Two weeks of camping are now behind me, and the hordes of grandsons that I seem to have accumulated (OK, five, but they've got big energy) have made their way back to their respective homes. And isn't it just like the sun to start shining on the very day that I return to my work.
But I've promised myself to quit griping about the bad weather - it's tedious, I'm sure. I've got a new project, to write a daily haiku as a way of detailing some aspect of each day, and am determined to find the "poetry" in life's simple moments for at least as long as I manage to stick to this new discipline of haiku journalling.
Here's the link to the site, should you want to take a look. I wouldn't call it art, but hey, it's authentic.

Keep the wrinkles

I watched part of “Burlesque” the other night on TV. The movie was quite awful, but never mind - the really terrible part was seeing what beautiful wild-child Cher has done to herself.

With my aging face looking back at me every morning from the mirror, I completely get the pull of cosmetic surgery. A tuck here, a lift there - would that be so wrong?

Fortunately, Cher and a long line of other celebrity beauties who have tried to stave off aging are out there to remind me of the enormous price to be paid for giving up your real face.

I’m as susceptible to wildly overpriced potions as the next person when it comes to promises of firmer skin, fewer wrinkles, more lustre or less droop. I don’t pass judgment on any woman for the crazy things she may try in an attempt to stop a completely unstoppable process.

But cosmetic surgery - that’s just not going to be my thing. And I’m thankful to the celebrities for helping me see that. As much as I hate the aging process, I know from looking at them that I’d hate even more to go through it with a face that didn’t belong to me.

I read a magazine article years ago offering tips for preventing wrinkles. The main advice was to smile less, because every smile pressed wrinkles into the skin.

You can laugh at advice like that, as I did (and wrinkle up a little more). But cosmetic surgery and toxins like Botox take that article’s premise to a whole new level. We’re actually altering our faces’ ability to smile at all.

When Cher smiles now, what you see is a slight lifting at the corners of her mouth, a Mona Lisa version of the great big smile she once had. A heavily altered face like hers is just too tight, too stuffed, too deadened to produce a full-on smile anymore.

I can hear every anti-aging salon and cosmetic surgeon in town - and there are a lot of them - preparing retorts right now declaring that great progress has been made in cosmetic procedures, and that there’s no need to look anything other than “refreshed” if you get the right work at the right time, done by the right people.

And that’s probably true to a point.

But think about this, people: Celebrities have all the money they need to buy the best cosmetic procedures out there. They’ve got access to the latest stuff and the most renowned professionals.

And yet their faces still end up ruined. They get maybe five or 10 more years of looking better than expected for someone their age, but then it’s a hard, rough fall from there. 

You think it’s going to be any different for the rest of us?

As the procedures pile up - because really, is one facelift, one eyelid tuck, ever going to be enough? - the price of messing with Mother Nature is revealed.

There are the ridges up high on the cheekbones. The tugged, cat-like eyes. Lips so big and tight they look painful to the touch. A mouth line that pulls horizontally rather than vertically.

Cosmetic surgery doesn’t stop you from feeling emotion, of course. Just don’t expect them to play across your face like they used to. Excess cosmetic work leads to a face so devoid of affect, it wouldn’t be out of place on someone with Parkinson’s disease.

Worse still, everyone starts to look alike. It’s as though Kenny Rogers and Joan Rivers and Dolly Parton were siblings from an odd-looking mannequin family, having given up their former faces for the remarkably similar one that emerges after too much cosmetic surgery.

 At this point, I wish I could trot out the old saw about taking pride in each and every one of my hard-won wrinkles.  Truthfully, were it really possible to hang on to a firm, fabulous face at 54 through some Benjamin Button-like miracle of science, I’d definitely be checking it out.

So I won’t lie and say I like the two crescent lines that now bracket my mouth. But I do like the thought that they’re there because I smile a lot.  I don’t like the furrow between my brows, either. But if that’s what a rich, emotion-filled life with frequent eyebrow contractions leads to, so be it.

Youth is a beautiful thing. But only on youth. Hate the wrinkles, love your face.

High government salaries create divide 

Working ourselves up over the salaries of senior government employees and politicians is something of a tradition in B.C. What surprises me is how little the lather ever leads to.

The Vancouver Sun recently updated its excellent database listing B.C.’s highest paid civil servants, and the statistics highlight a worrying situation we’ve created in this province by paying corporate-level salaries to government employees.

Hundreds of people working for taxpayer-funded government bodies in B.C. now earn salaries of $200,000 or more. The last decade has seen nothing but big, big growth in pay, pensons, benefits and severance packages for government managers.

While average British Columbians have seen their weekly wages inch up a total of 26 per cent since 2001, to $830 a week, senior government managers - in provincial offices, Crown corporations, health services, school districts, universities - have in many cases seen their salaries double in that same period.

While the rest of us were belt-tightening and battening down the hatches over the last two years, the number of public servants earning more than $100,000 a year jumped 22 per cent. Just four per cent of B.C. adults have salaries at that level.

It’s the unseemliness of the thing that troubles me. Children go begging, people with developmental disabilities lose their homes, old people pile up in hospital. And the managers in public service repeatedly get double-digit increases.

Some are even landing bonuses because they’ve cut public services. Think about that. We’re paying extra to be provided with less.

We’ve heard many, many times that these increases are needed to keep B.C. competitive. Running a province/hospital/school district/city is complex. Doesn’t B.C. deserve the best? And don’t we nay-sayers comprehend that the private sector will snap these people up if we don’t compensate them well?

(Never underestimate the power of that argument to jack up salaries. Five managers with B.C. Hydro’s marketing arm saw their salaries skyrocket in 2008-09 after a firm on Wall Street started checking them out for hire. One guy’s salary more than tripled that year, to $629,200.)

I’m sure it must be very hard work to be in a senior government position. Then again, it was very hard work when I ran a small non-profit for a salary of $52,000. I’m not convinced that the public servants earning six-figure salaries are really working two times, four times, even 12 times harder and better than I was in those years.

In a perfect world, everybody would be paid richly for a job well done.

But we’re not talking about a perfect world here. We’re talking about a public system, funded by people who pool their tax money to pay for services that will benefit British Columbians overall. Where’s the rationale for compensating the managers of such a system at ever-increasing amounts while those paying the bills get by on ever-dwindling services?

Is all that expensive governance at least buying us a better province?

As Times Colonist columnist Paul Willcocks noted in a February piece, not really. Citing the most recent report from the government’s own Progress Board, Willcocks found B.C. has at best done a middling job of meeting economic goals in the last decade, and is failing outright on a number of social measures. 

Productivity, personal income and exports per capita have all slipped since 2001. University graduation rates have stagnated.

On infant health, B.C. has fallen from second place to eighth in Canada. Where we were once in the middle of the pack on child poverty, we’re now routinely at the bottom, and have been for eight consecutive years.

And yet the generous pay raises continue. The gulf grows wider between average British Columbians and the government that purports to represent them. The big salaries beget other big increases all around them, because that’s how it works. Everyone wins except for the people paying for it.

This issue has no champions.

The pundits - public servants themselves, for the most part - generally come out on the side of higher public salaries, pointing to provinces where other pundits and governments are saying the same thing. Well-paid people compare themselves to other well-paid people, and not surprisingly conclude that everyone is worth every penny.

People in the public service - or wanting to be - certainly aren’t about to jump on any bandwagon aimed at slowing down salary increases. Even if a senior job isn’t in their future, wage inflation at the top has a ripple effect.

And you and I?  We’ll just keep paying more for less. It’s what we do.

I'm on vacation for a couple of weeks, and will return   to regular blogging in the week of July 18. In the meantime, I write a column every Friday in the Times Colonist and have left some behind in my absence to run on July 8 and 15 - you'll find them here. 

That something weird is going on with our weather ought to be clear by now, on this July 1 morning that feels more like, what, March? Not exactly what comes to mind when you hear "global warming," but a definite signal that things just aren't like they used to be.
The 2010 State of the Climate report underlines that in a very worrying way. Here's a link to a Nunavut newspaper article that highlights the report's findings, with a link to the report itself at the bottom of the story.