Carrick to Calgary

Well, here goes! Mr White promised that I would update the world on our little trip to Kananaskis (also known as 'K Country' - probably because it would be easy to get carried away with those 'an' repeats - we could have ended up in Kanananananananaskis if we weren't careful!).

So in order to keep the promise, I think that this is going to turn out to be a bit of a photo blog. I'm not really in the mood to write screeds of text today as its about 20 degrees C, the sun is shining and the sky is pure blue - and I need to be outside! Mind you, being outside in all that beautiful sunshine also has a bit of a downside - the relative humidity at the moment is hovering somewhere around 20%, whereas I see that Belfast (NI) is luxuriating in a nice damp 80%! Did you ever think you'd hear me say that I missed the rain... Actually, its not bad at all... all it means is that you have to be sure to use moisturiser almost religiously (Mr White has even decided to do so - he told me a while ago that he thought moisturiser was really just 'for girls', but he has now decided that it is really for people who want to keep their skin), you have to water the lawn at least once a week, and you have to nurse your plants a bit more carefully than at home. Mr White reckons that buying annual bedding plants might have been somewhat optimistic, and we might have been better investing in some cacti...

Anyway, back to K Country...

We had decided to go away for a couple of nights over the long weekend, but rather than drive for days to get somewhere exotic, we decided to go a whole 45 minutes up the road to stay in the Delta Lodge at Kananaskis. What a fantastic setting! The leaders of the G8 also thought so too (I think), as they stayed up there for the 2002 Summit meeting that was hosted by Canada. Someone told me the other day that, for the 3 weeks before the summit meeting, there was a mountie posted at every trailhead for miles around, just to make sure that 'terrorists' didn't climb up a mountain for the express purpose of sniping at all our glorious heads of state (GW Bush being among that illustrious group).

So, here's the 'proof' that they were there ...



Mind you, I see now that the meeting was hosted by the now scandal ridden government of Msr Chretien - I wonder if they paid very large sums to a 'friend' of the government to make the plaque (confused? Check out the web for Liberal Sponsorship Scandal, Gomery Inquiry etc).

The hotel itself is nestled in the trees - trying very hard to look like it isn't there...



The rooms are pretty neat - we stayed in the Signature Club part of the hotel, in a 'loft suite' - which basically means that we had a one and a half storey room. Downstairs, there was a fireplace (very nifty), sofa, easy chair & footstool, desk, chair, bathroom (with jetted tub), fridge (NOT a mini-bar), coffee maker and kettle, TV etc etc. Upstairs was the bed, and another bathroom...complimentary evening snacks in the lounge, and (if you were capable of being up and about before 9.30am on the weekend, free continental breakfast in the lounge - very posh!!).


Here is the downstairs portion of the room...


And here is the upstairs...


And the rest of the location is fantastic - if you want a hotel in the middle of the mountains, with breath-taking views, with an 18 hole golf course in the valley, with miles of well maintained walking trails, with no shops to speak of, with an indoor heated pool, with an indoor/outdoor hot-tub, and with some nice restaurants, this is the place for you! As you can tell, I was impressed!

So here goes with the rest of the pics...




Well marked, well mapped, well maintained walking trails




The sign warns about ticks, but we didn't encounter any nasty little blood sucking critters...




Did come across a couple of bigger creatures though - these guys didn't seem too worried about us...


Now for some general views from our 10 mile hike (seriously!) on the Saturday we stayed in K Country...










If you look very carefully in this picture (above), you'll see a bunker on the golf course in the valley floor. We met a guy who told us he'd seen a grizzly bear and cubs fording the river on to the course once, and he said it was the funniest thing, because all you could see was golf clubs flying everywhere as the golfers scrambled to the carts to get away from the bear... I imagine the poor golfers didn't quite see the same humour in the situation!


This next picture is of a 'playing field' just behind the hotel - in our couple of days up there we saw it used for baseball, ultimate frisbee (bit like football, but throwing a frisbee instead), and weddings. The only problem with the outdoor wedding being set-up on Sunday was that the wind was whistling down the valley so hard that the 'bridal arch' (draped with some very fancy white silk) kept blowing over on to the grass - distinctly not bestest...



So, there you go - the latest in J and P adventures.

Next few weeks are looking a little busy - I head off to Boston to speak at a cancer registries conference (to stand in for my boss - 6th-8th June inclusive), off to Toronto to an epidemiology conference (27th-29th June inclusive), J goes home (10 days at start of July), J's brother, sister-in-law and Seb arrive 5th June (staying for 2 weeks), and Denise&Roy arrive early July (when Mr White is at home!). Phew!! Will keep you posted on all the goings on!

P

18:00 RMT Friday 27th May 2005

Back again, a fairly slow day on-call so far (touch wood), possibly due to the lovely weather. It's just like those days when we were in primary school before the end of the year, late May or early June when the whole class was allowed to come out of its stuffy mobile and sit on the grass and read. If you're outside for a few minutes, the heat starts to soak into you - it's just lovely!

Anyway, more photos - we went to Bragg Creek a couple of weekends ago and walked along the Elbow River. When we set out the weather forecast was good, but once we got there the skies darkened from the west and it started to rain. We got a good walk down-river before we got wet, though:


Wild river


Having a break


Darkening skies


P and the River

We also have some great photos of Miss Vanessa Kate McAlister, who is looking fantastic, and we thought we should share them with the wider world:







We also have one of Granny Brown, back home again, in a 'four generations at once' kind of photo:



Oh, and my new 60GB iPod has arrived, although I'm still waiting on the new hard drive so I can complete the surgery on the old one:



And lastly, the White men have all installed Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) and are enjoying the experience of multi-way video webchats. You need a G5 Mac to really get the most out of this, but it runs OK on a G4, even if the pictures are a little blurry:


Three-Way Webchat

We're trying to get Uncle Jim up and running too and then we'll be having webchats in real time between the UK, US and Canada!

That's all for now, J.

PS - We have more photos from our weekend away in Kananaskis, so hopefully Mrs White will stick them up on the blog shortly!

Friday 27 May 2005, 13:00 Rocky Mountain Time

On-call today, the first of three (THREE!) Fridays in a row, which is good news for the bank manager but not for me. At least once June 11th comes I have almost 6 weeks on-call-free before my next night on July 21st, which will allow me to go to the UK and back, and celebrate P's (and Dad's) birthday without having to swap any nights.

After a fairly dismal Victoria Day holiday (dark and overcast, with cold winds and no sun) the weather has taken a turn for the better and for the last couple of days it's been clear blue skies, warm winds and temperatures reaching +21 in the afternoons. We've even brought the plants up out of the basement to put them on the deck, it's so warm, as the chances of a surprise frost seem to be diminishing daily. Not that we can't get a sudden snowstorm in June or July, you understand. Oh, and we have a new lodger, a little red-breasted bird (maybe an American robin) who has taken up residence in the joists under the deck. Every time we walk out on the deck, there's a flurry of feathers and our little friend shoots out from under the deck to perch on the back fence until we go in again.

The Queen had a fairly nasty time of it in Edmonton, torrential rain and only +7, which meant that only 25,000 Edmontonians turned up to greet her. She only had part of Wednesday in Calgary, and tickets were snapped up in a few minutes for her brief stop at the Saddledome. Come 4pm, they closed the roads and Liz and Phil were whizzed off to the airport to their waiting plane back home again.

Anyway, we have decided that 'Summer's Comin' In' as last night we got the tables and chairs out of the basement, dusted them off (we've been using the table for potting plants!) and put them back on deck, so we could have our tea sitting in the sunny evening warmth. We even had a classical summer BBQ staple, chicken on skewers, to reinforce the summer feeling:


First deck dinner of the year!

We've also been out and about the country recently - Bowness Park is really coming to life with the warmer weather, loads of kids, open-air BBQs everywhere, the river is high with all the melt water and the lagoon has been refilled so that the boats can go on it. This weekend we're planning to rent a canoe and go for a bit of a paddle, weather perimitting.


Sitting on the edge of the Bow


Ice Cream at the Lagoon


Bowness Lagoon in February - seems like another world

We've also been to Sunnyside Garden Centre a few times to get our gardening supplies, and we noticed this sign:



If you can't make it out, it says"

Sunnyside Weather Station

If Rock is Wet-------------------------Raining
If Rock is Warm------------------------Sunny
If Rock is Cold------------------------Overcast
If Rock is White-----------------------Snowing
If Rock is Swinging--------------------Windy
If Rock is Bouncing--------------------Earthquake
If Rock is Gone------------------------Weather Station is closed for today

Better go and do some work, more later if possible,

J

"Dear Mr White

CERTIFICATE OF COMPLETION OF SPECIALIST TRAINING

I am pleased to inform you that the Specialist Advisory Committee in General
Surgery has recommended that you have satisfactorily completed your
higher surgical training. We have, therefore, recommended to the Specialist
Training Authority (STA) that you be awarded a Certificate of Completion of
Specialist Training.

The STA will contact you directly and will send you a document concerning
entry to the GMC's Specialist Register. It is important that you act on the
instructions given in the document in order to minimise any delay in your
Register entry.

May I take this opportunity to congratulate you on completion of your
training and wish you every success for the future.

Yours sincerely

Anna Johns
Speciality Manager
SAC General Surgery and Paediatric Surgery"

Got home and popped our photos of Piano Man through Photoshop - see what you think...




Seeing them both in black and white at the same magnification makes a bit of a difference, doesn't it? They don't look like the same man at all now... The mystery goes on...

J

Super story over the last few days on the BBC website:

A wealth of names and nationalities have been suggested to try to identify a man found wandering in Kent who communicates only through piano music. The mystery man was unable to communicate with police or carers after he was found in a street in Sheerness in a rain-soaked suit. When staff at the Medway Maritime Hospital gave him a pen and paper in the hope he would write his name, he drew a grand piano. His carers then put him in front of an instrument in the hospital chapel and he stunned them with a virtuoso classical performance. The mystery man produced a pencil drawing of a piano. He has also composed music since he was found.

You can read more here, here and here (and here on CNN).

These are the two most frequent images of him at the moment:





It seems that he just turned up in Sheerness soaking wet in a suit, shirt and tie, unable to speak a word of English. The police who found him thought he had been in the sea. Sounds like the first part of the film 'The Bourne Identity', so far. As he was unable to communicate, he ended up in hospital and then in a mental facility before he ended up in front of a piano in a hospital chapel.

Initially they thought he might be a street musician from Paris, but this seems unlikely (how could you busk on the streets of Paris with a piano?) CNN and this French website report he might be a Swedish musician called Martin Sturefalt who has studied in London. Could this be the man, or will the mystery continue? If you Google the words Martin Sturefalt for images, there's only one image on all the web. It's one of a number of files on the following Swedish website: www.kmh.se, which appears to be the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, so the image might be of the man we're after. You have to admit, there is a certain resemblance... something about the hair, the ears, the high forehead?


Could this be the man?

You be the judge...

And if the Piano Man is this Swede, it still doesn't answer the main mystery - how did he end up in the drink and why can't he speak?

Answers on a postcard, please...

The confidence vote has just gone through at Ottawa and the final total was 152 - 152 votes, a tie. The government managed this by getting votes from 2 Conservatives, Belinda Stronach (who defected) and Chuck Cadman (who used to be a Tory but resigned). In the end it came down to the Liberal-appointed Speaker of the House, who voted with his masters and saved the Government by a single vote.

I watched all of this in the Doctors' Lounge at the Foothills, on the big screen TV at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Strangely, I was alone - if you were in the UK, there would be a crowd of interested staff clustered round the TV just to see history being made or a government falling, but here no-one seems particularly bothered. Everyone's happy enough, the sun is shining and everyone has a job and enough money, so who cares about politics? Maybe that attitude towards politics partly explains how Canada got into this mess in the first place. If more people were paying attention, maybe they wouldn't have been able to steal 200 million dollars...

So Tony Blair's back in 10 Downing Street in the UK, but no-one wants him to stay, George Bush is in the White House and the Democrats are leaving the country, and the Liberals retain their weak grip on the country of Canada. Didn't politics used to be more interesting than this? The Government will limp onwards, pushed hither and yon by the winds of chance until an election is called early next year. And who knows where we'll end up then? No more politics for now...

J

Today is a big day in Canadian politics - later this afternoon (about 4pm Rocky Mountain Time), there will be two votes in Ottawa to determine whether the Canadian parliament has any confidence in the elected minority Liberal government. This time last week it seemed certain that the opposition Conservatives and the Bloc Quebecois would put the Liberals out of their misery, but that was before the 'Blonde Bombshell' was dropped on Tuesday morning. That was when one of the Conservative MPs, the blonde-haired multi-millionaire MP Belinda Stronach, defected from the Tories to the Liberals in return for a seat in the Cabinet. She's been roundly criticised for doing this to advance her own career, and also because, by defecting she's managed to dump her boyfriend, a guy called Peter McKay who is deputy leader of the Tories (he's apparently shell-shocked). This "girl-dumps-boy-for-political-career story" has created a huge storm of intrigue here in Canada:




The Blonde Defector


The Jilted Boyfriend

Because of this, the number of votes of each side is now dead even, with 2 independent MPs left unaccounted for. If both vote for the government, it will stand. If both vote for the Tories, the government falls. If it's 1 each, then it will be a tie and the speaker of the House (a Liberal) will vote to break the tie and sustain the government. So at the moment, it looks like the Government has the upper hand, barring a last minute surprise. A few MPs are sick and may not be able to get to the vote, so that may have an effect. Even so, if they do win, they'll be winning a vote of confidence by one vote, hardly a ringing endorsement. Either way, there's another election coming soon, and Canada is more divided than ever.

More news later from your Calgary political correspondent (eat your heart out, John Cole!)


Where is he now?

J

PS. Queen arrived safely in Saskatchewan on Tuesday night, will come to Calgary next week, getting the flegs ready for her, have no fear, NO SURRENDER!

Update Thursday 12 May 2005, 16:34 Rocky Mountain time:

Granny Brown has finally been released from Inver Hospital today and has returned to live in Island Park! And about time too! We're hoping to have a picture of her in her recovered state later on, and maybe see her on the webcam at the weekend! Good going, Granny, keep up the good work!

In other news: in Ottawa, the Liberals have offered to hold a vote of no-confidence in themselves and their Budget next Thursday, while the Queen is visiting. The Tories have rejected this as they want to hold the vote now, and have used their slim majority to shut down Parliament for the last 2 days running. They're also accusing the government of hanging on in the hope that a few of their MPs who are undergoing cancer treatment will become too sick to travel to Ottawa to vote. It's getting nastier by the minute on Parliament Hill...

J

Big news from Ottawa today - the Conservative opposition managed to get a no-confidence motion passed against the minority Liberal government last night (153 to 150 votes) but the government is refusing to recognise the vote and resign, so there will be more shenanigans today, no doubt. It looks like there's going to be an election some time very soon. Not that it'll change much, as Canada seems evenly divided between the Tories and the Grits (the Liberals). The current crisis has been precipitated by something called the Sponsorship Scandal. The story goes like this:

1. The French-Canadian province of Quebec had been talking about becoming independent from Canada for years and held a referendum in 1995 to see if the people really wanted to split from the rest of the country. The 'separatists' narrowly lost, but gave the Liberal government a good scare.


Where is Quebec?

2. The Liberals decided that they had to do something to keep Quebec on-side, so they put in place a 'Sponsorship Program' in which they would spend lots of Federal money on convincing the people of Quebec that they should remain part of Canada. The main part of this program was aimed at sponsoring events and advertising campaigns within Quebec to emphasise what a jolly nice place Canada was and how you'd be mad to think of leaving it. The PM at the time was Frency-type, Quebec-born fellow Jean Chretien.


Chretien

3. Chretien resigns in December 2003, 8 years after the Sponsorship program started. Paul Martin becomes new Liberal PM. Calls an election in June 2004 (just after we arrived here) and forms a minority government. The other parties are the Conservatives (right-wingers, mainly popular in the West, very popular in Alberta), the NDP (National Democratic Party, lefty Labour types) and the Bloc Quebecois (pronounced blok-ke-bek-qua, the Quebec separatist party, a bit like the Scottish Nationalists).


Paul Martin, also known as 'Mr Dithers'

4. Meanwhile, the Auditor General had been sniffing around the Sponsorship Program and in Feb 2004, she issued a damning report, saying:


Senior government officials running the federal government's advertising and sponsorship contracts in Quebec, as well as five Crown corporations – the RCMP, Via Rail, Canada Post, the Business Development Bank of Canada and the Old Port of Montreal – wasted money and showed disregard for rules, mishandling millions of dollars since 1995.

More than $100 million was paid to various communications agencies in the form of fees and commissions, Fraser found. In most cases the agencies did little more than hand over the cheques.


So it seems that the Liberal Party, which has a big power-base in Quebec, was basically giving money away to friendly Quebec ad agencies. Lots of money - 100 million was the first estimate, then they said 200 million. And they were giving it away in brown paper bags, under table in restaurants. It looked pretty bad. Of course, Chretien had already gone and although Martin had been his finance minister (you know, looking after _money_), he said he didn't know about any of this but that he would set up a commission, the Gomery Inquiry to get to the bottom of it all.


Brown Paper Bag

5. The Gomery Inquiry had been taking evidence all year and will report in December. Chretien has been questioned, and basically said he couldn't remember anything specific and anyway, he was the PM, so he could do anything he wanted. He's a slippery French bugger. Martin was also up, and essentially said 'dunno'. Last month, there was a lot of testimony given in secret under a publication ban, so it couldn't be discussed in Canada, but it leaked out to the American blogger sites anyway, so eventually the ban was lifted. It turned out that not only was money being given away to Quebec ad agencies, but it was also being funnelled from the government into the pockets of Liberal party staff and back into party coffers, effectively robbing the tax-payers to pay the party.


Hand in the Cookie Jar

This was just what the Conservatives had been waiting for, evidence that the Liberals had been stealing from the people. Even if Martin didn't know about it, as finance minister he should have. The Tories, the Bloc and the NDP have more votes in Parliament than the Liberals, so they should be able to bring them down in short order.

In response, Martin went on national TV and announced that he would hold an election after the Gomery Inquiry's report, in December. He also agreed to change the budget, which still hasn't passed, to add 4.5 billion dollars for social programs in exchange for NDP support. Even with the NDP's support, Martin still doesn't have enough votes to survive a confidence motion against the Tories and the Bloc. He's also been announcing a few new spending initiatives - an average of 72 million dollars in spending has been announced every day since the crisis started. It's the same pattern as before - when there's a problem, throw money at it.

Anyway, no-ones too sure what yesterday's vote in the Commons means. The Tories say it was a standard no-confidence motion, and the government should go, while the government says it wasn't. If it wasn't important, it's hard to see why 150 Liberals and NDPers hung about into the evening for the vote.


Ottawa

It's likely to go to the Queen's Representative, the Governor General, to determine the exact constitutional position. She can suspend parliament, dissolve the government or recommend that another confidence motion be voted upon. If the government falls, the Budget will fail to pass, which will leave a few of Provinces up in the air, as they won't have their Equalisation payments sorted out.


The Governor General

[Quick aside here - the Provinces are divided up into the Haves and Have-Nots. eg. Alberta is a Have (lots of oil money) while Nova Scotia is a Have-Not (lots of fish). The idea of Equalisation is that the Haves give their extra money to the Have-Nots. Some provinces like Newfoundland & Labrador have off-shore oil money which flows back to Ottawa and the province wants a bigger cut of its own resources. The new budget gives more money back to provinces like Newfoundland, but if the government falls the Budget will fail and they won't get their dosh. Isn't democracy wonderful?)


The Haves and Have Nots

So what will happen next? Well, the Liberal government is clearly going to fall, sooner rather than later. There's no way they can last to December with the Tories and the Bloc gunning for them, and able to out-vote them in any number of confidence motions. Martin is pleading for more time, going on TV and handing out money like a man with no arms, which only makes him look even weaker than he is. He's so busy trying to hold on to power that the country seems stuck, and nothing is moving forward. There will probably be an election in July, which makes the Queen's upcoming visit later this month a bit of a problem (she's coming for the 100th anniversary celebrations of Alberta and Saskatchewan, but she likes to avoid elections-related controversy, so she might cancel at the last minute if the government falls.


Coming or Not?

And what then? Well, an election won't really solve the problem, as the country is still divided. Quebec will vote for the Bloc, the east will vote Liberal and the west will vote Conservative. Whoever wins in Ontario will probably form the next government, which really irritates Albertans. In Ontario, the Liberals are spending lots of cash in anti-Tory ads suggesting that the Tory Leader, Stephen Harper, has a 'secret agenda' to abolish free health-care, social welfare and generally to make the whole country more like That Awful Place Alberta. The Tories on the other hand are planning to run on the slogan 'At Least We Won't Steal Your Money'. So there's a lot at stake in Ontario.


Where is Ontario?

The next government is unlikely to have a big majority in any case, and may be another minority, so there's likely to be more instability in the future. In the longer term, and remembering that the mess started with the Quebec referendum 10 years ago, the whole crisis has only served to strengthen the separatist vote in Quebec, with the Bloc expected to get more than 2/3 of the vote. The end result of the Sponsorship Program may be to bring down the Liberals and allow Quebec to leave the confederation of Canadian provinces. And once Quebec leaves, the voices of the Western separatists will be heard even louder: "how come Ontario gets to decide who's in charge, and why are we always governed by eastern, French-speaking Liberals?" Alberta has enough cash to go it alone, after all, being the only debt-free province of them all. This whole thing could end up with Eastern Canada, Western Canada and Quebec going their separate ways after all...

More news as it happens....

Well, the 04/05 season is winding to a close, Chelsea walked off with the Premiership (amazing what you can do with Russian oil money) and the Rocky Mountain Rovers are making a late surge at the foot of the table. Having spent several weeks hovering dangerously close to the dreaded relegation slots at the very bottom (#27 and #28) in position # 26, they've finally stirred themselves and shot up to a faintly-respectable first-season #24 with 914 points, a comfortable 27 points ahead of #25 (Dirty Den's Diamond Geezers). The Polish Plums are in #16 with 1118 points, Robbo's Robbers in #12 with 1159 and The Calgary Visitors are a creditable #4 with 1345. Looks like no-one's going to catch the top spots, Come On You Irons, who have to thank Terry for 348 points, Lampard for 330 points, Henry for 276 and Defoe for 201. Oddly, the Irons have 5 of their team sheet in common with the Rocky Mountain Rovers (Jenas, Okocha, Weir, Stubbs and the awful Campo), which just goes to show what a funny old game it is. The Rovers have to thank Lauren (130 pts), Dickov (123 pts) and Cech (146 pts) for their avoidance of relegation this season. Anelka and Viduka did well too, but couldn't maintain their form when it mattered.

As the third official says:

Only the two midweek games, the last full day on Sunday and the two cup
finals are left. Some people are on the pitch......... They think it's all over...

One final update left, on the finishing positions and the post-season analysis (in true Alan "what a shocker" Hansen style) and tips for next season.

J

Wednesday morning here, clear bright blue skies and 3 degrees on the way to work. Dr P is safely back from the Big Apple, having finally got home at 2am, so we're both a bit bleary this morning. I sat up to welcome her home and listened to the Radio 4 morning news on the Internet to pass the time. The Tories have a 33-year old Shadow Chancellor - maybe it's time they started to out-Blair Labour... Anyone for the New Conservatives?...


George Osborne

Odd weather yesterday too - it's been cloudy and overcast for a few days over the weekend, and then on Monday night it seemed as though there was a storm coming in, with high winds and rain on and off. First thing on Tuesday am it was raining steadily, just like the weather at home really. And then on the way into work, it started to snow. Just a little a first, and just in the North-West initially, but as I drove further it got a bit heavier. I got to work as normal and got started on another Big Case in the operating room. Time passed quickly (as it always does) and when I looked out the window at noon I was surprised to see that the weather had moved on and there was now a full-scale blizzard in progress, a complete white-out making it impossible to see out. But then when I scrubbed out at 4pm, the snow had cleared and the blue skies were back again. There wasn't even any snow on the ground! Talk about all the seasons at once - this was like all the seasons during one case! And today you wouldn't know it's been snowing at all. The winter isn't officially over until the end of May, anyway, so we may be in for another touch or two of snow yet...