Jill Browne, from home and away

Monday, January 3, 2011

Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Home

It just occurred to me (doh) that in most postcards people talk about the weather.

I’ll start mentioning it daily if I remember.

Since the New Year started, we have definitely felt wintery, but not all that cold.  What does that mean? At the warmest part of the day it’s been around -5 degrees C, just enough below freezing to be convincing and for the snow not to melt.

We have had a fair bit of snow so far this winter, but not like the storms elsewhere, like in eastern Canada and the US, or in Europe.

There’s a layer about 8 inches deep (let’s call that 20 cm) most places, though the depth varies with the wind, the tracking down by people’s feet and cars, and the shovelling from one spot to pile it in another.

Today was pretty bright and sunny.

Sunrise: 8:40 a.m.

Sunset:  4:42 p.m.

The new Bow Building dwarfs Calgary's downtown landmarks (Photo: Jill Browne)

January 3, 2011

Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Home

The new Bow Building isn’t finished yet but it already dominates Calgary’s downtown skyline.

Designed by the firm of Sir Norman Foster, the building was commissioned by energy company EnCana.  It’s 58 stories high and larger in scale than Calgary’s other office buildings.

On the plus side, the building is said to have some environmentally-friendly design features.

The big negative, as far as I’m concerned, is that the opportunity to take hundreds of  jobs out of the downtown core has been lost.  Calgary is a flat, sprawling city.  Most people depend on their cars to get almost anywhere.  Now even more people are going to be going downtown, further taxing our public transit and limited downtown parking and roads infrastructure.

I don’t see how this can possibly be considered environmentally friendly.

In spite of my vinegary attitude, I do love the surprising picture, linked to below.  If you know who the photographer is, please tell me so I can credit them properly.

Link to picture:

Workers at the Bow Building, Calgary

January 2, 2011

Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Home

The newspaper headline today stunned me: fatal shooting at 1 a.m. last night.

It happened downtown, 3rd and 3rd, which is near the Old Spaghetti Factory and the Westin.

I used to work in one of the buildings near there.  Got my hair cut in another, went for lunch about once a week in a third, and dinner twice a week when working overtime, in a fourth.  Not at 1 a.m., granted, but I don’t want to rely on just a gap of six hours or so as my protection against the next senseless shooting.

We cannot ever get complacent about violence in our city.  Whether it’s criminals shooting each other or not, violence and especially violence involving guns, is something we must be outraged about.

Canada is still a safe place.  Calgary is still a safe place.  But we have to make a big deal out of every gun murder, every act of violence involving a gun, and every criminal act involving a gun.  These cannot become mere statistics.  One is too many.

Guns and gun crime are not new but they are still relatively rare.  It must stay that way.

Some people like to draw a straight line between a gun crime and whether or not the gun registry was a good idea or not.  That is a fruitless debate.  It deflects attention from what we all need to be focusing on: how to stop this madness before someone else gets hurt.

It sickens me to think that even one person a year is shot to death in Calgary.  I want my fellow Calgarians to feel this same outrage and to never ever become numb to it.  Gun violence is not part of our way of life.

And to think, when I woke up this morning I was planning a pleasant little blog entry about Love, Actually.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Home

Just realized I haven’t left the house today.  Winter can do that.  We had a brilliant day, but the sun comes up at 8:40 a.m. and goes down at 4:40 p.m.

You snooze, you lose.

But some people in the family got out for a skate on our local lake.  It’s an urban, man-made lake, but out there on the ice, it feels as natural as any other lake.

In years when the ice is very clear, I feel my toes tingling and my knees getting a bit rubbery skating  just a few feet above the cold black water.  And when the ice cracks, or moans, or hisses, or does any of those active ice things, I want to run for shore.

It’s silly really.  They only let us skate on the ice when it’s strong enough to hold the Zamboni!

Happy New Year,

Jill