is already very intelligent and well-trained. In fact, probably not much more that I can teach her.

Meet Lady, who is not quite three years old, and who came to live with us last night,

While the kids and I still tear up thinking of our late, much loved Heidi, there was definitely room in our hearts and on the farm for another dog. We didn’t dare hope for another German Shepherd, but when the kids and I went to check the notice board at the vet clinic for animals to give away, lo and behold, there was a sign for a young shepherd, to give away to a good home.

Lady spent the first part of her life with a family who has another, older dog who needs more attention than they could give her with an active young dog around. They were kind enough to let us give Lady a new home and the three young, lively playmates she needs. Also a fan club,

But while Lady is young and lively, she’s also quite calm and quiet. She hasn’t given a thought to running away or barking or jumping up on people, and seems to have taken ownership of the house, yard, and children. We thought it might be wise to keep her tied up overnight, just to get used to her new surroundings. No need. This morning, Daniel woke up brighter and earlier than usual, and discovered Lady where we had left her, in the garden in the shade, but disengaged from the chain. Waiting for someone to come play.

Needless to say, lessons for the three humans here happened outdoors this morning.

Or rather, books from geeks, GeekDads to be specific.

Today Michael Harrison at GeekDad has a post about Laura’s new b00kn3rd.com blog [it took me a while to figure out that "book nerd" is in there, but then I'm still woozy from my breakfast of waffles, whipped cream, and strawberries] and her post on rare children’s books at the Library of Congress.  Definitely worth a look.  Michael also links to a GeekDad post from last summer about the Rosetta Project.

Other recent GeekDad posts worth a look:

also by Michael, a GeekDad who obviously appreciates children and children’s books — “Resources for Reading Out Loud”

“Treasure Hunting for Kids”, by Dave Banks, which is a fabulous idea for spring and summer

“What our 11-year-old thought were the “best birthday gifts ever” by Chris Anderson

Building a new open-front pole shed.

Tom and his helper, his father, and the boys (Laura is otherwise engaged, halter-breaking Benny) have done this bit in the past week. Daniel especially likes what I think of as the “high wire” work. I’ll stay down on the ground with my camera, and the chickens, thanks. When it’s finished, the pole shed will be covered with green steel and will house the tractors, loader, and telehandler.

Trusses going on:

You should just be able to make out seven-and-a-half year-old Davy, in the middle just in front of the concrete post,

from all the mamas and their offspring at Farm School!

Callie the calico cat and some of her kittens,

Laura’s 4H cow-calf pair, Bunny and Benny,

Oreo the Speckle Park calf,

It’s still Friday around here, for another two hours and 50 minutes, so technically I’m not late. It’s been a busy week, with swim club starting (requiring us to be in town four afternoons a week), an art lesson (we had just about forgotten what the art teacher looked like), and a make-up singing lesson today, just to make sure that we could be in town five days this week.

We had about an inch of rain last week, so with a bit more warmth and sunshine, the mushrooms should be coming up soon. Which made me think of

Mushrooms
by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless.

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

For more poetry fun, writer2b is hosting this week’s Poetry Friday round-up

From The Edmonton Sun, May 5, 2008:

Despite a public apology from Syncrude following the deaths of 500 ducks in one of the oil giant’s tailing ponds near Fort McMurray, an investigation by the province will continue, Premier Ed Stelmach said yesterday.

“I certainly thank them for the apology they gave the print media, but we will continue the investigation until we find out what happened,” he told reporters before taking part in the Bell Walk For Kids Help Phone event at Calgary’s Eau Claire Market.

“And once the investigation is complete, we’ll communicate that with Albertans - and also at the same time ensure that it doesn’t happen again,”

Syncrude, the world’s largest producer of synthetic crude oil, took out full-page ads in several Canadian newspapers on Saturday, including the Edmonton Sun, to apologize for the deaths of the ducks and to promise to improve operations so it doesn’t happen again.

The open letter was signed by Tom Katinas, the company’s president and CEO. …

While Stelmach said he appreciated the apology, he didn’t necessarily accept it. He said there are still several unanswered questions as to what happened and why.

Speaking in response, company spokesman Alain Moore said Syncrude acknowledges that the apology is only one component of the followup.

“Really, the biggest focus, the biggest energy, is around responding to the incident - but also doing a thorough investigation.”

Meanwhile, the company is also helping to pay for the work of cleaning and rehabilitating the surviving ducks - at a cost “in the low thousands.” …

In a further development, however, ConocoPhillips Canada reported Saturday that eight migratory birds - including three loons - had settled on a pond at the company’s Surmont oilsands project northeast of Fort McMurray.

One loon was found dead, but the cause is unclear.

“We are concerned about the loons, and are taking this very seriously,” senior vice-president Matt Fox said in a statement. “We’re working with the appropriate authorities to manage this situation.”

Speaking of government investigations, Greenpeace yesterday rightly called for an independent inquiry of what happened last week at Syncrude’s tailing pit. From Canwest News Service yesterday [emphasis mine]:

Greenpeace is calling for an independent public inquiry into the deaths of about 500 ducks that landed on a northern Alberta tailings pond last week.

Mike Hudema, climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Canada, said at a news conference at the provincial legislature [in Edmonton] Monday that a government-led investigation into the incident at the Syncrude Canada oilsands mine is not enough.

“The ties between government and industry run too deep,” and bias is inevitable, said Hudema. The provincial government, he added, must also take responsibility for what happened.

Shamefully, Alberta’s Environment Minister Rob Renner thinks otherwise. Demonstrating that tin ear that seems to characterize Alberta Tories, Minister Renner said yesterday that he rejects Greenpeace’s call for an independent inquiry. Of course, antipathy between Greenpeace and the Tories is so high that if Greenpeace said the sky is blue, the party would say it’s pink.  From the same Canwest article:

…Renner reiterated his belief Monday that such questions are only a small part of a larger investigation.

“Right now, we’re focusing on what happened, how did it happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again,” he said.

Inside the legislature, Renner again faced tough questions from the opposition Liberals and New Democrats.

Liberal Leader Kevin Taft said he supported Greenpeace’s call for an inquiry.

“The stakes are so high here,” Taft said. “We’re talking about 50 square kilometers of liquid that’s so toxic that when 500 birds land on it, three come out alive.

“The public has a right to know what’s going on, how it’s being managed and most importantly, what’s going to happen in the future.”

Taft said the inquiry needs to cover oilsands operations, environmental monitoring, liability for any cleanup of tailings ponds and accountability for the duck deaths.

Both Taft and NDP Leader Brian Mason pressed the government for more environmental inspectors.

Hudema also demanded that the Stelmach government assemble a team to search other tailings ponds in the province for wildlife and other environmental infractions, saying the problem may be much more widespread than the public realizes.

“To believe an industry is going to report every single incident, every single spill, is to have too much faith in the industry,” he said, noting initial reports about the Syncrude incident first came in through an anonymous tipster, instead of company officials.

Alberta Environment conducted surprise inspections on all 13 oilsands tailings ponds last week, said ministry spokeswoman Kim Capstick.

The department is also working with another oilsands developer, ConocoPhillips, to make sure it deters more migratory birds from settling on a blowdown pond. Such a pond prepares recycled water and salty groundwater before it’s turned into steam.

The company first noticed three loons on the pond last Thursday and unsuccessfully tried to scare them away. Then, more birds landed Saturday and again attempts to scare them away failed.

One loon was found dead near the pond and is being examined to determine the cause of death.

Capstick said the water in the pond is less saline than seawater, but it has a high pH of 10.

That is almost as alkaline as ammonia. Lakes this alkaline can be caustic and burn almost anything that enters them. Animals must be specially adapted to survive in this kind of habitat.

ConocoPhillips’s senior vice-president of oilsands, Matt Fox, said Sunday the company was not originally required by the provincial government to put deterrents on the pond.

Greenpeace wants no new tailings ponds built and no existing ones expanded until better technology is available, and is seeking job protection for whistleblowers who have information on incidents at oilsands operations.

The group also wants to see stiffer penalties for oil companies that don’t meet environmental regulations.

The current maximum allowable fine of $1 million, Hudema said, is too small to affect an oil giant such as Syncrude. “For them, a million dollars is pocket change and is the cost of doing business,” he said.

Stelmach, who was shadowed by Greenpeace during the recent provincial election, has said Greenpeace doesn’t speak for Albertans. But Hudema pointed to opinion polls suggesting Albertans want a slowdown of oilsands development.

If the government doesn’t take action, Hudema said Greenpeace may launch a provincewide ad campaign itself, asking concerned citizens and oilsands workers to come forward if they have evidence of harm to wildlife and the environment.

Thank you, Greenpeace, and thank you Mike Hudema, who in a bit of good timing returned to Alberta last August to open a Greenpeace office in Edmonton.

that I didn’t post any “before” window project photos. Here are a few before and during shots.

Before, inside (with apologies for the crummy quality):

Before, inside, with Davy:

Before, outside:

During, just after they removed the old window, and the wall:

During, with the new build-out framing:

During, getting ready to install the windows with some very brief snow flurries:

After (about 10 days later), through a new glass, and blizzard, darkly:

“To plant a seed is a hopeful deed.”
– unknown gardener

It didn’t take more than a week, living with the new enormous south-facing window in the master bedroom, to realize that what I had was not a large sunny window seat but the perfect seed-starting greenhouse. I planted some seeds in early April — from the giant squash we bought and carved last fall, short-season watermelon and cantaloupe and tomatoes, cucumbers (an Italian variety that seems quite vigorous), zucchini (because you can’t have zucchini too soon), as well as purple zinnia, morning glories, and sunflower (you can’t have those blooming too soon either).

Here are a few shots, from which you can see that we still have to sand the drywall and do some painting; you can also see one of the raised bed gardens outside, where not much is growing yet. I suggested to Tom, shortly after I had the greenhouse idea, that we put off the finishing til after the seedlings move outdoors. I also suggested that I’d have more room for plants with a shelf, and instead of laughing or leaving the room, my husband the carpenter suggested a free-standing unit with a couple of shelves. Which is why I love the man.

A very fast growing giant squash seedling,

which makes me wonder if I’m going to wake up one morning with tendrils tickling my face.

I went back to the greenhouse in town yesterday, to show Tom some of the new University of Saskatchewan cherries, and we ended up buying three young shrubs, two Cupids and one Juliet, along with some annuals to put in one container together — a new variety of geranium called “Graffiti”, with jagged, pointed petals, sweet potato vine, and dark purple Angelonia angustifolia (summer snapdragon).

When Tom and I heard the news earlier this week about the hundreds of ducks killed earlier this week when they landed on a Syncrude tailings “pond”, we both immediately thought of an article we had read late last year in albertaviews magazine; the article was “The Ponds” by the Calgary investigative journalist Andrew Nikiforuk, in the November 2007 issue.

I can’t find a copy of the article online anywhere, but Nikiforuk wrote a similar article for The Globe & Mail the other month, “Liquid Asset: Could the oil sands, Canada’s greatest economic project, come undone simply because no one thought about water?” (March 28, 2008) which you can in fact still find online; many thanks to The Globe & Mail. I recommend it, even if you don’t live in Alberta or Canada because if you’re in North America, the question of an adequate and clean water supply applies to us all.

And back in January, The Globe & Mail ran a week-long series, “Shifting Sands: How Alberta’s Oil Boom Is Changing Canada Forever”, with articles and remarkable aerial pictures by noted Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky.

From Andrew Nikiforuk’s timely and prescient Globe & Mail article, to wet your whistle, so to speak [any emphases mine]:

Some 90% of the water withdrawn from the Athabasca River for the oil sands ends up as waste in tailings ponds. Nearly a dozen ponds line both sides of the river and pose an enduring threat to the entire Mackenzie River basin. Many are already leaking and creating their own tainted wetlands. Even the pro-development Alberta Chamber of Resources considers this primitive form of long-term storage “a risk to the oil sands industry.”

The ponds, which contain a ketchup-consistency mix of water, oil and clay, give off a strong aroma of hydrocarbons and rarely freeze. Minnows dropped into the ponds die within 96 hours; unwary ducks get coated by surface oil and drown.

The ponds, like everything in the oil sands, are supersized. The dykes that contain the ponds can reach 100 metres in height. Although the ponds already cover 55 square kilometres of forest and muskeg, they’ve just begun. Within a decade, they will cover an area of 150 square kilometres.

According to the Alberta Chamber of Resources, the industry spits out six barrels of sand and 11/2 barrels of fine tailings for every barrel of oil it makes. Altogether, the ponds contain 5.5 billion cubic metres of sand and fluid waste.

Syncrude, the largest producer in the oil sands, also owns the largest tailing pond. Every day, Syncrude dumps 500,000 tons of tailings. The Syncrude Tailings Dam is deemed by the U.S. Department of the Interior to be the world’s largest dam by volume of construction material. The pond, built in 1973, covers 22 square kilometres and holds 540 million cubic metres of water, crud and sand. When China completes the Three Gorges Dam this year, Syncrude will surrender the record. “We are still second-best,” quips Randy Mikula, who has been studying the tailings waste problem for 22 years.

As the team leader on the subject at Natural Resources Canada’s CANMET Energy Technology Centre in Devon, Alberta, Mikula calls the tailings waste problem a “frightening” and vexatious issue. Engineers originally thought that the tailings waste would quickly settle, leaving clear water on top. But that never happened, thanks to what Mikula calls “the bad behaviour of clays.” He suspects the waste won’t settle to solid form for thousands of years. “So something has to be done.”

The prospect of a major dyke failure has also raised concerns. Every tailings pond contains polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), napthenic acids, heavy metals, salts and bitumen. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers reports that of 25 PAHs studied by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 14 are human carcinogens. Both PAHs and napthenic acids kill fish.

In 2003, the intergovernmental Mackenzie River Basin Board identified the tailings ponds as a singular threat. It noted that “an accident related to the failure of one of the oil sands tailing ponds could have a catastrophic impact on the aquatic ecosystem of the Mackenzie River basin.”

Peachey, Schindler and other water experts agree. Engineering studies also highlight an uncomfortable truth: The reliability of mine waste containment dykes is among the lowest of all earth-made structures. “The longer the tailings sit there, the more likely there will be a major extreme weather event and a big dyke failure,” predicts Peachey. In Schindler’s view, “the world would forever forget about the Exxon Valdez” if a dyke failed.

The Alberta government is getting worried. Preston McEachern calls the ponds his No. 1 concern: “We know they leak and we capture these leakages or let some fall into poor-quality water formations…but it’s the long term. What do we do as they build up?” The good news, concludes Mikula, is that both industry and government are pouring millions into research on containment.

The bad news is that there is already evidence of downstream health effects. Last November [2006], a study for the Nunee Health Board Society in Fort Chipewyan, 300 kilometres north of Fort McMurray, found elevated levels of mercury, arsenic and PAHs in local waters. The report asked if these contaminants were connected with dramatic increases in fish deformities and rare forms of cancer in the community, and called for a major health study. To date, the Alberta government has not taken up the recommendation.

Downstream users are worried. “We have tremendous concerns in terms of the pace of development and contamination issues,” says Michael Miltenberger, Minister of Environment and Natural Resources for the Northwest Territories. “What happens on the Athabasca affects people as far away as Inuvik.”

Open-pit mines aren’t the only big water users in the oil sands. About 80% of all bitumen deposits lie too deep in the ground for open-pit mining. To access these lower-quality deposits, the oil industry has developed a number of novel technologies. The most popular, steam-assisted gravity drainage, injects high-pressure steam into a bitumen formation with one pipe and then brings the melted hydrocarbon to the surface with another pipe.

Land leased for SAGD production now covers an area larger than Vancouver Island, which means that this kind of drilling could affect water resources over an area 50 times greater than the open-pit mines. The industry calculates that it takes about one barrel of raw water (sometimes taken from deep, salty aquifers) to produce a barrel of oil using SAGD. But researchers suspect it often takes much more water. “It’s just as big a problem as the mines, and it’s not going away,” adds Peachey. “And we don’t have a plan or strategy for it other than reducing water usage as fast as possible.”

SAGD’s thirst for water, mostly used to make steam, has a host of implications. Industry used to think that it needed only two barrels’ worth of steam to melt one barrel of bitumen out of deep formations. But the reservoirs have proved unco-operative. The multibillion-dollar Long Lake project south of Fort McMurray, a joint venture of Nexen and Opti Canada, originally predicted an average steam-to-oil ratio of 2.4:1. But the joint venture now forecasts a 3.3:1 ratio.

This dramatic but typical loss in efficiency means companies have to drain more aquifers to produce more steam. In order to heat the water, the companies purchase more natural gas, which, in turn, means more greenhouse-gas emissions. By some estimates, SAGD could ultimately consume the equivalent of the entire gas supply of Western Canada. “A lot of projects may prove uneconomic in their second or third phases because it takes too much steam to recover the oil,” says one Calgary-based SAGD developer, who asked to remain anonymous.

Due to the spectacular projected growth in SAGD (nearly $4 billion worth of construction a year until 2015), Alberta Environment can no longer accurately predict water demand. The Pembina Institute, a Calgary-based energy watchdog, reported that the use of fresh water for SAGD in 2004 increased three times faster than the government forecast of 5.4 million cubic metres a year. Despite the province’s effort to get companies to switch to salty groundwater, SAGD could still be drawing more than 50% of its volume from freshwater sources by 2015.

SAGD also generates formidable piles of waste. Companies can’t make steam without first desalinating the brackish water. An average SAGD producer generates as much as “15 million kilograms of salts and water-solvent carcinogens,” which simply gets trucked to landfills, the SAGD developer says. Because the waste could eventually contaminate groundwater, John Robertson of CH2M Hill calls the salt disposal problem “a perpetual care issue.” The anonymous SAGD developer adds, “There is no regulatory oversight of these landfills, and these problems will be enormously difficult to fix.”

But the biggest sleeper issue for SAGD production may be overall changes in the water table over time. “If you take out a barrel of oil from underground, it will be replaced with a barrel of water from somewhere,” explains Peachey. Here again, the lack of research data is problematic: Alberta “doesn’t have enough data to understand surface and groundwater connections” in the oil sands region, says Peachey.
Given SAGD’s record as a natural gas burner and producer of greenhouse gas emissions (three times that of conventional oil), both the Canadian government and the industry regard nuclear power as an energy alternative. The French nuclear giant Areva has said it can add four reactors to the province’s grid, while Energy Alberta Corp. has suggested building as many as 11 Candu reactors. While some of these reactors would provide power for bitumen mining, oil shale (a hard-rock form of bitumen) and SAGD operators, others would upgrade bitumen into marketable oil.

But that plan doesn’t solve the water problem, because nuclear power requires enormous volumes of water for cooling. It is estimated that just one reactor, proposed for Grimshaw, would require 20 times the amount of water used by the city of Calgary. Such a plant would also lose nearly 57 billion litres of water a year to evaporation.

The final act of the oil sands process will be reclamation of the land. The mining will eventually dig up an area that is the size of Lake Erie and is largely comprised of boreal wetlands. Wetlands are known as the “kidneys” of a watershed because they regulate flow and remove contaminants. According to Lee Foote, a wetlands specialist at the University of Alberta, no one really knows yet how to reclaim a fen, bog or peatland in the oil sands. He calculates that the cost of replacing the projected 96,000 hectares of mined wetland, depending on the replacement standards adopted, could, at $25,000 a hectare, range between $7 billion and $24 billion. “It’s a significant liability if it can be done at all,” Foote says.

Turning bitumen into cleaner oil requires “upgrading” to create a product that can be refined into fuels and petrochemicals. The process also requires — surprise — lots of water for cooling and refining. Thus, proposals to build as many as 15 upgraders outside Edmonton, along the North Saskatchewan River, have spawned yet another water controversy.

Given that the industry has neither the room nor the labour force to build more upgraders in Fort McMurray, a host of oil companies have proposed building nearly $30 billion worth of upgraders in the area east of Edmonton that has become Alberta’s industrial heartland. Three separate pipelines would supply the upgraders with fresh bitumen.

But the upgraders, like their bitumen-mining cousins, gulp lakes of water. The North West Upgrader, under construction by a Calgary firm, will annually use up to 5.6 billion litres of water from the North Saskatchewan—a river only a third the size of the Athabasca.

Last year, a report done by the engineering firm Morrison Hershfield for Strathcona and Sturgeon counties added up the water footprint for the upgrader boom. Each facility would require anywhere between 16 and 20 megalitres of water a day — the equivalent of six to eight Olympic-sized swimming pools. By 2026, their daily thirst could amount to between 200 and 240 megalitres or the equivalent of more than 80 Olympic-sized swimming pools. In contrast, the city of Edmonton uses 350 megalitres a day and returns most of that water to the river in treated form. The upgraders, however, won’t do that: Some 70% of the water will be consumed or lost to evaporation.

The oil patch rates as the North Saskatchewan basin’s second-highest water user (18%), behind other industry in general. The upgrader boom, however, will make the petroleum sector No. 1. In fact, a recent report for the North Saskatchewan Watershed Alliance says that “nearly all of the projected increase in surface water use will be in the petroleum sector.” By 2015, the upgraders’ demands on the river will increase water use by 278%, and, by 2025, by 339%. John Thompson, author of the report, says the absence of an authoritative study on the river’s ecosystem remains the central issue. “We don’t know what it takes to maintain the river’s health.”

A long read, but you can, and should, read the rest here.

Late but interesting: I didn’t see this until today, when it was already too late, from Gever Tulley’s blog:

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be speaking and answering questions on Thursday, May 1st at the Maker Day event before the Maker Faire and then again on Saturday, May 3rd, the first day of the Maker Faire. I’ll be doing an expanded version of “Five Dangerous Things” with bonus topic “Make Your Own School”.

Make your own school, eh?  The idea sounds curiously familiar.  I’m hoping someone attending Maker Faire this weekend posts on this.