In it she has a poem of such extraordinary breath and depth and soul that it should be shared. The piece is included under “Words to those who follow.” Buy it. Print it out. Give it to everyone. It is heart. It is simplicity of spirit. It is humans at their best.

And next… tell your schoolboard to buy her book: “Patty Pitter hates Litter.” In this world now we need it and we begin with children.

https://nimbus.ca/store/pattie-pitter-she-hates-litter.html?srsltid=AfmBOopDyXiDynTtICpsY2y357iV6YCjtpy-tqqGIcdF0DNCm52VNfcV

Thank you.

So I was having a cup of tea at the table—well, the computer desk, if the truth be known—and looking out the window, thinking, This world is insane.

Of course, I do that on a regular basis most mornings when the sun begins and the night ends and all the creatures switch positions: the chattering of raccoons replaced by birds being bloody happy and singing.

“What the hell are you singing for?” I often wonder, but then chastise myself because they are lovely little chirping, melodic things with wings. Some say they are the souls of the departed, sparkling at dawn to remind us we are still loved and remembered. But that is fancy. Without caffeine first thing in the morning, they are just obnoxiously happy noises.

Caffeine makes all things better, I find.

But then, what is that to anything?

Nothing, really.

What I was wondering about over my tea is what the world will do without baby boomers. Once the algorithm figured out who the boomers were, we became the world’s biggest market in a deeply disturbing way. Where once, when we were young and beautiful, they sold us jeans and tube tops and fluorescent lipstick and skipping ropes and sexual innuendos with everything…

Now it is different.

We’re old. Particularly women, it seems. We are old and the algorithm has figured that out. The old men get served up advertisements for prostate health and balding heads and gouty toes. But the women… Oh no. They get it all.

Our bodies are the target of every miserable insult a human being can invent. We baby boomer women are falling apart, or falling to pieces, or more like falling into pieces. We are not ourselves anymore.

I have marionette lines.

Did you even know you had marionette lines?

I had never heard of marionette lines when I first came across the term in one of those horrible advertisements you’re forced to watch now and then on the internet. I had to drag out a mirror to inspect myself, and sure enough, a long line from my nose to my chin on either side of my grimace could very well have been a puppet’s ghastly dimple hanging on a string.

Oh gawd, I thought.

I’m a mess.

Again.

I knew about the crow’s-feet thing and the turkey-neck thing. These are traditional grievances we have when at war with our faces first thing in the morning.

Our grandmothers even had them. They didn’t do much about them, but our mothers tried. They used Oil of Olay and hazelnut paste, as I recall. It didn’t much work, but the point is, we all knew these things. A comfort, really, in an odd way. We’d all grow old and get crow’s feet and turkey necks. It was the way of things. We had evolved into the wisdom part of life.

But it is different now.

There are more things.

Many more things—and animals—that make up the bits and pieces of old women now.

It is the new world order of things. I’ve learned this from advertising on the internet.

We have eyeball saddles and apron bellies and skin barnacles and bat wings and stomach tires and teardrop boobs. We have cankles and speed-bump bra bulges and rat’s-nest hair and pigeon toes.

We are a bloody great mess.

We are not ourselves at all.

Just a pitiful conglomeration of animal parts and yard-sale junk.

The comfort of our crow’s feet has become a distant memory. I can’t even remember, between the barnacles, bats, rats, pigeons, crows, turkeys, spiders and crocodiles, which one I’m supposed to do battle with on any given day.

There just isn’t enough to fix it all.

But of course we’ll try, won’t we?

At least once.

Feebly.

We’ll send away for lotions that prevent age spots and spider veins.

And that is why I’m worried about all this.

When the baby boomers are gone, who will buy all this stuff? The market will die. And our crocodile thighs won’t even be remembered when the revenue is gone.

But it must be known that we fought this war.

We old women.

We were warriors.

At times, a vacuum exists where opinions swirl around it like leaves in the wind. It is that peculiar state in which you watch the world and think, casually, That’s interesting, and then move on.

What we move on to doesn’t much matter. It is the act of passing briefly through chaos, because how consequential are our foolish observations when the grand picture is clear? How much difference does opinion make when planned decline is the truth?

Limp leaves on well-trodden ground.

We’ve seen this before. Not as rapidly, perhaps, but a cursory look at history and there it is.

Here in Canada, opinions are heated like popcorn in a pan: popping, hissing and going off in all directions. Presently, over trade tariffs that represent less than five per cent of Canada’s export business.

The point, of course, by the powers that want to be, is to keep the lid on it.

For now.

Until it is done and we can no longer have opinions.

And that is not quite in place yet.

We are performing financially as one of the worst in the G7. We have the highest inflation rate, and, of course, we have The Orange Man Bad to deal with.

The latest shenanigans by Orange Man are probably the only opinions I stop and listen to these days, because I’m going to hell for sure because of it.

I mean, dammit all, is it not funny?

Renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America?

That sent me off into peals of laughter.

Oh hell, I know all the reasons why I shouldn’t laugh. I should clutch my imitation pearls and cry instead. But dammit…

It was funny.

That’s the thing about the Orange Man. He’s never dull.

And then, to add insult to injury, he tweets about needing an ocean now since he has a gulf and a lake. The northern states shiver at the implication, looking out as they do toward vast seas of oil and gas and shipping routes waiting.

Oh, the amusement of it all.

I know it’s not amusing.

But in some strange way, it is.

Perhaps I’ve gone mad like the rest of us, puttering while the world is being dismantled around us. We putter, mutter, sputter, and put jam on our crumpets and butter.

Who among us thinking types hasn’t gone mad in our own peculiar ways?

I’m feeding raccoons, for godssakes.

How mad can we be?

But now a raccoon is a puppy of the forest. Mostly related to the koala bear and the panda. Scientists are discovering that raccoons are growing shorter snouts and bigger eyes or something in preparation for their new role as family pets.

I do not tell a lie.

But then, I do digress, as I do.

I’m just saying that feeding raccoons is an inevitability for us all one day.

Just so you know.

Now, I bring up the Orange Man Bad for a reason.

If only I could remember what the hell that was.

Oh yes. I’ve been going to hell for quite a while over him.

He’s hysterical. A born comedian, all wrapped up in overt narcissism and bluster.

A ham in a bluster bun.

Yet I do not say this amusement out loud anymore unless I’m writing a damn column and accidentally tell the entire world—or the six people who actually read me now and then.

Yes, I know.

Gaza. Iran. Trade deals and tariffs. Old-fashioned misogyny.

Ghastly things to consider.

I’m just thinking that if all these things are going to happen—and I’m of the mind that they were—it wouldn’t have mattered who was in office. What will be will be.

The Predatory Class needs what it needs, when and how it needs it, and their puppets do as they are maneuvered to.

So at least Orange Man is entertaining in the devastation.

Trust me, he is not the only one causing devastation in this mad world.

But I deviate from the point of this again.

Whatever that point was.

Oh yes.

We will never get it together.

Not ever.

The divides are never going to be bridged in this lifetime, I’m afraid.

If you hate Orange Man and someone else loves Orange Man and you happen to be in conversation, the tussle-scuffle that follows is usually a sight to be seen—and recorded on an iPhone by bored bystanders.

The same is true for COVID, LGBTQS2+, BLM, immigration, oh, you know…

The list.

There ain’t no bridging the divide.

Now why would that be?

And why are people even trying anymore?

It is as simple as apple pie sitting on a windowsill: people’s opinions are now their identities.

Question their argument and you are questioning their personhood.

This is something people who are not free individuals do. They are with their herd and they are safe.

They think they’ve made an autonomous decision but cannot bear criticism.

It is as if you were pointing out that their outfit made them look like Donald Duck.

Do not send wolves into the herd or they will stomp you to death.

Even if you see them as lemmings heading toward a cliff, all the tripwires and cajoling and grabbing them by the scruff of their little hairy necks will not stop them.

They are safe in their herd.

Safe in the knowledge that they’ve made the right personal decision inside a sea of propaganda.

Everyone they know thinks like them, so they can’t be wrong.

Perhaps they’re not.

We’ll never know.

We’ll never know because there is no discussion.

Now, I think Orange Man is an arrogant misogynist doing dreadful things sometimes, but he is funny.

If you can escape your herd long enough to venture saying that.

If you can put aside the horror.

Heaven knows it is a hard thing to admit in Canada these days.

Anyway, the point is, take it from a former humorist: some things, in the stretch of time, become funnier and funnier.

Including our maladaptive need to convince anybody of anything.

Or to feed raccoons.

We are just human.

Foolish.

Right.

Wrong.

Silly.

We’re here for a blip in time.

So laugh now and then.

It drives the madness into its appropriate box.

One day Orange Man will not be in office, and who will make us misfits laugh then?

Although I do think Carney is ripe for the taking at this point.

But don’t get me started on that!

And, of course, if there is a fool in me, it involves raccoons.

Now, I know I experienced that whole “opening the door and confronting a carpet of twenty-five raccoons” thing that year. I remember that. I remember vowing never to feed them again. But this winter was different. Because he arrived—Winston—a scrawny, miserable leftover from the cold, scratching the plastic tab at the window for my attention. He was small, like a teenage raccoon, with that bleak, haunted look in his eyes. And I couldn’t ignore him—this child of the wilderness starving on the still-snow-covered ground.

So I fed him. He came at high noon for some reason, growing more content and less dismal as spring spread its promise of green, even under the fire-smoke skies. By early summer, Winston had grown a little fatter but not much bigger, and he became Winstonia.

Have I learned nothing? I am always assuming they are males, and they are not.

Winstonia appeared with five little ones, still not able to eat solid food and wobbly on their little paws. They snuggled around her with pride as she showed them off to me. They always do that, the females, as if to say, “Look what I did.”

“Yes. Look what you did, indeed,” I thought, as the horror of six grown raccoons by winter, dickering about on my deck demanding food, became a real possibility. I had only been feeding Winston, even though some others came and went that I steadfastly ignored. Because he was little and was a boy. And because of the hell of my winter.

So then, how precious can five little baby faces with little hands possibly be? Adorable, furry, bundled, bumbled munchkins with beady little noses and mewling melodies and chippering chirps, who licked my toes so I had to put on shoes (which I hate to do, being a Cape Bretoner and all).

I vowed, of course, to feed them only once a day, and not a lot. “Go, Winstonia,” I’d say, as if she understood. “Go teach your babies how to hunt for food.” Eventually she accepted this, and I would feed them only once a day, and all was well.

I named the babies One, Two, Three, Four, and Five. It was Four who was the problem. He is ADHD, I think. He is all over the place with curiosity and carnage now, lumping and bumping the woodpile even though he is the smallest of them all. He had a bold spirit that took to trying to learn how to scratch at the plastic tab on the window long before the others. He learned quickly how to growl at his siblings over a nugget of cat food, and he would look me in the eye every time. As if to say, “I’m here. I know you.” And so I guess he did.

Of course, I knew I’d be in trouble somewhere along the way. Why I ever told Winstonia to go and teach her babies how to hunt for food is beyond me, because I think she listened to me.

And so it was 9:30 at night, and the plaintive cry began.

The cry of a baby raccoon for its mother.

On and on it went, and I was beginning to become somewhat annoyed with Winstonia. Where was she? A baby was calling. It called and called, and I could barely stand it. A neighbour came by to drop something off, and I asked him where he thought that baby was. He said, “It’s in the garbage can.” And we both wondered where the mother was.

Winstonia had indeed taught her babies where to look for food.

So I had my friend go and look, and he came back to tell me the can was full of water. “Do you have a broom or something?” he asked.

Which I couldn’t find (which might, of course, explain my housekeeping issues, but that’s another story).

We decided to put a shovel in the bin so the baby could climb up and out. And when my friend left, it was quiet for the longest time, and I settled into another James Herriot book.

And then it started again.

And I really couldn’t stand it.

At one o’clock in the morning, I wandered out to the front with my gloves on (okay… my oven mitts made of some sort of silly silicone that doesn’t work, so never buy those dang things), a big towel, and my cellphone with its flashlight on. I had checked the region on the internet for rabies (for which there is none, thank the heavens). I debated calling the neighbours, but it was one o’clock in the morning. Or maybe the fire department. Or the police. Then I thought, I can’t disturb these people over a baby raccoon. They have ghastly criminals to attend to, and drunken drivers, and wildfires, and all those things. And, as hard as it is to believe, not everybody thinks a little raccoon is anything to be concerned about. And I couldn’t risk listening to that reasoning at all.

So I wandered over to the bin by the light of my cellphone—a decrepit old lady in a nightgown wearing oven mitts.

“Why, oh why?” I asked myself.

But that is neither here nor there.

I flipped the lid.

And it was hell.

The stench of hell in eight inches of water, with all sorts of miserable refuse floating and bobbing and stinking. And there, in the middle, desperately holding onto the metal shaft of the shovel, was Four. He was wet. The most pathetic, desperate little face I’ve ever seen.

And I thought, I can’t put my towel or my oven mitts into that sewer.

Where the hell was Winstonia?

I’m not a mother.

Only a mother could bring herself to do such things.

And so I played mother.

And I’m seriously annoyed with Winstonia.

And worried, if the truth be told.

And that was my pathetic little-life-as-it-happens story.

And for those who made it through, well... I’m impressed.

Happy Day to all.

It boggles my silly mind I guess. Luxury taxes on yachts and private jets are dropped while a 10% tax is levelled on canned vegetables. Developers and banks in Vancouver’s condo market are bailed out by the government because they can’t sell them at the price they want or need. The middle class losing their houses are given no such help? Maybe the government could buy their houses. That’s the plan anyway, isn’t it. Socialized housing.

Nobody owns anything but the elite in their offshore accounts, flying their jets, eating their caviar and living in their castles? All of this activity simply explains how little the ruling class cares about the majority of people here. We’re like flies buzzing about their monumental heads. “Just swat them and they’ll go away,” I’m sure they think. “They’re too stupid to understand,” I would say is their mantra about the people they are supposed to represent.

I think they forgot that we are one of the most highly educated countries in the world. And we also have a grounding in practicality the ruling class has no concept of really. We would have seen some of these problems, in fact did see some of the problems long before they happened. e.g. We wouldn’t have allowed the purchase of a fleet of EV buses in Edmonton that could not operate in the cold. We could have told them. We wouldn’t have spent millions on cricket farms that went basically defunct. We would have filled the fields with food instead of bird-killing windmills. We would have shooed away the elite for their silly utopian ideals in order to actually survive and thrive. A managed decline, well, maybe it is necessary but it certainly should be equal over class.

And we would have explained what was happening to a public that deserved, by virtue of taxes paid, to know. According to Bill Gates and other august bodies, it ain’t the environment. It is entirely possible that if the news we don’t know is so bad, it is the elite and not the people who will panic. In fact, I believe that is what is happening. And well they should. They have a lot of explaining to do. If they can stoop to such levels.

Large bag of rice

Extra eggs

Spices you use regularly

Peanut butter

Coffee/Tea

Cooking oil

Canned tomatoes

Canned fish/tuna/salmon/sardines

Pasta

And in “our area” here near Ottawa:

The National Capital Region is seeing rapid data centre growth, particularly in Kanata and across the Ottawa River in Gatineau. This expansion is driven by the region’s secure government network requirements, access to green hydroelectricity, and booming tech and AI sectors. [1, 2]

Key Data Centre Locations Near Ottawa

Gatineau, Quebec (The Hub of Large-Scale Growth) [1, 2]

• Equinix OT1: Located at 200 Avenue Lépine. This is a massive, carrier-neutral International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre designed to service enterprise, financial, and secure government ecosystems.

• Gatineau Data Hub: A scalable, sustainable hyperscale 50MW data centre facility currently in development by AVAIO Digital Partners and ADAM Real Estate.

• Shared Services Canada (SSC) Facilities: Various secure federal government data operations and nodes are housed in this area. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Kanata, Ontario (Tech North)

• PureColo (DC1): Located at 390 March Road, sitting right in the heart of Kanata’s tech park.

• Hive Data Center (OTT-1): Also located at 390 March Road, this facility features a 20MW power capacity tailored for high-density, low-latency workloads.

• Qu Data Centres (OTT-3): Operating out of 436 Hazeldean Road.

• Rogers (OTT DC3): Located at 436 Hazeldean Road, serving as a major carrier-grade facility. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Ottawa Core & Nepean

• DNSnetworks IDC1: Located at 2934 Baseline Road.

• ThinkOn (OTT DC1): Based at 95 Colonnade Road (formerly Qualicum Centre), servicing public and private sectors with sovereign cloud solutions.

• PureColo (DC2): Situated at 3755 Riverside Drive. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

And:

Do these facilities require a large amount of water?

Yes, traditional data centres consume immense amounts of water, with an average mid-sized facility using roughly 1.1 to 1.4 million litres of water per day. However, the exact water footprint of the facilities near Ottawa depends entirely on the specific cooling technology they deploy and Canada’s unique climate. [1, 2, 3]

https://thenarwhal.ca/ai-data-centres-canada/