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This is the time of year when anticipation and anxiety grip the gardener with equal fervour.
In the woodland bed, the hepatica is blooming, the white trillium are just starting to show colour, the hosta are beginning to poke their pointy heads out of the ground (except for the late-starting Honeybells) and the Virginia bluebells have huge leaves and tiny buds.
The white hellebores are finished, the red are in full bloom and the new one, with the supposed acid-green flowers, has swelling buds that look set to burst forth momentarily.
The incredibly pasty-white tops of the Mayflowers are visible and the Dutchman's Breeches and Meadow Rue are on course.
But what's missing? No sign of the Jack in the Pulpit. Are those tiny little leaves the start of Spring Beauty?
Doesn't that tag mark where the new red and painted trillium were supposed to be showing by now? How far did they get moved in the winter?
At the base of one of the posts holding up the porch just outside our front door, the Globe flower has returned without incident. But where are the many Moonflower seedlings that should be showing by now? Will we not be blessed this year by their gorgeous scent and the white night-light that their gigantic fluorescent blooms provide in mid-summer?
Something should be coming up right beside the sidewalk because I know I planted there. Maybe that gardening journal would have been a good present after all. But then it would spoil the surprise should something green eventually emerge in front of the coral bell, whose pink leaves are literally glowing each morning when the low sun shoots it through with electric colour.
The martagon lilies are coming up in groups. The squirrels have only taken the tops off a couple of them this year but there's bad news: the American red lily beetle has moved in en masse. Having munched their way through most of the Asiatics and latched onto the Orientals and LAs, they are now heading for the more expensive stuff. Time to get out the Neem Oil and launch a full-scale (non-toxic) counter attack!
So it begins — the annual tug of war between man and nature, design and execution, and hope and reality that we call gardening.
Once more into the breach, trowel in hand, to ache like no back has ached before, in the pursuit of a perfection that will always elude us. Praise the Lord and pass the compost.

Betty Dales. Phyllis Beamish. Kay Morrison. Pauli Nasmith. Fifty years ago they pioneered pre-school child care in Mississauga.
Long before anyone had heard of Dr. Fraser Mustard or Success by Six and long before anyone had done research to figure out that certain brain pathways can only be opened and fertilized in those critical formative years, these women instinctively knew what they were doing.
In 1955, a couple of women got together in a kitchen in the brand spanking new subdivision of Applewood Acres and hatched a plan. Some of their children's friends were heading off to kindergarten but the younger ones were left at home alone. There was no nursery school in the new area.
So the women decided to start their own program where they would take turns hosting the kids on different days. When they found out that there was a qualified nursery school instructor, a Mrs. Tanaka, living in nearby Orchard Heights, they were thrilled.
She was hired to teach the children and thus was born the Applewood Co-operative Nursery School, which is definitely the oldest of its kind in the GTA, and in all likelihood, the oldest of its kind in Ontario and Canada.
The school started out in St. John's Anglican Church at Dundas and Cawthra but moved to Applewood United after it opened. It's been there ever since.
The minutes of the first meeting dated Sept. 14, 1955 have been lovingly reproduced on a piece of Bristol board that will be on display Saturday when the school and the community celebrate a half-century of sweat equity by parents.
What sets the co-op pre-schools apart is their insistence that parents actively participate in the educational process, by volunteering in the class to keep the teaching ratio at five students per instructor, to serve on the board and to fund-raise for the special trips and extras that are always required.
While the motivation originally may have been to save money and keep fees down, the result has been a transforming experience for both children and parents.
When children see their own parents interacting with older kids and parents see how their children socialize with other students and react to other adults, their perspective is changed, and they understand each other better, says Anita Bratsberg, one of the school's three instructors.
Anita has seen the school, as a mother of three children who went through Applewood, as a "duty day" participant, as president of the board and now as a teacher.
One of the other instructors is Jo Anne Boni, a 15-year participant in Girl Guides whose youngest went to Applewood when the family moved here. As a parent, she found duty days afforded a chance to talk to others experiencing the same parental issues and to swap survival strategies, says Boni.
Inevitably, the school hears that its "graduates" are doing very well adjusting to JK-SK.
Although there have always been ups and downs with enrolment as demographics change in the surrounding neighbourhoods, life is getting tougher for programs like Applewood. Both parents now must usually work to survive economically. Unless someone has flex hours or works shifts, it's difficult to perform duty days.
In the name of survival, compromise has been made to allow parents to join, pay a higher fee and dispense with the classroom volunteering.
There's lots of competition from Montessori schools and Froebel schools and the publicly-funded JK-SK programs.
Bratsberg concedes that, yes, Applewood with its vintage toys from 30 years ago still sitting at the back of the cupboard, is "a bit of a dinosaur."
She's asked if the fate of the co-op programs and the school, may be the same as that of the dinosaurs.
"I don't think so," she replies. "It's one of the few places where parents can really become involved hands-on." As a parent, she knows how invaluable the experience was for her and her children. "It's such a short period in a child's life and it's gone in the blink of an eye."
When parents and children from the five decades of Applewood's existence return for a celebration Saturday from 11:30 a.m.- 2 p.m., the Duplo, the Fisher-Price airplane, the room filled with giant building blocks and the Brio railway will remind them of just how well spent that precious time was.

Maureen Shaw has handed the assignment out many times in her career as an English teacher: write about a time when you were scared.
"Usually, it's 'a dog chased me down the street' or 'I had a bad dream,'" the Grade 9 English teacher at Erindale Secondary School said Wednesday at a very special meeting at the fire hall in Port Credit.
"But when Samera read this to me and the other students, our jaws just dropped," Shaw said.
Samera Khan's first-person account called, "The Day That Brought Me Close to My Death" has brought a lot of people close to tears, including some hard-bitten firefighters who've seen a lot of things they'd rather forget.
In her own words, Samera explains the horrifying events of Feb. 25, 2000 that saw her awakened in her family's smoky apartment at 2111 Roche Crt. in the middle of the night. A fire in the unit next door started a blaze that engulfed the whole floor and forced Samera and her two siblings and their mother and father to flee.
Then eight years old, Samera was separated from her mother during the escape bid. With her hand burned by a scalding metal doorknob and her bare feet being burned by melting plastic from the carpets, Samera rushed partway down the hall where she collapsed and screamed for help.
It was that scream, heard by Ken Stevenson and Duffy McCarthy, who subsequently found her and picked her up, that probably saved Khan's life.
At the meeting Wednesday the firefighters explained the poor odds they faced. The blaze in a 100-ft. hallway was particularly bad because the door of the unit where the fire started was left open. There were no fire breaks to protect them in the hall, the smoke was so thick you could not see the firefighter standing beside you and heat so intense it melted Stevenson's plastic visor.
"We don't usually risk ourselves like that," Stevenson said cryptically. There was obviously a lot of good management and more than a little good luck that night when both Samera and her pregnant mother were saved.
"If there is one thing I regret through that experience," Khan wrote in her story, "It is the fact that I could never say a 'thank you' to that person and that team of firefighters, who risked their lives to give me an additional opportunity in it. They make a difference in the world, whether people realize it or not. They make a tremendous difference which may result in their own deaths."
Thanks to Shaw, a Mississauga resident whose partner is a Toronto firefighter, and fire department officials, Khan's wish to say 'thank you' did come true.
"To meet them," Khan said later, "was beyond words."

Couple of notes today.
Remember Stephen Wahl's dust-up with City Hall over ward boundaries last fall?
Wahl took umbrage at what he saw as the illogic of the lines that were used to add two new wards to the municipal map for the election Nov. 13. He wasn't satisfied with the brush-off he got from council and appealed to the Ontario Municipal Board where he was not nearly as well-prepared as he ought to have been and took a beating from OMB Vice-Chair Susan Campbell.
As Campbell carefully couched it, Wahl's, "allegation of gerrymandering gives the impression of this being a frivolous and vexatious appeal."
Not satisfied to have Wahl's complaint so summarily dismissed, the City saw the opportunity to deter all future municipal malcontents (can you say Donald Barber?) by asking Wahl to pay its legal costs of $8,795.16.
It was a punitive and vengeful move that can only have a chilling effect on citizen appellants. What message does it send to ordinary Joes who disagree with council, but don't have the means to hire professional planners and lawyers to state their case on appeal?
A slightly-chastened Wahl wrote to the OMB in response saying, "I believe it is the duty of citizens to speak up and take a stand even when it is difficult or you must stand alone."
Well, the OMB has now responded and has fudged the issue further by asking Wahl to pay $1,000 to the City. So the Board accepted the City's argument, apparently, but not its accounting.
Wahl is thinking of paying... if somebody insists. Has the City made its point or is it now going to press for its blood money? Stay tuned.
* * *
Ward 10 council candidate Sue McFadden got her knuckles wrapped recently by City Hall for using its corporate logo in an ad, which is a definite no-no.
There was a time not that long ago when councillors thought nothing of sending appeals for funds for their individual re-election campaigns out on municipal letterhead. Those days are long gone, and rightfully so.
McFadden, who looks like the front-runner of the baker's dozen candidates in the new Ward 10, got in trouble when she bought an ad in the program for a roast for Fire Chief Garry Morden. Without her knowledge, she says, the campaign ad included Mississauga's corporate logo.
The Ward 9 trustee Peel District School Board trustee knows the rules, and knows she broke them. She turned herself into the logo police by calling City Hall.
"It was an honest error," she says. "I can live with myself."
The mini-hubbub the incident raised around the horseshoe at 300 City Centre Dr. suggests not everyone at City Hall is a McFadden fan.

Unlike everyone else in my family, I have not read Lord of the Rings. (Cries of 'Shame, Shame!' to be supplied here).
Not only have I not read it once, I have not read it many, many times.
This is to provide balance to my wife and children who have continually immersed themselves in the world of Middle Earth.
Despite my father's addiction to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was always on the coffee table in our house beside Scientific American when we were growing up, I never got the fantasy bug.
So it was with some trepidation that I accompanied my wife, a connoisseur of all things Tolkien and Rowling, to the stage version of the epic at the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto Saturday night.
NOTE TO SELF: Each time you make your annual trip to the metropolis to the east, add another 10 minutes of travel time.
Despite leaving 50 minutes before curtain, we didn't make it. This only happens, of course, when you have good seats dead centre in the long, long rows in the front.
The production was a spectacle of the first order, well-acted, beautifully staged and lovingly mounted.
Lots of surprises, the most exciting of which was the literal emergence of a horrid Balrog to take up the entire stage at the end of the first act and blow black gunk at the paying customers.
Michael Therriault, whom I'd seen in a slightly different role as Leo Bloom in Mel Brooks' The Producers in my last trip to Toronto, was deliciously obsequious as Gollum. No matter what else was happening on stage, your eyes were inevitably drawn by the strange, convulsive, quivering shakes and shimmies Therriault used to portray the tormented wretch's psychic struggle.
It's hard to out-act an Oscar-winning computer-generated movie image, but the young Oakville actor managed the trick.
The problems with the production are problems beyond its solution. Despite a three-and-one-half-hour running time, one cannot do justice to the intricacies of such a work. (Despite my own personal failings as a Tolkien reader, I was able to confirm this by speaking to the authority who sat beside me.)
Some characters make cameos that are more mystifying than edifying.
A climatic epic final battle between two vast armies loses something in translation to the stage. Something like scale and impact.
And why would anyone be afraid of the all-powerful Sauron, when he looks suspiciously like a bunch of headlights strung across the back of the stage?
Fortunately, my lack of familiarity with Lord of The Rings allowed me to ignore most of its shortcomings.
I was just too busy being entertained.

When Silken Laumann was in Mississauga last year, she told me she could tell a good school within the first five minutes of going in the door. Her antennae told her that Plum Tree Park, which she was visiting to promote her Active Kids program, was one of those special places.
Don't know about five minutes, but I do know that good schools have a certain buoyant atmosphere that is almost palpable. It always starts at the top and permeates from the principal down through the ranks.
After a recent visit, it's safe to say that Sheridan Park Public School in the Homelands is one of those locales.
Exhibit Number 1: Canada We Are The World, the school play being put on tonight and tomorrow (9:30 a.m. and 7 p.m.)
The idea started last fall when parent Camille Jocsak, or Cami as she's known to one and all, got chatting with Jim Carswell, who's been an exceptional music teacher at Sheridan Park for the past decade or so.
They wanted to do something different for the staid old spring play. They wanted to make the event about what really happens in their school, as envisioned and created by the students.
Thus was born the idea of a fictional account of new students coming to Sheridan Park, including Sherise from hurricane-ravaged New Orleans, Abdullah from earthquake-shattered Pakistan and Zhao from China, who try to fit into a new country and deal with unfamiliar and conflicting dynamics of the school yard at the same time.
"We did a lot of research on bullying," says Cami, who describes herself as a parent and freelance volunteer with a special interest in the arts. She's worked on a pile of different arts and fundraising events at Hillcrest, Homelands, Erindale and Cawthra and organized much of the concert given by Oscar Peterson last October at the school named in his honour.
Education is a collective, collaborative, community experience in the opinion of Sheridan Park Principal Luciana Cardarelli. Everyone has pitched in to help with this project, from the car dealerships in the Erin Mills Auto Campus who provided funds to the Grade 5 class that did the backdrops.
Professional musicians such as Steven Eadie worked with the 100-piece (that's not a typo) orchestra. Parent Keith Bonnell, a sound expert who works at CBC did the audio. Gerry Campbell (father of actor Neve), a teacher at Erindale Secondary, not only provided risers but helped cut, build and install them. Parent Chantelle Kowdrysh, who has National ballet experience, helped with choreography. Danni Semenchuk sewed her fingers to the bone doing costumes.
The list of expert volunteers goes on and on.
"It overwhelms me to see the bounty of people willing to help in this community," says Cardarelli of the surrounding Sheridan Homelands neighbourhood.
We Are The World has truly been a collaborative experience that allows students not necessarily used to the spotlight to shine for a change.
"When our children learn to make music," says Cardarelli, "we nourish their self-confidence, creativity and compassion and contribute to their development as a whole person."
Ditto, it would seem, for the adults.

It's very comforting to know that Woody Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land as an antidote to the treacle of Kate Smith's God Bless America.
Guthrie couldn't stand the sentimentality of the Irving Berlin song he kept hearing on the radio and so, contrarian that he was, he set out to write a song that would capture a truer picture of his land, one that celebrated its bounty without the bombast.
The Oklahoma folk singer would have been happy to know that a major poll commissioned in 2002 ranked "This Land" the second most historically important song of the 20th century, behind "Over The Rainbow." "God Bless America" was 19th.
Thanks to Bruce Springsteen, who's just released a new CD called The Seeger Sessions, both Pete Seeger and by association, his very good friend Woody Guthrie, are enjoying revivals.
By coincidence, I've just finished reading a marvellous book called Ramblin' Man, The Life And Times Of Woody Guthrie.
Like most people I only knew the legend of Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, the nomadic folk singer who documented the Dust Bowl migration from the southern states to California in such great tunes as Do Re Mi and So Long, It's Been Good To Know You.
One of the first singers to introduce social protest into his lyrics after seeing the dark side of the American dream, Guthrie had a poet's knack of taking the ordinary and transforming it into the mythic.
Because my father was a folk music fan who had some of the old American Folkways albums, I knew Guthrie's music through the singing of his buddy Cisco Houston (Reuben James, East Texas Red, Hard Travellin'.) That was before Bob Dylan's "Song For Woody" on his first album that put Guthrie on the cultural map for my generation.
For those who knew the real drinkin', swearin', womanizin' Guthrie, his subsequent sainthood came as a big shock. As his friend and fellow member of The Almanac Singers, Millard Lampell put it, "the problem is to keep the mass media from turning Woody into a precious folk hero."
Cray's book certainly demonstrates the hobo saint had feet of clay.
In the portrait Cray artfully sketches, Guthrie emerges as a little unkempt kid who never grew up. Chronically unemployed, he thought nothing of leaving his first wife and small children to fend for themselves while he indulged his insatiable yen for the road.
He was averse to baths of any description, would hit on every skirt in sight especially when drunk, and would simply move in unannounced on friends and relatives for a period, then be off on his next adventure.
He lived his whole life on the run from his debtors and his demons, including the Huntington's disease that eventually confined his mother to the mad house and put him in the New Jersey hospital where he gradually disintegrated over the last decade of his life.
All of which makes fascinating reading but is totally irrelevant to the man's musical legacy, which has stood the test of time.
After finishing the book, I dug out an old single I have of Joan Baez singing one of Guthrie's best songs, "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)." It was another song he crafted after hearing a radio report that upset him. A group of Mexican migrant workers being flown back across the Mexican border who were killed in a plane crash were dismissed as deportees in the report. His song gives them names and faces and souls.
In a time of the renewed hostilities on immigrants on both sides of the border, Guthrie's words still cut to the quick. "Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?/ Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?/To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil/And be called by no name except 'deportees?'"
When the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp in 1998 to honour the man who was branded a Communist and thrown in jail so many times he lost track, his son Arlo remembered the man behind the myth.
He said, "For a man who fought all his life against being respectable, this comes as a stunning defeat."

Reed (HBP) Johnson rocks.
Johnson is the overachieving, left-field platooning outfielder for the Toronto Blue Jays who is probably best known for his penchant for being plunked by pitches, or HBP (Hit by Pitcher), as it says officially in the box scores.
He's currently tied for the league lead in the majors for being Hard Ball Prey. Rick Weeks of the Phillies is co-leader of this dubious category. Weeks, though, has twice as many at-bats as Johnson.
Which means in the statistically-obsessed world of baseball that Johnson is a really setting himself up as a target twice as effectively as Weeks, especially when you consider that there are no wind-aided HBPs at the SkyDome....er....Rogers Centre...er...Ted's Toybox.
What you have to love about Johnson is that he's one of those classic utility guys whose always kept around because of his versatility and always ends up in your line-up because he's just a damn fine player.
If you're sitting on the other side of the field and Johnson comes up, you're undoubtedly saying to yourself: 'Let's not let this little pipsqueak beat us.'
Like a lot of those pesky types, Johnson is good at a lot of things because he's had to learn everything to make himself useful enough so someone will hang on to him.
He runs well. He can steal a base. He hits in spurts. He'll take a walk. Plays all the outfield positions. Can lead off, hit second, bunt and put the bat on the ball for the hit and run. Most importantly of all, he hustles and takes nothing for granted.
While some millionaire outfielder who makes more per at bat than Johnson makes in a year is rounding second base too widely as he ponders how his stock portfolio is doing, old HBP is throwing behind him to make an out.
Last night, Johnson played one of his best games. He had four hits and scored three runs. He's been a run-scoring machine this year with 21 in 54 at-bats. By contrast Troy Glaus leads the Jays with 30 in 120 at-bats and Vernon Wells has 23 in 135.
Of course, when it came time for somebody to make a game-changing play here came Johnson, who has short legs that make him look like the Tasmanian devil when he really gets churning, diving head-first to catch a Texas Leaguer down the left-field line. He even let the ball bounce around a couple of times in his glove for dramatic effect.
Johnson's the kind of guy that some people (like our sports editor) insist is a fringe type, not the type you get to the World Series with. Couldn't disagree more. Reed's the kind of guy who, when you get there (this would be a good year) could be MVP. Then all kinds of folks will be asking themselves: Where'd this guy come from?
Everybody has faults, of course, and Johnson sports his on the end of his chin. It's a little, wispy goatee thingy that can't rightfully be termed facial hair.
My theory is that Reed is trying to distract pitchers so he can work more walks. Either that, or he's going to stick his chin out one day, get his goatee parted and earn another free pass.

Margie Mastrangelo isn't the first Mississauga tourist who fell in love with Cuba, and she surely won't be the last. Not if a plan she is carefully hatching comes to fruition.
Mastrangelo is a professional photographer who went to Cuba on a trip to celebrate her 20th wedding anniversary earlier this year and was completely captivated by the look, sound and scenes of street life in Havana.
"Being a photographer, I was really taken by the contrast of light and shadow that you find in the bright sunny environment and the narrow streets," said the 42-year-old, who grew up in Mississauga and recently moved back into the City after establishing her career as a commercial photographer. "I was touched by it."
She took hundreds of images while in Cuba and even travelled back again for a long weekend, she was so captivated by the place.
It was while reading a book called The Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present that the light went on about why the pull she felt was so strong.
The former Margie Witko grew up in Bratislava. Poland and Cuba were two Communist countries, "full of dilapidated buildings and unusual landscapes where the people are warm and friendly."
Whatever the reasons for Mastrangelo's affinity for Cuba, she's ploughing ahead with a plan to take a group of people interested in photography to Havana and environs next January or February. She would give them workshops combined with a few days at the beach and lots of chances to learn how to shoot the street life.
"It would be for anyone who has an interest in photography and travel," she said.
Meanwhile the photographer, who opened her own shop in Port Credit last June, is sifting through the images she shot down south and considering what to do with them.
She's contemplating one of those "publish-on-demand" books where people can go to a publisher's web site to sample the book and then order one. No big up-front costs for printing required.
"I'm thinking about doing it documentary style," she said. "It would be something bigger than I originally envisioned."
Amazing what a little vacation trip can lead to, eh?
Let's see: a trip to Havana to sample some of the sun and maybe an Ernest Hemingway grapefruit daiquiri or two in mid-winter, with a chance to learn more about photography, and a ready-made street studio teeming with colourful subjects at your beck and call.
Sounds like a winner to me.
You can check Mastrangelo's web site at www.portraitboutique.ca for future progress on her "little project."

"I wore a very nice white shirt and a black blazer. Then I ever-so-erotically took off my blazer. Then, in a moment of wild abandon, I undid one button of each cuff and rolled it up. I undid one button of my shirt to reveal a mass of curly grey chest hair. I obviously had them swooning."
That's John Fraser speaking. It may be hard to understand his pronunciation because he has his tongue firmly (and erotically, no doubt) planted in his cheek.
Fraser is describing the scene last month when he and 29 other would-be sex symbols auditioned upstairs at a runway in The Crooked Cue in Port Credit for a new charity calendar coming out in August.
West End Boys is a follow-up to the very successful West End Girls Celebration of Life "We Bare Because We Care" calendar of last year which raised some $27,000 for Princess Margaret Hospital and breast cancer research.
In another life, the about-to-turn 73-year-old Fraser was the director of education for Peel's public school board and wrote a very famous report in the 1970's about why the school system is failing so many students who were dropping out before graduation. Plus ça change.
You may not know Fraser but you've seen him. Always the dramatic actor, especially when he was subtly putting down trustees who made the mistake of asking dumb questions at the board table, John has established a flourishing post-education career as a model. He's all over the tube in the Canadian Home Income Plan TV commercials, acts as host for virtual tours of development sites and has been in loads of print campaigns for major corporations. Based on his experience as a "dance host" on cruise ships, he's even written a novel called The Reluctant Gigolo.
Anyone who knows Fraser and his flair for the dramatic and his skill at stand-up comedy won't be surprised to learn that he struck a blow for Generation Zzzzzzzz by decimating the "competition" and garnering the most support at the selecion night for the calendar.
A cancer survivor himself, Fraser didn't hesitate to be a poster boy for a devastating disease.
Even for a good cause, getting on a stage wasn't such an easy thing for some of the other participants including Chuck Jackson who's graced many a stage with the Downchild and Cameo Blues bands among others.
"It was nerve-wracking," he said. "You're up there and you're basically defenceless," he said.
"Some of the guys were pretty boisterous and some were pretty subdued. Some had tearaway pants," added the Port Credit resident. "I did a couple of dance moves. One of the girls threw underwear at me. I guess that's a compliment."
Jackson was chosen but decided to withdraw for personal and professional reasons. Which puts a new twist on Flip, Flop and Fly.
Ron Duquette, a former Mississauga Citizen of the Year and a marketing man who knows his way around a good promotion, took the advice of organizer Helen Peacock and checked with his family first.
The nudity wasn't really an issue for Duquette or his family.
"For us, it was the cause," he said. "Breast cancer is a terrible disease."
He expects to be Mr. December considering his age (62) and his (real) white beard.
Port Credit Photographer Margie Mastrangelo may be dedicating her
services to the cause but she's not taking it lightly. She's sitting down with each of the participants to get to know their personalities and to make sure that the finished product (birthday) suits them. She already has an idea for Fraser: in the pool with an outsized hat. To match his ego no doubt.
The project is the brain child of Helen Peacock, yet another Port Credit resident, who saw the film Calendar Girls and was impressed with a project for a hospital in Huntsville which featured two of her girlfriends.
Peacock, who publishes children's inspirational cards and teaches yoga, pilates and Tai Chi, posed for the Girls calendar and is overwhelmed by the response the Boys have been getting.
The Ladies' Choice Night at The Crooked Cue has raised $4,000 for the cause already and so many women asked Peacock when the next event is that she's organizing a July 16 family barbecue.
The calendar itself will be launched Aug. 22 at the Oasis Convention Centre in Lakeview.
The men's calendar has proven easier than the women's on a couple of fronts. First, Peacock is using one photographer rather than three.
The other big thing: "With men, you don't have to worry about the hair and makeup."

Gypsy moths make a sort of music that doesn't sound anything like the great rhythms of gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt.
More like heavy meddle — with the lives of our trees.
About a decade ago, we had an invasion of gypsy moths at our cottage in the Kawarthas. More than the burlap wraps around the trees, more than the beige egg masses all over the woodpile and more than the green contraptions that looked like demented party hats hanging from the tree limbs to catch the critters, you remember the sound of their munching little mandibles.
Heading out for an evening walk, you would hear the strange sound, like a distant waterfall or a trickle of a stream. It took us a while to figure out what it was: the sound of hundreds of caterpillars chowing down on the oak leaves above. A very scary sound it was.
The tree damage on our place wasn't as bad as on some others. On some of the heavily-treed lots, several trees were lost. There were transformations that just left you heartsick.
You don't realize how important the context of a cottage is until the nice leafy frame disappears.
There's no quick fix for the loss of a 100-year-old tree. They leave gaping holes in the landscape that simply can't be replaced.
Which brings us to today's press conference behind the Iceland Centre where City officials, sounding like generals giving a military debriefing, talked about this morning's aerial attack on the moths.
After hearing the details of the months of preparation for the spraying from low-flying helicopters, timed with a series of road closings, you almost expected Director of Recreation and Parks John Lohuis to declare, "I love the smell of Btk in the morning."
The spraying for gypsy moths is a classic dilemma for those who like to think themselves environmentalists.
No one embraces the thought of pesticides being sprayed on their neighbourhoods.
But the threat of destruction of thousands of the City's most mature trees, many of them already stressed from drought and disease, is a real one.
Try to imagine Gordon Woods or Lorne Park Estates with half of their trees gone. Or go down to Whiteoaks Park and look at how many oaks have already been removed because of disease.
Then give a big sigh and head indoors when the helicopters come over.

Is there anything sillier, or more fun to watch, than the ongoing skirmish between the Parliamentary Press Gallery and the new sheriff in Ottawa?
Ever since Stephen Harper rode into town out of the dusty west, on his Blue Roan no less, he's been putting those low-down, mangy ink-stained varmints in their place.
(Was that a chorus of, "It's about time" I heard from the boys in the saloon?)
Yesterday, our new Prime Minister was set to host a press conference following a government caucus meeting.
His press secretary invited the media to sign a list if they wanted to ask a question. Reporters, who have complained constantly about the tight ways the new government has with information, declined.
They were afraid that the list was just a dance card that would allow Harper to pick his favourite partners and avoid any reporters, or subjects, that he deemed potentially negative.
No reporters signed the list and no questions were asked or answered.
Isn't democracy in action, or is it inaction, a wonderful thing to see?
What's happening here would be called the "feeling-out" period in the first quarter of a football game. You run it up the gut a few times and hit the other guy hard enough to turn his helmet sideways. Then we really start to play.
Harper has only been in charge a brief time but he's already set the tone. He's the boss and everything will run through his office.
When he doesn't get his way, as in having his nomination of Gwyn Morgan to head the public appointments nixed by a Parliamentary committee, he just throws his hands in the air and says, 'Well if you're going to be that way, I'm not going to clean up Ottawa at all.' Since the Liberals (they're the ones wearing the horns) were the real source of the problem, and the good guys are now in charge, integrity in government won't really be a problem anymore anyway.
More and more Mr. Harper reminds one in temperament and attitude of none other than Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
After Harper shakes his kids' hands to say goodnight, do you suppose he goes out in the hall and practices pirouettes?

Tom Cousineau. Johnny Rodgers. Joe Theismann. Terry Metcalf. Sandy Stephens. Billy "White Shoes" Johnson. Doug Flutie. Ronnie Knox. Granny Liggins. Anthony Davis. Fred Biletnikoff.
And now....Ricky Williams...maybe.
It's possible that the former New Orleans Saint No. 1 pick could be running around the Toronto Argo practice fields at UTM as soon as Monday.
The possibility has the usual suspects in the usual tizzy.
There is a long list of big names from U.S. football who have, "fled north of the Canadian border," as American sports broadcasters are so fond of saying.
It's always interesting to note the superiority complex that many American sports "authorities" have about the CFL.
Remember listening to WGR in Buffalo a few years ago when the announcer was condescendingly announcing that Jeff Garcia, "a refugee from the CFL," was going to start at quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers. The contempt in the voice was unmistakable.
Of course, Garcia went on to become a big star, just like so many of the other Ice Bowl "refugees" from the wilds of Canada, people like Bud Grant, Joe Kapp, Warren Moon, Marv Levy, Joe Horn and the list goes on and on.
The arrival of the undersized, overachieving Flutie in Buffalo set off a veritable border war on call-in shows from (mostly) Canadians supporting Flutie and (mostly) Americans who supported California surfer-dude Rob Johnson as pivot.
The competition amounted to a Titanic battle between the football inferiority complex of our country and the football superiority complex of theirs.
Williams presents an interesting case in the ongoing, unresolvable and pointless debate about the leagues.
The directionally-challenged former Dolphin, who only knows north-south, could be a mammal out of water in the CFL.
Conventional wisdom suggests Ricky will have more trouble on the wider field. But then, as we all know by now, Ricky doesn't believe in conventional wisdom.
Social anxiety disorder. Being traded for another team's whole draft. Studies in holistic medicine. Strolls on the beach in India. Interviews with Mike Wallace. Court decisions that make you pay back $8.6 million to the team you quit on without notice. Those things change a guy.
If Ricky needs help adjusting to the quicker, more wide-open Canadian game, he has a mentor. He can just ask Pinball, can't he?
A little swivel-step here, a spin move there and Ricky will soon be returning missed field goals 120 yards in the snow.
Of course, if Coach Clemons really wants to help, he needs to pin a great nickname on his new ball player.
Crazy Legs was taken and Crazy Dreads is out of date. If he grows the right facial hair, he could be The Galloping Goatee. Leo Lewis, another great runner, was the Lincoln Locomotive, so how about the Texas Tornado for Ricky? No, too cutesy by half.
Might as well go with the straight goods. Ricky "Lone Wolf" Williams, it is. Has a northern flavour and will give the Argoooooooooooooos fans something else to howl about.
Will Ricky actually ever play in Canada?
One is tempted to answer with the pat, "You Never Know."
With Ricky, however, YOU NEVER KNOW.
After all, the man is still mastering the art of being Ricky. His theme song is Different Drum by the Stoned Ponies.
Like the argument about the value of the CFL and the NFL, in the end, it really doesn't matter.
As sure as football is football, Ricky will be Ricky. Sit back and enjoy the show while it lasts.

Imagine taking out your digital camera and having Tom Edison show up to ask if you know who invented that contraption.
That's a little bit how long-time Dixie Arena Manager Ron Rutledge and his crew must have felt when none other than Frank J. Zamboni showed up at the ice palace on Dundas St. E. one day to gawk at the "Dixie Dandy."
That's what the Dixielanders had dubbed the ice flooding machine they used at the Mississauga hockey mecca.
It must have been just a little bit embarrassing to have Mr. Zamboni peering over the boards and, no doubt, frowning.
It seems that, based on the machine that Zamboni had invented, two innovative employees of the Port Credit Arena had emulated the notion for their facility. Hugh MacNeil and Gary Scaife knew that they weren't in violation of the patent rules if they produced only one machine for their own use.
The problem was that other arenas in town soon saw what Port Credit had done, liked it and ordered machines of their own.
The word must have got back to Zamboni, who duly appeared at Dixie.
Not by coinidence, I'm sure, a short time after his trip, Dixie acquired a real Zamboni machine.
That's just one of the delicious little anecdotes in Dave Cook's new book: From Frozen Ponds to Beehive Glory - The Story of Dixie Arena.
The highlight of the book is a section called Anecdotes and Other Tall Tales. Cook, a former reporter at the long-lost Etobicoke Gazette and The Mississauga News and the city's Ward 7 councillor for a couple of terms, admits that he can't account for the truth of many of the stories in that chapter. He can account for their entertainment value, however, and that's why they're included.
Cook thought he'd finished with his historical writing after he produced his history of Applewood Acres called Apple Blossoms and Satellite Dishes. But strains of the Dixie Arena story kept popping up in the threads of that book. Cook couldn't resist another shot.
That's why he made 87 trips to the Central Library, doing research four days a week for a year.
For hockey buffs, the book will be a cornucopia of Dixie arcana, including the names of all 701 Dixie Beehives (including Brendan Shanahan for one whole shift during which he broke his stick) and the 48 who went on to the NHL. There's strong sections on Dr. Art Wood, the Stanfield clan, Flash Hollett, St. Lawrence Starch and its hockey card program and on the myriad of wonderful events, from pro wrestling to the largest showing of gladiolas in the world up to the time, that took place at Dixie.
The Cook book might not have happened without the support of another former Ward 7 councillor, though. Terry Butt has bought 1000 copies which he's offering as fundraisers to various groups. It's a wonderful gesture that has a benefit of supporting good causes and preserving history.
I asked Cook what he thinks will remain of Dixie's story after all the old-timers and their marvellous tales are gone.
"Unfortunately," he replied, "my book will probably be the only remnant of Dixie Arena 50 years from now."
From Frozen Ponds will be available at a book launch June 3 at 7 p.m. at S. John's Anglican Church at Dixie (of course) and Cawthra. The $20 volume is also being sold at Heritage Mississauga at the Grange and at The Hockey Hall of Fame.

No one enjoyed politics more than Frank Bean.
From his early days on the Applewood Heights Ratepayers' Association to his last days as the chair of the Region of Peel, Frank was the ultimate student of the game.
He lived it. He breathed it, and he thrived on it.
Bean died last Saturday at age 68 in Niagara Region where he'd lived since he got out of politics in 1991.
My first contact with Bean came when he launched his career in 1975 with a run in the bye-election for Ward 3 councillor. Mississauga council was a cauldron of intrigue at the time, since a judicial inquiry into the old council had been called by the new council and its fledgling mayor, Martin Dobkin.
Former Reeve Chic Murray, who felt his reputation had been sullied by the inquiry, was running to get back on council and clear his name. He had sued Dobkin and then-Ward 9 Councillor Hazel McCallion for damaging his character, a suit that was eventually dropped when the inquiry was quashed for legal reasons.
Bean came out of nowhere to nearly win that bye-election. He was ahead until the last polling station, in the ritzy Applewood Landmark building, came in.
The loss might have fazed others but it just seemed to fuel Bean's ambitions. He spent the next year sitting at the press table with another would-be councillor, Larry Taylor.
It was an unlikely alliance. Bean was a dyed-in-the-wool Tory and Taylor the token NDPer. They sat, they watched, they learned and in the 1976 election, they both won.
Taylor said this morning that he thought of Bean as, “someone who really cared about his constituents. He was really active in his ratepayer associations and he did his homework.”
The rookie politicians' friendship would be a key in Bean's eventual election as Peel's second chairman.
As usual, Bean was the dark horse in a race that featured senior Mississauga Councillors Fred Hooper and Frank McKechnie and Brampton Councillor Terry Miller.
The Bean team, quarterbacked by Taylor, pulled a classic coup.
Caledon and Brampton had met before the vote but couldn't agree on a candidate. As a result, Caledon Mayor John Clarkson withdrew even before balloting began.
Bean's forces figured out that if they could get him through to the last ballot against Miller, Caledon would choose the lesser of two evils.
The rules did not prevent councillors from voting for more than one candidate at the time, something only the Bean forces had figured out. So the Bean team gave Miller a majority on the second ballot, which meant his name was set aside.
In a memorable meeting in the men's washroom, Taylor convinced Mayor Clarkson that if Hooper were the Mississauga candidate left standing in the final round, then Miller would become chair. Caledon put Bean through to the final and he won easily, 16-6.
There were might cries of foul, of course, and the losers felt the process had been hijacked.
Bean smiled that Cheshire Cat smile of his and proceeded to calm the waters, as any good chair would. “I ran on the platform of a moderate and I was elected as a moderate,” he told reporters, slipping into his new role with nary a blip.
Once again Frank Bean had done his homework, had studied the players carefully, and, as a result, had exceeded expectations.

I wonder what Victor and Agnes Sandford would make of the pile of rich dirt which has been bulldozed into the corner of their 100-acre farm closest to the southwest corner of Eglinton Ave. and Mavis Rd.
It would probably break their hearts. Every time I drive north on Mavis I still glance to my left, in the stupidly vain hope that the lovely Sandford Pond will somehow reappear. Hoping  that the beautiful, open natural stretch of water and weedy vegetation that served as a staging area each spring and fall for migrating waterfowl will still be there.

That's the spot where I saw my first American Widgeon. There were always scads of diving ducks there, especially in the spring.  Every once in a while you'd see a little head bobbing about that definitely looked like a muskrat.

For a long time, the pond sprawled across both sides of Eglinton but now the sprawl is of another kind. Sales pavilions and row houses sprout like the crops that the Sandfords used to raise on their property.

In an excellent column he wrote in 2002 before the developers moved onto the land, Port Credit historian Alan Skeoch recalled how the old-fashioned Sandfords, Victor and his sister Agnes, slowly receded into their little piece of heaven.

Agnes and Vincent Sandford were determined to resist the urban sprawl of Mississauga that gobbled up farms like an insatiable predatory monster, wrote Skeoch. All around the farm new housing estates were built and along the south side the multi-laned 403 expressway sliced its way across the fields.

To the north, clearly visible was the Mississauga landfill project, the city dump in less polite words. It grew higher and higher each year. All around the Sandfords was change. But in their world there was little change. When the electricity failed due to a broken pole, they went back to the use of kerosene lamps. They were not exactly opposed to modernization, they had tractors and hay bailers and veterinary care for their cattle and supermarket food. They just didn't need total change.

If we learn as we grow older and wiser that change is the only constant, why do we become ever so much more emotionally resistant to the inevitable, undeniable transformation of our landscape?
Resistance is futile but it still feels like the only sane response.

The Sandford pond is no more. The Sandford House, vandalized too many times and the victim of a June 24, 1999 act of arson, is a long shot to be preserved and rebuilt.

In a few years, it's likely that only the grove of 100-or-so black walnut trees sitting on public property on the crest of the hill near the house will still stand as mute testament to the people of the land who once lived there.

It's easy to slough off the musings of Prime Minister Stephen Harper about the sins of the media as politically motivated. He obviously considers the Parliamentary press posse his enemy as he moves to rein in the careless flow of public information to, of all people, the public. His goal seems to be to have as much as possible of the government's decision-making power reside in the grey space between his ears.

It's a lot harder to slough off the carefully-chosen words of Governor-General Micha‘lle Jean to The Canadian Press gala dinner in Halifax last night.

Jean has no clear political motivation for her comments. She does have experience as a working journalist, for both the French and English language branches of the CBC.

In a speech in which she cast her comments against the backdrop of her native Haiti, where speaking out against the government was usually a death sentence for journalist or citizen, Jean thoughtfully laid out her concerns about the influences that seem to work against serious journalism in this country.

She decried the disturbing tendency of mainstream media ( due to increasing competition from the Internet and TV headline-news operations) to adopt the tabloid tactics that see all of life and politics reduced to a quick sound bite and a snappy headline.

Here's part of what Jean had to say:  Journalism does not consist merely of reporting the news to the public; it also gives the public a better understanding of a world that is becoming increasingly complex with each passing day and may at times seem incomprehensible, with no reference points, no ideas, and no analyses. To truly inform others is to refuse to allow the news to become a product, a commodity, a profit; it means making the news a tool to explore the world around us, to discover it, to understand it. We are more susceptible to powerlessness and fatalism when we do not understand.

I am absolutely convinced that what is most unique and, if you will pardon the expression, most noble about journalism is that it has an inherent duty to remember, contextualize and understand. But as soon as profitability gains the upper hand over accuracy, entertainment triumphs over reason, lies over truth, then the very ethics of information are at risk, threatened. One cannot practise this profession with integrity without accepting this responsibility.

Good journalism takes time and thought, two things that are often in short supply as understaffed newsrooms produce more, shorter bits of news, for the cavernous maw of the myriad new products that each news organization seems obsessed with trying.

The internet, hailed as a vehicle to allow the broadest spread of information, instead seems to have narrowed our view, as the newest tidbit, true or not, flies around the globe.

I urge you not to give in to the demands of machines that produce and market information, the Governor-General said. It is the shades of meaning that make life so rich, so intense, so precious. We may find life so bewildering because we no longer stop to think about it, really think about it.

Interestingly, on the same day that Harper said people aren't interested in, inside Ottawa stuff such as the squabble between him and the media, Jean said that, journalists must move away from the contemptuous attitude that only a happy few are actually interested in thinking, that in-depth reporting doesn't sell, that people just don't want to have to think.

Maybe the Prime Minister and the press corps have more in common than we thought.

David Harrison, 17, was the one wearing the orange Miami Dolphins sweater with "R. Williams" emblazoned across the back. His fraternal twin brother Daniel, sitting just in front of him, was the guy wearing the Williams sweater in teal.
Much to their surprise, they found themselves this morning staring out on the practice field at the University of Toronto at Mississauga at the object of their apparel.
The TTC strike prompted the Toronto teens' dad to let them off school and bring them out to the Argos practice to see the latest twist in the bizarre football career of one Ricky Williams.
“It's mind-boggling,” said David, who apparently got the talking gene for both twins.
“If you'd have told me a couple of years ago that Ricky Williams would be out there, I would have laughed,” said Harrison, an avid fan of both the CFL and NFL. “I would have bet against it for sure.”
But there was Williams, looking - if not in top shape, then certainly not that far from it — as he took tosses left and right, showed his natural speed to the corner and burst straight ahead with an apparent hunger to find a safety and run him over.
“Everyone has been very positive and I'm very excited to be here,” Williams told a scrum of reporters that included some curious representatives from south of the border. “I'm still anonymous here,” noted the big back. “Everybody's so relaxed here. It's a change. Everyone's so nice."
(We won't tell him about Labour Day at Ivor Wynne just yet).
Ricky is already an honourary Canadian.
“I just want to come here and work hard and be a better person,” he said, as some of his team-mates played games with kids from the UTM sports camps. He refused to put down any other Argo backs or to belittle the Canadian game as so many of his countrymen do. He may not know that his rouge from his 55-yard line but he drop-kicked every question aimed at leading him into controversy.
Asked how he would change the Canadian game, Ricky said, “They can expect me to be me. They're the ones who brought me here, you'd better ask them.”
He hopes to teach at The Toronto Yoga Centre. He's just been hangin' out here and he doesn't need a cell phone because the only people he talks to are his girlfriend and his agent.
One thing Ricky has obviously impressed his new mates and coaches with, is his genuine humility.
“He's a very thoughtful person,” said Kent Austin, the offensive coordinator who makes Port Credit home. “He's shy. He's nice and he's cordial.”
And, oh yeah, he has the tools to run like crazy. In just one day you can see, “Ricky's a very special back,” said Austin.
In the midst of the media circus, Austin and Quarterback Damon Allen were at pains to remind everyone that the double blue are already a very good team.
Allen explained patiently that the Argos are not going to be reconfigured into the Oklahoma Sooners or the modern-day equivalent of the Edmonton Eskimo Hall of Fame backfield of Normie Kwong (The China Clipper) and Johnny Bright.
“I've been in this league for 20 years and not one team has run the ball and won the Grey Cup,” said Allen. “We've got good receivers and we're going to use them.”
As a football fan though, Allen said it's wonderful to see a player as good as Williams come into the league.
“We have a special league,” said Allen.
How good is Ricky going to be?
“You can't really tell until you get on the football field,” said Allen. “It depends a lot on his ability to adapt to the new league, run motion and run plays.”
The CFL MVP in 2005 explained that the Argos have a little ritual when a new player joins the fold.
“He has to stand up in the locker room, say who he is and talk about his hobbies and what he likes to do,” said Allen. “Ricky didn't say much. It was short,” he laughed.
The CFL is Ricky's hobby now and he'll do his speaking three, five or 10 tough yards at a time.

Now that it's over, you have to ask yourself, what did the strike at Community Living Mississauga really achieve?
Precious little.
It was a strange labour action from the start. The union talked about how it understood the provincial underfunding in its sector and how difficult it was to walk away from individuals you've known and befriended over the years.
CLM Executive Director Keith Tansley talked about how underpaid his workers were before the labour dispute took place. Indeed, you could argue that the root of the strike is the lack of value that the Ontario government, and we as a society, put on care for some of our most vulnerable citizens.
The CLM workers are among the highest-paid across the province but that doesn't say much.
It became evident, as the weeks wore on after the pickets took to the streets April 10, that the strike really wasn't about money. Most other jurisdictions settled by agreeing that the local agency would pass along all of the money designated for raises this year and whatever came along next year. That could have happened here and, indeed, it is what ultimately happened.
In the end, this strike was about power, as most are.
The 360-member Ontario Public Service Employees' Union Local 251 is made up predominantly of part-time workers. Their president, Grace Mungal, is a part-time worker and one of the main issues in dispute was how shifts were scheduled.
The union wanted seniority to be the determining factor.
The local obviously feels that Tansley has far too much control of everything that happens at CLM. Mungal talked frequently about how, “the employer” wouldn't do this and “the employer” wouldn't do that. She was referring to Tansley.
Since he and Mungal have had a rocky relationship since she became president, things didn't go well at the table. They seemed to become personal, something that never works to the advantage of either side.
Even when they worked out a deal, they didn't have a deal. The provincial mediator brokered a compromise, but Tansley and Mungal couldn't agree about the terms of the back-to-work arrangement.
Lost in all of these details, just as they were lost throughout the strike, were the individuals who rely on the CLM and its staff to make their lives bearable.
Many of them can't speak, can't express their outrage and can't even raise a finger in protest.
The inevitable confrontations on the picket lines outside group homes left some of those clients bewildered and frightened.
In a “plea for help” to his MPP, Mississaugan Terry Girard said his daughter Sabrina, who was forced to cross picket lines to get into her group home on Schomberg Ave., had experienced a form of “terrorism.”
“Sabrina is not sleeping properly,” her father wrote. “She is confused and as she is non-verbal, is exhibiting her frustration in the only way she knows when she is desperate and feels she is in danger. That being she defends herself, physically, usually in biting activity. It has been years since Sabrina has shown this behavior and in just a short period of time these picketers have destroyed her self-confidence and mild manners. As a result of all of this it has been impossible to keep up properly with Sabrina’s medications and she is in very real emotional turmoil and physical danger.”
Sabrina is just one of many individuals whose carefully-structured lives have been shattered by the strike that no one says they really wanted.
Signing a new collective agreement is one thing. Putting all of those lives back together again is going to be something infinitely more difficult.

How does this sound for breakfast?
Shagbark hickory nut, mossycup oak acorn, bitternut hickory nut, pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, cashew and almond.
Hold the milk. Hold the flakes.
Then sweet potato, blueberries, green grapes, apple bits and button mushrooms.
That's the menu every evening when Sabrina the two-year-old northern flying squirrel chows down at her digs in Erin Mills. Yes, Sabrina has breakfast at night, because she's a nocturnal being.
Sabrina and her new playmate Scooter, a southern flying squirrel who arrived in Mississauga May 25, are “party animals” according to their owner, the inestimable Steve Patterson.
You remember Patterson. He's the guy who got caught in the Kafkaesque border snafu when he brought Sabrina into Canada without incident two years ago, then had to fight an expensive $30,000 rearguard legal action against the nincompoops at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency who tried to seize her and ignore provisions that allowed importation of rodents like Sabrina for educational purposes.
Speaking to Patterson yesterday after he made two presentations to Grade 7 students at Hazel McCallion Public School, a couple of things quickly became obvious: the self-taught biologist is still outraged at the audacity of bureaucrats who wanted to snatch the tiny squirrel away from him after he and Sabrina had just bonded. Second, he wants to put all that stuff behind him and get on with his real business of introducing city kids to the magnificent wild world out there.
In a captivating 90-minute presentation, students oohed and aahed as Sabrina demonstrated her amazing flying ability, yes, but Patterson also passionately pursued his personal campaign to end what he calls, “the nature deficit disorder in children.”
Here are some of the fascinating things that the students learned about Sabrina and Scooter, the nine-week-old, 44 gram (he's gained 4 grams already) squirrel who made just his second public appearance yesterday:
• if you've camped in Haliburton, chances are a flying squirrel has played one of their favourite games with you, called bounce off the tent.
• Patterson's personal research project in Grey and Bruce counties, where he's put up 400 nesting boxes, has proven for the first time that a squirrel has had two litters in one year, an important indicator of climate change.
• There are 43 species of flying squirrels, the largest of which lives in Kashmir and is four-feet long.
• Sabrina is potty-trained.
• Southern flying squirrels came to North America when the water dropped allowing them to use the Bering land bridge some 25 million years ago.
• If you drop a young, sightless squirrel, it will automatically spread its limbs to activate the flap of skin attached to its sides called the patagium, that allow it to glide down.
• Squirrels will form a gang in winter, find an abandoned woodpecker hole and cuddle up (and squabble) all season long to keep warm.
• They have a sweet tooth and often drowned in buckets in the old days until a better bucket was designed.
• Adding a little Sleeman's beer to the peanut butter and sunflower seeds in a squirrel trap is a good idea because it helps attract the keen-smelling rodents.
• You can lure a squirrel from his hole by banging a baseball bat on the base of a tree. The squirrel will poke his head out to see what the fuss is all about. If you put a butterfly net over the hole and hit the tree again, the squirrel will automatically leap out and be caught in the net.
• Owls, snakes, raccoons and house cats are among many predators.
• The presence of flying squirrels can be detected by looking at nut shells on the forest floor. They open shells in a unique way, creating a single, long elliptical hole.
• The squirrel's taste for exotic black truffles that live six inches underground is critical to the continued health of our forests. The squirrels eat the truffles and their waste spreads the spores around the forest floor. The fungi produce tiny web-like shoots that attach to tree roots, improving their ability to absorb water and nutrients and acting as a barrier to soil-borne diseases.
Asked what prompted his fascination with the species, the 53-year-old father of two says,“once you've held a litter of baby flying squirrels in your hand, they get in your blood.”
The species does seem to be in the Patterson family's blood. Much to dad's delight, youngest son Jesse, a graduate of Sheridan Park Public School and Erindale Secondary School, is pursuing his master's of science in forestry at the University of Toronto. His research involves - surprise, surprise — the effects of habitat fragmentation on Glaucomys sabrinus, the northern flying squirrel.
“The nut doesn't fall far from the tree,” says the elder Patterson.
The computer consultant has established an excellent website, www.flyingsquirrels.com that tells you all you need to know about the rodents, including Sabrina's secret passion, a weakness that seduces many a human: chocolate.