I live in the beautiful Quinte Region in Southern Ontario, Canada, but when I need to get the lastest news about what is happening in Libya, at a convenient time, I must admit that I am tuning in to CNN more often than I am to our own news services.

There are more important things involved in this conflict than giving credit to all of the nations involved, but I do find that the Canadian contribution to this effort to this action is seldom mentioned, and, with a son and daughter-in-law both serving in our armed forces, that does sadden me.

With some hesitation, I am going to offer a reprint here (forwarded from a friend) that says something about about the contribition that our country makes, often lost in comparison to the efforts of larger nations.

Thank you to my son, my daughter-in-law, and all those who selflessly make this contribution both to our nation and to others around the world.

- Bob Foster

***

Reprint from The Telegraph, a British Newspaper

The Country the World Forgot - Again
By Kevin Myers 12:01AM BST 21 Apr 2002

UNTIL the deaths last week of four Canadian soldiers accidentally killed by a US warplane in Afghanistan, probably almost no one outside their home country had been aware that Canadian troops were deployed in the region. And as always, Canada will now bury its dead, just as the rest of the world as always will forget its sacrifice, just as it always forgets nearly everything Canada ever does.

It seems that Canada's historic mission is to come to the selfless aid both of its friends and of complete strangers, and then, once the crisis is over, to be well and truly ignored. Canada is the perpetual wallflower that stands on the edge of the hall, waiting for someone to come and ask her for a dance. A fire breaks out, she risks life and limb to rescue her fellow dance-goers, and suffers serious injuries. But when the hall is repaired and the dancing resumes, there is Canada, the wallflower still, while those she once helped glamorously cavort across the floor, blithely neglecting her yet again.

That is the price which Canada pays for sharing the North American Continent with the US, and for being a selfless friend of Britain in two global conflicts. For much of the 20th century, Canada was torn in two different directions: it seemed to be a part of the old world, yet had an address in the new one, and that divided identity ensured that it never fully got the gratitude it deserved.

Yet its purely voluntary contribution to the cause of freedom in two world wars was perhaps the greatest of any democracy. Almost 10 per cent of Canada's entire population of seven million people served in the armed forces during the First World War, and nearly 60,000 died. The great Allied victories of 1918 were spearheaded by Canadian troops, perhaps the most capable soldiers in the entire British order of battle.

Canada was repaid for its enormous sacrifice by downright neglect, its unique contribution to victory being absorbed into the popular memory as somehow or other the work of the "British". The Second World War provided a re-run. The Canadian navy began the war with a half dozen vessels, and ended up policing nearly half of the Atlantic against U-boat attack. More than 120 Canadian warships participated in the Normandy landings, during which 15,000 Canadian soldiers went ashore on D-Day alone. Canada finished the war with the third largest navy and the fourth largest air force in the world.

The world thanked Canada with the same sublime indifference as it had the previous time. Canadian participation in the war was acknowledged in film only if it was necessary to give an American actor a part in a campaign which the US had clearly not participated - a touching scrupulousness which, of course, Hollywood has since abandoned, as it has any notion of a separate Canadian identity.

So it is a general rule that actors and film-makers arriving in Hollywood keep their nationality - unless, that is, they are Canadian. Thus Mary Pickford, Walter Huston, Donald Sutherland, Michael J Fox, William Shatner, Norman Jewison, David Cronenberg and Dan Aykroyd have in the popular perception become American, and Christopher Plummer British. It is as if in the very act of becoming famous, a Canadian ceases to be Canadian, unless she is Margaret Atwood, who is as unshakeably Canadian as a moose, or Celine Dion, for whom Canada has proved quite unable to find any takers.

Moreover, Canada is every bit as querulously alert to the achievements of its sons and daughters as the rest of the world is completely unaware of them. The Canadians proudly say of themselves - and are unheard by anyone else - that 1 per cent of the world's population has provided 10 per cent of the world's peace-keeping forces. Canadian soldiers in the past half century have been the greatest peace-keepers on earth - in 39 missions on UN mandates, and six on non-UN peace-keeping duties, from Vietnam to East Timor, from Sinai to Bosnia.

Yet the only foreign engagement which has entered the popular non-Canadian imagination was the sorry affair in Somalia, in which out-of-control paratroopers murdered two Somali infiltrators. Their regiment was then disbanded in disgrace - a uniquely Canadian act of self-abasement for which, naturally, the Canadians received no international credit.

So who today in the US knows about the stoic and selfless friendship its northern neighbour has given it in Afghanistan? Rather like Cyrano de Bergerac, Canada repeatedly does honourable things for honourable motives, but instead of being thanked for it, it remains something of a figure of fun. It is the Canadian way, for which Canadians should be proud, yet such honour comes at a high cost.

This weekend four shrouds, red with blood and maple leaf, head homewards; and four more grieving Canadian families know that cost all too tragically well.

*****

Here's a link to copy of the large (1800x1080 pixel) Nasa image of the "Groundhog Day Storm". If you load this in your browser and you see a magnifying glass cursor as you mover your mouse over the image, please click it again to see the full-sized image (1.1 Mb.)



See the full-size image.

Nasa Details: Three images aboard NASA's Terra satellite were use to create this image of the storm system. They were captured on January 31 at 10:30 AM , 12:05 PM, and 1:45 PM EST.

Further details are available on the Nasa.gov website.

Just listed - 14.5 acres of rolling land with open fields, mixed bush, and a great view, only 9 minutes north of the Quinte Mall in Belleville, Ontario.

The country home has been very extensively renovated and upgraded. Complete details, along with a slideshow and video tour are available on its website at -

http://286smith.info/

The video is also on YouTube at - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8TBKIoFaII

Municipal by-laws allow for keeping horses on this property.

If you would like further details or to arrange a tour of this property, please feel free to contact me directly on my cell phone at 613 921 3933.

- Bob Foster

The real estate market was stable with moderate growth in the Quinte region through 2010. Total dollar sales were up 3.2% and average residential sale prices were up 4.7% compared to last year.

One unusual feature of the statistics for December 2010 was that prices remained relatively high even though there was a significant drop in the number of sales.

We did not see the dip in average residential sale prices that often occurs in winter months. In fact, the average residential sale price last month was very stable compared to October and November, and a remarkable 7.2% higher than is was in December 2009. In spite of the fact that prices remained fairly strong, there was a significant decrease in the volume of sales, however. There were only 112 residential sales in December 2010 compared to 145 in December 2009, and the dollar volume of sales was down 17.2%

A similar trend for December (prices high, but fewer sales) was noted in many parts of the country. Please see this Globe and Mail article published on January 14th.

To see a graph showing average residential sale prices for all of 2009 and 2010, please click the thumbnail image below.

A longitudinal graph of average residential sale prices in our area is updated on my website monthly at

http://bobfoster.ca/real_estate_news.htm

If I can be of assistance in showing you properties in our area, or if you would like to discuss the possibility of marketing your home using my Internet Advantage Service, please feel free to contact me on my direct cell line at any time - 613 921 3933.

GREMLINS! Yes, they do exist and they live in computers. The story is too long to repeat here, but it took me almost nine hours to do a video that should have been done in three. It's safely in the arms of YouTube now. Does anyone want to buy a country condo?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjDZDIypQcY

Ok. There are some pretty smart people out there on AR, so maybe you can give me some help with this one.

Chestnuts, check.

Fire with nice coals, check.

Metal coal shovel thing to put them on, check.

So I put the chestnuts on the coal shovel, placed it on the coals and went to tell my wife that I was roasting chestnuts on an open fire.

She came back 30 seconds later to see them burning very nicely with flames 6 inches high!

"Hmmmm.. they must have a lot of oil in them," she said.

By the time I grabbed the camera they had been relegated to being fuel.

So does someone have a better approach?

Ok.

I am/was a Blackberry user. Great business tool, no question. I like the keyboard, so I watched for more than a year as my son went on to produce iPhone applications.

I was still a Blackberry user. (You must get a lot of mistakes pushing virtual buttons on the sceen, don't you? Well, don't you???)

Then, the trackball was going on my 8330 Curve, and there was that unfortunate incident with my dropping the Blackberry into some water ... yikes! And even though it recovered, I had visions of things rusting inside. The time had come. I needed a replacement.

Someone mentioned 250,000 applications.

So I am now the proud owner of an iPhone 4, and I am amazed.

Please understand that I have been heavily involved with computers for a very long time. In my former career as an educator, I was responsible for leading a team who helped other teachers implement computer use in classrooms. I remember looking at my Palm Pilot, and taking to my team  - "I wonder how ling it will be until they come out with a handheld dveice that does it all - phone, internet, photos, video, music, databases, etc."

Obviously, we are there, and well beyond that point now.

So, now I can easily

- answer my emails
- suft the 'Net
- text message
- listen to music
- check the most immediate weather forecast
- read books on Kindle
- get directions on GPS
- take 5 Mp pictures, or do complete house tours with 720p video (and edit them with iMovie)
- post videos to YouTube
- check in on Facebook
- watch movies on several sources, including YouTube
- use Skype
- go on eBay
- play games
- check out Google Earth, or Nasa broadcasts

and

well, thousands of things that I have not had time to explore in the 5 days that I have had the iPhone 4.

And all of the on a display where, honestly, there are no more dots. Just vibrant images.

Consider me ... sold.

I'm lucky enough to live out in the country on 29.9 acres, with the part surrounding our house being in a very wild state. When I parked my car today, this guy was looking at me from the wall. I set him on some leaf litter and took this picture.

Jabba The Hutt?

No, as you can likely tell from the pine needles, he was only about an inch and a half long - a common tree frog. It was nice to catch a picture of him, though, before he adjusted his camoflage to become part of the scenery.

A couple of thoughts struck me when I looked at this picture this evening.

To us, a tree frog is a tree frog, but my guess is that the individual markings we see around his mouth and eyes make this little fellow just as much an individual to his fellow frogs as we are to each other. And then my realtor self reflects on the thought that we never deal with generic "clients". Every person we meet is different, as is every solution, as we try to help them take the next important step in their lives.

My second thought was that I was really, really happy to see this little fellow on our property. Miners used to carry canaries into the mines to provide an early warning of when noxious gases might prove fatal. We now know that the greatly endangered amphibian population on this planet is telling us that we need to be much more cautious about how we are affecting the environment, for ourselves and all of the world's creatures.

These are large messages, but for now I need to settle back to enjoying my close encounter of the green kind today. I am happy that our place provides  a good home for this fellow, and all his froggy freinds who live in and around our goldfish pond.

I hope that my grandchildren will also grow to live in a world they can share with creatures like these.

Despite many years of a declining monarch butterfly population here in southern Ontario, Canada, we have been lucky here on our rural land, partly because we maintain milkweed stands where they occur naturally on our roadsides and in hedgerows. Most years we still get a good showing of monarchs, at time with half a dozen or so seen fluttering around at once.

This year is different.

The milkweed is up, the fragrant flowers are fully open, but the monarchs are missing.

This morning I was driving through several of our rural roads with camera at the ready, and I found just one survivor. This one was quite intent to keep going, so I wasn't able to geet a good picture, but there is it is - July 13th, and this is the first and only monarch I have seen this year.





This CBS online broadcast from April 11, 2010 does a good job of describing the challenges the butterfly is facing in its winter nesting areas in Mexico.

If you would like further information about this problem, please check out the following links.

Globe and Mail article by Matthew Hart, July 5th, 2008

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News - 2009

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News - 2008

I understand that the term Scuttlehole was used in pioneer times for the hole that was used to access the attic of the home. Perhaps you had to scuttle (scurry) to get up there. It was also used to refer to the a small hole with a movable lid on the deck or hull of a ship.

A scuttle could also be a metal pan for carrying coals, or a shallow open basket for carrying vegetables, flowers or grain.

The scuttleholes still to be found in our area, though, are none-of-the-above. They are geological formations on the Moira River.

Some details are available on a website I prepared for one of my listings -

http://yourcountryhome.ca/location.htm