In Sweden sidewalks a gender equality issue

I have mixed feelings when it comes to sidewalks. Many of the argument in favour of sidewalks seem hard to refute. Then one encounters the huge dichotomy between the promise and the reality. This is a dichotomy that should not exist.

I've noticed that folk using wheelchairs in my suburb are as likely to be on a road as on a sidewalk. One some streets, like my court, the wheelchair user has no choice. There is no sidewalk. But on others streets, the sidewalk is impassable while the roadway is well plowed.

For this reason, I've been a promoter of the woonerf concept, at least for small courts and culs-de-sac. Today I discovered that there is another approach: the Swedish one. In Sweden they try to clear sidewalks first and they have added another argument as to why. Clearing sidewalks first is a move towards gender equality.

More women than men use sidewalks. This means the number of woment injured falling on sidewalks rendered treacherous by weather is far greater than the number of men injured. If you watch the first part of the following Swedish video, you will understand the Swedish position.

Teachers walking picket line; students hitting slopes

Ontario, the province in which London is located, is being hit by rotating teacher strikes. This coming Friday is another strike day for our granddaughters. I'm glad that two of the kids were keen to learn how to ski. Come Friday some friends are hitting the slopes for the day with their parents and Fiona and Isla have been invited to tag along.

I want to cheer. The girls will not be playing computer games. They will be out interacting with others and getting some exercise as well. Yeah!

Green Recycle Bins Make Kids Happy

Children see recycling as very important. The long line of green recycle bins in front of the school two of my granddaughters attend makes those two little girls very happy. It confirms their school cares.

I don't say anything. No sense bumming them out. But, I wonder why the school generates so much waste paper in the first place and I wonder where the scrap paper ends up. Is it really recycled?

Recycling almost everything, other than aluminum beverage cans and PET plastic often used for bottles, is a money losing proposition. Values have been dropping in recent years.

Still, the kids have the right idea. My granddaughters encourage me to use less and recycle more. Use it, then recycle it. It's time for the adults in their lives to stop just going through the motions. It's time to deliver on the promise made by that line of recycle bins.

Children are our future

My six-year-old granddaughter loves Lego and has for a couple of years. Me, I'm a new Lego believer. I grew up with Meccano: green-painted steel, brass pulleys and lots of small screws and little bolts.

So many toys are fun but at their core they are but a way to waste time. Lego is different. I watch as the little girl tackles the construction of a carnival ride. It's complex and intricate. It demands attention to detail while encouraging planning and patience and careful adherence to instruction. She works through the illustrated book slowly, insuring that the assembled piece is correct at each stage along the way. She does not want to find herself ripping apart her finished work.

A few months back, the city had a freshly laid road ripped up. Why? It was discovered that there were errors made in laying down the base layers. On the good side, the construction company accepted responsibility. The repair cost the city nothing.

But this was a mistake that my granddaughter is being trained to catch and to catch during construction and not after the final asphalt has been laid.

My wife and I had a young boy living with us for awhile. This was some years ago. He loved playing SIM City on my early Macintosh computer. He outgrew the computer game but he didn't outgrow his interest in cities. Today he cares greatly about the neighbourhood in which he lives.

Toys don't have to be time wasters.

This may be the last year for this scene.

The berm hides the gravel pit. Millions of tonnes of gravel and sand have been quarried there over the past decades.

This is coming to an end. The gravel pit is being closed. One doesn't close a big pit in a day, the steeps sides must graded, topsoil spread, grass and trees planted.

Already there are houses to be seen on the edges of the distant cliffs. By this time next year the berm and its trees may be nothing more than a memory.

How will self-driving cars handle snow?

The roads in my subdivision are snow-covered, ice-rutted. The roads are slippery and treacherous. Many have not been salted or sanded and there is no sign a snow plow has been by. It is hard enough for a human driver to negotiate these roads, how will a self-driving car fare? I look at our winter roads and I am filled with concern. (This image is a download straight from my point-and-shoot. The scene is as black and white as pictured.)

Close is a win in more than horseshoes.

Late last night, well after midnight, my wife, unable to sleep, went to the kitchen. She looked out the large kitchen window and thought the backyard made a picture. Despite the hour the yard, with all the snow, looked quite bright. Still, she wondered, is a picture even possible. Soon I wasn't able to sleep either. My wife had me up trying to get a picture in order to get back to bed where I belonged.

The resulting image was marred with blotches of yellow and there was a lot of noise across the entire image. The noise resembled the clumped grains of silver that once marred images taken with film pushed to a too high ASA/ISO number.

I took the image into Photoshop, changed the mode from RGB to Grayscale and then blurred the noise that marred the snow. The change to Grayscale caused the yellow staining to disappear. I changed the image back to RGB and weighted the picture to cyan with a touch of blue and a hint of green. In my world, snow demands an overall cool colour.

My wife tells me that this is the way our backyard looked last night. She, of course, is wrong. Memory is generous. Photographers don't have to deliver pictures that accurately depict what folks see but simply trigger the right memories. Close is a win in more than horseshoes.