Belleville, ON

Ready for some good economic news?

I know I am, so I was delighted to see this article in our local newspaper last week:

http://www.intelligencer.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1458779

In January and February of 2008 building permits in Belleville, Ontario amounted to $2,428,908.

With timing that is especially fortunate given the current economic crisis, the Canadian Federal Government has started a major renovation project on its property at 11 Station St. in Belleville that will cost $8.5 million. This boosts the overall value of building permits issued in January and February 2009 to $11,288,100, an increase of 365% over the same period last year.

I'm sure that plans for this have been in the works for a long time, but having this project proceed now is a stimulus at just the right time.




City Hall, Belleville, Ontario

I must admit that I have very little experience in re-reading books. Most often when I finish a good book, I like to think about someone who would enjoy it and give it to them. Passing it along means that it can be doubly-enjoyed.

One book I decided not give away, though, is "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time" which was first published in 2003. The author, Mark Haddon, take us to a place we can never visit on our own - inside the mind of a young man with Asperger's Syndrome.

Haddon manages to do this so effectively that reality, as Christopher John Francis Boone understands it, makes sense for us. The behaviour we would have dismissed as being bizarre has meaning within his experience, and his outlook on life challenges us to examine the assumptions on which we have based our own.

After a few years I have picked up this book for a re-read, and I find that it is still just as fresh and compelling as it was when I first received it. If you haven't found the bright red book with an upside down cutout of a dog on the cover yet, you are in for a treat.

It's easy enough "talk the talk" but I am very grateful to have an office manager who also knows how to "walk the walk". Edie Haslauer is away from us for a month while she distributes bedkits to children in Kenya.

Edie is the kind of person who doesn't say much about her personal values - she just shows them by example in the way she lives. At a recent staff meeting she told us that she would be away for a month and detailed who would be taking over her role in training sessions and staff meetings. Today I got an email from one of our admin staff that let me know more about what she is doing, and here it is:

Sleeping Children Around the World (http://www.scaw.org/) is an organization that gives 100% of every donation to children in need. Here are some details from their website:

"Sleeping Children Around the World [SCAW] donations provide bedkits to children of any race and/or religion who will benefit the most; typically being located in underdeveloped and developing countries.

"Each $35 donation (Canadian funds) provides a bedkit that consists of a mat or mattress, pillow, sheet, blanket, mosquito net (if applicable), clothes outfit, towel and school supplies. Bedkit contents vary from country to country depending upon local needs.

"Since its founding by Murray and Margaret Dryden in 1970, SCAW has provided bedkits for over 900,000 children in 32 countries. In 2009 the one millionth child will receive a bedkit."

You can find a blog maintained by Edie and other members of "Team Kenya" at -

http://scawlivereports.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html

Feel free to check out the site and send the team some encouragement for the wonderful work they are doing.

Twenty years ago the only way to share what you knew with a broad audience was to publish a book, write a magazine or newspaper article, or get on a radio or TV broadcast. In each case the barrier was that some "gatekeeper" (a publisher, editor, producer etc.) had to understand your material well enough to be convinced that there was value in what you had to say before they would put time, money and other resources to work giving you access to an audience.

The effect of this was that information was highly isolated. When I was doing a thesis at that time, I spent weeks looking at catalogues of articles with relevant source material, then the task was to obtain and search through massive amounts of material on Microfiche film rolls. A lot of wonderful expertise was never shared on Microfiche, and what information was shared was often hard to find. The net effect was tremendous inefficiency as we failed to transfer knowledge effectively. Mot innovation was through local solutions that had little effect in solving similar problems elsewhere.

Then came the Internet, and suddenly anyone could publish to a worldwide audience, as we do each time we write a blog post here at ActiveRain.

So, how has this affected the sharing of knowledge?

I am in steep learning curve again because I am in the first year of my new career a realtor. I can ask questions at a staff meeting or training session and draw on the collective experience of perhaps a dozen people. The information I get is very valuable, because it relates to our local market.

For most of my questions, though, I go to a worldwide staffroom populated by more than 130,000 real estate professionals. I use the search feature on ActiveRain to look for answer to problems, and I always find a rich resource in previous blog discussions.

When I post questions in my own blog, I find that AR members are tremendouly responsive, and it's not unusual to get half a dozen replies within 5 minutes. The replies will always provide a range of opinions, which is a richer resource than drawing on any one person's knowledge.

In a way, the Internet has become not only a great repository of human knowledge, but a very effective way to facilitate the discourse needed for human knowledge to develop more rapidly and more completely than has ever been possible before.

Winter can take a while to leave here in Ontario. In fact, there was one time that our family went to a reunion in Western Ontario on May 20th, and we had a sprinkling of snow!

Overall, though, the signs of winter losing its power are already here. Longer days, strong sunshine and melting snow are all welcome signs.

Before winter leaves, though, I thought you might enjoy a few pics:

1) A pick-up game of friends playing hockey on the mill pond in Stirling, Ontario.



2) A Great Grey Owl. We had one of these that decided to feast on a dead rabbit near our driveway, just after dusk each day, for about a week this winter. If we were coming in late, we needed to drive slowly to persuade him to fly away. My wife and I each learned that after close calls when he almost became a hood ornament by flying out in front of the car. He certainly wasn't afraid of us.

I'm glad things turned out ok. What a beautiful bird. I took this pic of another great grey about a mile from our home.



3) Down at Glenora, near Picton, Ontario, we have a ferry that operates year round to take people from the highway on one shore to its next section on the other in a place where it has not made economic sense to build a bridge. The operators tell me that the constant runs of the two ferries manage to keep the ice broken up, and that it is only in really nasty weather that they have to close down.

4) And this will be happening very soon. Already with the cold nights, warms days, and lots of sunshine, the sap is running and people will soon be collecting enough to turn it into delicious maple syrup. The equipment has obviously been updated since the natives used to collect sap and boil it in birchbark containers, but the taste always says, SPRING!

- Bob Foster