It’s been eventful week. More on the world and national front than locally though. Here, we’re waiting to move into the new house. The previous owners have been moving out this weekend so everything should be ready to go as soon as the realtors and lawyers finish pushing paper around. Right now we’re scheduled to move Wednesday. So today we’re job hunting, picking blackberries, and enjoying the warm days, cool nights and crystal clear skies of late summer. I’ve even had time to read, something I haven’t had time to do for several years.

Some of you may have heard that Jack Layton passed away. He’d been fighting cancer for well over a year. For those of you that hadn’t heard he was the leader of the NDP party in Canada. He was passionate about fighting for the little guy. He reminded me of a Paul Wellstone or even more of Hubert Humphrey. The one thing that everyone said was no matter how rancourous the battles in Parliament, no matter how close fought the elections were he always maintained a dignity and a sense of fair play. He took the NDP from a group of small parties with no real national presence to the second largest party in government and seemed poised to be Canada’s next Prime Minister. The respect that all the parties up here had for Jack Layton is shown by the decision to have an official state funeral for him, something normally reserved for the Prime Minister or Governor General. He wrote a final letter to the nation that sums up his approach to government nicely. The final paragraph is something I’ll always remember:

My friends, love is better than anger.
Hope is better than fear.
Optimism is better than despair.
So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic.
And we’ll change the world.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/08/22/pol-layton-last-letter.html

Also this week Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple resigned. This was not a surprise, he’s also been fighting cancer and though it seems to be in remission the battle left him very thin and weak. I know there’s a few out there that don’t appreciate what Jobs did for the computer industry. I’ll just say that without Jobs influence computers wouldn’t be nearly as easy to use, as ubiquitous, and I would be working in a different business. A very nice article came out that sums it up nicely: A Revolution Every Other Year:

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/steve_jobs_a_revolution_every_other_year/

So even if you never touch a Macintosh computer, an iPhone, an iPod or iPad, what Apple has accomplished has really changed the world. Microsoft was committed to DOS until the first Macintosh showed them that a ‘windows’ environment with a mouse and keyboard would work well. Portable music players were a niche business until the iPod came out. The iPhone not only changed the mind of North Americans toward Smart Phones but now dominates the field. The iPad sold more in the first year than all the other tablet computers from all the other companies had in the previous ten. Most importantly Jobs took Apple Computer, a company that was by all estimates just months away from declaring bankruptcy and closing up, to the second (and on a good day the first) largest company in the world. For those of you into the stock market here’s a nice chart of the fortunes of Apple Computer over the last fifteen years. From a $3 billion dollar company with a moribund product line in 1996 (when we could have bought AppleStock at $12 a share) to a nearly $400 billion dollar company with a stock price just below $400 a share that leads many major markets (I calculated this week that if we’d bought 100 shares of Apple in 1996 LIKE MARSHA WANTED TO BUT I SAID NO, it would be worth today somewhere above $300,000. My Bad.)

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apples-market-cap-during-steve-jobs-tenure-2011-8?op=1

In other news, of course you’ve also all heard of the east coast earthquake that damaged the National Cathedral and cracked the Washington Monument. Now Hurricane Irene is battering the east coast. Note to a couple of friends of ours: Are you SURE Baltimore is where you want to be?

And lastly I did my good deed for the week. I was driving into town when I saw a small animal on the road. It was terrified and confused as several cars had passed over it without hitting it. I pulled off and ran back. With my feet I eased it off of the pavement. As soon as it felt the grass it seemed to figure out what was going on and took off for the bushes. I feel really good about saving the poor creature's life. I feel even better about telling Marsha about how I saved the life of the 3 foot black and yellow garter snake. I’ve told her several times in detail about the giant snake that is now happy and living free in our neighbourhood.

Somehow she doesn’t appreciate the story or the deed as much as I do.

Doug & Marsha

PIX: It's harvest time!

Apples are almost ready both in the yard where we're renting and at Barbara's place and there's two dwarf apple trees in the yard of the house we're buying.


Blackberries are in. We've picked and frozen eight quarts for us plus three gallons for Barbara who makes jam.


There's also a lot of these berries. No idea what they are. Being cap-berries they're probably edible. I remember the rule from my Wilderness Survival class when I was in High School "Black and Blue berries are almost certainty edible. White are never edible. Red may or may not be edible." We're going to proceed with caution.