry of people from many countries. There are Polish, German, and Hun names in my ancestry, among others, but we called ourselves Hungarian. So what does Orban talk about when he says that Hungarians are not a mixed race?

In the same speech, Orban also said “countries where European and non-Europeans mingle were no longer nations”. Aha! Now you say that Orban is OK with the mixing of European people but not others. Who could these others be? He meant African migrants who came to Europe over the past ten years. And, of course, Africans are Arabs and Blacks and many are Moslems. They have different skin colors and religions. He is against these people coming into Europe: there can be no other interpretation of his comments.

The reaction to his comments was swift both in Hungary and in Europe: he was called racist and his statement was out of the Nazi playbook on racial purity.

We can identify race as humans with similar and distinctive physical characteristics, such as skin color or hair texture. But race has no specific identifiers in the human genome. There is only one race: “homo sapiens”. Altho race is a social construct, it has developed connotations for social exclusion, discrimination, and violence towards certain social groups. We often express it in a social hierarchy with white-skinned people with privilege over darker-skinned people.

Unfortunately for Orban, the trend does not support his thesis: the trend is toward increasing interracial marriages. Partially, it is because of migration patterns, people move from Africa to northern locations. It is also because of increased educational levels; with higher education, there is less prejudice. Sometimes it results from the lack of available partners. For example, many men perish in wars, and the incarceration rate among blacks in the US is high.

In Canada, five percent of marriages were interracial, according to the 2011 census. The rate was ten percent in the city of Vancouver. In the US, over eight percent of marriages are interracial, while ten percent of marriages were interracial in 2015. In Honolulu, forty-two percent of marriages are interracial, while in Las Vegas it is thirty percent and in Santa Barbara, CA, it is thirty percent.

There are many people with mixed-race parentage. Just think of President Obama or our own Governor General Mary Simon. My older brother married a Chinese woman from Hong Kong. Peter and Angela had lived in Hong Kong and Toronto. The family accepted and got along well with Peter’s wife. I enjoyed the diversity Peter brought into the family. You may know some people, in your family or outside, who married someone of another race. So what the hell is Orban talking about? The future is already here; interracial marriage is now.

How College Students Spend Summers – Then and Now

August 3, 2022

This is not a scientific poll by any stretch of the imagination. But I reflected on how three of my college-age grandchildren spent their summers this year and compared it to what I and my friends did for summers while attending college over sixty years ago.

We had one goal: to get a job to pay for tuition, room, and board for next year at the university. My grandchildren had loftier goals: do something interesting, educational, and even exciting, while making money. Big difference in aspirations! Is this true? You be the judge.

OK. So what did I and my friends do when we were at college? To pay for the cost of attending university the next year, we took the first job we could get. The emphasis was on getting a job, any job. We did not think about fun activities.

Looking for a job in my first year at university, I had a couple of false starts. One was strawberry picking on the lower mainland of British Columbia, where the stench of the accommodation and backbreaking work all day finished my enthusiasm in one week. The other false start was my unsuccessful career selling Collier’s encyclopedia in small towns along the Fraser Valley to poor people. After these attempts, I was successful in getting a sustaining job: I settled into a summer of dish-washing at the Essondale Mental Hospital. Boring as dickens but steady and paid well. The mental patients ribbed me about seeing me doing “women’s jobs”. But I lived at home and could save all my earnings.

Other jobs followed in subsequent years. I was happy to be hired by a survey crew where I did machete work in the wilderness of Vancouver Island’s interior, memorable for the cloud of deer flies and mosquitoes. When I complained, they assigned me to work inside, where I experienced the most boring job of my life: drawing cross-sections for a highway from survey data. Each drawing took a few minutes; plot seven dots on graph paper and connect the dots. I decided never to be a draftsman for a survey crew.

One highlight of this job was that I learned to like and drink beer (in retrospect, this may not have been a positive highlight). We drank beer in the hotel pub at night, having nothing else to do. I learned to gulp down a glass of beer by holding the glass with my teeth and knocking my head backward while opening my throat. Most nights ended with the natives joining us and getting into a rumble that I avoided at all costs.

I left the survey crew in a haste on my last day, after hearing the crew members talking about teaching the “college boy” about real life by stripping me and inserting my private parts into an anthill.

So what do college kids do today? My grandson Cedric showed up at the cottage in Elgin, ON, after a 3000-mile bicycle ride from Portland OR. He is an engineering student at Oregon State University (in Corvallis) and decided to cycle coast to coast before taking on a summer job. What a great physical and educational adventure! And potentially dangerous, too.

Among his many observations he related, he found the prairie people more friendly and curious than west coast people and discovered coffee at Tim Hortons in Canada much hotter than McDonald’s in the US. He avoided places where people looked at him with suspicion, but also met many friendly folks who let him camp overnight in their yard.

He used the “warm showers community” website in his travels, where people offer a welcoming hot shower and a place to bunk down, to cyclists. What first-hand experience learning about your country!

My thoughts circled back to Cedric and his financial situation and how he could afford to spend six weeks cycling and not working. I recalled that last summer he did fire-fighting in Idaho and saved money: accommodation and food were provided in tents in the wilds of Idaho. They were paid for sixteen-hour days and there was no place or time to spend money. They worked in fourteen-day stints, then were off for two days before another fourteen-day session started. For Cedric, it was another amazing educational and well-paying experience as well.

Here is another example of what students do for a summer job today. Not satisfied with repeating a job as a cashier in a grocery store, my granddaughter, MaryKate, created her summer job. With friends from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, where she is a student, they secured accommodation from the friend’s family to stay at their cottage in upstate New York. Then they took training in whitewater rafting and obtained a job with ARO, an adventure class white water outfit in Watertown NY. Another great experience! When MaryKate did not work at the white water center, she worked at the local grocery store. She created her job!

One final example is how another grandson, Alec, parlayed three seasons of fun-filled sailing camp experience in Ottawa, Canada, into teaching sailing to disadvantaged children on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. All I heard from Alec during the summer sailing camps was the fun they had turtling (turning the sailing boat upside down), but obviously, they also learned to sail!

Alec negotiated his accommodation in New Orleans by sleeping on a boat belonging to a friend. It had never entered my mind that summer camps can provide skills making you able to get into the workforce.

Yes, three examples do not form a valid sample. Despite that, my cohort, over sixty years ago, had much more pedestrian jobs. Why? I can only speculate that the children today live more in the present and try to maximize their opportunities. As well, they have more confidence. What are your thoughts on this subject?

Interactions with the City of Ottawa

July 17, 2022

I witnessed a bylaw officer exercising his power by writing a ticket for a car pulling away from the curb, occupied by a hurried mother dropping off her child at day camp. On the same day, I also experienced an unbelievably friendly outreach by OC Transpo. Let me describe my day.

Although bylaws are necessary, and I support them, sometimes I find them heavy-handed when enforced to the letter of the law. A case in point is a situation I witnessed yesterday dropping off my granddaughter at a soccer camp by the University of Ottawa, which upset me to such an extent that I wrote to the Mayor of the City, Jum Watson, about it.

“Jim, I witnessed an outrageous incident this morning. Dropped off my granddaughter for soccer camp at the University of Ottawa Minto field on Templeton this morning when one of your meanest and nastiest bylaw officers wrote down the license plate of an unfortunate parent, going to work after dropping off her child. Yes, she was in a no-stopping zone and yes, the officer did what they pay him for. But…

Parents have to walk onto Minto field with the child to register, so one has to park and walk the child to the field, which takes a few minutes. Now I have the time to park a block away and walk back to register my granddaughter, but many parents work and try to drop off the child by putting on the flashers. This poor woman I saw running back to her car and getting in while the bylaw officer wrote the ticket. She drove away, and the officer was still writing the ticket. What a mean-spirited attitude!

I wrote this in the heat of my anger but received the following reply:

Thank you for your correspondence. Your feedback and concerns are always appreciated. I have shared your feedback with the Mayor and his staff for their review and consideration.

There you have it. Courteous and brief but will go nowhere. Perhaps they will copy their human resources group to train bylaw officers to use their power judiciously, considering the individual situation.

The same day, my granddaughter discovered double-decker buses in the city when we drove to her soccer camp. She wanted to ride one. Not knowing which routes these buses run and at what time, my wife contacted our local councilor, who referred our request to OC Transpo, the agency running the bus service. In a couple of hours, we received an email:

 “Hello, Katherine. Thanks for reaching out. We have an idea that might be the most flexible in your needs to get your granddaughter on a double-decker bus. I understand why she likes them. They are very different and fun to ride. It would be much easier to talk a plan through by phone. Please give me a call at your nearest convenience and we can discuss it. “

The upshot of the phone conversation was that a transit supervisor met us at 5 pm at Baseline station and flagged a double-decker bus for us, shepherded us into the bus, and recommended that we take the bus to the end station and wait and come back on the same bus, which took a different route to where we parked our car. The supervisor suggested we sit on the top deck, on the left, so that we can enjoy the view of the Ottawa River. We had a scenic ride that the supervisor recommended, almost a tour of a part of the city. My granddaughter was beside herself.

This was much more than we expected; all we wanted to know was where and when the double-decker buses run so we could take a ride on one. OC Transpo went beyond our expectations to assist us.

Lessons learned? The city provides numerous services; do not judge its performance by any individual activity. In one case, the city was client-oriented, while in the other, it was not.

A Canadian Welcome Called ArriveCan, Driving to Canada

July 11, 2022

“You have been picked randomly to take the covid test,” said the Canadian border agency officer, handing David and his two children covid test boxes. They drove from Durham NC crossing to Canada via the Thousand Islands Bridge into Ontario. That was David’s introduction to Canada, after four years of absence.

He and the children travel with Canadian passports, all had three covid vaccine shots, and filled out the ArriveCan document successfully. So what more does the government want? Do they have Covid? The government just did away with random testing at Pearson and other airports in Canada because of the huge delays. If you have a government mandate based on science, as our PM claims, all Covid mandates are based on science, how come you do not enforce it at airports but enforce it at border crossings by car? This is utter nonsense.

The one good thing was that the entire conversation at the border took five minutes, but the agent left them with an ominous warning to take the supervised tests on the first day upon their arrival and submit them in twenty-four hours, or a fine of $5000 may be levied.

To put it in context, my son David and the two children came to visit us for a few days at the cottage that is on an island accessible by boat. And they were told to take the covid tests with a person supervising via an audio/visual internet connection. On this remote island, the internet is sparse and slow, and sometimes non-existent. Have the government policy wonks considered all the potential circumstances where they may have to administer this wretched Covid test?

So David made appointments for all three of them for the next morning; each appointment was scheduled for twenty minutes by the government.

I listened to the conversation the next day when the government officials, three different ones, instructed David and the children, aged nine and twelve; to take out the info sheet from the Covid testing box; fill it out with their birthdates; addresses, etc. and then swab their mouths on two sides for three seconds each and each nostril for fifteen seconds and the government officials counted the time down.

Then they put the labels on the test tubes; put the swabbed sticks back into the tubes in the right direction; etc. and place the test boxes in the fridge (a weird suggestion since the last time we came back to Canada and FedEx picked up our tests. The driver told us the FedEx truck was unrefrigerated). Like you were in kindergarten. And then they were told how to submit the repacked boxes. Two of them said to get FedEx to pick it up (as if FedEx would send a boat to an island), but the third one said Lifelabs and Shoppers Drugmart are places where you can drop off the boxes. Seemed to me the interviewers needed additional training; the instructions provided by the three people should have been identical.

 A couple of interviewers asked David what time it was as the interview was taking place (Canada has three time zones), a strange question; not knowing where in Canada he was and what difference it made, although the information was available. The border guard asked David where the cottage was for his stay in Canada. The IT people developing this program should have provided location info for the interviewers if they were worth their salt (the question showed the interviewers could have been all across Canada and did not know where David was).

This lack of coordination by the agencies delivering ArriveCan and testing reminded me of a similar situation that happened to me when I came back from the US in May. Although the border guard told me I do not have to quarantine, I received a robot call every day for fourteen days upon my return, asking me about my quarantine location. Assuming the border guard punched in the right information, why had the government follow-up program kept calling me? Does the government contract with the lowest cost IT companies that may not have the best track record? Or, perhaps, government officials never test-drive their creations.

Another ridiculous aspect of the experience David went through is that he never received the result of the tests. He stayed less than a week, but by the time FedEx picked up the packages and the lab developed the results, he left the country. He just told me he never received the results and it is a week after arrival. The entire exercise is a total waste of time and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Yes, vaccinated travelers to Canada may have Covid. But the effort required for, and the inconvenience caused by, testing far outweighs the benefits of finding out how many people entering Canada. Covid is community-spread today in Canada, far more than by people arriving from outside the country.

If the government wants to test arrivals to Canada, it should test all arrivals, including those by airplanes, via highways, and boats, and should make sure that all the agencies administering this process are well-coordinated. Just my opinion.