SPOILERS!
SPOILERS!
Shea and I went to the Sask NDP’s Coronation Park Nomination Meeting tonight and it was wilder than we ever expected – over 400 rowdy people crammed into Thom Collegiate’s auditorium to hear from three candidates – April Bourgeois, Noor Burki, and Chris Gust – and choose the person who will represent our home constituency in the next provincial election.
Shea’d picked her candidate ahead of time but I legitimately hadn’t decided who I was going to vote for as there were things I liked about all three of them. (As is often the case in contests of this type, you end up wishing you could put all candidates in a blender to combine the best qualities of each.)
But, since shoving human beings into large blenders is illegal, I decided I’d go to the meeting and make my decision based on their presentations, their shows of support as well as the impression I got from any pre-meeting contacts I had with the candidate or their teams as well as what I could find out about them via social media and online.
Another interesting thing to think about in contests of this type is the “constituencies within a constituency” and where candidates might draw the bulk of their support from – people who share a connection via their line of work or their involvement in the labour movement or their ethnicity or where they grew up or where they went to school or their community profile or where they volunteer or from former neighbours and so on.
For that reason, it wasn’t 100% certain but it was pretty clear that there was a large presence of people from Noor’s ethnic community at the meeting which seemed like it might make the final result a foregone conclusion before we even got out of the registration line.
Still, my understanding is that something similar happened in another recent nomination contest where one minority candidate had a lot of visible support but he ended up losing because many of those people were not resident in the constituency and only there for support but ineligible to vote.
But in the end, that wasn’t the case this time. The votes were counted and Noor Burki was chosen as the next Sask NDP candidate for Regina Coronation Park!
Anyhow, I can’t do a post like this without creating a list so here’s…
10 Random Thoughts From The Regina Coronation Park Nomination Meeting
“Saskatchewan” – Zachary Lucky
The best part of seeing a big tentpole movie on opening weekend is that you can go on the Internet again without fear of seeing SPOILERS:
Most couples meet through friends or dating sites or at church or the bar. The story of how Shea and I met is a bit more random.
Her parents were at a funeral and happened to be talking to someone from my hometown. They mentioned their daughter was starting university in the fall and needed a place to stay.
The person said they knew of two families from my hometown that owned condos and rented rooms. One was owned by a couple who were farmers and teachers (and coincidentally, their son was a good friend of mine and I had actually lived in their condo first before my parents decided to follow their lead and buy a condo that my sister and I could live in while we were in University, renting out the extra rooms to help pay the mortgage.)
The other condo they knew about was owned by a farmer and a nurse. That was my parents and since Shea was going to be studying to be a nurse, they decided to call us first.
I’m not sure if it was the first day they came to see the condo or move her in but they still joke about me sitting on the couch, and in a very “college” moment, eating macaroni and tomatoes right from the pot, possibly even offering her parents some! 🙂
Shea moved in in 1997 which means I’ve known her for 19 years, nearly half of my life, but we obviously didn’t start dating right away and our relationship was strictly platonic.
There’s a bit of a soap opera part in here that led to us dating that I’m not going to get into but at any rate, we started dating a year or so after she moved into the condo (I make the totally inappropriate joke that we started dating after she couldn’t pay the rent one month but the reality is that I’m always happy that we started our relationship as friends – going to movies, playing cards, eating meals together – and it grew from there.)
Our dating was sort of on the down low at first (kids today have a different term for it – “Friends with Benefits”!) with her parents still asking “When did you start dating?” occasionally and my mom corralling me at lunch one day to ask if I was dating my roommate which I denied even though it was basically true.
Our relationship continued to solidify and grow though we moved at a pretty slow pace (hmm, maybe that’s what inspired the name of our son?).
Shea convocated from nursing in 2001 and wanted to move to Alberta for a bit to have the experience of living in a different province/bigger city. We had some serious discussions about our relationship at that point since I was very happy in Saskatchewan. But luckily for Pace and Sasha, we ended up moving to Calgary together and ended up staying there for three and a half years.
While living in Calgary, we got engaged at Fairmont Hot Springs in 2002 and married in Mexico in 2003. We moved back to Saskatchewan eventually and had Pace in 2007 then Sasha came along in 2013.
We’re recently passed fifteen years of marriage and for the most part, it’s been pretty good. What works well is that we’re of a similar mind on the big picture stuff – politics, religion, finances, etc. (not to mention we both work in caring professions which shows a similarity in personalities as well). But we also complement each other well. Shea’s the detail-oriented, logical planner and I’m the big picture dreamer; she tends to keep things serious and on track, I tend to be goofy and prone to spontaneity. To co-opt the popular metaphor, she’s the destination and I’m the journey.
After getting married on the beach in Mexico in March 2003, we had a reception in Shea’s small hometown for a couple hundred friends and family who couldn’t join us in Mexico.
Neither Shea nor I are huge dancers and were sort of dreading the obligatory “first dance”. While reading about weddings online, I’d come across the idea of a “removal dance” instead of a “first dance”.
The idea is that you invite all married couples to join you on the dance floor. The DJ plays a song (I had a perfect one in mind where each verse details the growing depth of a couple’s relationship through old age with a beautiful melody and a darkly realistic lyric) and after each verse, your MC asks people who’ve been married “less than one year”, “less than five years”, less than ten years” and so on to leave the dance floor.
(And holy shit, until reading about this song on Song Meanings, I’d *never* realised that the conceit of starting each verse with “Line One is the time…”, “Line Two is the time…” had a double meaning as he’s not just describing the start of a verse in the song which is how I’d always heard it but also how each verse captures something that causes wrinkles (lines) to appear over time! So much for my English degree helping me learn to analyse texts!)
We hadn’t planned it out ahead of time but Shea and I left at the first announcement (along with a couple septuagenarians who’d remarried late in life but had only been married to each other less than a year!) then stood on the edge of the dance floor watching other couples dancing – friends who’d married a few years before us and whose weddings we’d attended, cousins and gradually older aunts and uncles, our respective parents, and others in the crowd.
Again, we hadn’t planned it this way but it worked out perfectly when the final verse was introduced by our MC saying “Could everyone married forty years or less leave the dance floor” and it emptied except one long-time couple from Shea’s side and one long-time couple from my side. (Quick note – I like how many weddings now post signs saying “Take any chair – we’re not about sides” which is a positive change from the old way of thinking of each family having a “side” of the hall or church or whatever.) We went back on the dance floor and joined the two longest lasting couples at our reception to finish the dance together in a big circle.
Life will bring many joys, much sadness and the odd curveball but here’s hoping that even if we’re not big dancers, Shea and I are the last ones dancing at some young couple’s wedding someday a few decades in the future!
The Flames are out but I’m still watching NHL playoffs, especially with a bunch of games going to game seven and/or overtime which is always exciting.
But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sequence like the one that happened last night – Vegas Golden Knights leading the San Jose Sharks 3-0 with about ten minutes left in the third period. Normally, that’s game over. But after a post-faceoff cross-check puts the Shark captain off-balance and then a different Knight collides with him, leading to a freak injury for the Sharks’ captain, the Knights player who gave the initial cross-check gets a 5-minute major and is tossed from the game.
In the ensuing power play, the Sharks rally to score a record-tying FOUR powerplay goals on one penalty not only catching the Knights but passing them.
There’s now maybe four or five minutes left but after a near total collapse, the Knights press back. Finally, with less than a minute remaining, the Knights score to tie the game which leads to overtime.
Then, after an edge-of-your-seat, back-and-forth overtime, just as the extra period is nearing its end, an unheralded Sharks player who’s not played much so still has fuel in his tank, takes a pass and skates in to score and win the game.
Immediately there was lots of controversy about the penalty call – was it a reactionary call because of the injury? Do refs “manage” the game with how they choose to call/not call penalties (that post-face-off cross-check is a common move and it was only because of the injury that the major was assessed. And does it matter that the cross check didn’t directly cause the injury, only indirectly? On some level, did the refs think a harsher penalty would help control a heated game where the Sharks captain was just taken off injured? And that it wouldn’t have such a significant outcome since it’s still incredibly rare to score 3+ powerplay goals on a 5-minute power play. Put it this way – the average team scores on about 20% of their power plays, the Sharks scored at an 80% rate on this single power play.) And ultimately, can any series hinge so much on one play or one penalty? The Knights have to own that they collapsed – letting in so many goals but also letting go of a 3-1 lead in the series generally plus they didn’t capitalize on a (make-up?) call that put them on the power play late in the game, let alone score in overtime?
For me, I think the ultimate issue is that refs in the NHL are as inconsistent as in any sport in the world. Rules are applied differently at the start and end of the season and at the start and end of the game, they’re applied different in regular time and overtime, they’re applied differently if players are injured or not (that’s probably understandable to some degree), they seem to be applied differently depending on which teams are playing or sometimes which players are involved (“reputation” calls). And most egregiously, there appears to be a different set of rules in the regular season and playoffs where hockey’s old-school, conservative culture demands that refs “let them play” and so players can slash, hack, trip, punch and yes, cross-check, with very little risk of being penalized.
Anyhow, watch this…
…and here’s some commentary by The Hockey Guy:
Finally, this…
After their best season in a generation and winning the Western Conference, I was super-stoked for a long playoff run by my Calgary Flames.
Unfortunately, they flamed out in the first round losing to the 8th seed Colorado Avalanche in five games, shutting out the Avalanche in the first game but then losing four in a row.
(Believe it or not, the Flames actually did better than the Tampa Bay Lightning who finished as the overall top team in the regular season but were bounced in four straight games by the 8th seed in their conference, the Columbus Blue Jackets.)
Now that a few days have passed, here’s a few thoughts:
This *was* a penalty against the Flames at a critical point in the game putting them down by two players for two minutes…
This was *not* a penalty against the Avalanche when Johnny Gaudreau was constantly hooked, slashed and held to slow down someone who is otherwise one of the most dominant players in the game (at least when the rules are enforced as written)…