Sovereignty of SeaWitch

For the past month, I've been quickly readjusting to life back in Canada. I'm no longer surprised when people say "thanks" when I open doors for them and I'm getting used to chatty neighbours who just "pop in for a visit". But that's just life in the Maritimes. People really are friendly. My husband even has his favourite toll booth employee on the bridges and he's now on a first name basis with the employees at the local Home Hardware store.

My son's adjusting well to school even though there's a lot more expected of him, he finds it interesting. He's even impressed that his school has a PA system where the principal can talk to all the classrooms at once or just one at a time. The things I always took for granted like school busses being on time and teachers showing up 99.9% of the time are nothing short of miraculous for my son.

So with nothing really to complain about, I find it difficult to blog when things are going along too smoothly. I can't just blog about boring things and that's why, dear readers, it takes so long for me to post.

The one thing that puzzles me though is the number of totally mindless shows there are on TV. For a continent with some of the most educated people in the world, there seems to be no shortage of pseudo self-help and reality shows and gossip mavens who try to pass off their shows as something more than the advertising shills they really are.

24 hours a day, you can watch people divulge their most shameful secrets in front of millions while others clog up an hour of tv just to talk to you about absolutely nothing of importance or even remotely interesting. Today, I turned on the TV to see if I could find a good documentary or just some news but all I found were dancing dogs on one channel, religious ex-cult members on another and at least a dozen soap operas. Even BBC Canada didn't offer me a reprieve...just another do-it-yourselfer telling me how I can spend a whole day painting fake tiles on a wooden wall.

Out of 400 TV channels I get with my satellite cable company, I watch a grand total of 3. The History, Discovery and A&E channels. The rest of them are witless drivel aimed to feed the egos of their over-hyped hosts or to serve as vehicles for the legions of advertisers paying top dollar to get their products into your homes.

What's the point of having an education, the freedom of speech and thought and decent wages when all people seem to want is to be spoon fed a daily diet of junk information? We don't use the internet to become more informed about the world around us. No, the majority of people use it to download porn or play games. So why should I expect TV to be any different?

The real question is who dictates the programming? Like good little couch potatoes, do we just watch what's thrown in front of us or because we really don't want to be intellectually stimulated or challenged anyway, the TV execs just cater to our innate and proven predilection for nonsense?

I'm inclined to believe it's the latter and that disturbs me even more. Bruce Springsteen was almost right when he sang "57 Channels and Nothing On". Had he written it today, it would be 457 Channels and Nothing On.

Since I'm still in 'vacation mode', I haven't been paying much attention to the current events of the past few weeks and therefore my blog has reflected my complete lack of interest. Instead, I've been enjoying the tourist's life and visiting as many attractions the Doers and Dreamers Guide of Nova Scotia has to offer...such as Monday's trip to the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park.

I took my son and my nephew to see some of Canada's indigenous animals (except the peacock and emu) and although they weren't so happy to see us, we were more than happy to spend an afternoon watching them laze about in the sun.

Here's a few photos of some of them...

Dall's sheep.

I don't think there's ever been a time that I've visited the park and seen any of the Black Bears doing anything but sleep. This visit was no different.

The peacocks roam free in the park and there isn't a child who has seen one and not tried to touch it. As easy as it looks, the peacocks aren't that naive and never let the kids closer than 2 or 3 steps from it. This guy led my son on a 20 minute chase through the pheasant exhibits and successfully dodged all his contact attempts.

My hero. The raccoon. Why? Doesn't this pic make it obvious? At least I know what they do when they're not into our garbage.

Off season for the Easter bunnies.

It's now been exactly a month that I've been in Canada and one of the things I just love the most about being back here is the scenery and wildlife.
Since I'm living 30km outside the city, I get to enjoy the drive in every day. Nothing but green forests, lakes so calm they look like mirrors and the odd porcupine and rabbit on the edges of the tree lines. After 8 years of honking horns, noisy motorbikes, and noisy neighbours, it's just so relaxing to appreciate the tranquility that country life has to offer. The noisiest neighbours I have right now are the bullfrogs in the pond at the end of the lane.

Even domesticated dogs seem to have it better here. Almost everyone seems to have one and they all sit in the front seat of their owner's cars if they can get away with it. My own dog is enjoying all the attention every time she's on her daily walks and she's making friends fast with all the four-legged critters on her street except my sister's black lab, Jackson. I guess she's finally met her match when it comes to begging for scraps from the table and she doesn't like it one bit. Once we get settled in our own house next month, she'll resume her place next to my chair without any begging competition and maybe the two of them might be able to make amends.

By the end of this week, I hope to have some photos to share with you of my corner of the Great White North--if I can only remember where I put my digital camera.

I've come to the conclusion that Canada must be a disease factory.

So many people seem to be suffering from diseases which, up until now, I'd only read about in the back pages of obscure medical journals. If they're not already on disability insurance for it, they're doing their best to convince the government that they should be, or, failing that...persuading anyone and everyone around them to change their lifestyles to accommodate their wide range of (what I previously thought were) rare symptoms.

Canadians (myself included) seem to be obsessed with our health and I'm not sure if it's a result of government advertising campaigns to promote a healthier lifestyle or if it's because corporations use our already innate fear of death to manipulate us into buying their products. Either way, it's getting on my nerves already.

Let's start with peanuts. They seem innocent enough. But not in Canada. Here, they're a surefire way to kill people. In drive-through windows at fast food outlets, there are signs assuring customers that their food is not cooked with peanut oil. Attached to my son's summer day camp registration form was a reminder not to give him peanuts or any food which could include any peanut derivative (like peanut oil) in it. On restaurant menus, diners are reassured that their food does not include nuts.

The reason behind all the notices is that some people suffer a serious allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis which can be life threatening. According to Anaphylaxis Canada, about 1-2% of the population suffers from it but from all the warnings I'm seeing, you'd think 100% of the population is midst of an anaphylactic epidemic.

I'm almost 40 years old and throughout my whole life, I only know one person who is allergic to peanuts. I grew up on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches along with the rest of my childhood friends. Because I am a vegetarian, my nutritionist told my mother that she should include peanuts in my diet since I wasn't eating meat to ensure a good dose of protein to keep my immune system working properly. I feel badly for people who suffer from this allergic reaction but does it really warrant so much fear mongering?

And then there are all these people walking around wearing masks suffering from environmental illness. While I recognize that some people do feel sick from smelling too much perfume or detergent, but in the eight years I've been absent from Canada, has our environment deteriorated so much that it justifies the sudden increase in people claiming to have environmental illness? Am I that naive or insensitive to the horrors of such illnesses? Or are people just taking things too far?

We could tell the sufferers of such diseases to stay home but apparently they're not even safe there since the advertisers for bug repellant are telling us that if we don't buy their brand, then we might very well be bitten by the deadly West Nile virus carrying mosquitoes.

And I thought terrorism was our biggest threat on our lives. Coming back to all these peanut, perfume and mosquito warnings, you'd never even know there was a War on Terrorism.