Keep active! Stay engaged! Be involved in your community!
That's the advice everyone from Facebook posters to family members to your friendly physician doles out on a regular basis, regularity being a concern of some of them more than of others. OK, here's my project list in case you want to grab yourself a piece of the action. Some of them I've put on hold until I get the hands of some assistants or the ears of some people with the authority to move it forward. Others are gaining momentum.
The Haiku Pathway at Kinsman-Gorge Park is coming along nicely and I get to make a presentation to Esquimalt Parks & Recreation dep't. in April. Other folks are on board with it and it has the support of the Victoria Japanese community and Haiku Victoria. We're doin' it! Other things are a tad slower.
Recycling alone will not save our planet, but it will definitely make it a pleasanter place to live in while we do what we need to do to actually keep it habitable. The trouble is that not everything is recyclable in every community. In my apartment, for instance, the blue-box people stopped picking up glass and clamshell plastic containers - not profitable.
Fortunately there's a volunteer group that staff a depot at the community school once a month and they get all kinds of discards into the recycling stream somewhere. They're doing a great job and my monthly connection with them clears out a lot of stuff from my balcony bins, but it shouldn't have to.
I am learning to shop a little more carefully until the system gets the overhaul it needs. A head of lettuce in my shopping bag may avoid the light plastic clamshell in the landfill, but I wish the decisions were made further up the food chain. It was great news that stores had to stop using plastic bags at checkouts, but no one told them they had to stop using plastic bags at self-serve bulk food dispensers. Who wants to kick start a project there? And where's it being done so we can borrow their advice?
And still on the subject of recycling, you who travel know the places that have recycling bins on sidewalks. Toronto has them, I know, and so do a lot of European cities. We could use them here in Victoria and the benefits wouldn't be just for us the discarders. It would definitely simplify life for bottle scroungers, and it would train all of us in the recycling process - what's acceptable and what goes where.
Finally and still on this soapbox, there is a need for recycling bins at all Canada Post Community Mailbox clusters. It should be as mandatory for government agencies such as Canada Post as it is for residents. I've said it before at https://www.derekpeach.com/blog/mailbox-recycling but ya gotta keep bugging 'em. My arguments presented to all of our local municipal councils were simple:
It would demonstrate the rate of acceptance/rejection of flyers and unsolicited mail. If advertisers wanted hard data instead of hoopla, this is where they could get it.
It would certainly decrease the amount of paper in household bins.
Nothing, so far.
The other thing that needs attention is the individual waistline. We're out of shape and too fat and vacation time often means a holiday from our exercise programs as well as our work; therefore we need Project Participaction. The elements are simple:
Recreation Centre Passes Should Be Valid Nation-wide
This would encourage participation while traveling.
Cost should not be significantly higher in facility upkeep.
High density tourist destinations might have an increase over regular use. We can deal with it if it happens.
Reciprocal arrangements would make travel attractive.
Use could be restricted to usual drop-in activities such as:
Fitness classes
Weight rooms
Swimming pools
And good citizens should be rewarded by the opportunity to garner credits on their rec. centre pass. Those plastic ID cards that you scan as you enter a facility can hold a lot of information besides the balance of your paid admissions. A universal pricing code or QR code can store a sizeable quantity of data without violating any privacy laws. For the purpose of granting you access to facilities where you can maintain your good health what would you want it to have? I'd like it to receive credits from volunteer work. And if I don't need all of those credits for recreation activities, well, let me spend some at income tax time.
Several years before I retired, I realized that I wouldn't be able to continue making generous financial contributions to charities while living on a fixed income. It seemed that contributions of my time, rather than money, would be much more manageable and possibly just as welcome. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that a tax incentive should be established to give seniors a catalyst to get involved with volunteerism. It occurred to me that both the charities and other organizations that needed the help would benefit as well as the seniors who joined the volunteer ranks.
I don't believe it would be an administrative nightmare, and it just seems to make a lot of sense that exchanging hours of volunteer time for a tax credit is a win/win scenario. And it ties in with community "payment" for volunteers in the form of contribution to a volunteer ID card to be used as payment for activities at a community recreation centre. Volunteer work as ushers and other positions at your theatre or hostel kitchen would certainly be appreciated and many of you do that even without the incentive. Can we kick it up a notch? Should we?
Speaking of good health (as I often do now that I'm well into my ninth decade) I have just emailed all the property management firms in the city to ask if they know of any buildings in their stables of properties that have automated external defibrillators (AEDs). I'm going to get myself trained in the use of these life-saving devices even though a fireman I spoke to assured me that the machine itself had a tape recording that would talk a novice through the successful application. My original proposal was here,
https://www.derekpeach.com/blog/stayin-alive but the article didn't make it into the op-ed section of the city newspaper. If you've ever used one of these machines, tell me about it.
I was happy to see that CPR and AED training is now part of the BC curriculum. I'd love to see us go one step further following the example of some European nations and make that education a condition for motor vehicle licensing. As I said in my original post:
"Have your next heart attack in Norway. Or Austria. Or Hungary.
Those places require every person who gets a driver's licence to have training in administering CPR and AED (automatic external defibrillator). Many other jurisdictions in Europe and around the globe also ask that their driving public be trained first responders with at least CPR knowledge. It is not so in Canada, and that is unfortunate. We have too many heart attacks and we die in disproportionately large numbers - one every five minutes. In Norway, Austria and Hungary that doesn't happen so much.
Keep active! Stay engaged! Be involved in your community! But you don't have to make yourself a pain in the ass about your pet project. City planners and administrators really do want to consider the interests of their citizens and if they seem to never get around to considering your pet project, well … "the mills of the gods grind slow" and all that. Give them a hand, or at least a plan. And keep doing it.
In Victoria (and so many other places) there is a homeless and opioid death crisis and governments know it and have recently backtracked on workable solutions. Organizations like MomsStopTheHarm and some concerned citizens have told them what will work because they have buried the family members who were victims of what doesn't work.
Housing, safe drug supply, supervised consumption sites, available rehabilitation procedures when requested – these work AND THEY ARE CHEAPER THAN …
involuntary incarceration and treatment in confinement. Those procedures simply create smarter drug users (until they die of fentanyl poisoning) when they're turnred out back onto the streets. Check out the data and get on the lobby horse.
https://www.momsstoptheharm.com/news25
https://www.holdinghopecanada.org/
https://bc.cmha.ca/news/new-resources-to-support-bc-families-impacted-by-substance-use/
I'm done. I haven't posted anything for a few weeks even if I've started quite a few essays. The world news is really bad right now and although I'm not seeing an "End of Times" apocalypse, the simple arithmetic of supply and demand tells me we are all in for some serious belt-tightening. And the very fact that I can refer to our future privations in such moderate terms is an indicator of our collective good fortune here in Canada. Survivors in Gaza, fighters in Ukraine, parents of young people killed in Iranian schools, Sudanese slaughtered by agents of their own government, Venezuelans, Cubans and citizens in Iran subjected to blockades and sanctions that will deprive them of medical care and necessities of life - these people understand privation and the helplessness of being at the mercy of international bullies. If you are part of projects aimed at ameliorating global distress in any of those areas, thank you.
Tell me what you're up to. Enrol me.