Does my MP even read the emails I send him?

On 8 February 2007 I read this article about the Tory government's attitude towards 'Net Neutrality which I found disturbing and I immediately emailed my local MP (Gary Goodyear), Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Industry Minister Maxime Bernier my thoughts on this.

Today (technically yesterday since it is now after midnight) I received a response from Mr. Goodyear's office saying “...I wish to acknowledge receipt your letter of February 23, 2006, regarding your concerns on ‘Net Neutrality.’” Excuse me? February 23, 2006?!?!?

Now when I email my elected officials I don't expect a personally targetted reply and an invitation to in-depth dialog—I know they are busy people. However, I do expect a prompt acknowledgement, especially from my local MP. I also expect the staffer writing the reply to at least be marginally competent and properly reference things so I know that my MP has been made aware of my concerns.

Even if this is just bad writing on the staffer's part and they meant to say they were acknowledging receipt on 2007/02/23 (4 days from receipt to acknowledgement), the fact that it took them so long to reply is just terrible. It's also the first email of the last 2.5 years since I moved to Cambridge that my MP's office has responded to, and they took three weeks less two days to do it.

When I lived in Kitchener (Kitchener-Wilmot riding, specifically) I got an acknowldgement froma staffer within 5 business days and, occasionally, a direct response from my MP within 2 weeks. They certainly didn't take almost three weeks to merely acknowledge.

Now I'm unlikely to vote Conservative in any event, but this seeming lack of competence from my MP's office certainly isn't going to raise my faith in my current MP.

Man, am I beat!

This past weekend was the Winter Retreat Weekend for Mennonite Church Eastern Canada youth groups, and my church belongs to this conference. I was a youth sponsor for a few years until three years ago, when I got my now non-existent job at a call centre and ended up working night shift and weekends, so this is the first time in a while that I have been able to do something other than lead Sunday School.

I ended up going along because MCEC has a strict requirement of a 5:1 ratio of youth to sponsors on these weekends and even though Pioneer Park is not a big congregation, with the extra friends that were going along there 12 teenagers but only 2 sponsors. If they didn't have a third then there would two very disappointed people.

But then on Wednesday evening I started to get a scratchy throat and I thought “Oh no, I can't get sick! They are counting on me!”. So on Friday afternoon I did my laundry at my Mom's place and picked up a pharmacopoeia of stuff to help me make it through the weekend. As it was I still felt crappy — the call–into–work–honestly–sick crappy — and I could hardly talk all weekend. I got less sleep than normal when I should have been getting more and I still can't talk.

But you know what? I wouldn't trade this weekend for anything. Not the lack of sleep and crashing for four hours when I got home. Not the bruises from a game of tackle spatula. Not the fact that I probably extended this horrid cold by an extra few days by not getting the rest I needed. It was the best weekend I have had in a long time.

For myself, there was no question that I would go along — when I was in high school I was the only teenager at my church so I kind of got left out of the planning of the life of the community. Fortunately I was attending Rockway Mennonite Collegiate, a private high school affiliated with MCEC. If it had not been for friends there and the ability to hook up with their youth group it would have been so easy for me to have become disassociated from the church. As it was, my life throughout high school revolved around the church. Faith was evident in daily life at school, weekends were spent with friends who also went to church each Sunday, and I went to every conference youth event. I got what I needed, spiritually, from that community and is why I am not a lapsed Christan as an adult.

This is why I want to be involved with youth activities at my church. I don't lead Sunday School because I want to indoctrinate impressionable youth into what I think is the right way to interpret the Bible. I don't want the kids at church to feel left out of the community like I did, 20 years ago. I hope that simply by being there and interacting with them, showing that the church has not forgotten them and that they do not feel that same disassociation that I felt.

Oh, and you know what else? When we got to the camp where the retreat weekend was being held we found out that something had happened so the sponsor for the Calvary Church from Ayr wasn't able to go along. MCEC is quite strict abut the 5:1 youth/sponsor ratio (so I am told), so without a sponsor the three kids from Calvary wouldn't have been able to attend, but we only had twelve youth for three sponsors so we were able to absorb them for the weekend so they could be there. Double plus good.

Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!

So last night at about 23:30 I had this sore feeling in my lower tummy. At first I thought it was just how my laptop was sitting on me and poking into my abdomen. If only.

The pain quickly became excruciating, as if I were being stabbed in back in the kidney area, and the most unbearable spikes the knife being twisted. So around 01:30, with no end in site and the brief respites really only five to ten minutes of slightly less excruciatingness, I called a cab to haul my butt downtown to Cambridge Memorial Hospital.

To cut a long story short, after several shots of morphine and a CT scan of my lower torso, I found out that I have a nice 2.9mm kidney stone working it's way from my right kidney, down the ureter and into the bladder. According to both emerg docs (I was there from about 01:45 to 10:15, across two shifts) and the nurses, that is the painful part.

Thank God! I am no stranger to pain, having had morphine a few times in the past for severe abdominal distress, ultimately related to the intussusception I suffered at age ten. This, however, has got to be the absolute worst physical pain I have ever experienced.

So just before I was discharged they gave me a final shot of morphine, a scrip a whole bunch of medications and the doctor showed me the picture series of my CT. And now I am going to bed since I have been up for a little over 27 hours. :-)

A Canticle for Leibowitz by William M. Miller Jr.

This is a good book and, in spite of the fact that it was written in the late 50s it does not come across as out of place. I'm sure you've read that sci-fi book from decades ago that has the characters talk in awe about a closet-sized computer that is light years in advance of the typical room-sized, vacuum-tubed behemoth. That's typical of “hard” sci-fi which is almost as much driven by describing the science as it is by the plot.

Canticle is more character-driven. In each of it's three sections it focuses on a specific individual and tells the story from their perspective, albeit in third person style. It's much more of a literary sci-fi and, as such, more suitable to the non-geeky. If there's somebody whom you're trying to get to read sci-fi but they're resisting, thinking that sci-fi is still the crappy pulp fiction stuff from the 50s and 60s, give them this book. They'll like it (and understand it!) a lot better than they would something outré like cyberpunk.

I give it a 3 out of 5 stars.

Kirlian Quest by Piers Anthonly

The third novel of the Cluster series, it is still readable by itself without demanding that one has read the previous two. It takes place two thousand years after the first novel and one thousand after the second.

While I liked the novel, I do find the biologies of some of the various alien species to be a bit hard to believe and occasionally this would “bump me out” if the willing suspension of disbelief required for most science fiction stories. Like many of Anthony's novels there is a lot of exposition that goes on inside the primary character's head and at points the plot can go very slowly.

I've never thought that Anthony was a fully A-list writer like Asimov, Niven or Gibson, but neither have I considered him a hack like so many others do. He can be a trifle formulaic but I have enjoyed virtually all of his books that I have read.

I give this book 3.25 out of 5 stars.

Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven

Definitely a good book, though it starts out rather slowly. It doesn't really pick up until the Pak Protectors are mentioned and Louis Wu realizes that they built the Ringworld and humanity are descendants of normal Pak colonists on Earth millions of years ago whose Protectors died off.

Because it took so long to get to that point and thus to find the Ringworld control centre, the actual fixing of the Ringworld's orbit seems a little too pat and deus ex machina to me.

I give it 3.5 out of 5.

Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. LeGuin

This is a book that I have had on my bookshelf for decades, but I have never gone back and re-read it like I have so many other books in my personal library. So a couple of days decided that now was the time. Unfortunately, it just wasn't as good as I remembered.

Yes, I know that this book and its two sequels were written for as younger age group, but so were the Harry Potter novels, and those are awesome. So Ged meets this one dragon and uses his magic to sail around the islands of Earthsea, but beyond that there isn't much more than narrative. It gets rather boring, actually. Even the encounter with the shadow creature was anti-climactic.

I give it a measly 1 star out of 5.