It’s been a few days since I posted anything and I’ve had a few things in the back of my head that I’ve wanted to comment on but have not had much time to post anything. So, here we go.
<START RANT>
Earth Hour. Recently I experienced a one hour period where all of the lights had been turned out in a representation of Earth Hour (which I think is in May isn’t it?). This one hour period consisted of all lights in my surrounding area having been turned off. The idea being that if we all do this everywhere in the world, we help reduce the carbon footprint and all of that… as Eric Cartman would put it “treehugging hippy crap”. “Big” efforts like this shared across companies and people are supposed to show how we are willing to do our part to help the environment. But yet there are countless companies out there who insist on leaving half the lights in their corporate buildings downtown on all the time. So when I drive by at 11pm at night, I see all kinds of lights on in all kinds of businesses and somehow THAT is ok? How is shutting off the lights for an hour going help compared to having those massive office buildings shut all their lights off for 5-10 hours a day? Do you not think THAT would be a better way to save some energy?
It is for stupidity like that that I chose not to participate in things like Earth Hour. When far better, and as far as I am concerned more logical, things can be done to help, my turning off one or two lights for an hour is not going to help any. It doesn’t mean that I don’t care about the environment. What it means is that I recognize that there are far BETTER ways to impact change in the world. It reminds me of the folks who think drive-thrus should be banned because people sit in their idling cars. The exhaust pollutes the air and if we got rid of drive-thrus, we’d have less exhaust. What about red lights and stop signs? Far more cars are idle at those than drive-thrus. Should we eliminate those? If people and governments want to be serious about environmental safety and protection, then why aren’t they pushing for cleaner fuel and by pushing I mean PUSHING! Why not come out with a law of some sort that says all oil based vehicles need to be replaced by fuel cell or battery powered cars within 10 years? Since fossil fuels seem to be the core of the environmental issue why isn’t more being done to simply throw the gauntlet down and say we’re done with them? No, instead of getting rid of the cause of the problem, we’ll turn our lights off for an hour once a year and that will make everything all better. Puh-lease.
Onto my next “rant” which had to do with the former Kiwanis Lifestyle show. This show has been known as the lifestyle show for as long as I can remember. I remember WAY back when me, J.C., and Jason were so psyched about possibly going for the lip-sync contest there. It’s been part of Moncton’s history for ages. Now it appears that the Lifestyle show is no more and has been renamed Joie de Vivre Moncton. This show happened just recently and I would not have even known anything about this change except for the fact that Tamara was working there all weekend.
When I found out that it had been renamed, I got kind of mad. In fact, I was pretty pissed. I am an English speaking person living in a primarily English speaking city (more than 60% of Moncton is English speaking). I do not speak, read, or write French and quite frankly, I have no real interest in learning it. Because I am English, I am interested in attending events that are in English. I am not a snob and I have nothing against the French, but why would I go to an event if I cannot understand the language being spoken at such event? If I had not known that this “new” event was in fact supposed to be the lifestyle show, I would have seen the French name and immediately assumed that it was a French event and passed it over. Why would I as an English speaking person think that an event that is named very obviously French would be in English?
Secondly, since Dieppe is supposed to be our big French neighbor, would it not have made a hell of a lot more sense to hold such an event in the city of Dieppe? Of course not because this was an ENGLISH event. So let me get this straight, you change the name of a historic Moncton “show” to a French name that most English people will have no idea what it means (as a side note, the major sponsor of the show was L’Acadie Nouvelle which is a fully French newspaper), keep the show in English (and I am assuming there was probably some bilingual vendors there), and hold it in a city that is primarily English. Am I the only one that doesn’t see the logic in this?
Apparently I am not. From what I heard, there were a LOT of complaints at the show because of the sudden change. I also was told that the show was crap compared to what they have had in the past. Apparently it wasn’t even half the size of what they have had before, and according to Tamara, attendance for two of the three days was horribly low. Somehow, this made me feel a bit better as I hope Master Promotions realizes how incredibly stupid an idea like this was. Especially given all of the controversy about the recent Dieppe sign bi-laws. With the whole English-French debate coming up again, this was not exactly the best time to do something like this. I told them what I thought of their change in a very nasty email to the events coordinators.
I do however want to make one thing VERY clear. I am not anti-French. The French people that I know and associate with are great people and very kind hearted and I am glad to know them. What I am bothered by is that as an English speaking person, when I see and hear about “The Kiwanis Lifestyle Show” being renamed to “Joie de Vivre Moncton”, that reeks of being a French only event, and it makes me feel like I am no longer welcome at such a show. If I don’t speak or understand the language, how could I possibly know that this is both an English and French speaking event, especially when I live in a primarily English speaking city?
Regardless, I could probably write an entire book on the whole English-French issue but I don’t want to commit anymore time to it. I said to Tamara that it seems the language issue in our city comes up every few years, a lot of people get riled up by it, then it settles for awhile and no one hears anything. I suspect that now is such a time.
</END RANT>
Now that I have the ranting part of me done with, how about some actual news?
Our “well” situation at the cottage seems to have finally come to an end, sort of. A couple of weeks ago my mom and grandmother went down there to check on the cottages. We normally open them up in early May and since the whole water situation was still up in the air, we didn’t know what would happen this year. When mom got down there, she noticed the ground had been dug up and that our neighbours now had a well cap. Sure enough, after a phone call yesterday, I confirmed that they had in fact dug their own well and are now supplying themselves with water. We no longer have to feed water to them.
This was great news. The question was though, what exactly did they do? See, my folks had split the cost of the pump and controls for our well with the neighbours. The pump was on our property and the controls were on their property. So when I talked to them yesterday, I got the lowdown.
Apparently they seemed to think that we told them to get their own well. He went on and on about how this was what we had agreed upon when we spoke to a lawyer last year. It was actually quite funny because he got pretty worked up about the whole thing and all I wanted to know was what had been done. We never agreed to anything. In fact, as far as we knew, the sharing of our well was going to continue. But he went on about it and this and that and eventually I was able to make sense of it. They left our well, and the pump alone. They had their own well dug and used the controls they had on their property for the new well. So really, we should have been informed since we co-owned both the pump and controls but since they let us keep the pump, it sort of evened out in the wash.
The end result is, we no longer have to deal with them regarding this water issue. Saturday I will meet with the well drillers to assess how to get new controls put in, and hopefully within two weeks, we’ll have water and the entire mess will be over.
I have more news to report but I need a break from writing so I’ll post this one for now, and more later. Toodles!
