we got to bed about 2am and listened to Coast. Art had a Climatologist, as his guest the topic was global warming. We listened for a bit. Lost of skeptics came on. I figured out 2 prevailing themes from the skeptics #1 Follow the money, #2 global warming is not a man made issue. I partly agree with these two themes. First the Skeptics have their own money trail as well or agenda, wanting to preserve the status quo. Second: global warming isn’t just a Climate/earth cycle’s thing. Human activity has contributed to global warming but how much we don’t know. Since I’m not a climatologist, I’m not qualified to make comments about this issue but I have a voice called this blog. I think this current about of global warming is about two thirds natural and one-third human activity. I don’t know what the answer is to combat global warming. The ICPP is saying every scientist agrees. Well they don’t all agree and this tells me where the origins of follow the money comes from. I’m leaning towards the skeptic’s side of this issue and I’m not trying to open up a debate here. Just reacting to the show last night.

So now the news of the day here in Alberta is that the Province now want’s to make it easier for foreign workers to work here and have made a special arrangement with Ottawa to make it easier for these foreign workers to adjust here. Does this mean that they will be taking all of our upcoming “affordable housing” units away from the people that have lived here for years? What I’m getting at is we have a 0% vacancy rate here in the City. Where are these people supposed to live? We have our own citizens of this City that are being forced out on the street because of these greedy gouging property management firms. Where are these people supposed to live now that they have to compete with foreign workers for housing? Pardon me if I’m sounding Red neckish here. People who know me will say I don’t have a racist bone in my body and I’d like to think that’s true. The media has been saying, “Don’t come to Alberta unless you can find a place to live.” On the other hand we have a real labor shortage of skilled workers. Over 1000 people a month are moving into Alberta add foreign workers into the mix and this will strain our housing even more. There’s not that much land around here for housing as it is. There are other questions this raises as well. How does this impact Unions? Usually any new workers that come onto a company have a waiting period of about 3 months before they can be signed up to a Union and get Union benefits. Labor quality. In the last ten weeks we’ve had 2 industrial accidents in Fort MacMurray. Each of these workers were killed assembling oil tanks at the Horizon oil site. The first worker was Chinese I don’t know about the second worker but if there is a common denominator at work here this means that by bringing more foreign workers we’re risking more industrial accidents and sloppy construction practices. These people aren’t trained at NAIT or SAIT. We’re putting them at risk as well as ourselves.

I think I read 5 scenes yesterday and about to reach scene #40 sometime this week. This means I’m at the half waypoint of the first edit. Good stuff. I hope to have the first edit completed by the end of the month. Then comes the fun stuff doing the rewrite. I think the first rewrite should be done in June, if I’m lucky that is, the 2nd rewrite in July. The rewrites usually get better after the first couple then it’s just a question of connecting the dots and adding closure. I figure the book will be ready for submission October. Over the summer all I’m going to be doing is the job F and website stuff. I also did some splicing and cutting, trimming back scenes that were too large and if I had 3 such large scenes how to make a 4th scene out of the three. I trimmed out 10 scenes this way as my target is to have 80 scenes/100K. At the moment I have 64 scenes by splicing and cutting, I’ll have an extra 10 scenes to expand to 74 scenes. That means I’ll need another 6 more scenes. I have 86,431 words so far and since I’ll need 6 more scenes that means I’ll need 13,569 extra words between these 6 scenes. Some scenes like scene #59 is 1514 words. Where scene #9 is 935 words. I’m not trying to keep the scenes all the same word count. It is what it’ll be. But 13,569 words/by 6 means that each scene will be 2,261 words way to long. I need to take 800 words out of that “formula” and beef up other weaker scenes. Of course avoiding info dump and summary but this will all come out in the rewrite. I plan on cutting and splicing after the first edit. Then the rewrite begins. Now that I’ve spoke to that, it’s time to work on F before the job thing.