Johnson: In ’96 you became the Director of Space at Ames.
Morrison: Director of Space was a wonderful title. I still have a few business cards with that on it. I joked that it was a terrible responsibility: if I didn’t do my job every day the planets would fall out of their orbits, the galaxies would explode. But then NASA Headquarters did a reorganization and created a division called the universe, and so they had Director of the Universe at Headquarters.
Dr. Michael Gardam, the new CEO of the Island’s health system, spoke to the CBC about the challenges of overcoming our 18,000-person waiting list for a family doctor.
Impenetrable bureaucracy has beaten down more than one Island health system revolutionary over the years; Dr. Gardam appears refreshingly frank in his assessments of the problems and the possible solutions, and I hope he sticks with it.
His take on one reason the solutions are taking so long:
“If we want to buy new computers, we go through a different branch of government. If we want to find space, we go through a different branch of government. If we want to spend more than $100,000 of money that’s in our budget, we have to go to the Treasury Board. These are rules. These are things that were identified a long time ago.”
The Achilles heel of all re-engineers is a desire to keep re-engineering until they fix everything, down to the roots.
Several years ago I attended a seminar by a senior Ontario government bureaucrat, a high level rumination on the work of the public service. Rather than rail against “silos,” the usual target of almost anyone making a case for what’s wrong with government, he suggested that compartmentalization was and always will be a part of public administration, and that we need to get over that, move on, and become better at navigating the complexity.
Although I’ve fallen victim to the silos many times, I tend to agree with that assessment. As much as Dr. Gardham might wish that the bureaucratic waters would part to accommodate his revolutionary plans, that is not going to happen, and the sooner he accepts that and embraces the confounding thicket on its own terms, the sooner his plans will bear fruit.
Riverview Country Market was overflowing with new potatoes and fresh strawberries this morning. Is this not the best of seasons!
I’m not a huge fan of Peter McKinnon and his hyper-polished hipster EDC snowmobile ATV drone renovation videos. But on occasion he strikes a chord. Witness I did this for 30 days and it changed my life, the mother of all clickbaity titles, but with a simple message:
Make a handwritten list of 8 critical things you need to accomplish at the start of every day. Then do them, crossing off as you go.
Not an original idea—indeed John Grimsmo does most of the explaining—but kind of brilliant in its simplicity.
I am on day number one.
So far from the list I’ve taken a bunch of stuff to the thrift shop, scraped some long-standing gunk off the library floor, and taken a bag of cables to the office.
Item four on today’s list: charge my bicycle lights. I figured if I was going to do it, I might as well make it easier for the next time, so I conjured up a system.
Apparently smoke alarms, or at least my smoke alarm, aren’t recommended for use when the humidity is higher than 85%.
With the humidity at 100% outside, and a window fan drawing outside air into my bedroom, my smoke alarm went off just now: I presume this is why, as, fortunately, my house isn’t actually on fire.
I took myself out for supper last night at The Farmacy & Fermentary, Olivia being away for the night. It was beautiful and warm and sunny, so I sat outside on the patio facing Timothy’s and committed the scene to paper.
I was back out to Freetown yesterday for another horseback riding lesson with Jester the Horse and Jackie the Human.
I was certain that I had forgotten absolutely everything that I’d learned at my first lesson, but dribs and drabs flowed back to me, so it wasn’t quite starting from scratch. At the very least I was considerably more comfortable.
The big new activity yesterday was taking Jester for a jog, which is essentially, as I understand it, more than a walk and less than a trot. From the feel of things up atop Jester, his kinesiology certainly changed, and from the feel of things a day later, whatever muscles I needed to prevent myself from falling off once Jester kicked things up a notch were well-exercised.
I’ll be back for more in a couple of weeks.
About This Blog
I am Peter Rukavina and this is my blog. I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.
To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way). You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, or receive a daily digests of posts by email.