Placeholder for Postblogging Technology, June I, 1945

Well, it was a nice vacation, as elder care emergencies go. Plans to do work tended to get sidetracked along the way by one thing or another. I'm not blaming anyone but me. I am most certainly thanking the good people at Interior Health and Boundary Hospital, though. 

Here. Enjoy the sights!

The historic Grand Forks Hotel. Or, where it used to be before it burned down and was repalced by this parking lot. Which is unfortunate, because with a population that's been declining for over a decade, the town does not need anywhere near as many parking lots as it has.

And if it did, the owner of this "For Sale By Owner" abandoned house could sell it for extra parking. He'd have to kick the deer grazing in the old garden, out, though. This post-apocalyptic, abandoned landscape is directly opposite the hospital, by the way.

Grand Forks is a nice place.

While I'm not a very good photographer. Focus on the beautiful hill, not the gigantic parking lot.

It's a huge (well, not Central Valley of California huge, but 10,000 hectares, easy) basin of agricultural land in a region that's not oversupplied with such. It  is a cross-roads on a major Canadian highway and unimportant American one, has a a railway and an "educated workforce." It's in one of the "growth provinces."

It shouldn't be depopulating, but it is. Given the way that global warming is looming over this incomprehensibly dry landscape, seeing how much land is going fallow in the valley is frustrating.

I'll let that hang. I think I need to set up my ducks before I talk about agriculture and global warming. I will say that I saw more horses than cows on the fields, and more deer than people in the Grand Forks "suburbs." This land is not going to waste because it can't be productive. It's not even going unproductive because of perverse incentives. The nursery business is growing like Topsy around the Boundary country. It's just that a hundred thousand acres plus of nursery would be a lot of investment. I think, demand being there, it will all be nursery before the end of time.   Given enough demand, it will all be nursery tomorrow. Which is kind of the rub.

Regular service will resume tonight or tomorrow.