00:58 - 05.04.06
Behind the Mask(s)
The first real rain of spring mixed up with the sweet scent of wood smoke. That was what it smelled like tonight. My youngest and I locked the cats up in their rooms and opened all the doors and windows wide around 10 in the PM. Since tomorrow is garbage day, we hauled all the bags down to the bin and cleaned up the yard as well. There was still some wood left mid-yard from the fence building we completed in November, so it was placed around the bottom of the fence where the neighbours' dogs on both sides have been digging - there are some fairly big holes. Why the clean up tonight? Well as I noted the other day the ground isn't frozen anymore. Means all the detritus blown in over the winter is now coming unstuck from the ground as well as those decorative Hallowe'en bags I'd hauled around back. Right now there is no limit on the number of bags of garbage one can put out, as opposed to during the gardening season here which begins in another month when I think the limit is supposed to be 5. Final reason is that the neighbours can't see over that beautiful six foot fence without being caught as peeping Toms. Even so I don't relish the possibility of more verbal abuse, so why not do it late in the evening when most people are sleeping. Cleaning the yard doesn't make any noise after all. Besides that I really wanted to be barefoot for that first sensation of grass and dirt under my feet. Because of the time, I was outside with my youngest with just my shift and a pullover on. He wa nagging about my lungs, but that fresh rain washed air felt like a tonic. I was energized rather than otherwise. The only negative thing was that I found one of the railings on the steps to the balcony had been pulled out and the piece of siding that should have held it in place was nowhere to be found. Guess that I'm going to have to take photos of the fence, the balcony and the backyard as well as the area around the front yard and those 6' bushes that screen us from the neighbours as well.
The big story in the province has been the weekend convention of the ruling provincial political party. The Premier's leadership was being reviewed. He got a 55% approval rating from the delegates, which might have seemed ok anywhere else except in our province, where his approval rating has never dipped below 80% as leader. There are several people who want his position, obviously. They have become openly aggressive since the Premier said he would be stepping down next fall. They have made it clear they don't want to wait, although the truth of the matter is that it has always been on his coattails that the party itself and most of the elected party members have held their seats. Quite frankly I have detested a lot of the activity that that party has undertaken since taking power under that leader for the past 13 years. Rather than act as responsible stewards for the wealth of the people of Alberta whose resources they've exploited, they've gutted spending on education, health and social support for Albertan families while opening the province up to be the testing grounds for things like Enron et al little manipulation of the power grid and the resulting rolling brownouts that hit the US a while back. In the US courts that has been deemed theft and compensation has been ordered for several states. Yet here, that little group has never been brought to account, even though it is known exactly where and how it was practiced on Canadian power grids first before taking it stateside. The province deregulated our energy sources and the conditions were proactively fostered by several of the MLAs some of whom are still in office.
The first story of the incident that appeared in our local paper on the Saturday morning after the vote the evening before mentioned that it appeared to be a carefully orchestrated and intentional humiliation of the Premier. That included drunken boasting in the bars afterward by some of the people involved as overheard by reporters. What I found interesting was that the one person who had been responsible for and orchestrated the attempted palace coup of the MP that ran in my area this last election was one of the people interviewed immediately after. The next afternoon the person he supports, who was a federal politician, made it clear he was thinking of running in the leadership race too. Even though I hated a lot of the decisions made by the Premier over the years it was always very clear that those decisions were driven by the party and their funders. The one thing that kept them in power was the man who led them. I think this is the first time in a long time they've let the mask slip even a little to show who they really are. I hope someone other than me notices.
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