Christmas 2019

It's Christmas Day and I'm in Guelph. In recent years, Christmas hasn't been a very eventful occasion, but we still observed some rudimentary traditions. We would put up a Christmas tree and put gifts under it. We would hang stockings and have a turkey Christmas dinner.

This year, not so much. I didn't bother to put up my Christmas tree in Kitchener, and they didn't put one up in Guelph either, despite the fact that we both have artificial trees that we reuse annually. There are no stockings, no gifts, and we had nachos instead of turkey.

It was a green Christmas this year. We've had a lot of snow, but we got hit by a warm front just for the holidays and most of it melted. Last year I got the Christmas week off, but this time around, I worked Monday and Tuesday and will work Friday. We don't shut down entirely because Christmas still has a base in religion and we aren't a religious organization, but we still get Christmas Day and Boxing Day off. A lot of our members take the week off anyway, and the two statutory holidays make our regular scheduling difficult. As long as we're open, we need to have at least two staff members in the building, and since I took last year off, it was kind of my turn. We had more staff show up than I thought would, though.

I'm sure the loss of Luna plays a part in the more subdued nature of this years' festivities. I'll have some opportunity for a more traditional holiday gathering, though, as I am headed to Lee-Anne's family's place for Boxing Day, in which a number of people in her family network are gathering.

That's all I really have to say about Christmas this year, so I guess I'll just write on some more things I forgot to include in previous posts.

I should say that, this year is looking to be my worst in terms of updating. Previously, the year with the lowest number of updates was 2017 with 39. As of this post, I'll be at 36.

So... I've been wondering about whether or not it's ethical to jam a bunch of updates into the end of the year just to keep up with my goals. I mean, making three more posts in the next week isn't exactly unattainable.

So I think I'm going to try for it. Keep an eye on this blog during the next week for the end-of-year rush.

With that being said, here is a collection of things I meant to speak on but forgot about.

I saw a squirrel fighting a hawk during the summer this year. The squirrel kept running up to the hawk and hassling it, causing it to flap and reposition itself. Eventually, the hawk was at the end of its branch and the squirrel launched itself full-force into the bird. Its' front paws connected with the hawk and knocked them both fully off the tree. The squirrel then free-fell through the air, and caught itself with one paw on one of the lower branches, which bent, then sprang up, launching it safely onto another branch. The hawk flew away.

Probably the hawk was eyeing the squirrel's nest, and the squirrel was being protective of its' young. But still, the initial sight of the prey animal harassing a predator was captivating. Then the strength behind the blow the squirrel gave the hawk was shocking, the fact that the squirrel would launch itself out of the tree and free-fall to get rid of the hawk was touching, and its' acrobatic maneuver to save itself at the last moment was just such a great show of athleticism. The whole scene was captivating from start to finish, and I just happened to see it while I was having coffee in my backyard.

This year, I led a group to J&J's Hobby Store and got a set of Super Big Boggle. I don't mean to brag, but I might be the best Boggle player you'll ever meet. If you don't know what Boggle is, it's a game where letters are randomly laid before you in a square, and you need to find as many words as you can before a timer runs out. The longer the word, the more points you get. It's my favourite board game. A regular set features a 4x4 grid, while this one has an 8x8 one, making it four times as large. Such a simple way to make an already great game that much better. I can make far more words, and much more complex ones with this set.

It's not that important, but I did eventually attach that water filter to my kitchen sink that I got for my birthday. I don't have any particular reason to suspect my tap water, but hey, we were drinking that lead-contaminated water at our place in Guelph for the better part of a decade before we were notified, so I think it's probably better to be proactive about this. Plus, I'm a little skeptical about Kitchener water in general ever since we ran through two water coolers at work in quick succession due to the pipes corroding.

A place called Franky's closed. I meant to mention it in my City Developments post. Franky's was a dive bar, and considered to be the central hub for all of Kitchener's lowlifes. While some people were glad to be rid of the establishment, others thought that it had been useful for pooling together the city's riffraff in a nice, avoidable location, and were concerned that its' patrons would start frequenting other downtown spots. Some people didn't feel strongly about the news, assuming that the Franky's crowd would just migrate to Capers, another dive bar with a similar reputation. Another perspective that has been kicking around is that the closure of Franky's signifies the continued gentrification of downtown Kitchener, and that, even if you didn't care about the bar, it wouldn't be long before other independently owned businesses would be choked out.

One of Extend-a-Family's better-known employees, Nicki, recently retired. Among other things, she oversaw our Summer Program, WALES, and was deeply influential in Bridges to Belonging, previously known as Facile, in which I was an Independent Facilitator for about a year. I have been deeply involved in each of these, and so, her journey and mine have overlapped quite a bit in this past half-decade.

For her retirement, the organization threw a party. It had a High Tea Theme, which is characterized with high-backed chairs, tea, hors d'oeuvres, and fancy clothes worn in sort of an English style. We didn't have the chairs, and fancy clothes were optional, but we did have the tea and appetizers. There were a number of speeches, and probably the highlight was our Executive Director, Al, singing a modified rendition of Justin Bieber's Love Yourself. This is Bieber's really passive aggressive breakup song dedicated to his ex, so the fact that our Executive Director was doing a retirement version for Nicki was really funny.

Speaking of Nicki, one other way that she has impacted Extend-a-Family in recent years is by establishing a relationship with an online training course run through Cornell University, called CCLD. This stands for Citizen Centred Leadership Development, and has been influential in how we at WALES operate. For example, we used to refer to the people we serve as participants, which was considered progressive, as it replaced the clinical model's term, which was client, but now, with the CCLD perspective, we call them members, because they're not simply participating in the development of their own lives. Also, WALES was originally hosted inside a school and followed an education model. I wasn't around during this time, but eventually they moved out and became a day program, but now we're branching away from the day program model and we are considered a community group.

Anyway, point is, it's a 14-week course and my employer funded me to attend it, which I've been doing every Tuesday for the past 14 weeks. So I've successfully completed this training, but never mentioned it on here while it was happening.