Life on (our) farm
People seem to be amused when I tell tales of my life in Manitoba, so I thought I’d post a more detailed account with photos.
In the early 1980s my parents purchased 80 acres in rural Manitoba, with an ancient log cabin on it, and we moved there. I think we stayed for most of three years, and then again for a couple more years in the early 1990s. Today I’ll just talk about the somewhat rustic living conditions I had the pleasure of experiencing.
The cabin was a small three-room affair built of logs and insulated with a mixture of mud, straw and manure, which was common in the pioneer days (judging by what the neighbors told us, this cabin was probably built around 1900, give or take a couple of decades). The attic was of slightly more modern construction, having wooden shingles, a cut lumber frame and adding a finished wood ceiling to the ground floor. It hadn’t been lived in for a long time when we arrived; the windows and doors were long gone and birds were nesting inside.
These photos, taken when we were unloading our moving truck, give some idea of what it looked like and the finish on the walls:
The first thing we (meaning my father) did to make the place habitable was to knock out all the mud insulation
and then fill in the gaps with modern insulation, install doors and enlarged windows, and wrap the outside walls in plywood to deflect the wind. He also knocked out the interior walls to make it feel more spacious, so there was just one room downstairs and one up. After all that, the house looked like this:
Here’s what the interior looked like after we moved our stuff in.
There was no electricity here, and we couldn’t afford to get it installed. On the table to the right you can see a couple of the oil lamps we used for lighting at night.
To brighten things up, we painted the floor and wallpapered the interior with light colored wallpaper and shiny foil. Later we got a Coleman gas lamp, which was really bright but also made a lot of noise and gave off fumes.
In the above picture you can see the oil drum stove my father made – the wood-burning kitchen stove we bought (shown in the kitchen photos below) was insufficient to heat the place in the winter, though it made great bread. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see that we also brought in the propane cookstove from our camper – but that was only good for cooking things and not for heating. We preferred the propane stove for summer cooking because it didn’t produce excess heat and didn’t take time to get going, but the wood stove was essential in winter.
There was no water here. The well that had once been on the property had filled itself in. No streams, and lake and pond water is dangerous to drink. We also couldn’t afford to have a new well drilled, so we had to truck it here ourselves in 5-gallon camping jugs, seen under the orange table in the upper photo. Nearby water sources weren’t reliably clean, so most of the time we got our water from the town of Rossburn, which was about 25 miles away. In the first kitchen photo above, in the corner you can see an antique washing machine that we used to store washing water, and the big camping thermos on top of it was for drinking water. The orange pails on the floor were used to take waste water outside.
No water means no plumbing, of course, and without electricity you do not want to have to use an outhouse in the winter here. Our toilet was a big pail with a seat on it, placed near an upstairs window with a view of the woods, and with a curtain on the indoor side for privacy. It had to be emptied about twice a week. Bathing involved standing in a kiddie pool and pouring water on yourself from a bucket using a cup. Here’s the bathtub set up in the kitchen, as verified by our cat:
In winter we could melt snow for bathing water, so we didn’t have to make water runs quite so often.
The one utility we did get installed was a telephone, which was essential for my father to find work. It was a party line, shared with our two nearest neighbors (1/2 mile and 1 mile distant, respectively). Incoming calls signaled the intended household with distinctive rings – short ring for one, long ring for another, and two long rings for the third. If you wanted to make a call you had to first pick up the handset to verify the line wasn’t already in use. Occasionally a change in the line noise made us suspect that one or another of the neighbors was eavesdropping on our calls.
We also had a battery-powered radio. CBC national radio was pretty darn good in those days, and we passed a lot of time listening to Peter Gzowski’s “Morningside” talk radio, Lister Sinclair’s “Ideas” for science news, Arthur Black’s amusing “Basic Black” op/ed show, and Jackie Farr’s weekend comedy hour “The Radio Show”. I still think of Peter Gzowski as the voice of Canada – there’s no voice that better represents Canadian culture in my mind.
The final major improvement we made was a greenhouse, which my father built using surplus glass from a construction site in Calgary, and old lumber from a derelict barn nearby:
With this and an outdoor garden we were able to grow some of our own food. I also grew flowers, including some giant sunflowers, one of which eventually reached a height of 14 feet.
Our sleeping area was in the attic – we usually slept in individual sleeping bags, zippered up, to help keep the bugs and mice out of our beds. (We would occasionally find a garter snake in the house too, but they never came upstairs, thankfully.)
There was a problem with reading at night though – dozens of brown moths would work their way in through the roof shingles and throw themselves at the oil lamps we usually read by. Not only was it startling and irritating to have moths landing on your head or book while trying to read, it was a bit of a fire hazard because sometimes they would succeed in their attempt at glory, and would fall inside the lampshade and burst info flame – and on rare occasions this heat imbalance would fracture the lampshade too. I switched to using an electric light powered by a car battery, but that required idling the truck to recharge the battery every other day.
We stapled plastic sheets to the inside of the roof to try and keep the moths out, but it wasn’t enough. Eventually I put my bed inside a tent in my wing of the attic, so I could read with only my face and arms poking out, and sleep with the screen closed. Yes, I regularly slept inside a tent inside a house, for practical reasons.
My bedroom, bed-tent on the left. Note the plastic sheeting on the roof, which was not enough to keep the suicidal moths out.
It got a bit chilly here in the winter. We only spent one full winter here, and thereafter found reasons to be elsewhere during the coldest months. Waking up with frost crystals where your breath fell was common enough, but that one Christmas morning we woke up to find the temperature -50°C outdoors, and -30°C inside the house. We spent most of that day either in bed with long underwear and multiple socks on, or in full winter gear with our booted feet in the oven to help warm them up. I don’t think the interior temperature ever got above freezing that day. This is my “get off my lawn” story for Vancouverites or foreigners who complain about it being cold even when water is still liquid. If it had been much colder in Manitoba, we would have had to break off and melt chunks of air to breathe, ya softies! You haven’t experienced a Canadian winter unless you’ve had to light a fire under your vehicle to thaw out the oil so you can start the engine.
There was no rural mail delivery in Manitoba then, though I gather there is now. We had to drive 12 miles to the nearest town, Angusville, to pick up our mail and do our banking. That was a town of about 200 people, and all it had was the post office, bank, a cafe, two mechanics, a small general store and a hotel that wasn’t rebuilt after it burned down. Most of those services are gone now.
We got most of our supplies from the town of Russell, which was about 30 miles in the opposite direction from Rossburn. We made a weekly trip to Russell to get groceries, household goods and to do our laundry, and to entertain me – this town was large enough to have a pizza joint with attached arcade, a pool hall with arcade games, an indoor theater and a drive-in theater. Here’s what the main street looked like back then:
There were two large grocery stores, a clothing store, a Sears catalog outlet, a hospital, a small library, two hardware stores, a drugstore and a couple of passable restaurants – all the luxuries you could want. I tried to spend as much time as possible in the arcade because it was the only chance I got to play video games.
Thanks to its proximity to a valley with hills suitable for skiing, Russell has managed to play up tourism enough to avoid the zombification that has claimed most prairie towns. I returned there recently on my cross-Canada road trip, to see how things had changed. Since we left, our cabin has suffered a lot of deterioration. Animals have broken in through the decaying roof, and the interior is now a disaster zone. I wouldn’t want to go in there without a hazmat suit. Here’s what it looks like from the outside now:
The green thing on the right is the wooden camper my father built, which you might have noticed him removing from the back of the truck in one of the photos at the top. We lived in this now-stationary camper while fixing up the house. The camper is now a giant camper-shaped ant colony.
Overall, despite the rustic conditions, I rather enjoyed my time in Manitoba. It was certainly character-building, anyway. Now, as an exercise for the reader, imagine spending your late tweens and early teens in a place where the nearest other kids were 1.5 miles away and you didn’t see them at school because you were homeschooled. And there was no TV or video games or computers, because no electricity. Radio, music cassettes, books, comics and Lego were what I had. Plus the great outdoors, my family and pets, of course.
I haven’t talked at all about why we moved here, what we did while here, what there was to do in the area, who we interacted with, or why we left. Maybe some other time.
To give you the lay of the land: Map
Accomplishments for 2012
I don’t make New Year resolutions – why set myself up for failure? Instead I think it’s more positive to review what I’ve accomplished in the previous year, and it serves as encouragement to do more in the coming year without having to specify what in advance.
1) The most personally important thing I did in 2012 was to get my wisdom teeth removed – all four of them. They were impossible to clean and had been poisoning me and thwarting progress towards fixing my dental situation. This was a big step for me, because when I was a teenager a dentist told me my lower wisdom teeth were impacted and I would have to go for jaw surgery to get them removed. He described it as having my jaw broken on both sides and then having my mouth wired shut for a couple of months while it healed. For some reason that put me off dentists for a while. More than ten years, in fact. Finally I couldn’t ignore the problem any longer so I went for more opinions. It turned out they were no longer impacted as badly and could be pulled without surgery. I had it done under IV sedation (because I’m a severe gagger) in March. It was miraculous – my only experience of the operation was a strange dream, and there was no swelling or any other complication afterwards. I’m so glad that part is over with.
2) I took my first overseas trip this year, visiting Hawaii for a week, getting a grand tour of the Big Island from my friend Phloem, and watching the rare transit of Venus from up on Mauna Kea. On the way back I visited San Francisco, also for the first time. My trip included several other firsts: Swimming in the ocean, snorkelling, visiting a volcano, banyan trees, malasadas and burritos.
3) I took an online design course to gain some breadth, and designed a built a piece of furniture for myself. While it may not seem remarkable in itself, it was an accomplishment for me because I’ve never done anything significant with wood and woodworking tools before, and it turned out better than I had hoped. I’m proud of both the design and the construction of this artifact.
4) Finally, I continued to make incremental progress in my ongoing life cleanup process. I digitized some more of my film (now up to 60/250 rolls done), eliminated a dozen boxes of old computer hardware and other junk from storage, grabbed a bunch of my vanity domain names (except my dot-name, which is blocked by an illegal registration) and started putting together a new personal website.
I’m happy to have accomplished stuff this year, and look forward to doing more in future.
Manboy and the Girl Cooties
(You can use the title as your band name if you want.)
There has been a lot of media awareness of gender politics in the gaming community lately, and I’ve been following it with interest. Today’s Twitter feed brought me this: A Call to Arms for Decent Men. I was going to simply retweet it as usual, but I found that I couldn’t accept the implicit agreement with all of the content, and that I would have to explain my disagreement in order to avoid feeling like a jerk. It’s likely nobody would notice if I simply failed to note the article, but it does have a lot of content that I think is valuable and worth reading.
Go read the article and then come back.
The first thing I have to quibble with is the underlying assumption that the giant boys who are making things difficult for female gamers are like that because they never outgrew the “girl cooties” stage. I don’t think that’s true. There may be some like that, but if you’re talking about the kind of gamers you find on XBox live, they probably actually ARE at the “girl cooties” age.
Showing my own bias here, I think that the anti-female attitudes displayed by supposedly “adult” male gamers comes from the continued resistance to and undermining of womens’ legal and social equality, which has become glaringly visible in the sensationalist media spotlight recently, especially in politics. In other words, male gamers are reflecting the attitudes they pick up from TV news, movies, sports commentary, advertising, talk radio, music, church, school and social groups. The contribution of their gaming community is not the main source of the bad attitude but it tends to be a strong reinforcing factor, which is where the call to arms of the article I linked may prove effective.
Secondly, while I agree that the existence of the sexist gamer problem is not subject to debate, I take exception to the author’s statement “The real-world analogy is not to social issues but to violent crime.” No. A man denigrating or even screaming invective at a woman does not equate to a man hitting a woman. They’re both bad things, but of different orders of severity. You don’t actually need a real-world analogy for this because there are several real-world terms that already cover the situation, for example “emotional abuse” or “mental abuse”.
Thirdly, I’m not entirely convinced his proposed solutions are likely to work. Calling immature players immature in the heat of a match is probably not going to have a positive effect. I also don’t think financial penalties are a good idea in an environment where mass false accusation is a viable strategy for revenge. The rest seems reasonable though.
And finally: Since members of my gaming community (some of whom are even female) are likely to read this, and I would hope they would call me out on it, I must admit that I’m not exactly a saint here. I would like to think that the article I linked is aimed at me, that I am one of the “reasonable, decent, but much too silent majority of male gamers,” but there have been occasions when I’ve blurted out things like “That’s what she said!” or “Don’t be silly, everyone knows there are no women on the Internets!” I won’t bother making excuses. I usually feel bad about it seconds later, and if you play with me please say “Dude, that’s uncool!” if I do it again.
What I’ve Been Reading: Velikovsky
Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky, 1950
Earth in Upheaval, Velikovsky, 1952
Scientists Confront Velikovsky, Goldsmith, Sagan, Storer, Huber, Mulholland and Morrison, 1977
I occasionally like to consume the works of crackpots as a form of entertainment, and Velikovsky has a reputation as one of the greatest. Having found two of his three books (the third sounding relatively uninteresting, and I didn’t learn of it until too late) and a rebuttal by noted scientists, I read them back to back.
To sum up, Velikovsky contends that in historical times (less than 4,000 years ago), the planet Jupiter spat out a giant comet. On two occasions, around 1,500 BC and 700 BC, this comet made very close – perhaps even physically grazing – approaches to the Earth, and also knocked Mars around a bit, causing Mars to also have a close encounter with Earth. After all this, Mars settled down into its present orbit and the comet assumed a circular orbit and became what we now know as the planet Venus.
These close approaches to Earth caused the major biblical catastrophes; gravitational effects caused massive tides, accounting for a variety of flood myths around the world. Material falling from the comet’s tail became the “manna from heaven” of the biblical tale, and the rains of vermin also fell from the comet. The close contact also caused slippages of the Earth’s crust, causing its rotation to appear to pause or change direction, changing the length of the day, and moving many lands out of their accustomed climates, accounting for the flash-freezing of the Siberian mammoths, the massive anachronistic animal boneyards found in various places, and the misalignment of a few buildings that were notably constructed to have calendrical functions. Interplanetary lightning bolts and tidal effects caused the moon to melt and bubble, the bubbles being the cause of the visible circular scars we call craters.
There’s much, much more but these are the main features of his work. To back this up he cites a lot of mythology from around the world and points out selected geological oddities that he believes support his case. I’m not doing this part justice, but there are three books full of this stuff – it’s not easily dismissed, as the rebuttal shows.
(Edit: In the interest of not presenting things back to front, I should mention that I think Velikovsky’s intent was to reconcile a large number of historical and mythological catastrophes, and the planetary billiards theory is what he came up with to accomplish that purpose.)
In reading Velikovsky’s books, I found his list of geological anomalies quite interesting and was fascinated by his recounting of relevant myths from around the world, and the exciting way he made connections between them. He’s quite a good author and gives the impression of having thoroughly researched everything he writes about. However, he did frequently make one mistake that is a personal bugbear of mine – he asserted things as proven that were not. Verbal handwaving crafted to flummox the credulous. There were also several claims made that I found laughably wrong, though they may not have been known wrong back at time of writing. If you weren’t watching for these things, you could easily be taken in – he writes like a popular scientist, has footnotes and references and all that. By the end there was such a long laundry list of doubts in my mind that I had taken to reading it as an amusing alternate universe history text – a work of fiction – rather than a serious attempt at science.
But it was apparently a serious attempt at science, and it became an interesting phenomenon that drew the attention of serious scientists not because of its content but because of the way things went down. Velikovsky was rightly laughed out of all real scientific publications, so instead published his work himself, as these books. They became popular with nonscientists, and over time quite a hubbub arose over how this outsider with a good theory was being ignored by the ivory tower scientific establishment, who don’t like to admit error – this in itself a sore point of public misunderstanding about how science works. History is full, they said, of outsiders who were later proven right, therefore Velikovsky must be right – PLUS, his work makes the Bible and a lot of other mythologies all work out! Surely that’s of great value and shouldn’t be ignored.
Goldsmith, Sagan and the others organized a conference and invited Velikovsky and his supporters to present papers in support of his work, and also themselves presented papers that demonstrated how some of his key claims could not possibly be true. The major works against are presented in the third book on my list above, and they’re pretty soundly damning. For example, actual math demonstrating that even if somehow Jupiter could have ejected a mass the size of Venus, the amount of energy required to do so would have vaporized the mass in the process. And even if it didn’t, the probability of this mass having multiple near-collisions with Earth and Mars within a span of two thousand years is trillions to one against. And even then, there’s no known way to get such a body into a circular orbit afterwards, using what we know to have been present in the inner solar system at the time.
This should have put the last coffin nail in his theories, but he and his followers continued to try to shore up his crumbling edifice long after. It probably was the end of his general public popularity though.
An interesting comment made in the introductory material of the third book is that all of the astronomers etc. who reviewed Velikovsky’s work found his astronomical claims absurd but were fascinated (as was I) by his seemingly credible connection of many interesting worldwide mythologies, whereas the historians who reviewed his work found the history part worthless but thought the astronomy was credible. Velikovsky himself had scientific training, though neither as an astronomer, historian nor physicist. It just goes to show the importance of relevant expertise.
None of the papers in the third book really addressed the mythology – the closest was one that explained why his dates for some historical events couldn’t be right – and I would actually like to read a similar debunking of the mythology because I found it tantalizing.
Overall, entertaining reads on two counts: Reading the story of Velikovsky’s failed assault on the imagined “ivory tower” of science provided an interesting and unexpected perspective on the way we view science in relation to pseudoscience today, and secondly, Velikovsky’s works themselves are very entertaining if read as a history text that dropped out of a bizarre alternate universe.
A thing I just realized about RPGs
I like single-player computer role-playing games a lot, but there are only a few that I’ve stuck with until the end. Usually at some point I get bored or frustrated and put it down for a while, and end up never coming back.
Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Skyrim. Actually it has consumed most of my free time since I bought it three weeks ago, and it has made me realize the nature of one of the qualities that sets a good RPG apart from a mediocre one.
A good RPG makes you want to tell stories about things that happened in your game.
Now that I think about it, this generalizes in some sense to other kinds of games too.
Here’s the specific story I told, the formulation of which made me realize this thing: Once I emerged from looting a dungeon in Skyrim to find a dragon fighting a giant. When I realized neither was about to turn on me, I watched them fight and when the dragon was almost dead, I finished them both off with two arrows each.
What made this experience inspire storytelling was that it felt emergent – for all I know it was scripted to happen when I exited that particular dungeon, but based on other things that happen in Skyrim, it really felt like the dragon had just happened to be cruising by at that time and decided to pick on a giant. It felt like something that probably hadn’t happened in my friends’ instances of the game.
A different example is from the first Neverwinter Nights. I played all the expansions for that one, and in one of them there was this epic battle where you were supposed to defend a gate from an attacking army. It was supposed to be a very challenging battle, but by that point in my game I was at a higher level than the designers had perhaps anticipated. I had two dragons on my side, and a few other summoned creatures. On seeing the dragons, the invaders mostly panicked and the dragons simply roasted them while they tried to flee. So the battle was a cakewalk instead of a challenge, but it was really enjoyable because the ease of it felt like a reward for all the effort I had put into reaching such a high level.
More emergent behaviors, please. More alternative ways to progress through the game, even at the risk of sometimes making the challenge level lumpy (err on the side of the occasional cakewalk here, as frustration is more, well, frustrating.)
But the take-home message is that I will get excited about games that sometimes produce unique-feeling experiences that I will want to tell other players about.
