Post 2760 - Tuesday

Hi. Welcome back to Halifax.

We got back here around 3:30. A couple of Subway sandwiches later, and a long and luxuriant shower, I felt much, much better. My god, it is amazing how much dirty and detritus can get on a human body in just a couple of days.

The cottage is in Pictou County, as you may recall. That is the place where there is the Northern Pulp mill is. It has been there for decades. When she was growing up, she was told that the odour was "the smell of success", and it was understood that to criticize the smell was almost heresy, nearly treasonous. So when Pictonians rise up as they have this summer and decried the stench from that mill as vociferously as they have, then that should tell you something. I am not taking a political stand here, just a humanitarian one. They have to do something about that plant, sooner than 9 months from now. The jobs that would be lost by the plant's abrupt closure would be significant, but people dying from whatever diseases that will result from that pollution is an incalculable cost.

Anyway, I tell you this because we drove through Lyon's Brook to get to the highway. Right around where the West Pictou Amalgamated School is (the same school that Patricia attended, plus George Canyon and J.D. Fortune and other celebrities), the stench hit us hard. The windows were up and the air conditioning was on, but the smell crept in somehow and I nearly felt sick to my stomach. I don't know how the kids and the staff at that school are handling it. Will somebody please, for someone's sake, do something about that mill?

It has been a quiet evening. It is past 9pm. I was out on both the front and back decks for a while this evening enjoying the fruits of my paid-for labour, and realizing that I have to return to work in the morning. Why do weekends go by so quickly? And why do holiday weekends go by even more quickly? And, why oh why, do holiday weekends where you add another day to make it 4 days off work, go by the fastest of all?

I think I will close off my evening by watching a nice relaxing episode of The Strain. Now that I know that the show is not about a guy who tries to go to the bathroom after a cheese-eating contest, I think I can get into the show.

See you tomorrow.

Bevboy