A real snow storm is hitting.

We have a snow storm hitting us today and I want to say something about HRM and the road care before I post a rant that I wrote the night before the storm hit.

The storm started late Friday night. High winds and some snow. I heard snow plows out at 2 AM Saturday morning. I left for work at 3:10 AM and the roads were in decent shape. Not scraped to the pavement, but then again I don't expect that. The side streets I took were in good shape. The main roads in better shape. I took my time, 40 minutes instead of 20-25 to get to work. That includes a stop at Tim Horton's for coffee.

Overall, I remain impressed with how prepared HRM and the road crews were. Thank you for getting it right. Keep up the great work. PLEASE!

HRM and Winter Road Care

They, meaning the Halifax Regional Municipal Government, wonder why people get so pissed off about the way they take care of the roads in the winter. The answer can be summed up in one word; inconsistency.

Last Wednesday, January 16, they were calling for 10-15 cm of snow starting around noon. HRM had salt trucks out at FIVE AM!!!! The snow started, lightly at first, around 11:30. The roads were more than ready and the plows were ready. By the time rush hour started and the roads were ok. Sure there were some fender benders, mainly due to idiots driving too fast for the road conditions. The plows had been and were still out. Schools didn't have to be closed early.

Today, Tuesday, January 22nd, we have snow. They were calling for it to start overnight. It didn't start until around 6AM. Were the salt trucks out and the plows on standby? No. I took the dog to the park for a walk at 7AM and the roads were shite. No salt trucks had been by. NO plows had been by. I was on bus routes for the most part which HRM says are the FIRST places salted and plowed. It was pathetic. At 9:30 I had to take my mother out. The roads still hadn't been touched. At Noon I found myself out again and the roads were still in sad shape. By 1 PM I had seen ONE plow. The MIDDLE of my street, which is part of a bus route, had been plowed. ONLY the middle. Which of course meant that fucktards treated it as a one lane road.

Schools had been closed or rather NEVER opened because of the "storm". The previous Wednesday they didn't have to close early. The snowfall was pretty much the same both "storms". What a wild difference from the way the city responded a week before.

Why the blue hell would the response to snow be so inconsistent? HRM will whine about not being able to please everyone but this goes beyond that. It smacks of incompetency in the staff who are in charge of dealing with winter roads. They get their weather information from the same source I, and many others do, Environment Canada via the Weather Channel. Yet they can't seem to get their act together.

HRM often tries to use the excuse that the weather took them by surprise. The snow Tuesday was LATE starting so how the hell were they NOT ready? Inconsistent. Incompetent. One does lead to the other.

Rant: Dog Mooks

I am sick and fucking tired of the fucking dog mooks that inhabit this city. Their sense of entitlement is equal to if not greater than that of the worst adjossi or adjumma in SoKo. Is it so hard for these fucktards to keep their dogs on a leash at an ON LEASH park? Evidently it is.

I had Grizzly out for a well deserved walk after work. In 20 minutes we ran into 6 people with dogs. Only ONE had their dog on a leash, and she was running into the same DoOoks I was.

The first moron we encountered was some bimbo with a dog half the size of mine. Of course he was off leash. She was about 35-40 feet away when I warned her that my dog is aggressive/defensive on leash and a bit head shy. She acknowledged that and made absolutely no attempt to stop her dog from running up. I warned her again. Nothing. Her dog ran up and then tried to go under mine and of course he flew at it. THEN she freaked and got her ass over and leashed her dog.

I told her that if there were any bites it was her problem. She was warned and didn't keep her dog away. In fact the dog should NOT have been off leash. She started getting a little lippy which pissed me off even more.

I said "Listen you stupid cunt. I warned you in PLENTY of time for you to leash your dog. You did NOTHING. You stood there like a stunned bunny. I warned you again and you did nothing. It wasn't until your dog was in trouble that you finally moved your fat ass and did something. If you had your dog on a leash like you were supposed to this would NEVER have happened."

She whined about my language and I stopped her. "Do you actually understand why I am pissed off?"

She replied "Yes."

I retorted "Well, I warned you twice what would happen and you didn't understand that. I call you a stupid cunt and now you do. I guess I should have used that language first and the incident wouldn't have happened. Let's call animal control or the RCMP and report what happened and see who gets in trouble."

She chirped a bit and left in a huff.

About 4-5 minutes later we encounter ... another DoOok. This one with two chocolate labs running loose. She saw us at the same time, from about 25 feet or so away. This one had some brains because she immediately leashed her dogs. I thanked her for doing that and explained my dogs issues. She wasn't so bad but still a bit of a mook.

Then we run into the only other person who had their dog on a leash when we met them. I have met her before, and she ALWAYS used the leash at this park. Her dog is like Grizzly. Which is WHY we take them to on leash parks where they SHOULDN'T run into loose dogs.

After that I ran into a mook with a lone mutt running loose. It took a few words for him to get his dog on a leash.

At that point I gave up. Grizzly was extremely agitated because of the loose dogs coming at him. We turned around and headed back to the parking lot.

Then we ran into yet another mook. This one with with 2 labs, one black the other yellow, running loose. He was a distance away and I was able to avoid Grizzly seeing them.

As I got him into the car another couple of mooks with 3 dogs running loose walked into the parking lot. One his dogs actually ran up to my car, where Grizzly was inside, yapping and snarling. I told one of the mooks that if the dog touched my car they would be springing for a new paint job. They leashed their dog and sulked off to their car.

All in all it was the worst outing ever. Because of these fucktards who don't understand that the on leash rule actually applies to them. We should be able to cock punch these morons, and have their pets taken away.

***

I wrote this Monday afternoon right after I got home from walking the dog. It was fresh in my mind and I was PISSED. Uber pissed. I never posted it because I try not to post things I write in anger. I would rather calm down then come back and look at it.

Having left it for a few days, and in each one of those days had problems with Dog Mooks I decided it wasn't too harsh to post. So I posted it today.

HRM Winter Maintenance

HRM seems to stand for Highly Retarded Morons rather than Halifax Regional Municipality. Or maybe that is how the Municipal government views the people that live here.

Speaking as someone who uses the city streets a lot travelling to and from work winter maintenance of the roads has been horrible in HRM. We haven't had a lot of snow but when we have been hit the road crews have done a piss poor job of taking care of the roads. Yet somehow HRM is claiming to have used up 62% of the snow budget. The reasons Hayward gives for why so much has been used seem specious.

Salting? Once again, as someone who uses the roads a lot, there has been little salting done. At least when it was needed. I do remember at least one day when the roads were heavily salted ... but we had no snow or ice. Yet the days it was needed there was little or none.

Overtime for weekend storms? We haven't had any real storms! What kind of fuckery is this? And where the fuck are the plows when it is snowing?

Just how stupid are the folks at HRM? Well, here is a great example.

Monday night we had snow. 5-10 cm of it. The roads were pretty greasy. I saw ONE plow out. The roads that were plowed were pretty shoddily done. There was NO salt on the roads. The winter parking ban was NOT in effect so when the plows finally did show up they had to go around parked cars.

Tuesday night there was NO snow but the winter parking ban WAS declared in effect by HRM. Which led to a lot of cars being ticketed for parking on the street even though there was no need for plows to be out.

What do the workers do when there is no snow? According to Hayward

"On days like this they're out filling potholes, graffiti removal, litter pickup — that sort of thing,"

Really? Our winter road snow removal budget is used for graffiti removal? Litter pickup? I have yet to see anyone doing any of the things Mr. Hayward cited. Add to that the fact that the city doesn't usually bother touching potholes until AFTER the spring thaw. What a gobshite.

What a bunch of icetards.

Yesterday

... and I am actually talking about yesterday, not the Beatles song Yesterday. ;)

I spent the day out with my best friend. We hit the Halifax Municipal Archives in the morning. What a great spot, and one not many people even know exists. It is a treasure trove of information on the area. The staff is excellent. Very helpful and informative.

My main purpose was the afternoon excursion to the Nova Scotia Public Archives. I wanted to do some genealogical research. While I didn't find information about my grandfather I did locate some information about a great great great great great grandfather that had been confounding me for decades. (I started doing Family tree research when I was in high school.) As with the HMA, the staff here was great. They helped me find information I hadn't even thought of looking for.

Lunch was a bit of an adventure. For old times sake we went to Pizza Corner and ate at Sicilian. My friend thought there was some donair sauce on the table and kind of ignored it. A few minutes later a bird flew in and started walking around. I thought i had seen one fly out when we were walking towards the place but figured I was imagining things. The staff did nothing to get rid of the bird and continued to leave the door open. The donair sauce on the table was probably bird shit. To top it off, the pizza slices just weren't that good. The sauce had little flavour and they skimped on the pepperoni. I won't be eating at that place again.

Shannon Park

Halifax and Dartmouth have always been military cities. Maritime Command, the naval part of the Canadian Armed Forces, is based here. When military spending cuts are made this area usually felt them.

This is what happened when personnel cuts were made in 2004. Shannon Park and Wallace Heights. Defense cuts in the late 90's saw some of the housing was made available on the civilian market in Wallace Heights. A friend of mine, serving in the forces at the time, lived there when this was starting to happen. Eventually all of Wallace Heights was made into civilian housing.

Shannon Park wasn't so lucky. The housing there was shut down as the military personnel were reduced. Those who weren't let go were relocated to military housing in Willow Park, Halifax. Shannon Park has pretty much sat empty since then. The High School became an Elementary School. The hockey rink is still used. Everything else is closed down.

The apartments that could house, I read 300 families, sat empty. There were plans to convert the area into an athletes village if Halifax got the Commonwealth games but that went the way of the dodo. Now, the area is a health hazard. The apartments can't be used due to mold. They are now a toxic mold health hazard.

What a waste! Think of all the people that could have benefited from the housing there. Instead it sat empty until it became uninhabitable.

Below are some photos I have took of the area, from the outside.