Something in the air...

It was a lovely summer-like day here today.  It was a day filled with carefree gardening and the casual running of errands...or at least it was supposed to be.  Oh, the gardening got done and the errands were run, but nothing about today was carefree.

Why?

Oh...a big part of it was the unending hum of helicopters overhead.  This isn't an exaggeration.  There was not a moment today that was not accompanied by the thrum of rotors in the sky.  As I sit here typing this tonight, I can hear them even now.

Why?

Well, here's why.

Small towns are supposed to be safe places - and they are.  Intellectually I know that this is an aberration, unlikely ever to happen here again.  

In my heart I feel sick - and worried for my kids.

The sick things I look at...and a lovely little Corner

I have spent the last couple of days immersing myself in the flu.  

All kinds of flu - avian flu, swine flu, horse flu, dog flu - even duck flu.  All of them - potentially the next great pandemic that will shake we humans off the earth's back like so many fleas off a dog.  

I have also been going over the numbers for SARS.  All of this is background material as I flesh out Patriot.  SARS appears to have been the global wake-up call for serious pandemic planning and we are seeing the effectiveness of that planning with the handling of the current swine flu outbreak.  

The problem is, in Patriot, the world's Pandemic Plans need to fail - and catastrophically so. Hence the research.

Beyond obsessing over horrific respiratory diseases and influenza, it has been a fairly fruitful week.  As I have written before, I am a member of the local heritage committee.  I also chair the BT Corner Sub-committee.

"What's a BT Corner?" you might ask.

This is:

And here it is in three dimensions:

It is a small park that commemorates an industrial and social powerhouse in my community.  In 1874 a pair of brothers came to Fergus and started a machine shop which grew into, at one time, the largest producer of farm implements in the British Empire.  Those brothers were George and Mathew Beatty and their company was Beatty Brothers Limited.

We've been raising funds etc for some time and had a bit of luck last week.  The Grand River Agricultural Society has generously donated $15,000 over the next three years.  Thanks to them, our little commemorative park is a definite go.  

Next time I'll add a bit more about the Corner, but for now it's back to the Pandemic...

Home again, home again, riggitty jig...

After a successful trip north and back again  - success being measured in NOT hitting wildlife with the car - I'm back home and climbing a mountain of things to be done.

It was a perfect spring day so I naturally was in the garden working on dandelion control for part of the day.  I worked a little bit on my Old-Timer project and read over some of the Middleman Acquisitions thing I'm working on.  I have a whole pile of stuff that didn't get done.  Tomorrow promises to be a busy "Deal with the stuff you've been avoiding" day.

One thing to mention - at my wife's urging I joined an online writing group - a sort of workshoppy-feedback sort of thing.  In order to have your writing reviewed you need to review other folks' efforts.  As expected, some of the writing is very, very good and other writing really, really isn't.  So far I have posted only one story and it has been well reviewed.  There is something gratifying about having total strangers validate a piece of writing.  One reviewer's first comment was simply "Delicious." The unexpected bonus of the on-line workshop is that I have very much enjoyed reviewing other people's writing.  I didn't think I would.  I chose some stories that I considered quite good and purposefully chose some that, to me, were weak, but showed promise.  There were a few I read that were quite poorly written which I chose not to review, remembering the old "If you haven't anything nice to say" adage.   I know how difficult it is to put yourself out there and I've been around long enough to know if I find a story impossible to read, maybe it's just me and perhaps I'm not getting it.

Well, kids are home, the sun blazing down and the dog wants out...