When sadness lives in beauty
we have nothing left to lose.
To our soul we have a duty
and our mindset we do choose.
Our will directs our destiny
choosing details for our path.
We can live in happiness
or succumb to raging wrath.
Sadness is destructive
when it is left to smolder,
circulating in our system;
it makes the blood run colder.
An exacerbated emptiness
can fill us with a void
leaving only room for heartache
while others get annoyed.
Hi folks, my name is Del Phillips and I’ve lived on Denman Island for 33 years. As of this month I’m the proud parent of a brand new musical album, entitled:
“ Gentle Molecules “
The 13 song album was recorded, engineered and produced by Hornby Island master of all things musical, Marc Atkinson. Marc, recent winner of the Canadian Folk Music award for Best Solo Instrumental Album, also plays every instrument on every song and co-wrote all of the tunes. Scotty Donaldson, Randy Duncan, and Cafe Pete Keher also co-wrote tunes with Marc and I. Hornby Island residents Kim June Johnson and James Emerson provided additional vocals as well.
It’s an album of stories presented in sometimes traditional Folk style, while others are more alternative Folk. Some tunes are guitar based, others piano. The album deals with important and oft controversial topics like the opioid crises, Fish Farms and the declining viability of the shellfish industry. Maidens Blush is a song of love, loss and renewal placed on Canada’s Prairies in the 1950s. Just A War Wound is a dramatic and moving piece that poses the question …” can you feel anything at all? “ within a deep dive into PTSD.
Not to say that the album is all heavy listening, not at all. Several toe tapping tunes show up in the form of a Celtic ode to life and love down at the Riverside, a sea shanty about a life of work on the beach, and a hook laden song about a poor fella and his communication breakdown with a bewildered Lady In The Lake. The title song Gentle Molecules is a bouncy and happy tribute to the empathetic people that have hoisted me up from anxiety and depression that sometimes invade my life.
This is my first album in 16 years, following my “ Delbertwindowpain Suites “
This new album or singles can be streamed or purchased on almost all streaming platforms, Google Music, Amazon, Apple Music, You Tube and Spotify. The CD’s arrived on our front porch last week and are available from myself or Shirley Phillips at Lilac Sun Pottery. CD Albums also available at Abraxas Books and at The Guest House on Denman.
Check out my website, delphillips.ca for all the album details, song lyrics and photos.
Green Wizardries, Hot Mash for Hens and Darning to Save the World, by Maxine Rogers
The Oak King is losing a hard-fought battle with the Holly King. According to Druid legend, the Oak King rules the summer half of the year and the Holly King rules the winter half of the year. It has been getting colder and dry with sharp frosts and then wet and mild with rain as the Oak King battles back. We all know he is going to lose and soon.
The question is, how will this affect your hens and what are you going to do about it? I was talking with a young lady who has her first flock of laying hens and she said they had stopped laying. Now, there are two factors here: one is that hens need a certain amount of daylight hours to lay eggs at all. They need 14 to 16 hours of daylight to lay eggs. The supplemental light should be added in the morning so they roost naturally.
The second thing is, in the cold of winter they need enough nutrition to keep warm and to lay eggs. If they are not getting enough good food, they will stay warm but stop laying.
You may well ask why the hens don’t just eat more of their layer pellets? Think for a moment. Layer pellets are always a food of last resort for hens. The feeder can be full of layer pellets and not a single hen is eating. If you throw in a chunk of wormy compost, suddenly, they are all eating.
That is where a hot mash comes in. Some people like to put their hens in the barn at night with a hot mash and some people like to give the hens a hot breakfast. Mine get a hot breakfast in the winter and they seem to thrive on it.
One farmer friend just pours a kettle of boiling water over a dish of layer pellets and lets the water soak in and cool down a bit and gives his hens that. The benefit to this is the hens think they are getting a treat and eat the hot mash up quickly, getting lots of water at the same time. Hens don’t want to drink ice-cold water when they are cold already so a warm, moist mash gives them the fluid they need to digest their food.
Other people make more elaborate mashes containing table scraps, porridge oats, fruit, kelp meal, soaked hen scratch and chopped greens. I sometimes soak alfalfa pellets and add that to their mash but not too much or the hens balk at it. I render lard from pig’s fat and the crackling, the leftovers from lard production, go into the hens mash. I give them mutton fat too as they really need rich food in the winter, especially bantams.
My bantams are Mille Fleurs, so you might expect them to be a French breed but they are really from Holland. They are large for bantams, about half the size of a laying hen. Smaller birds have more trouble keeping warm in the winter and mine stopped laying in the winter, years ago. I looked up the problem and the traditional solution: hot mash.
The next part of this essay deals with another underutilized traditional skill and that is darning. To illustrate my story, I want to tell you about a. favourite pair of trousers I have. They are green, cotton breeches that tie at the waist and knee. They came all the way from Nepal. I loved them so much I wore them out on the inner thighs and tore a hole in the leg while wearing them in the garden.
The holes in the inner thigh were very large and the remaining cloth there, very thin. Sewing a patch on them would not work. I thought about a story I read set in the gold rush of South Africa and how the servant would darn the master’s trousers. I thought I would try some visible mending.
Back in the day, people did invisible mending. They used different coloured threads to simulate the weave of a tweed or what have you. Some of those darns are minor works of art. I know because people were so proud of their master works that they were sometimes framed. I guess this helped if you were going for a job where needlework was part of the work. Easier to bring a framed scrap to an interview than a whole pair of trousers.
I can’t darn like that but I did have wool yarn I had spun and dyed in two shades of green. I was able to darn the thin cloth to strengthen it and to reweave places were the cloth was frankly missing in action.
The result was a fine pair of trousers with some very attractive darns if you look closely enough. One pair of trousers will not save the world but think what went into my having the trousers in the first place. Someone had to plow a field, probably using a petroleum-powered machine. The plants probably got dosed with synthetic fertilizer which, along with plowing, is terrible for the soil health. Then the plants were probably sprayed with fungicides and possibly herbicides. Cotton is a very polluting crop.
We are not done yet. The cotton was picked either by someone under the hot sun by hand or picked by another petroleum-powered machine. Transported by belching, diesel truck to a mill, carded by electrically-powered machines but the electricity was most likely from a (dirty) coal-fired electrical generation plant. Spun and woven by the same dirty electricity and then transported again to a factory to be cut out and sewn up by people who are classed as cheap labour and who help our lives of exaggerated luxury to continue on their exploited backs.
Then, the trousers were probably packaged in plastic that will be around, polluting for ages and poisoning any little creature who ingests it by mistake. Then, the trousers were shipped by various polluting technologies most of the way around the world where they came to me.
So, you see, by darning the trousers, I have saved the need for all that environmental destruction, exploitation and pollution that would have been necessary if I had bought another pair of trousers. Plus, I would never have been able to find this style of trousers again. If you are interested in darning, you might want to look up Sashiko, a traditional Japanese style of visible mending.
A Kraken (of sorts) Awakes
Shortly after being thoroughly insulted, we were ‘marched’ for the first time. Now – this is awkward – before I move on, please understand that I am a reasonably coordinated person. I can drive a car without tying my legs and arms in knots, I can dress without a great deal of assistance, and I can even rub my tummy and pat myself on the head at the same time (or is that the other way round?). I was moderately proficient at several sports which required me to do more than one thing at a time and very involved in playing rugby. I’d therefore anticipated no problems in the area of working out how to move my arms and legs to travel forwards. Uhuh…
Having received some basic instructions, we moved across the parking lot in a wobbly single file. Most of us ended up looking down at our feet for some reason, as if we had no other way of telling what was happening down there. This provoked hysterical shrieking from our instructor. Of course, it just had to be me who made the basic – and utterly disastrous – error of trying to march. Perhaps I crave attention…anyway, the result of my inability was catastrophically funny to everyone except myself and Tendril.
“WHAT!…IS!…YOUR!…BLOODY…NAME!?” he screamed when we were safely out of earshot of the people in the buildings. Adding to my anxiety, we were by this time disturbingly close to where I’d parked my heap of automotive delight. In his own gentle and nurturing way he marched alongside me, seething noisily. It didn’t help. I tried to tell him that my body was no longer under my conscious influence – I really did – but with my neurology fully engaged in trying not to tie my legs into a pretzel, I was unable to speak. For a moment I considered bursting into tears and sitting down on the spot but decided that – despite the disaster unfolding below my neck – doing so was probably not the best way to start a career.
At first, it wasn’t too bad because I was at the back of the line and it only sounded hilarious to my colleagues, but after a short period of hopeless staggering about, Tendril stopped us with a high pitched shriek of “Class!…Claa-aassss…HALT!” We sputtered to a stop. Tendril made his way to exactly one point six-seven millimetres from my cheek. “WHAT are you trying to do?” he shouted into my ear, a second or two after the soft pitter-patter of halting feet had died down. While my left ear began to close up for the rest of my life, I computed the data and assumed that this was a rhetorical question and kept my mouth shut to await the next sarcastic volley. “WELL?” Oh; not rhetorical; “Trying to march, sir.” I replied, with as much dignity as I could muster. ‘Trying’ was the operative word; I was trying very hard, but I was failing in a manner that had reduced my colleagues to a giggling bunch of idiots. Trying wasn’t working.
Somehow – and I still don’t know exactly how I did this – before we had come to a halt, both of my arms had started moving forwards and backwards at the same time. As in: together. Try it – go on. Stand up and start walking with both arms held out in front of you, then swing them back together – and repeat. If you have just done so – and by the way, I hope that you aren’t reading this on a train or in the library – you’ll know that it’s a very difficult way to move about. Tendril was – rather unfairly, I thought – quite ignorant of the extraordinary feat of locomotion that he had been privileged to observe. I deserved a medal, not abuse!
“Is there something wrong with you then?” he said with a hint of desperation creeping into his voice, as a tiny drop of saliva landed on my earlobe. My brain, busily engaged in the middle of a protracted re-boot, located a suitable response from its mid-term memory cache. “Hay fever, sir!” Part of me (the thirteen-year-old class clown) rejoiced in the comic timing, and part of me (the almost-adult) quailed at the clanger that I had just dropped, not unlike an ACME anvil, onto my own foot. There was an unpleasant silence of the kind that usually hangs around between the time the condemned person looks up and notices the guillotine blade and the moment it starts to fall. The great man tried to work out what I’d said, allowing several of my colleagues to splutter, snort and unsuccessfully stifle their laughter. Somebody along the line sounded like they were retching.
My nemesis glared at me from underneath his slashed peak, seemingly lost for words, working out if I was mocking him. Somehow, probably as a by-product of my abject terror, I managed to maintain a deadpan expression. Had I intended to be facetious, I’d have never kept my face straight, but what had taken place instead was the equivalent of my brain surprising itself. His own internal battle continued for a few seconds as his spleen wrapped itself around his gall bladder and squeezed, whereupon a hoarse scream devoid of any actual words erupted from his shrivelled body. I braced myself for a bayonet between the fifth and sixth ribs. The man visibly took a moment to draw some deep breaths and control himself. “Right…we’ll start again, this time going back towards the building. Sort yourself OUT!” This last was aimed at the group as a whole, and then he turned to me with a snarl: “I don’t care if you’ve got St. Vitus’ bloody dance my lad, get your friggin’ arms swinging properly!” He sounded fragile, as if for the first time realizing the enormity of the challenge. For the first – and only – time, I felt a tiny pang of pity for the man.
Having turned us all to face in the right direction, he set us off once again: “BY THE FRONT, QUICK MERCH!” he croaked. I was rather pleased with myself for stepping off with the proper foot, but within three paces I was thinking furiously, listening to Tendril’s barked “’Eft, ‘ight, ‘eft, ‘ight…” and, fatally, trying to get conscious control of each arm. Trying is the bane of novice marchers. The result was horrific; a fuse – or possibly a valve – blew somewhere in my head and the brain went on holiday once again, leaving my body to try to make the best of a bad job. It failed. Both arms began to move together – again. We headed towards the buildings and pale faces appeared at classroom windows as we made our way towards them; faces which bore expressions of amusement, incredulity and, I swear, on some was fixed wonder and awe. Needless to say; within a very short period of time our meagre band, maintaining an entirely new variation on ‘single file’, came to a halt and dissolved into helpless laughter at my ambulatory failings. Tendril, beside himself with rage and for some reason taking my unintentional spasms as a personal insult, spluttered and croaked and was clearly bemoaning the fact that he didn’t have a suitable firearm with which to dispatch me, as he would a wounded animal…
20 November 2021
Killer Drones
By Gwynne Dyer
Commercially available quadcopter drones carrying small amounts of explosives are “the most concerning tactical development since the rise of the improvised explosive device in Iraq,” US Marine Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., senior US commander for the Middle East, said last February. But now drones are political weapons as well, and it will get worse.
Two weeks ago three quadcopters flew into the heavily fortified ‘Green Zone’ in Baghdad to attack the home of Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi, who won last month’s national election and is working to form a new coalition government (usually a months-long haggle in Iraq).
Two of the drones were shot down, but the third dropped explosives that blew in Kadhimi’s front door, injured at least five guards, and wounded the prime minister’s wrist. If he had died, he would have been the first senior politician killed by a drone, but that honour will have to go to someone else. We probably won’t have to wait too long.
Small quadcopter drones were first used by ‘Islamic State’ during the siege of Mosul in 2017, and the main venue is still Iraq. A drone loaded with a 2-kilo munition was found on a rooftop in central Baghdad in March, another was found nearby after it crashed in July, and US forces shot down a quadcopter carrying explosives over the US embassy later that month.
Long-range, million-dollar drones have been killing people remotely for a more than a decade, but those are big aircraft making big explosions and they usually avoid densely populated urban areas. They won the war for Azerbaijan against Armenia last year, which was their first decisive use in a ‘conventional’ war. But now we are seeing something quite different.
“I’m not just talking about large unmanned platforms, which are the size of a conventional fighter jet that we can see and deal with by normal air defense means,” explained General Mackenzie. “I’m talking about ones you can go out and buy at Costco right now for $1,000.”
If you have some people who are good at making improvised explosive devices ( a fairly widespread skill these days), then buy yourself a clutch of drones big enough to carry two or three kilos each and you can go into business right away.
Otherwise, you’ll have to figure out how to make ‘IEDs’ for yourself by trial and error – and do bear mind that errors are generally lethal. But the golden age of political assassinations, dormant for a century, is probably on its way back in.
You can shoot down quadcopters, of course, but they are small, fast-moving targets. They can be launched in large numbers, and they can avoid detection until the last moment by staying low amid the urban clutter. If they are actively guided you can jam the signal, but if they are following a pre-programmed flight path using GPS there’s no signal to jam.
They’re also untraceable. Even if you find the bits after the thing exploded, there will be no markings on the pieces that let you trace it back to the person who bought it.
What caused the recent unpleasantness in Iraq was that Khadhimi’s party won the right to form the new government in the October election, while the pro-Iranian militias lost two-thirds of their seats in parliament. It was a surprisingly fair election, but the militias automatically claimed foul. (They even borrowed Trump’s slogan: “Stop the Steal”.)
On 5 November stone-throwing militia supporters marched on the Green Zone to protest. The police opened fire, dozens of people were injured, and at least one demonstrator, maybe two, died. The drone attack on Kadhimi’s house, ‘safe’ inside the Green Zone, came just two days later.
It doesn’t take much by the way of offense to motivate people into doing something that’s so cheap and safe (for the attacker). Even if the attack fails, the authorities probably won’t be able to find the perpetrator. Just wait a month or so, and try again from a different direction with different speeds and altitudes.
It’s inevitable that this technique will spread rapidly far beyond Iraq, and that politicians and other prominent public figures will be vulnerable to it in every country, even the well-run ones. They will need more security than before, perhaps much more, and even that will not guarantee their safety.
And there may be one more step in this dance. It’s not normally a good idea for a killer drone to be in direct radio contact with the person who launches it, but if that person has access to face-recognition software it might be possible to make remote attacks outdoors on individual people with relatively little ‘collateral damage’. Is nothing safe?
Of course not. It never was, really. Kings needed food-tasters to avoid being poisoned; presidents and prime ministers just need different kinds of protection.
Denman Green Affordable Housing Project – Update
Submitted by Denman Housing Association
Affordable housing has been a longstanding need and issue on Denman Island. Studies in 2008, 2013 and most recently in 2018 all confirmed an acute need for affordable housing. The needs are diverse including families, singles and seniors. The Denman Community Land Trust Association (DCLTA) is working hard to address the need for affordable housing for seniors. We applaud their efforts in this regard. The Denman Housing Association (DHA) is focussed more on younger singles, couples and families and is working to create a 20-unit affordable housing project in ‘downtown’ Denman.
Many of you are probably wondering if the Denman Green project will ever happen; we have been at this for many years. While there are many hoops yet to jump through, the good news is that we are steadily advancing.
We are writing to provide you with a summary of the project and an update on our progress.
20 affordable housing units on the old Rawganique property opposite the Community Hall, playground and school on one side and the Seniors’ Activity Centre on the other – corner of Kirk and Northwest Roads
The rental units will likely be 10 X 1 bed, 6 X 2 bed and 4 X 3 bed in several buildings – two purely accommodation and one also containing a common use area, laundry and service/utility rooms
The site is large so there will ample green space and an area that will likely be made into a pond
This site is an ideal setting for affordable housing, but does require rezoning.
Two weeks ago, working in conjunction with the Islands Trust planner and our local Trustees, we took the first step in our application to rezone 1151 Northwest Road from Commercial to R4(1) Affordable Housing. This first reading of the necessary bylaw amendments is a critical and complicated step.
As most of you will be aware, water is a key issue for any new project on the islands. Our group’s first attempt to secure land for affordable housing was not successful, primarily due to the lack of water. Because of this experience, we are being extra diligent to ensure we have a good water plan.
Key features of our plan include:
The plan was developed by a mechanical engineer working together with a professional hydrogeologist
The well was determined to have a sufficient year-round yield to meet the daily water needs of Denman Green
Mindful of the potential impact of climate change in the future, we are planning a rainwater harvesting and treatment system that is capable of supplying 50% of the potable water needs of the project.
Water management will be enhanced by utilizing low-flow fixtures in bathrooms and kitchens and by treating greywater from showers and basins before using it for toilet flushing
Our application to the Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resources Operations (FLNRO) for a water license is currently being reviewed. We are hopeful that it will be issued early in the next year.
The water plan has been reviewed by Island Health and is now with the Trust’s Freshwater Specialist for review.
A wastewater assessment of the Denman Green site, carried out by H2O Environmental, concluded that the site has the capacity to treat the calculated volume of effluent and meet all regulatory standards. The septic field will likely be located in the SE corner of the site.
We have retained a local architect (MacDonald Hagarty) with signifcant BC Housing experience to help us develop a site plan and schematic design for the buildings.
In addition to building locations, driveway access, parking and more, the site plan will also inform water and wastewater system designs, landscape design and other work aimed at making Denman Green visually attractive and a pleasant place in which to live. The site will also feature a photovoltaic (PV) array to reduce hydro consumption and will incorporate the storage cisterns for our rainwater harvesting system.
So how will we afford to build Denman Green? BC Housing is likely to be the primary funding agency, providing both a grant as well as ongoing financing for the project. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) may also be a funding source and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) may provide funding for the incremental costs associated with enhanced sustainability measures, such as our rainwater harvesting. Of course there will also be a mortgage that is paid off over many years since full grant funding is not available.
The key points of our upcoming work are as follows:
We will continue to work diligently with Islands Trust, Island Health and Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resources Operations, to complete the rezoning and obtain other necessary approvals on time for the BC Housing application.
Develop the site plan and building design with the assistance of our architect and other design team members.
We will also obtain the assistance of contractors to help develop a budget based on the design, all aimed at an anticipated funding application to BC Housing in June of 2022. This is a very competitive process – we hear that in the last round BC Housing funding was approved for only 500 out of a possible 3,000 units.
We will be meeting next month with the Denman Community Land Trust Association to trade insights and lessons learned in this complex process. It is important that we support each other in our joint mission to create affordable housing on Denman Island.
As you can see, while we are making progress, there is much left to do. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions. You can call at (335 2559) or email denmanaffordablehousing@gmail.com.
Memoir of a Rural Sisyphus-Redux
Introduction
Memoir of a Rural Sisyphus-Redux
Bill Engleson
For a few years, I kept a diary of my inauguration into the Denman Community. This column, recently renamed Memoir of a Rural Sisyphus-Redux, will
extract several of my observations from a dozen or so years ago and share them. Hopefully, they will have some modern times currency.
Retirement Reflections
March 2, 2005
I have my share of idle time, time that I hope will become well-wasted, to play off the slogan of the Comedy Network. In my retired state, and particularly in winter, I hibernate from the weather and from gatherings of people. I sometimes wish I was more garrulous, a more social fellow but the truth of the matter is that I enjoy my own company, my thoughts, my way of existing. Still, I sometimes yearn for the sweet structure that was afforded me by life as a public servant social worker. Like many people, it was the folks I worked with that occupied a lot of my time, that gave me pleasure to be in their realm. I was paid to interact with people, to labour along side them, to enter their lives and perhaps help them sort out their dilemmas.
But there is no way back that I would find acceptable. And to help me visualize the point, one of my favourite TV shows wrapped up last night. NYPD Blue concluded its thirteen-year run. One character had retired on the previous week’s episode. This final week, he strolls into the precinct and poignantly observes that, ‘when you’re gone, you’re gone.’
In most ways, I feel fortunate to be a fair distance away from where I once worked.
I know that isn’t the case for everyone on this Island.
For me though, I don’t want to be some sad pathetic aged gaffer hanging around their old office, swapping stories with a younger generation, getting in the way like some sleepy ancient pooch you keep stumbling over.
No!
No, I’d rather be some pathetic old gaffer, some sleepy ancient pooch my wife stumbles over.
You think you’ve got this retirement gig figured out and then you look at it closely.
It takes some doing, let me tell you.
I have a ways to go to getting it right.
I’m not there yet.