I’m laid up with severe neck and shoulder pain, off sick from work today again, lying on the sofa and blogging via iPad, my neck propped up on a good pillow. In addition to visits to my family doctor and my physiotherapist (who also does acupuncture), I’ve started seeing a massage therapist. I had a one-hour massage session Friday morning, and felt wonderful afterward—only to have rebound neck and shoulder aches and pains which scuppered my Friday night plans and put me in a foul, cranky mood all weekend.
This is all coming at a time when I need to be well enough to attend a metaverse conference coming up this week! It’s the IMMERSIVE X Conference, organized and run from Berlin, Germany, but with events taking place in various social VR platforms and flatscreen virtual worlds. Instead of getting on a plane to go to a physical conference in meatspace, I just put on a VR headset and attend in cyberspace!
However, my physical pain today does not bode well for my metaverse excursions on Tuesday (Remembrance Day here in Canada, if not in Germany), Wednesday, and Thursday. Wish me well! I’m probably going to have to take breaks between sessions to pop painkillers, apply cold and heat packs, and do my prescribed physiotherapy exercises to get through this. But come hell or high water, I am going!!
I started preparing for the conference last week, revisiting some social VR platforms that I had not visited in many months, and making sure that I could still remember how to log in and move around in my Vive Pro 2 PCVR setup in my office (sadly neglected since I began my well-documented love affair with my Apple Vision Pro).
I must admit that I was surprised when I signed into my VRChat account on their website, to discover that I first joined VRChat 8 years ago! (You can find all my blogposts about VRChat here.)
And likewise, I had first joined ENGAGE in July of 2018, which means I have been using the metaverse platform for over seven years at this point! (You can find all my blogposts about ENGAGE here.) I am especially excited that the organizers were able to squeeze me into Andy Fidel’s keynote State of the Metaverse presentation in ENGAGE (a big thank you Thomas Zorbach and his team!).
In addition to VRChat and ENGAGE, I signed up for sessions being held on three other metaverse platforms: Spatial, Foretell Reality, and Hubs. I’ve been in Spatial and (formerly Mozilla) Hubs before, but Foretell Reality is new to me.
So I hope to be able to post my session notes to the blog, starting tomorrow. And, in the meantime, I will rest, take painkillers, do my physiotherapy exercises, and pray my body holds up. Stay tuned!
I have been postponing writing this blogpost, hoping that I would have more positive news to share, but I regret that I do not. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot of good in my life, and I have much to be grateful for. Compared to most of the eight billion people I share this planet with, I am a lucky man.
When I wrote that last sentence, tapping away on my iPad while lying on the sofa, I accidentally wrote, “I am a lucky pain.” Freudian slip? I do feel like one huge walking pain lately.
You see, for the past several months, I was been experiencing neck and shoulder pain. This pain ranges from mild to severe, and when it is severe, it is bad enough that I need to take a sick day from work (usually a half-day, sometimes a full day), go home, and either go to bed or lie on the sofa, my neck propped up on a good pillow. Which is what I am doing right now as I compose this post. I have taken a lot of sick days in September, which is my busiest time of year. THIS IS NOT A GOOD THING.
In order to find relief, I have paid several visits to my family doctor. He has suggested a regimen of over-the-counter painkillers, which has needed to be adjusted, and probably will continue to be adjusted in my quest to achieve effective pain management. He also sent me for X-rays, which indicate a deterioration in two of the neck joints in the cervical part of my spine. In other words, my neck is starting to wear out.
My doctor sent me to the physiotherapist with a letter, and I have been going once a week so far for treatment (starting twice a week next week). The physiotherapist has given me several exercises to work out and strengthen my neck and upper back muscles, but I am still sometimes in a lot of pain. As with the painkillers, it’s been a lengthy trial-and-error process these past few months to figure out what works and what doesn’t, what makes things worse and what makes them better. I am exhausted.
My neck and shoulder pain is not only affecting my work; it’s also affecting my off-work hours, too. Yesterday, I posted the following message to Primfeed, which is best and most concisely described as “Twitter for and about Second Life.” (Please note that I have completely given up on all social media in these batshit-crazy times in which we live, except for Primfeed and Reddit. In my opinion, real-life social media platforms have become a toxic cesspool and an utter dumpster fire, and are a major contributing factor to a more uncivil, divisive, and polarized society beset by misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. But I digress from the topic of this post; I will save that particular rant for another day.)
Because my account is private, I’m just going to post a screen capture of the post, along with the actual text:
OMG, I checked my usual lineup of freebie blogs this morning, and I completely forgot about the Halloween Shop and Hop!!! 🤯
Because my neck and shoulder pain still limits how much time I can spend sitting in front of a desktop PC (and, obviously, that limited desktop PC time needs to be devoted to the full-time paying job that keeps a roof over my head, puts food on the table, pays my power, water, sewer, and broadband bills, and sustains my Second Life obsession), I will NOT be doing my usual notecards with gift descriptions, sizes, and exact SLURLs for this event. Please accept my apologies. I need to listen to my body, and my body is telling me to rest.
Instead, I will be relying on the ever-efficient FabFree folks’ spreadsheet, and on Naria Panthar’s fantastic unboxing videos on YouTube! I will direct you to those resources instead; when those links have been posted, I will update this Primfeed post accordingly. UPDATE: Here’s the FabFree spreadsheet: https://fabfree-hopandshop.vercel.app/
No freebie fashionista notes for the Second Life Halloween Shop and Hop this year, folks!
And it’s not only Second Life that I now have to severely cut back on. The last thing I want to do right now is add the weight of a virtual reality headset to my already aching neck and shoulders! So, for now, I am going to have limit my VR usage as well. However, I have read (via the r/AppleVisionPro and r/VisionPro subreddit communities on Reddit) several reports of people with neck and back problems who have successfully used their Apple Vision Pro AR/VR headsets while in a reclining position, either sitting in an armchair with good neck support or lying in bed, so I might look into that.
I have been spending a lot of time lying on the sofa lately, my head propped up on a good pillow, listening to various podcasts. I think I’ve listened to or watched every episode of the excellent Fall of Civilizations podcast, and I’ve started listening to the Literature and History podcast episodes, starting from the very beginning in 2016 (the podcaster, a Classics professor, is working in chronological order, starting with the surviving writings of the ancient Assyrians, Egyptians, and Greeks). Literature and history are subjects which I feel I have neglected in my personal post-high-school education, and now I have an opportunity to learn more about them!
I’m also feeling extremely fortunate that I can visit many clubs and other musical venues in Second Life via the steadily-improving Mobile app on my iPad (I am still in the alpha test program via TestFlite). The music stream is clear and sharp, and I can listen to my favourite deejays and musical performers, even while resting in bed or on the sofa! In the Mobile app, I can even use the performer’s tip jar on stage to send them a tip in Linden dollars, Second Life’s in- world currency, which of course is exchangeable into real-world U.S. dollars!
I’m also spending more time lately off-world, perusing and participating in both the long-running Second Life community forums and the newer, previously-mentioned Primfeed (again, both via my trusty iPad on the sofa). Even if I am not actually logged into the Second Life grid as one of my avatars, I can still keep up-to-date on SL news and events!
Finally, on the advice of my physiotherapist, I’m getting outdoors more and going for walks to the pharmacy, or my local café, or just around the neighbourhood. My plans to walk to and from work are currently on hold, because I don’t want to aggravate my neck and shoulders further with my backpack, even though it was purchased using advice from one physiotherapist, and properly fitted by a second one, last year.
This was after I had experienced numbness and tingling problems in my right arm and hand, due to a pinched nerve, which was caused by a cheap backpack I had bought a couple of years ago. Yes, folks, my sexagenarian body has been complaining for a while now, and now I have ergonomics on my mind for everything! Last weekend, I purchased and assembled a brand-new, high-end office/gaming chair with adjustable lumbar and neck support pillows, for use in front of my Windows desktop PC at home. I have also scheduled an appointment with the ergonomics office at my university, for a professional ergonomics assessment of my workspace.
As I stated in my Primfeed post above, I now have to stop and listen to my body, and my body is telling me that business-as-usual is not gonna cut it. This means that my self-imposed hiatus from blogging is likely to continue, at least for the short term. However, as I have just demonstrated, I can still blog via WordPress via my iPad while reclining on the sofa, which is how I wrote this entire blogpost today (using the handy Jetpack Mobile app).
Everything in my life has been thrown up into the air by my pain in the neck, and I’m still trying to figure out the best way to get through all this, and how my life is gonna look moving forward. Stay tuned for updates!
Yes, I am also looking into massage therapy, in addition to my regular physiotherapy appointments (Photo by Emiliano Vittoriosi on Unsplash)
This summer, following my return to full-time work after my six-month, half-time sick leave for job burnout, has been interesting, in both positive and negative ways (remember the ancient Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times.”) I’ve already written at length about our unprecedented, climate-change-fuelled wildfire season here in Manitoba, but there have been other things on my mind as well: AI, VR, and the ongoing trade war with the United States.
I have been learning a lot more about artificial intelligence in general, and generative AI in particular, over the past few months. I am doing this to prepare myself for a couple of events this coming Fall term at my university.
Well, I have somehow talked myself into giving a 15-minute presentation on artificial intelligence and generative AI (GenAI) to the professors at an upcoming Faculty Council meeting in the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences (as I am the liaison librarian serving the faculty). This all came out of a recent addition to my PowerPoint slides last year, where I was warning the students I spoke to about the dangers of relying on GenAI tools like ChatGPT as search engines. I had been telling members of the Agriculture Library Committee about this work, at one of our face-to-face meetings. By the end of the discussion, I had agreed to give a presentation to Faculty Council. (Me and my big mouth!)
However, to my horror, I realized that the field of GenAI was now evolving so quickly, that pretty much everything I had talked about last year was already way out of date! So this necessitated a lot of reading (yes, actual books from the university’s collection), and a lot of web browsing, including taking some online courses, in order to work my way up the learning curve. It turns out that being asked to give an accessible presentation on a topic, to an audience of professors (who are pretty smart people overall), is a very powerful motivator to learn new things!
So I have been spending much of the past couple months learning more about AI. I had already had a subscription to ChatGPT, by OpenAI, being among the first million people to set up an account in 2022. To that, I have added a second subscription to a service called Claude AI, by a company called Anthropic, which was founded by some ex-OpenAI employees who had some ethical concerns about the direction in which their former company was going with its GenAI products.
I’m getting closer to the point that I now feel more comfortable attempting to pull together this 15-minute talk. In addition, I have agreed to team-teach a course to graduate students and student advisors on GenAI this Fall term, along with a lawyer. The lawyer will discuss the legal and copyright issues associated with GenAI, and I will focus on the technical and practical aspects of GenAI tools (leaning heavily on the same content as my talk to the agriculture professors). I am slowly but surely becoming the in-house AI expert at the University of Manitoba Libraries, as well as the virtual reality expert!
Speaking of virtual reality, now that I am no longer officially involved with the ongoing virtual/augmented reality lab project at my university library system, all the VR equipment I had donated to the lab has been returned to me (the people working on the project have decided to purchase brand-new equipment).
I have had to drag a second desk into my open-office cubicle area to re-setup my Windows desktop PC and Vive Pro VR headset, and I’ve had to find space to stash away my Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3 wireless headsets when I am not using them! Between work and home, I have no less than five different headsets to deal with (my Valve Index at home sits unused because I need to reinstall its software after the recent hard drive crash of my personal computer, and, of course, my Apple Vision Pro, about which I have written several blog posts over the past twelve months).
However, I must confess that I haven’t really used any of the Windows VR/AR headsets very much since I bought my Apple Vision Pro, which I still use a couple of hours a day at work in the large, clear (and now, ultra widescreen!) Virtual Display, with my MacBook Pro. Often, I lug my Apple Vision Pro home in my backpack, using it there to watch TV and movies, to browse Reddit news posted to the AVP subreddits, and to hang out and chat with folks from all over the world in InSpaze (still one of the killer apps, in my opinion). This device is worth every penny I paid for it, despite its high price tag, and I will be first in line for whatever Apple comes out with next in its line of spatial computing devices. I’m all in.
As many of you already know, I have already completely given up on most corporate-run, algorithm-driven social media platforms, most of which have become toxic cesspools. I left Meta’s Facebook several years ago, and I quit Twitter/X when Apartheid Clyde took over. While I still have nominal accounts on Mastodon (from which I watched the Twitter dumpster fire from afar), and Bluesky (to follow public health experts and, more recently, AI experts), I find that I can now go weeks at a time without bothering to check either site. I have found that my mental and emotional health has greatly improved since I have essentially discarded most social media, and I can recommend it highly.
I have also been going through the long, slow, arduous process of disengaging from Google as well, replacing the Chrome web browser with Firefox, Google search with Qwant, YouTube Music with Apple Music*, and Gmail with the Swiss-owned, privacy-oriented Proton service. In particular, the switch from Gmail to Proton email has been lengthy and ongoing.
I don’t think that most Americans (as disinterested as they tend to be about anything that goes on outside their borders) really understand just how royally pissed off Canadians are at the United States right now. As I write this, the latest word from Donald Trump is that he is planning to impose a 35% tarriff on Canadian imports, which of course is going to kick off another round of tit-for-tat trade war, which is going to piss Canadians off even more than they are already. Elbows up!
I read an article last week in Maclean’s (the Canadian version of Time or Newsweek) that made that point quite well, so I am quoting it at length below:
Canadians define themselves in opposition to the United States because the country was founded by people who rejected the bloody American Revolution. We’ve kept rejecting it for almost three centuries.
The United States is an unpredictable and increasingly dysfunctional empire, an extended experiment in pushing everything to the extreme. Canadians, on the other hand, have a long but imperfect history of muddling along peaceably. We are not bound together by some intrinsic identity—by language, race, religion or a shared and glorious history of revolution or conquest. We become nationalistic only when it is necessary to protect ourselves against the aggression of the United States.
That negative, defensive definition has always been enough. It is kind of the point of Canada.
…
As Canada settled deeper into the winter of 2025, and Trump kept boorishly insisting that Canadians would be happier in his clutches, we got mad.
Canadians yanked U.S. liquor from store shelves, cancelled trips and hoisted flags, even in downtown Montreal. Pallets of U.S. produce spoiled in the supermarket aisles. Normally bustling American border towns that depended on shopping day trips were suddenly silent. The U.S. departure lounges at Pearson and Trudeau were empty.
Nova Scotia Premier Tim Houston removed interprovincial trade barriers for any province that would reciprocate and, post-election, Mark Carney went a step further and pledged to dismantle all interprovincial trade barriers by Canada Day. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew announced he was planning to let some electricity contracts with the States lapse and use much of that excess power to boost his own province’s energy economy. Quebec Premier François Legault said Quebecers would consider east-west oil pipelines they had previously opposed.
People were soon speculating about a guerrilla war of resistance. The Americans might be able to take Canada, but could they hold it? How could they justify the casualties they would take? At the end of January, one of the most capable men I know texted me, out of the blue, that he had told his wife, the mother of his infant child, that he’d be “willing to die on the end of a rifle to make sure” the Americans could not take Canada.
It became clear how deep the feeling ran on February 1 at Ottawa’s Canadian Tire Centre, where the Senators played the Minnesota Wild. Because Ottawa is a government town, and there are often as many Leafs or Habs fans in attendance as Sens supporters, it can be a dull place to watch a game. But there was nothing sedate about the booing as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. Fans booed it heartily from start to finish, drowning out the unfortunate singer.
—Stephen Maher, “Never for sale.” Maclean’s, July 2025.
I honestly don’t know how all this is going to play out over the next four years, but I have slowly learned to tune out whatever batshit craziness is happening in the United States and its trade war with Canada (and the rest of the world), and to focus on what I can control. So I have been voting both with my feet and my wallet.
In particular, like many of my fellow Canadians, I refuse to visit the United States until Trump is out of office. No conferences, no vacations. Nothing. And I have already cancelled my subscriptions to Netflix and Amazon Prime, and most recently I added both Disney+ and Hayu (Bravo reality TV) to that list. I’m probably not done yet. I am pissed.
During the pandemic, I got into the habit of ordering my groceries online through the Walmart website, and then using their Pickup service early Saturday morning. Not any more! I have used my librarian skill set to extensively research Canadian-made alternatives to American brands (Buh-bye, Campbell’s Chunky Soup! Hello, Tim Horton’s Soup!). I have swapped the Walmart website for the Real Canadian Superstore, still picking up my online-ordered (but now overwhelmingly Canadian-produced) groceries bright and early Sunday morning. Works just as well for me!
Finally, I have gone and joined the Red River Co-Op, a locally-owned co-operative grocery store and gas station that has been active here in Winnipeg since the 1930s. And I do plan to regularly shop at the St. Norbert farmers’ market, just south of where I live in Winnipeg, to support local farmers and artisans (it’s quite literally across the street from the Red River Co-Op store I now shop at!).
So, that’s my report from my lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer! Stay cool and stay sane in these trying times.
*I fully realize that Apple is an American company, but I associate Apple with California, and I am not averse to supporting liberal-leaning, Democratic-voting California! 😜
I must confess that I am finding it harder than usual to focus on my work today. For those of you who don’t know, my home province of Manitoba is facing an unprecedented outbreak of hundreds of wildfires across its vast northern and eastern forests, leading to a human evacuation on a scale not seen since the Great Red River Flood of 1997.
A sampling of today’s headlines from the Free Press (formerly known as the Winnipeg Free Press), Manitoba’s major newspaper
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has declared a state of emergency for at least 30 days, as multiple wildfires are spreading across vast parts of the entire province, forcing more than 17,000 people to evacuate their homes.
The province has called upon the Canadian Armed Forces to fly residents from several northern communities toward safer areas, Mr. Kinew said Wednesday evening, just hours after seeking the military assistance from Prime Minister Mark Carney. The majority of those people will be temporarily housed in Winnipeg, where soccer fields and arenas are being readied to become large-scale evacuation centres.
“This is the largest evacuation Manitoba will have seen in most people’s living memory,” Mr. Kinew told reporters at the provincial legislature, as cellphones chimed loudly with emergency alerts. “For the first time, it’s not a fire in one region. We have fires in every region.”
An evacuation order has been issued for the mining city of Flin Flon, more than 820 kilometres north of Winnipeg, where roughly 5,000 people live along the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border.
Slightly west, along the shores of the Nelson River, the Northern communities of Pimicikamak Cree Nation, Cross Lake, Norway House and Mathias Colomb First Nation in Pukatawagan near the Pas are also being mandated to vacate by Thursday.
Meanwhile, the province is advising residents in eastern Manitoba to remain prepared for further evacuations with emergency kits and car fuel, as a roughly 31,200-hectare fire remains out of control along the border with Ontario.
As of today, these spring wildfires spreading across eastern and northern Manitoba are among the most devastating my province has seen in decades. Over a hundred fires have consumed nearly 4,000 square kilometres of forest, an area approaching ten times the size of Winnipeg, where emergency shelters have been set up in several hockey arenas and an indoor soccer complex to house the evacuees.
It is hard for me, to go about my regular workday, when so many of my fellow Manitobans are hurriedly packing up their lives and families and flying or driving south to the safety of Winnipeg, not knowing when or if they are ever going to see their homes again. Coming so hard on the heels of the shocks imposed upon Canadians by the wrenching and worrying changes in its relationship with its largest trading partner, the United States, and I must confess that I am feeling, at times, stressed out and overwhelmed. Toss into the mix a recent home computer crash, plus a serious tax mistake made by my former financial planner for which I am, over one year later, still waiting for a favourable resolution from my bank. And so on and so forth. I know that I am still a very fortunate man compared to many people who live on this planet, but still, it’s been a lot to deal with. And, at times, I have failed to deal with it well.
One of the lessons I have taken from the stressful situations over the past year is that I need to more clearly differentiate between what I have control over and what I don’t, and focusing on the former rather than wasting time and energy on the latter. This also means that, at times, I have chosen to step away from the little social media that I still do consume (mostly Reddit, which I peruse anonymously), as well as to deliberately avoid reading the news media, in order to preserve my mental and emotional health.
For example, during the first few months of the absolute batshit craziness emanating from Donald Trump’s second term as president (over which I had zero control, except to change my shopping habits), I assiduously avoided the mainstream news media by spending my evenings and weekends intently focused on cleaning through and reorganizing the voluminous inventory of my main Second Life avatar, Vanity Fair. And I full well realize what I was doing: investing time and energy into something that I could control, rather than fall further into a depressive, anxious spiral over so many other things that I had little-to-no control over. Such is the benefit of an all-encompassing hobby!
Find your little niche, your little happy space, and build a safe haven there for when you need to do something to protect your mental state from the chaos, craziness, brutality, and heartbreak of the real world. Even if you can only get away to it for half an hour or a couple of hours at a time, the flow state you enter while pursuing your obsessive little hobby gives your brain a chance to escape the hamster-wheel of worry. Interestingly (well, at least, interesting to me) is that I also find I get into this state when I am composing a blog post such as this one!
Anyways, back to the original point of this blogpost: my world is currently on fire, both figuratively and literally. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. I still haven’t made any decisions about what I am going to do with this blog (no change there), but I probably will still post every so often, just to let you all know I’m still here. And—if you do believe—please say a prayer for us besieged Manitobans. Thanks.
Manitoba Wildfire FireView dashboard
UPDATE June 3rd, 2025: The Free Press has an update on the wildfire situation here. As luck would have it, this past weekend was the Winnipeg Pride festival, with a rally at, and a parade leading from, the Manitoba Legislative Building. Premier Web Kinew, the first First Nations premier in Manitoba’s history, mentioned in his speech that this was the first ever Pride held during a state of emergency (and hopefully, the last). When I went in to work on Saturday to pick up a book, there was a Flin Flon transit bus parked in the parking lot behind my library. Things are definitely askew around here! But we adapt.
Manitobans tend to pull together for the common good in times of emergency, like blizzards, floods, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the current wildfire situation, with many people volunteering or donating money to help those displaced by the forest fires. This is one of the things that I love the most about my province, my home.
UPDATE June 10th, 2025: Smoke from wildfires in northern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba is still an everyday part of the weather here in southern Manitoba. Some days are better than others, but yesterday was BAD.
Most concerning to me is the fact that microscopic smoke particles can go deep into our lungs and even enter our bloodstream, and could possibly lead to cancer down the road. Keeping my fingers crossed that this won’t happen to me (I’ve already had one cancer scare which, thankfully, turned out not to be the case.)
UPDATE June 11th, 2025: The wildfire situation in Manitoba is not improving. Here’s a quote from The Globe and Mail newspaper:
In Manitoba, nearly 21,000 have been forced to flee their homes, as the province continues to grapple with 25 large wildfires.
One fire near Nopiming Provincial Park measures 218,700 hectares, or roughly five times the size of Winnipeg, officials noted Tuesday, while another fire near Flin Flon, Man., is 307,780 hectares, or about seven times Winnipeg’s size.
Lisa Naylor, Manitoba’s minister in charge of emergency management, is imploring all travellers within and from outside the province to reconsider any nonessential travel, as the government requires more hotel rooms for wildfire evacuees.
Federal officials are warning that we could see many more wildifres break out this summer across western Canada, due to hotter and drier conditions linked to global warming.
“Going into the summer, Canada was already experiencing a severe, early wildfire season,” research scientist Bill Merryfield told reporters, noting that the area that has burned so far in 2025 is triple the 10-year average for this point in the year. He said the country is warming at nearly twice the global rate, increasing on average by 1.8 C since 1948, and even more in its northernmost region.
Environment Canada meteorologist Jennifer Smith said large areas of Alberta and British Columbia are predicted to see below-normal levels of precipitation, as are parts of Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Fumes from the fires have the potential to be carried far and wide by winds toward cities well outside of wildfire zones, Ms. Smith said.
“Smoke can travel thousands of kilometres, turning skies hazy, making the sun more orange or, more seriously, leading to poor air quality right where you live.”
UPDATE July 11th, 2025: Yesterday, the province of Manitoba announced a new state of emergency, as wildfires continue to rage across northern Manitoba, sparking new evacuations (for some people, their second evacuation so far this summer).
My personal and work iPhones have been blaring emergency announcements every few hours, and this morning I woke up to a sky so smoke-filled that the sun is just a barely-visible, pale red dot. I couldn’t sleep, so I came into work this morning at 7:00 a.m., and this is what the sky looks like over the empty parking lot at work:
We have had so many days like this, so far this summer. The Free Press reports:
Manitoba has declared a second provincewide state of emergency, as about 6,000 more evacuees fled their homes Thursday amid the worst wildfire season in at least 30 years.
The convention centre in downtown Winnipeg will become a shelter with enough space for 7,000 evacuees, following mandatory evacuations in Garden Hill Anisininew Nation — where residents were airlifted by the Canadian Armed Forces — and Snow Lake, and precautionary measures in case Thompson residents have to flee…
Kristin Hayward, assistant deputy minister of the Manitoba Wildfire Service, said it is the worst fire season in three decades of electronic record-keeping.
More than one million hectares of land has burned — nearly 11 times the 20-year average of 94,000 hectares — surpassing the record of 720,000 hectares in 2013, she said.
ELEVEN times worse than the average of the past two decades. I wonder if every summer is going to be like this now. Climate change, with its warmer, drier, and more unpedictable weather conditions, are simply making things worse. (One million hectares is equivalent to 2.5 million acres, for you Americans, who are currently suffering under a federal government now hell-bent on denying climate change and dismantling programs to address it.)
Another Free Press article on Friday stated:
Even if you never smoked a cigarette, you basically had at least one on Friday because of dense smoke from wildfires wafting over Winnipeg.
Winnipeg reached its highest smoke particulate count of the season between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. For much of the day, Environment Canada air quality warnings urged everyone to limit time outdoors and reschedule or cancel outdoor sports and activities.
Christopher Pascoe, an associate professor in the department of physiology and pathophysiology at the University of Manitoba, said the city’s particulate count was at 372.6 micrograms per millilitre cubed.
“The current Canadian limit for daily exposure is a total of 27 — that’s 15 times higher than the acceptable daily limit,” Pascoe said.
“At that time, if you were out in it for eight hours, that would have been the equivalent to smoking six and a half cigarettes.”
I feel for the poor people who had to endure all the wildfire smoke at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this weekend!
It makes me wonder what future summers in Manitoba will be like. Is this year a severe outlier, or is this now the new normal?
