n. has been staying at PY1 – the Adolescent Psychiatry inpatient unit at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Center – since Friday August 13. He has been a voluntary inpatient for assessment. This represents a little progress. In February 2004 he had been admitted for a few days and started an assessment but he ran away.
On the first day of his hospital stay, he seemed to be confused and frightened. He was honest with me about his drug use and, at least that day, he appeared to be sincere about getting help to stop using all drugs except marijuana.
Edmonton 2004 – Sunday
The forecast for Saturday night and Sunday had been for rain. It didn’t rain. It was a cloudy, cool day but the sun came out and it warmed up enough for me to put my fleece away during the afternoon.
I started my day with a session that I will remember for a long time. The session leader was Brian McNeill, and the other participants were the new Quebecois group Genticorum, and John Reischman and the Jaybirds.
Edmonton 2004 – Saturday
It was cold and cloudy all day, but it did not rain. Claire and I arrived around 10:00 AM, a short time after the gates opened but well before the first sessions of the day. I had a good day, and enjoyed several acts. I wanted to see Ron Kavana and Brian McNeill, singer-songwriters from Ireland and Scotland. I have read about their music, but I haven’t seen them perform. McNeill’s discography is rather thin for such an accomplished and experienced writer and performer, and not very accessible in Canada.
Edmonton 2004 – Friday
On Friday, the Edmonton Folk Festival offers sessions (at some other festivals these would be called workshops) on 4 stages from 6:00 to 9:00 PM and three acts on the mainstage. The weather was warm, but not hot in the late afternoon and it was cloudy. There was a forecast threat of evening rain, but it did not rain during the evening. It cooled gradually.
Edmonton 2004 – Thursday
Claire and I stayed in Canmore on Tuesday after the Canmore Folk Festival, and drove to Edmonton on Wednesday.
We had planned to try some hiking and camping those days but we adapted to necessity. We had the car in a garage in Canmore to look at a transmission fluid leak, and managed to get it looked at very inexpensively, but we had to wait for the work. We spent the time with camping stuff – taking care of camp, cooking meals, walking, reading. We went directly to my friend Randy’s house in Edmonton and I had the car looked at again to deal with a problem I had noticed in Canmore which had not been addressed at the garage in Canmore.
We arrived at the Edmonton Folk Festival site in Gallagher Park in time to exchange our tickets for the weekend wristband passes and to pitch a tarp halfway up the hill.
Canmore 2004 – Monday
This counted as one of my better days, among many good days at summer folk festivals. It was sunny warm day, with moderate winds and I was able to leave the cold weather gear in the dry sack.
We started with the Canmore Pancake breakfast – pancakes and sausages served outdoors in front of the Legion Hall, no charge, donations for the Bow Valley Food Bank taken with thanks, with local amateur musicians playing rock and blues standards. We went to line up at the main gate to buy our day pass, and we had a spot of luck. The main gate wasn’t supposed to open until 10:00 AM and meanwhile people with weekend passes would be admitted through the other gate at 9:30. However the ticket sellers at the main gate came out and sold passes at 9:15 and we were able to enter and to get a spot in the first ring of trees by the main stage. We had warm sunshine during the first part of the morning and shade during most of the afternoon.
Canmore 2004 – Sunday
After being delayed by car trouble, Claire and I drove to Canmore Sunday morning August 1, set up camp at a campground in Bow Valley Provincial Park and drove to Canmore. We had missed the Saturday evening concert, but we were in time for the rest of the Festival, except for the first half hour of the daytime workshops on Sunday.
It was a cool day. It had rained early in the morning, but the rain held off for the rest of the day. In fact, when the wind gusted, dust clouds blew across the festival site and we got quite dusty and dirty. It was good to be back in Canmore, even on a cool, cloudy and windy day. I have good memories of other festivals there, and there is something about sitting at the workshop stages in the open field, looking at the mountains on each side of the valley, and the crowd, and listening to beloved performers…
Lost Boy – summer of ’04
I’m posted the first version of this post on Wednesday August 4 from an Internet Cafe in Canmore, Alberta, where I was camping on holidays. I came for the Canmore Folk Festival and arrived in time to see most of the Festival in spite of car trouble. I finished this post from my friend Randy’s house in Edmonton on August 5.
I had a call Wednesday morning from Red, the manager of the group home where n. is nominally staying. He said n. had come back after several nights awol, but was voicing ideas of hopelessness and worthlessness. Red wanted to call in the Mobile Crisis Intervention unit to meet and assess him.
Save the Mosquito
People who get mad about using chemicals to kill mosquitos.
Winnipeg has built itself at the junctions of the Assiniboine, the Seine, the LaSalle Rivers and other tributary streams and creeks with the Red River of the North. It sits at the bottom of prehistoric Lake Agassiz, at the low point of a flood plain. This contributes to the fertility of the soil, and to the presence of hundreds of thousands of sloughs, dips, melt ponds and other bodies of standing water which nurture the reproductive capability of the mosquito.
When the warm breezes of summer warm the breeding ponds of insect world, Winnipeg resorts to spraying the insecticide Malathion. When the spray trucks roll, the Greens start to write letters to the editor, to caucus, and ultimately to blockade. Last year it was a few streets. This year, it was the City yards where the trucks are loaded. Last year it was impromtu drama. This year it was civil disobedience and organized protest, resolved by arrests and criminal charges.
If it isn’t broken…
Movable Type has released version 3.01 which is a bug fix on 3.0D. The notes at MT’s web site said just download and unzip a file which contains upgraded files – no scripts. Just unzip and upload to the server.
Problem 1: which file? The download box gives you two options – full version or “upgrade”. Which one is the bug fix? Is “upgrade” a new set of files for people who installed 3.0 by upgrading from an older version or is it the bug fix for everyone running 3.0? Why is there a full version option on a page for downloading the bug fix??? Then Problem 2 – uploading. Remember the original installation? I have operating files in /cgi-bin/mt/ and I have a separate /mt-static/ container, which is the recommended configuration. Some of the files go to /mt-static/ and some of those files should be ftp’d in binary. There is no documentation in the upgrade zip archive. There is no warning or reminder on the SixApart web site. They assume you know or remember.
On the first try, I managed to overwrite mt.cfg, and loaded everything to /cgi-bin/mt/. I broke my blogging tool. After careful study, I reloaded the 3.01 files into the right containers on the server, and edited mt.cfg repeatedly until the whole thing started working again.
It came back in stages, like my colon coming back from my colostomy. Such great pleasure from such a modest accomplishment. This is not for the faint of heart. I feel like an Internet Red Green – pass me the duct tape, Harold.