So I was flitting around YouTube this weekend and came across this video of a member statement made by Carrot River MLA, Fred Bradshaw in the Saskatchewan Legislature and which was uploaded a couple months ago on April 17, 2013.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Psj4cFq7kqQ
Although they don’t specify who the “prominent NDP blogger” in question is (and out of the three or so bloggers who regularly write about the NDP in Saskatchewan, I’m probably number four on the list of prominence!), I’m pretty sure this guy is referring to this post I wrote a month after the Leadership convention.
Although my goal with this blog isn’t to provide ammo for the Sask Party back benchers and conservative radio hosts in Saskatchewan, one of my goals *is* to tell the truth (or at least the truth as I see it) while also being open and transparent.
To me, the altercation in 2009 took place in a public lobby when any member of the media or anyone with a camera phone or a blog or Facebook account could’ve reported what happened, just as I did. And similarly in 2013, my post about the lack of outreach I’ve noticed from the Broten campaign (other than a few fundraising appeals including a recent one that urged a donation to help keep up the momentum – grrr!) is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me dog.
Like the two approaches to politics I outlined in the original post, I think there’s a couple different approaches to how you behave as a member of a political party. Some believe that we’re all on the same team with our ranks closed to the outside and following the leader simply because he’s (or she as the case may be) is the leader. Others believe that we have a duty to tell the truth, speak out about things we don’t agree with and endeavour to be as open and transparent as possible – even about things that others might not want to hear.
The one thing I’d change if I re-wrote the post is to not make it appear that I’m speaking broadly for the Meili and other campaigns. I only know that I personally have not seen anything I would consider significant outreach and also that I have heard similar sentiments expressed by others who were involved in the leadership race in a variety of ways.
But of course, I also do not know what is happening behind-the-scenes and/or at the highest levels so perhaps Cam, Ryan, Trent and Erin are all attending secret meetings to plot how to rule the world (oh wait, that’s Brad Wall.) 😉
Anyhow, the worst part of all this as far as I’m concerned isn’t that the Sask Party used my blog for an attack that’s struggling to get to 100 views as I type this (and I’m probably responsible for half of those as I watched and re-watched it over the weekend thinking really?).
No, the worst part is that it was so easily preventable. As I said in the entry, had I seen some type of outreach – maybe not a personal phone call from Cam to everyone who supported a different candidate but something, I wouldn’t have written what I did and my post wouldn’t have become ammo for Mr. Bradshaw.
Seems almost too easy, doesn’t it?
(Coincidentally, today happens to be the three month anniversary of the NDP Leadership convention. Since I still haven’t seen anything I’d personally consider significant and meaningful outreach, as a mini-protest I’ve resolved to stop opening the NDP fundraising mailers and e-mails for the time being!) 😉
Pace went to a birthday party today and got a bubble tube as part of the goody bag treats. As soon as we got home, he suggested using it as a “light saver” so we could play Star Wars.
(I also have to note that after the party, Pace told us that he was the only boy from his class there. So that either means that any of the other seven boys in the class who were invited didn’t make it or my son’s got his first girlfriend!) 😉
Going to Hawaii a year and a half ago was one of the best trips of my life and I’m constantly thinking about when we’ll be able to get back (short answer: probably not for a long time!)
But if I can’t get there in person, I can pretend I’m there, even when I’m still in Regina. During my walk around Wascana Lake today at noon, there was lots of inspiration…
One person I passed was wearing coconut-scented sunscreen. If that doesn’t put you right on the beach, nothing will!
Another person, heavily tattooed and looking like a lifetime surfer was getting ready to take out a paddle board from the marina
I was listening to all kinds of “summer” music I also listened to in Hawaii – Bob Marley, Beach Boys, Jason Mraz, etc.
It was hot but not too hot, slightly muggy but not too muggy. In other words, just like Hawaii, perfect weather.
Lots of people in shorts, bathing suits, sun hats, etc. If I’d seen someone carrying a shave ice, I wouldn’t have looked twice! 😉
I might have to replace the “Cute” tag with one that says “Mega Cute” for this one…
(This pictures comes to me via a new app Shea and I have started using called Couple. It’s basically just like Facebook except it’s a social network for only two people. Why not just use Facebook? Couple is more private and there’s zero chance of accidentally sending some snarky comment to your entire friend list instead of just as a private message to your spouse.)
Plus it has a couple (er, no pun intended) features that I don’t think Facebook has – ability to send voice messages, option for private photos (ooh-la-la!), basic Events calendar and To Do List functionality. It even has the somewhat corny “thumbkiss” option although I can’t say Shea and I have used that one yet.
Went to TEDxRegina yesterday and honestly, my thoughts on the afternoon, with a couple exceptions, are pretty much the same as my thoughts on the inaugural one in 2012.
Perhaps because I usually cherry-pick the best TEDTalks when watching online, both years I’ve gone in expecting all TEDx talks will be stellar too. But honestly, like any conference you go to, some sessions are good, some aren’t as good
Different attendees will disagree about which is which and a lot depends on what you’re bringing in terms of your own viewpoints, interests and experiences (for example, last year one presentation done with a lot of heartfelt emotion didn’t resonate for me. This year, as a new father, hearing a very emotional story of a mother of a special needs child had me cutting onions throughout.)
Meeting new people is cool, especially new people you might not otherwise encounter. In some ways, those conversations are equally good or even better than the presentations. How do you get that in “real life” – meeting new interesting people on a regular basis outside your usual circles?
Partly because of the opportunity to meet new people, I preferred last year’s full day format which had (I think) the same number of speakers in the day but lots more time for socializing/networking/chatting including a lunch break.
Once again, there were people attending from my main circles – other librarians, politics, online communities including Twitter and MetaFilter, etc.
I liked the bigger venue this year as well after last year’s rather cramped (and exclusive feeling – which appealed to my own ego since I was in the room but not what I’d like to see in terms of maximizing people’s opportunities to participate in events like this – and I know that small size was due to the TED license, no decision of the event planners.)
At the risk of getting sued, I was joking with a couple colleagues who were able to attend with me that we should propose a parody for the next RPL Staff Conference (ReadxRegina?) where librarians and other staff members could get up and do their own 18 minute talks on whatever area is of interest to them.
Speaking of RPL, my former colleague at RPL, Library Journal “Mover & Shaker” and current Public Policy PhD student, Ryan Deschamps, was one of the presenters. In his presentation, he mentioned that “librarians know nothing…but we know how to find stuff” (I prefer the formulation “Librarians tend to know a little bit about a whole lot of things” which I think means basically the same thing – we are the ultimate generalists able to help people find credible, useful information about everything from health concerns to the tax code to the answer to 37-Down in today’s crossword puzzle.
The obvious is do something library-related (and that’s what I told people when we chatted about this question during breaks throughout the day). But what about libraries might appeal to a TED audience?
Libraries as the “grandfather of the current ‘sharing’ age”
A Swiftian “Modest Proposal” about why libraries are terrible places, wasting taxpayer dollars and should be abolished (When I inevitably daydreamed at different points of the day, I even had a plan for how you could do this using a storybook as a prop. Librarians love props!)
Why copyright should be eliminated (I did this one as part of a debate for a Librarians Forum at RPL so have much of the research done already.)
I did a special project on the relationship between Canadian publishers and public libraries in school and I’ve been published on the charging of user fees by Alberta public libraries but I think those are both pretty inside-baseball (hmm, maybe I should submit that latter topic to TEDxCalgary?) ;-)Beyond library topics, what else am I interested in?
I’m fascinated by the idea of a maximum wage so, although I think about it from a very layperson perspective, that’d be one topic I think I could have a lot of fun talking about. (Now where’d I put my Bono wraparound sunglasses?)
Went with Pace while he rode his new birthday bike over to a playground near our house. Along the way, we passed the house of one of his kindergarten classmates who was playing in her front yard and then, at the playground, another classmate happened to be there playing as well.
As I sat on the bench watching Pace and his classmate, I got thinking about some of my own memorable moments from my school years. I thought it might be interesting to record the first thing(s) that comes to mind when I think of each year of school I attended from kindergarten to grade twelve.
Other than the initial idea, I didn’t spend a lot of time planning what to write so these are going to be very spontaneous – literally, the first thing that comes to mind as I think back to each year. This means they’re not necessarily the “best” memory or whatever – just a scattering of memorable moments that stand out for one reason or another (it’ll be interesting to see if there are any patterns.)
Although I’m calling these “memorable moments”, the reality is that they’re all subject to faulty memory and details may have changed in my mind, elements become more important or twisted around or whatever.
Kindergarten (Ms. Halyk)
I remember hat we had to take a small rug to sleep on during a nap time each day which I thought was sort of strange. (I suspect I wasn’t taking naps at home by this time) We also had to tell the teacher every day if we’d done various hygiene tasks – comb our hair, brush our teeth, etc. I couldn’t figure out how she did it but she always knew if a kid was lying about whether they’d brushed their teeth (as the father of a kindergarten myself, I now know it’s not like five year olds are poker-faced liars!) Also weird – I broke my leg during the first week of kindergarten (maybe even the first day?) in a tragic teeter-totter incident yet that’s not even the first thing that comes to mind when I think about that year! 😉
Grade Two (Mrs. Hancock)
Occasionally Mrs. Hancock would buy her class treats as rewards – candy, donuts, ice cream sandwiches. Near the end of the year, she decided to buy the class ice cream and for some reason, I had my heart set on donuts. I somehow communicated that I wasn’t going to eat the ice cream, even if she bought it for me so rather than kicking my ass (as many teachers of that era would’ve done!) she ended up sending me and another boy (can’t remember if he also refused ice cream but somehow I doubt it – he just got roped in to accompany me) to the bakery to buy some donuts as well. (Side note: As this story shows, Mrs. Hancock was the sweetest old lady you could probably ever want for a teacher. Back before it was common, she used to buy bags of chips to hand out at Halloween and would regularly get hundreds of kids to her house in a town that probably only had a couple hundred kids in total. That’s why it was so shocking to find out that she later committed suicide after retiring from teaching.)
Grade Three (Mrs. Learmonth)
The first thing to come to mind is that I have this weird memory that there was a big deal made out of the metric system coming in or being made official when I was in grade three. But when I look at the Wikipedia entry for “Metrification in Canada”, I see no reference to anything significant happening in 1980. I wonder if I’m mis-remembering some other major Canadian milestone from that year? I see “O Canada” was officially made our national anthem in 1980 – are those two things similar enough that I could mix them up??? Or that something big happened regarding metric but in a different year? Oh, and I don’t know how it came about but I ended up selling my entire hockey card collection to Mrs. Learmonth, a collection which probably included half a dozen Wayne Gretzky rookie cards (though kids in those days didn’t “collect” cards so they were probably all ripped, written on and bend from actually playing with them!)
We had a health class and in one lesson, the teacher was explaining that every single food we eat comes from plants. “We eat corn – it’s a plant. We eat apples. They’re plants. We eat a hamburger or steak, it comes from cows that eat grass which is a plant. And so on.” I sat there thinking it over then put up my hand. “What about salt?” She stares hard at me then says “well, you couldn’t very well live on salt alone now could you?” which gets a big round of laughter from the class. But that wasn’t the point – I’d come up with something people eat that didn’t come from plants thus puncturing her whole lesson’s point.
And in that single moment, I realised a number of things… 1. teachers (and by extension, adults) don’t necessarily know everything.
2. if they don’t, they may change the question and/or outright lie to you.
3. looking back now, I’m not sure if this is where my skeptical side started or if it was something I always had. But it’s definitely one of my most valued attributes today. I’d go so far as to say that one of my maxims for life is still “Never Believe *Anything* 100%”
(I guess I also realised that even at ~8 years old, I could outsmart an adult. This is the first time I did that and it felt incredibly good and weird and amazing and scary.)
[Edit: I realised I put this story in the wrong place. I’m pretty sure this happened in Grade Three health class.]
Grade Five (Mr. Essery)
This one is pretty embarrassing to admit but given that I turned out to be a nerdy librarian, probably not that surprising. I was already a big reader so one day I got it in my head that I would get *really* smart if I read the dictionary (that we had to buy as one of our school supplies anyhow) from cover-to-cover. During reading time, I pulled out my Oxford Junior Dictionary (or whatever it was – I know the cover was blue) and started reading. Fairly quickly, one of the popular girls noticed and said loudly, “What are you doing? Reading the dictionary?” I can’t remember what I replied – instead of crumbling immediately with some excuse, I think I said “yes” as if this was the most normal thing in the world. But the next day in silent reading, I was back to reading the Hardy Boys or whatever I was in to back then. (Part of the reason I wanted to familiarize myself with the dictionary was that I was pissed that another girl in class – also popular plus a brainiac – *always* beat me when the teacher had us look up words in the dictionary then put our hands up as soon as we found them. She’s now a University prof teaching English Literature in Texas so I don’t feel quite so bad! 😉 (Side note #2: Mr. Essery was the second of my elementary school teachers to commit suicide. I didn’t know it at the time of course but later realised that he was rumoured to be a closeted gay man. I don’t know for sure but would expect that played a role in his decision to end his life.)
Grade Six (Mr. Quelch) Me and one of my best friends regularly finished our work early so often got to go sit in the library to read or play educational games or whatever. I can’t remember what it was called now but there was one game which I think was sort of like Monopoly but based on countries of the world and you got resources based on each country’s real world GDP and stuff. We played that game for hours and *loved* it.
Grade Seven (Mr. Hindle)
In my town, elementary school went from kindergarten to grade six. Then you moved to the high school which basically had “middle school grades” (eg. 7,8,9) in one wing and “high school grades (eg. 10, 11, 12) in another wing, divided by a gym in the middle and with very little cross-over between them. Mr. Hindle had a terrible reputation as a hardass, swinging rulers at kids, throwing chalk, taking absolutely no shit about anything. I was always pretty solid academically but I also didn’t like getting in trouble if I could help it. Luckily, I made it through the year without ever really getting his full wrath (not sure if the fact that his family lived across the street from us and that I regularly played with his two boys – both younger than me – helped with that. I doubt it.) Anyhow, although I never got in trouble, I remember once when he gave back a math test. It was a bit more advanced than elementary school 2+2=4 stuff but I knew I’d aced it. So I was surprised to see 99%. I re-checked my answers, realised I had it 100% correct so went up (probably quite tentatively) to ask why I only got a 99% “Mr. Hammond,” he said. “Nobody’s perfect!” and that was that.
Grade Eight (Mr. Huggins) This may have been grade seven but my memory is that it was around grade eight when one of my best friends got *heavily* into Dungeons & Dragons. I was pretty sure it wasn’t satanic like they alluded to in school assemblies but I saw a cult-like fervour in my friend’s devotion to his new hobby so didn’t let myself totally immerse myself like he and some of my other friends did. I did end up joining his newly formed D&D group for a little while (and have gamed a bit over the years but never to the extent of that group of my friends – most of whom I think still game on a weekly basis to this day!) But my one strong memory is that one guy in the group who wasn’t as nerdy as the rest of us (more of a jock with a bit of a reputation as a crazy daredevil) came to play and somehow him and I ended up getting in a fist fight. I caught him with a lucky blow and he ended up splurting blood all over my friend’s bedroom and probably some of his valuable D&D manuals as well. Probably one of the few times that role playing got that realistic!
Grade Nine (is it sad that I can remember my Grade One home teacher’s name clearly but have no idea whose homeroom I was in for grade nine? I think that’s probably because grade nine was when we started having different teachers for pretty much every subject and moving between class rooms depending on what you were taking so you didn’t build a strong connection with your home room) We had an art teacher who would play music during most of her classes after giving us our assignment – sculpt something with clay, draw an animal, build a spherical structure with straws or whatever. She didn’t like rock music no matter how much we tried to convince her to play “our” music so would usually play boring classical music. But she had one exception to the “no rock music” rule – for some reason, she loved Creedence Clearwater Revival so we’d often sit in class, especially if it fell on a Friday afternoon, with the CCR cranked! 😉
Grade Ten
Because I’d quit band, I joined choir, mainly so I could still go on band trips because of my deep love and appreciation for music. During the band tour, a random encounter with some sketchy characters on a side street in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan earned me the nickname “Pitbull” which I think only the three people I was with at the time know and only one continues to use in reference to me to this day.
Grade Eleven I always like playing sports although I was never a super-jock. So when a couple of my friends tried out for the high school football team in grade nine, I took a pass as being a tackling dummy for a bunch of older kids during 7am practices didn’t seem like my idea of fun. And in grade ten, I resisted the approaches of my friends once again. But by grade eleven, the team was desperate for players and there was only going to be one grade of kids ahead of me to punish me as a rookie (I was dumb enough to not realise that my friends, with two years’ under their belts, would also be part of the “veteran” group so they’d partake in some of the rookie abuse too – no brutal hazing but just silly stuff like making sure rookies cleaned up all the equipment after practice or whatever.) Anyhow, playing on the football team was a great experience and led to all kinds of memorable moments. Perhaps one of the funniest is hearing the coach yell “Monkey rolls!” and then we’d do this…
…until one of the three in the exercise landed on top of one or both of the other two. (You’d hope it was a smaller guy who ended up getting winded first but it was usually one of the bigger guys of course who’d land with all their weight on you.)
Grade Twelve This is another story I’ve related elsewhere on my blog but the TL;DR (“Too Long; Didn’t Read”) version is that a bunch of us skipped school to go on a road trip to Regina to “buy prizes” for a school dance one day. When we got back, we realised the school *did* notice when six guys from their grade twelve class all didn’t show up on the same day. It looked like we were going to get in huge trouble but by approaching the vice-principal in the evening when we got back and having a *very* frank discussion about what had happened, we ended up pre-empting any discipline.
For the past month, my Aunt Sandi has been visiting from Kelowna. Having lived most of her life in Regina, she moved to Kelowna when my grandfather was getting older to look after him and ended up staying there after he passed away.
We sure miss having her in Regina but love her annual visits – she usually comes for a few weeks around the time of Pace’s birthday every year as well as some Christmases.
Her timing this year was especially good – Sasha was born on April 16 and I had two and a half weeks off before I had to go back to work. Sandi was booked to arrive on May 2, just a couple days before I had to go back to work so it made for a very smooth transition from me being at home to Shea having someone else to lend a hand as needed.
And lend a hand she did – from pitching in to do dishes, helping with laundry or just holding the baby while Shea caught a nap, she was an enormous help! (As you can tell from the picture below, Pace loved having someone to play with too!)
She flew back to Kelowna today but we’re already looking forward to her coming back in July when she’s here for another couple weeks for a Peet family reunion.
