Five Days After the Snow

Here is a little look at what happens after a large enough snowfall in Montréal. What you see streaking by outside my window above is the grader that goes by to make the snow into a ridge in the street away from the sidewalk. Next is the other kind of large plow that they use mostly for the street corners and to clear the snow away from bus stops and the like.

If you see one of these (below) coming your way, jump! They are the small plows that speed along the sidewalks, removing snow and depositing salt and (*argh!*) tiny rocks that I have heard are actually a by-product of aluminum smelting (these are for traction).

Once the snow has been prepared for removal, you will see lines of empty dump trucks like the one below.

And then along comes the snowblower, picking up all the snow and depositing it in the trucks to be hauled away. While it used to be dumped into the river, salt and all, they are now a little more environmentally conscious and work to try to recover some of the salt and process the rest before it gets to the river.

Here is a full truck speeding by my apartment to get rid of the snow:

This can be a very efficient exercise when all the drivers obey the 12-hour no parking periods to allow for snow removal (those who park get towed, but it slows the whole thing down). This time, my side of my street was cleared overnight between Friday and Saturday (2 days after the snow) and the other side was done the next night. They are so efficient at getting rid of it that when I came home from shopping on Saturday afternoon the sidewalk on my side of the street was actually bare and dry (a little help from the sun being out, too).

And all of this accounts for tens of millions of dollars in the city's budget each year, but, like I said in a previous post, it is the stick by which we measure the effectiveness of the municipal government. If the mayor can't get rid of the snow within 5 days, it's time to consider getting rid of the mayor.

Am I Out of Touch with my Negative Brethren?

I was asked for a comment this week on the recent Ontario court decision to allow a fertility clinic to exclude a gay man from donating his sperm for the benefit of a lesbian friend. It was a refusal based on the risk of his being HIV positive, her being infected and the possible liability of the clinic.

I've faced a similar dilemma being asked about the blanket exclusion of gay men (actually all men who have had sex with men since 1978, I believe) from making donations of blood to the Canadian Bloood Services Agency or Hema Québec. I tend to understand the health perspective, statistically, and I don't really get the notion of a right having been violated.

Let's start with the health and statistics issue. The HIV prevalence rate among gay men in Canada's major urban centres is somewhere around 15% or more (prevalence being the percentage of individuals in the given population who are infected with the virus, cumulatively, and still living). That is about one hundred times the prevalence rate in the general population, so you might see how it is that as a statistical exercise it makes sense for these health authorities and clinics to apply this blanket exclusion. Add to this the generally accepted statistic that up to one third of individuals living with HIV don't know their status, and it becomes even more self-evident.

I can hear the other objections now: aren't all these samples tested for HIV anyway? Well, presumably they are, but we all also have to remember the 'window' period for HIV, the time between getting infected and developing antibodies to the virus, which is what is tested for. No, the window period is not 30 years, so there should certainly be some adjustment of the exclusion time. Hema Québec tried to adhust the exclusion period to one year since last having had a sexual relation with another man, but this was vetoed by Health Canada and the other international blood supply actors (we have to remember that these things, too, are integrated on an international scale, so many of these decisions cannot be made at a local, regional or even national level.

Let's move on, then to the notion that this is a right that is being violated. I can't really wrap my head around that one. I tend to think of a right as being something that confers a benefit, the violation of the right being something that deprives the individual of the benefit. So what is the benefit — to the donor — of a donation of sperm or blood? It is illegal in Canada to buy or sell body parts, including those two products, so there is no monetary benefit that is being missed due to the ban. That leaves us, pretty much, with the idea that this ban communicates some kind of lesser citizenship for gay men (or, using the blood example, anyone who spent a significant amount of time in Britain during the mad cow years, anyone who has ever had malaria, etc.). But in a system which does not demand proof of having donated these things in exchange for any kind of status (these donations are largely anonymous from the perspective of the general public), I'm not sure that this argument of lesser citizenship holds up either.

In my own case, I am old enough to have donated blood before the ban came into effect. When the ban was imposed, I probably shared some of the outrage that I hear from other gay men today. When, years later, I tested positive for HIV and learned that I had probably been infected for over a decade (these things are not precise: when diagnosed in 1997, I had a CD4 count of 4, and it is difficult to say just how long it took the virus to ravage my immune system to that extent), I was relieved that the ban had prevented me from passing HIV on to someone else through the blood system.

I fully expect, however, that there will be blood for me if I should ever need a transfusion. And that it will be disease free.

Frosty Valentine's Day

Here is the view this evening outside my front window:

This is our big snowstorm for Valentine's Day, which is always amusing. What you see at the bottom of the picture is snow building up on the outside of my window. The thing you don't know is that I live on the second floor!

Yeah...not that much snow: my window does have a ledge on the outside that captures snow. I think, ironically, that it is our neighbours to the south in the U.S. who are getting bigger snowfall amounts. Here, if the mayor wants to be re-elected, our snow will be plowed and taken away from the streets within the space of a maximum of 5 days. Anything beyond that time frame starts people grumbling about the ineffectiveness of our municipal authorities.

Until then, we'll have some amusing times watching people dig their cars out (after road crews heap snow on them from the streets) and try to figure out where they can park in order to avoid the snow removal operations.

I'll see if I can't capture some of the common machinery as the clearing begins over the next couple of days (our city has invested many millions in this equipment and has a giant snow removal budget each year that hasn't been used much so far this season.)

Secret Identity!

Okay, so I'm not really the four-legged creature I have pictured in my profile. In fact, I'm no longer agile enough to walk around on all fours ... at least not for extended periods of time. ;-)

So here is my first lovely, yet grainy and poor quality, picture of myself in my apartment, camera cleverly angled to avoid the stacks of paper and the hundreds of (imaginary) cats. And what am I sporting? Why those are my clever new wrist splints. I am supposed to strap these on each night, at least for three months, in order to address my brand new carpal tunnel syndrome problem.

They are made of plastic and attach with three velcro (or, to use the generic, 'hook and loop fastener') straps each. They were made from casts of my wrists (it took about a week to get them) and they were entirely covered by the Québec medicare system. (*Remind me to heap praise upon all that this coverage gives to me each day in a future post!)

Now picture trying to sleep with these things on. Complicate this picture by no longer being able to sleep on my back (we can thank the hump that my HIV meds have given me), and add a touch of tossing and turning from taking Sustiva (no solid night's sleep in the last two years, or thereabout). Note to Brian — not quite the nightmare experience you had with this lovely medication, and it did seem to be my best alternative to get away from the PIs. So would it be a surprise if even I, the ultimate adherent patient, decided to give myself a night off from the wrist splints from time to time?

My only other alternative is to use the magical properties of the Sustiva to imagine what these wrist splints might be...

Note to self: black cotton crew-neck sweater not really a fabulous bustier.

Supplementary note to self: find appropriate parking spot for the invisible jet — we are expecting snow tomorrow night and Wednesday (yes, Brian, snow, not sand) and the de-icing will kill you every time.

Minus 28°C With the Wind Chill

That will be our overnight temperature tonight. This translates also into the amount of time it would take for exposed skin to freeze: 10 to 30 minutes.

So I wonder what the fashionable people of Hérouxville will be wearing tonight when they venture outside? This is the small community in central Québec that decided to adopt a resolution relating to its standards of behaviour, just in case anyone who is not a white francophone catholic is thinking about moving there. Among their many assertions is that they do not cover their faces, in order to facilitate public identification, the only exception being Hallowe'en, mistakenly identified as a religious celebration marking All Saints' Day (actually someone else's religious festival marking Samhain, the day before the Christian All Saints' Day).

In light of their refusal to see covered faces, I imagine they won't be seeing any of this:

...no matter how many minutes they intend to stay outside!

And next spring, should any of them care to indulge in that marriage thing, presuming they are not same sex couples, I don't suppose they will be tolerating any of this:

...because that, too, would be covering one's face outside of the religious festival of Hallowe'en.

Seriously, it might have been a better idea for the people and the government of Hérouxville to take the time to express their values in a positive manner rather than in terms of negations of other people's cultures or their own bigoted perceptions of them.