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Election in Canada - May 2nd

I want to pay special attention to the federal election; especially in the Port Moody-Westwood-Port Coquitlam riding where I live. To stay up-to-date on anything anyone on the campaign trail says, try here.

The first thing I noticed when I went looking is that the Liberals and Greens have no declared candidates in this riding. Come on people - this election was a surprise, right? The NDP has Mark Ireland, and the incumbent since 2004 is James Moore (Reform cum Conservative).

Now, who to vote for?

Conservatives
I'm pretty confident that my friend John will be voting Conservative. He has a coffee mug at home that says "I'm a scary Conservative with a hidden agenda". That's just it ... I think there is a real right-wing, pro-business, anti-organizing agenda at work; although they'd never say as much. I think a corporate tax cut is sufficient evidence for this ... cutting taxes when our government is up to it's eyebrows in red ink shows real arrogance. I know that the other parties are jumping all over this one - and they happen to have the majority of Canadians on their side this time. Trickle down economics don't work. If you need proof, just look south of the border to our bankrupt neighbor. I won't say anything about the attack ads except that they sicken me and have the opposite to their intended effect.

Liberals
I think the Liberal leader suffers from what I call the "Jimmy Carter Syndrome". You get a guy in control of the party that's too intellectual - and thinks too much about all the angles to a problem. What you end up with is fodder for the opposition and the media, and your ability to lead is questioned by everybody. The bright side is, Ignatieff will do great as a philanthropist once out of  politics.

NDP
Jack Layton is clearly the best spoken, most articulate of the big three leaders. Personally I think he leans too far to the left, just as Harper leans to far to the right. Too bad he wasn't a Liberal - he'd easily be the most electable in the field.

Coalition
There's all this chat surrounding the Liberals about a "coalition" government. In my view, if this was to be embraced rather than shunned, the NDP-Liberal-Bloc coalition would win. I actually like this idea, and I think most Canadians are pragmatic enough to agree with me. After all, we've had a minority government since 2004, and we seemed to have weathered the international recession storm quite well - shows that working with your neighbors instead of burning down their houses is actually a civilized way of getting along.

Green
Unfortunately, the Green Party finds itself in the political wilderness, much the same place as the Reform Party was in 1986-87. What the Reform Party had at the time, though, was a visceral dislike to business as usual in Ottawa, and a voter base of like minded, action-oriented voters. The Greens don't have a motivated base in numbers sufficient to influence anything. If somehow they were able to squeeze themselves in to this mysterious "coalition" so that a vote for them would be a vote for the future government, then we'd have something!

Final Thoughts
It's good that I've got until May 2nd to figure this thing out. Right now, I don't know who to vote for ... the under-aged, under-life-experienced incumbent? Some left-leaning guy I don't know? The environmental responsible protest vote that won't count? The un-named Liberal? Stay tuned.

Anti-Apple

This is more a lesson in frustration than a productive use of time. You see, I'm multitasking right now - trying to do something productive while simultaneously re-sycing iTunes from my old netbook to my new one. This is the fourth time I've had to do it, and each time I have to look up conflicting reports on how exactly to do this. It wouldn't be a hassle if I primarily used one computer, and that computer happened to be Windows-based. Problem is, in my house, the most powerful computer with the best monitor is the one I built myself - and it happens to be Linux (UNIX) based (both because I like to play around with Linux, and it's free).

Now it happens that you can get iTunes on both Windows and Mac, although I imagine if you were trying to go from on to the other it would cause lots of grief. You cannot get iTunes on Linux, so I'm stuck using the relatively-underpowered netbook to manage the music.

After much consternation, I'm this close to giving my iTouch to Kathryn (who is very Mac-centric) if she would provide me with a cheap non-Apple MP3 player. Once you've "drank the koolaid" of Apple, you are completely locked in. Using iTunes on one computer is all they've made contingencies for. Moving my music/books/videos from one PC to another shouldn't be this hard. I know that, with every other MP3 player out there, your PC (or Mac or Linux computer) just treats it as another hard disk drive, and you can move files at will. I've got a big hate-on for Apple right now. Nice products, but you never notice the handcuffs they put on you when you buy them.

This is sad...

Our daughter, Kathryn, is home for the weekend. She only lives about an hour away, but we don't get to see her all that often. She's accepted an offer with the Government of Singapore to teach there starting in January 2012, and we'll miss her infrequent visits home. Actually, with the advent of Skype, we would probably see more of her when she's overseas (by more, I mean virtually, not physically) - I know during her last few months in Turkey she was on the computer with us almost every day.

But that's not the reason for my rant today. Kathryn forwarded me a website this morning which makes me both sad and angry. Two young, well educated, smart, motivated people have come to this - trying anything and everything to get a job. Interning is great, but if it doesn't lead to something with cash attached to it, how can you live? In our never ending quest to drive every last dollar out of our costs - both at work (outsourcing) and at home (Walmart), we've effectively neutered the next generation. These are the people who (we hope) will be looking after us when we get old. They won't be able to afford it.

When I was 25, I had a career. And starting a family. And a house. And a car. Opportunity too. None of these things were all that grand, but they were ours. What does a current 25 year old have? I know that the reasons for all of this are complex, but I have to think that a big contributor is our never-ending drive to get every last dollar on the table.

What should I tell Kathryn?

Beating a dead horse

Really short update. Last night I slept for about seven hours. No sleeping meds at all. This is significant - I only hope the trend (if one night is a trend) continues.

UPDATE: Didn't sleep at all last night (3/16). This is the most frustrated I've ever been!

UPDATED UPDATE: Went to my GP this afternoon (3/17), and he explained that getting any sleep at all at this point was a bonus. In his experience, people withdrawing from Ativan take months to do it, experience terrible insomnia while in the middle of it, and a large percentage give up and go back on the drug because they get no sleep at all. So I guess I should consider myself lucky.

Joshua Tree

We got back from a week at the Palm Desert Intrawest location last night. We drove down, stayed six nights, and drove on back to Vancouver. The drive itself is about 2200kms, so it's not a trip you would take on a whim.

On our way home on Saturday, we took a short detour through Joshua Tree National Park. I had a park pass that was still valid until June, so that seemed like reason enough to go. Once we were in the park, I realized again just why I feel so attracted to it. It is unlike any other place you'll go. The trees are spectacular (Joshua Trees - duh), and the landscape looks so incredible you think it's fake - somebody must have placed all those rocks there.

The campsites are small but the location is otherworldly. I want to make a real effort to come back and stay for a couple of weeks.

Sleepless Nights

I've been off the Ativan since Monday, February 28 ... so that's sixteen days now, and the sleep is still very much a struggle. A couple of nights ago, I had two back-to-back nights of measurable sleep - I dreamed, and I knew that I had been asleep. Unfortunately, for the last couple of nights, it's been back to the same routine of rolling around in bed until the alarm clock goes off at 7am.

I've only been able to find limited information on how long I should expect these withdrawal symptoms to continue, assuming I'm experiencing insomnia as a withdrawal side effect. I hope I can get some sleep tonight.

The Palm Desert "B" Tour

I'm down in the Coachilla Valley with friends, and we've spent the first couple of days exploring some not-so-typical destinations.

First, we made a half-day of visiting the Thousand Palms Oasis and hiking along the San Andreas Fault to a second palm-intense spot. The wind was very high that day, reaching 75MPH, and sometimes made the walking difficult and the resulting sandstorm a bit painful. After we finished up with the palms, we took a hike up a short incline and viewed the fault from a higher vantage point. Here you could see very clearly the line delineating the fracture; it was deset on one side of the fault, and green on the other.

The next day (yesterday) we decided on a road trip around the Salton Sea. It's unnerving when you drive through the pristine boulevards of Palm Desert and Indian Wells, then continuing through the working class neighborhoods of Indio. We were headed to Route 86 on the west side of the Salton Sea. Our first stop was courtesy of the California Highway Patrol, when he gave us a warning for doing 70MPH in a 55MPH zone. We used cruise from then on in. The next place we stopped was a little, unnamed town just north of Salton City. It had obviously been a great plan of somebodies to build a community of some size there - as the streets were all paved, and the power was in and all laid in a grid. Sorely, something happened on the way to prosperity; I imagine it was the real estate  crash of 2007-8. Homes are abandoned, unfinished or unstarted. The hundred or so homes that are finished and remain are all for sale at deep-dish-discounts. There are a few hardy soles still there, and somebody was bust fixing their roof as we drove by. We commented that it would be sad to have to live (by countless circumstance) here.

Next stop down was lunch in Brawley at the Cattle Call Park (lunch provided by the deli counter at Von's), next to the water treatment plant. Then back in the car to the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. Here we hiked about two miles round trip to a place where we could take a close look at the sea itself (quite smelly due to the high bacteria count in the water), and to all of the birds that either call the area home, or just a rest-stop on their migration.

Much to the chagrin of some of our travelers, we next went to have a look at Slab City, near Niland, California. This is a really interesting place where one must learn to live off the grid - no water, sewage or electricity. A small community of $500,000 motorhomes and $0 makeshift caravans are there, in an abandoned US Army tank training facility (circa WWII). You feel a bit voyeuristic when driving through the place, although there are plenty of signs out asking passers-by to stop and buy whatever they're selling. 

On our way back now, as I had thought the whole tour would take about four hours and we had already been gone six, we stopped in at the Fountain Of Youth Spa And RV Park to have a look see. Nice if you're stopping overnight or for a couple of days, but really in the middle of nowhere (Highway 111 south of Mecca, CA). Last stop was at Leon's in Meca - a Mexican grocery store that must have been the busiest place in North America. Here we bought some pastries that were unidentifiable, and only found out this morning what they actually were.

I don't recommend spending the day with five people crammed into Nissan Altima circumnavigating the Salton Sea, but it was a good way to see stuff you'd normally never go out of your way to see.