It was interesting to hear the Mayor of Weyburn talking about losing city employees to the oil patch. We're seeing something similar in our library region. I would say that traditionally, the bulk of our branch librarians were stay-at-home moms and housewives who were married to farmers or other people earning an average (or below-average in the case of most farmers ) income.
Now, with the booming natural resource-based economy, it's harder for us to find women wanting to supplement their family incomes because their husbands are making around six figures in "the patch". Or, if the wives do want to work, they can find higher paying employment with longer hours fairly easily since many gas stations and restaurants are offering $10-15/hr with all the hours you want just to get workers. (And lest anyone think I'm being sexist by talking only about female employees, I will mention that of the approximately 100 employees that SRL has out in its rural branch network, fully every single one of them - ie. 100% if you like easy math - are of the female persuasion. Sadly, the only males in the entire organization are the four professional librarians, our van driver and our shipping/receiving clerk.)
In related news (to the "boom", not to the issue of "who has boobs" ), Shea and I drove out to Stoughton, a town half an hour east of Weyburn for the local library's presentation on "Surface and Mineral Rights" as this is something that is of personal interest to both of us.
(I'll preface this by saying "as I understand it", since I always tend to get these things slightly wrong. But, basically, surface rights are where an oil company pays the landowner an annual fee for the right to be on your land as they explore for oil or for continued access after a well has been drilled. Mineral rights are when you earn a percentage from any producing wells that are found on your land. Mineral rights are, by far, the more lucrative although someone with a few producing wells on their land could make a decent annual wage, just from the surface rights.)
Now, a quick quiz - what's the most successful library program you've ever attended? How about 150 people in a community hall where said community has 653 people according to the last census? Of course, they'd advertised quite widely and a lot of attendees, including Shea and I, were from out of town. But still, that'd be like getting 45 000 people out to a library program in Regina! (Hmm, maybe the RPL should become the RidersPL?)
There's definitely a lesson in there about running programs that meet your community needs no matter the size of your community. Plus, the opportunity to promote the library and its services is huge, especially for a non-standard program like this. (Although it was embarrasing to hear one Government employee who was presenting ask, "Do you have Internet in the library here? I know we do in Regina but I'm not sure about here." Ouch!)
Anyhow, I'm off to sing myself to sleep...
Old dirt road,
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
knee deep snow
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
Watching the fire as we grow
(Saskaboom, Saskaboom)
o-o-o-o-old
Peak Oil is a theory that is increasingly relevant as the price of oil and gasoline continue to skyrocket. It was first proposed in the 1950's by an American geoscientist named M. King Hubbert who worked for Shell in Texas and correctly predicted that the supplies of oil were limited in the United States and extraction would peak at some point in the late 1960's then fall afterwards.
This theory was later applied to world supplies of oil with the prediction for when peak oil would occur worldwide ranging anywhere from 2010 to "never" depending on which study you read. (The "never" people are the ones who claim that oil is produced continually by internal earth processes and are sort of like the folks who still deny climate change in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.) MetaFilter recently had a thread about an International Agency study of 400 oil fields that found that, barring a substantial decrease in demand, the world would face an oil
supply shortfall of 12.5 million barrels a day by 2015 or 15% of current
production.
On the contrary, even people who agree with the idea of peak oil and don't think it'll bubble from the ground forever, point out that improvements in technology and/or the rising price of oil will lead to more finds or re-approaching fields that were previously unfeasible or thought to be tapped.
The other related issue is, of course, climate change. Even if the earth did have unlimited supplies of oil, there has to be consideration of what the burning of so many fossil fuels are doing to our environment.
(A digression - "fossil fuels" is a bit of a misnomer and many people think that oil fields are like the dinosaur version of elephant graveyards. The reality is that oil fields were likely produced, not by dinosaurs but ancient micro-organisms and foliage. A great way to understand this that I read somewhere: the weight of all the ants on earth is more than the weight of all elephants.)
Ethanol isn't the solution because, although it is renewable since it is fuel made from crops such as sugar cane and maize, it still involves burning which harms the environment plus it drives up the cost of those basic food crops. (Mexico recently capped the prices for tortillas.)
The role of speculators, both in driving up the prices of food crops (see the last linked article) and of oil itself, can't be ignored either. In fact, there are some that think the huge increase in oil prices in the last year doesn't have anything to do with peak oil and is completely based on self-fulfilling speculator prophecies (if you bet millions that the price of oil will go up, that will push the price up which leads other speculators to do the same and it becomes a vicious cycle which only end with a massive crash which will make 1929 look like a 16-year old learning to drive versus the coming crash which would be more like Evil Kinevil jumping over a canyon and not quite making it.)
Why am I writing this now? I've always been interested in the idea of Peak Oil for all the different areas it brings into contact - economics, environmentalism, politics, geology, etc. - but now that the Saskatchewan economy is booming due to our oil and other natural resources, and having spent the last year living in the epicentre of the Saskatchewan oil & gas industry (Weyburn-Estevan), it's hitting especially close to homebi-. (out of curiosity, I even went to the bi-annual Saskatchewan Oil & Gas Show in Weyburn last year - a place I never thought I'd find myself!)
Recent studies have declared that there is a "Saudi Arabia of oil" under Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North and South Dakota and Montana in the Bakken and Torquay formations (the blogger who posted the image below has downsized his initial estimate but it's still apparently the largest find in Canada since 1957).
I drove out to Shea's farm with her family a few months ago and we didn't recognize the area. The landscape now looks like the moon - instead of the never-ending greens, yellows and browns of the farm fields, there is just endless, flattened, black earth covered in rows of pumpjacks.
I've got a lot more that I could say but I hear a baby crying so I might come back to this topic later. I do hope this has given you an introduction if you didn't know about peak oil and maybe some more info if you do!
Well, we're back from Calgary and it was a great trip!
Pace was an amazing traveler, we saw lots of friends, family and old familiar sights. In many ways, it felt like we were trying to cram three and a half years of memories from when we lived there into just under a week of visiting. But even with that constraint, we managed to hit many of the spots we wanted to see - the Calgary Zoo, the Wave Pool, Shea's old unit at the Foothills, my old office at the Old Y Centre for Community Organizations plus lots of shopping and good eating. Oh, and the obligatory pilgrimage to IKEA that all Saskies must make when visiting Cowtown.
I haven't downloaded our pictures or video yet but was looking for something to sum up the trip and found the clip below.
If asked to name my single fondest memory of the three and a half years I spent in Calgary, it was when a dozen people (including the couple we stayed with while visiting on this trip) rented a 10 man dingy (yeah, I know I said it was a dozen people involved - but there were always two or more in the river at pretty much anytime so it wasn't *completely* illegal) spent a beautiful +30 day floating lazily down the Bow River that runs through the centre of Calgary.
The day had it all - beautiful hot weather, tons of other rafters to visit with, lots of chances to jump in and swim in the swift moving river or just hold on to the edge of the dinghy, a picnic lunch, getting ambushed by kids with water guns at one beach along the ride, a chance to drink directly from the river via one survivalist participant's new water filtration gizmo, a spot check by the river patrol (conveniently happening after our portage spot where we dumped a lot of empty cans!) and even a lost engagement ring swept away by the strength of the current (luckily not Shea's ring!)
We only did this once during the entire 3.5 years we lived in Calgary because I think we realised that doing it again might bring disappointment when it wasn't as magical as that first time.
I had the same worry going back to visit Calgary after so many years away and with so many good memories of our time living there. But except for a couple small pangs throughout the week (okay, and one big one when Shea and I spent a couple hours strolling 17th Ave aka "The Red Mile" where we'd spent so much time while we lived in Calgary), I realised I don't miss Calgary as much as I thought I would. It was a great city to spend a few years in during my 20's but I would argue that Regina's an equally great city to be a young parent in. (Comparing notes with a cousin who does a 2+-hour round trip to take her daughter to soccer three nights a week is all the proof I needed on this point! )
Anyhow, I found this video which doesn't quite do justice to how peaceful and wonderful and amazing our own day floating the Bow River was. But it may give you a bit of a taste...
Read at Work
is a site from the New Zealand Book Council that allows you to read classic books, poetry, samples from selected New Zealand authors and more, online and formatted to look like either the Windows XP interface and Powerpoint presentations. Very fun and cool (though I do not, of course, advocate performing non-work activities such as this while at work! Of course, if you work in libraries, this *is* work related...sort of.)
(via Reddit though I don't have the original link handy - you can search if you really need it)
As for Shea being a computer genius, I'm sitting in a hotel room in Swift Current right now. We made sure the room had an Internet connection as I've brought my laptop with me. I plugged it in when we got here, checked e-mail then trundled off to the pool with Pace and Shea. When we got back, Shea went to the computer and asked, "How come it won't turn on?" I pushed the power button, sure I'd left it running when we left. Nothing. Again, holding it a few seconds. Nothing. "Oh fuck" is the non-paraphrased thought that came to mind. I ran through the checklist...did the screen give out? The motherboard? The hard drive? Hopefully the motherboard - that's the least bothersome major error. The hard drive has a full back-up but would be PAINFUL to redo everything. We're in a poolside room...maybe the humidity just temporarily short-circuited it or something? Wishful thinking but maybe it'll work tomorrow if I crank the air and say a prayer to the techno-gods before I fall asleep. So I'm laying in bed with Shea and Pace and Shea goes, "How long were we at the pool? Do you know if the plug in you used was working? Maybe it wasn't and the battery died?" My battery life is down quite a bit from when it was new (now I get maybe an hour whereas back then, I got 3-4 hours) but w weren't at the pool that long...were we? I plug the laptop into a different outlet and...voila...it boots no problem. So I must say my wife is a brilliant computer-engineer level of intelligence that I am daily in awe of. (Also, I was up and out of the house by 5am today to go do weeding in a distant community. So I drove 3 hours round-trip, did six hours of weeding, then drove another three hours to get here. So hopefully that's an excuse for being such a moron at why my computer "died" tonight.) God, I need sleep... (Oh yeah, I didn't plan to get up at 5am but I had a dream about being at the library weeding and the branch librarian had got her whole board of 10+ people there to help - but in exchange, they wanted me to help them move their entire library...which is in reality a big part of the reason why I was going out - to do a major weeding to help them prepare for an impending move. But yeah...I dreamt about weeding. I think I've reached the next level on the Librarian Nerd Scale! )
I couldn't think what to post about so Shea suggested I give an update from my real life. So here it is...
- tonight we went for a big walk and ended up in River Park just down the hill from where we live in Weyburn. There was an In Motion celebration going on and Pace loved dancing and clapping and running around (yes, he's running now!) to the zydeco band that was playing.
- we're going to Calgary for a week, leaving tomorrow. Our main goals are to hit the zoo, do some shopping (Saskies have to make a pilgrimage to IKEA), visit some relatives and friends since we haven't been back since moving home in 2004 after having lived there for three and a half years
- blog posts may be a bit more sparse for the next week (but knowing me, probably not.)
- I had a day at work today where I accomplished tons, the time flew by, I wrapped up pretty much everything I needed to do before going on holidays. I love days like that!
- I'm on the road tomorrow doing weeding all day at one of our branches. This is completely different than smoking weed all day at one of our branches which is a practice that went out of fashion around 1977.
- Hockey is over. The other blood sport, the Democratic nomination proces is over. How will I entertain myself this summer. (Voice from next room: "Go outside!")
- I could see myself developing an addiction to energy drinks. I'd never tried them before but on a friend's recommendation, I gave it a shot and zowee-wowee. Them things pack a punch!
- Did I mention that I hope to visit a few of my old favourite CPL branches while in Cowtown?
- we probably won't go out to the mountains while we're there. We rarely did in the three and a half years we lived there - why change now? But seriously, we've got a pretty full week just with Calgary stuff so it's doubtful if we'll manage to head out that way.
- I've got a list of old favourite restaurants I want to visit as well. Beef satay at Viet West, chicken schwarma at Falafel King and a pizza from Hop n Brew are all on the menu.
- we've already been invited to a hot tub party - yay!
) income. 
), Shea and I drove out to Stoughton, a town half an hour east of Weyburn for the local library's presentation on "Surface and Mineral Rights" as this is something that is of personal interest to both of us. 
)
