Wedding Shower

This will be some tonal whiplash compared with my last post. I was going to take a break from blogging until the wedding, but my coworkers did something very sweet that I feel I have to share

They threw us a wedding shower!

I took a few more photos but I'm not going to show anything with identifiable information.

I kind of knew something was coming. Sometime earlier one of the members apologized for not being about to make it to the party. I asked if she was talking about a party connected to me. She said yes and I didn't press further.

I really tried to be oblivious. Later, someone apologized, saying they didn't want to ruin the secret. So I told them not to. I saw someone wiping something off the white board when I walked in. I asked what she was erasing, and she said she couldn't tell me.

I told Lee-Anne that I felt like I was getting something a little bit more than my congratulatory flowers and Indigo gift certificate, which I'd gotten a couple weeks earlier. I didn't know what time it was going to happen, or to what scale though.

Day of, one of the members asked "When's Gryphon's party?" and I saw the staff try to quiet her, but she still said "Is it at 12:30?" So I texted Lee-Anne "I think I'm having a party at 12:30"

Apparently I still missed a bunch of tells. Apparently the calendar just had "Community Event", and I didn't think to question it. There was a Strategic Plan at the main office and it was decided that each team should send a facilitator, and both my partner facilitators called not it, leaving me to fill the role. That put me out of the office for a couple hours before the event, giving them a chance to decorate.

So I went in, they all shouted surprise. I looked around, texted Lee-Anne "Do you know anything about this? It doesn't look like it's just for me". She said she didn't know anything. I sent her pictures, and she said "Fine, I know. Coming over right now". Apparently they told her when I said that she had gotten a job, so she was able to book time off to celebrate.

They had us play The Newlywed Game. It's where you sit back-to-back with your partner, questions get asked, and you raise an indicator (they had us use our shoes) showing which person you thought the question applied to more. Because you're facing away from each other, the couple doesn't get to see each other's answers but the crowd does. It makes it funny to see how well they know other and where they disagree.

Me and Lee-Anne agreed on almost everything. People were surprised when we both said she was the better cook (they know I have a food blog). We both said our own families were the weirdest, though.

They had a bunch of gifts for us and they were super thoughtful. They gave us some wooden bowls that were sourced from a local artist and an old friend of mine. I'd bought some for my mother and brother, and when I saw that the bowl I had for myself fit perfectly into the set I gave it away too. I'd said that I needed to go to the Art Walk this year to buy two soup bowls and a salad bowl. My coworkers tracked this guy down, bought two soup bowls and he's currently making us a salad bowl.

One of my coworkers made homemade blueberry jam as kind of an homage to my grandma.

We got a camping set. We got some chocolate canoes and some drinks referencing a boat tipping over, because of mine and Lee-Anne's fourth date in which we capsized a canoe. We got a gift card to Vincenzo's, an independent local Italian grocery.

The decorations were really thoughtful too. A lot of them were drawn by hand, and a lot of the sunflowers in the bouquets came from one of my coworkers personal garden.

You might have noticed that the theme was sunflowers. Well, when we came home, we saw this:

Our first sunflower blossom of the year! It opened up while we were celebrating (and it filled out more the next day)

RIP Cassidy

Unfortunately I have to follow my previous happy post with a sad one.

My mother and brother's cat Cassidy had been breathing loudly so they called the vet and they told them to take her to the emergency clinic. Over there they said that she likely had a respiratory infection and put her on antibiotics. She got a bit more energy but the loud breathing didn't go all the way away. They brought her to the vet for a follow-up and they looked a bit closer, finding infection throughout her nose but not her throat. They said this was good, as sinus infections are much less likely to be fatal than ones in the throat. Her appetite had dropped so they put her on an appetite stimulant. My brother was force feeding her with a syringe at this point.

I was in a team meeting at work when I got a text saying they were testing for nasal polyps, but that she could have cancer. Then a text saying that it was cancer. Then a text saying that they were recommending euthanasia.

My coworker drove me all the way to the vet in Guelph. I got to be there when it happened. We took her body back and buried her in the backyard that night.

She was only eight years old, and they'd owned her for three. Right now they have a nineteen year old cat that's still going strong.

It hurts additionally because they got Cassidy after Luna's passing, who was another cat that passed prematurely and unexpectedly due to an overlooked illness, although in her case they owned her for nine years before her passing. Both cats were female grey tabbies. It feels like history repeating itself.

Unlike the other Guelph cats, there was no overlap of when me and Cassidy lived there. I was still pretty involved in her adoption, though. They had been considering getting another, younger cat to keep the company of the two older cats after Luna's passing for a while, and I encouraged them strongly to follow through. There is a cat cafe in Guelph where you can adopt. The cafe part was shut for COVID, but you could still schedule time to mingle with the cats and adopt if you wanted.

I made the appointment for them and went with them. Before going, I remember joking with Lee-Anne after looking at the current cafe residents online, that they might fall in love with Cassidy based solely on her appearance. You're never supposed to replace an animal, but Cassidy and Luna looked similar in that they were both grey female tabbies.

I remember that Cassidy didn't emerge until near the end of their allotted time at the cafe. After hiding for most of the hour she walked out on top of a cat play structure and let Mom and Duncan scratch her neck while she stood above them.

Afterward, Mom and Duncan were still unsure, and I impressed on them to make a decision. I only mention my involvement to explain why I feel so connected despite her never being my cat.

They moved forward to get Cassidy. They had to interview with a cat expert there, who apparently had a soft spot for her but had difficulty getting her adopted because she was so shy. She'd lived in the cafe for years at that point.

When they first brought her home, Cassidy instantly tucked herself into the smallest space she could find and bunched into a ball. She would not interact at all with anyone. You could touch her and she wouldn't lash out or anything. She just wouldn't react. I remember worrying that she would starve herself.

But she did warm up and slowly become more and more affectionate. For awhile, she would hide from me when I visited, even though she was affectionate with Mom and Duncan. I remember the first time she approached me. She'd been following me around at a distance. I was spreading mayo on a piece of bread when I felt something soft land on my foot. I looked down and it was Cassidy, just sitting on me and looking the other direction. From then on, whenever I would visit she would still run and hide at first, but she would slowly warm up and want head scratches. Eventually she stopped running from me entirely.

She was brilliant with the two older cats. She interacted with them but never to the point of overwhelm. She was a naturally gentle cat.

Sometimes she would get a little playful with the humans though, and if she ever played a little rough would shrink away as if expecting to be hit, so she might have had a rough background.

She definitely wasn't a carbon copy of Luna. Luna was a goofball, Cassidy was coy.

As a weird aside, tonight there is a blue moon and also a supermoon. Two events that won't come together simultaneous again for 14 years. I don't know what that would symbolize or anything, but when strange circumstances in your life connect with rare events like this, it's always tempting to try and find connections.

Rest peacefully Cassidy. We love you and we miss you. 

Work Anniversary

Today was my fifth work anniversary at WALES. Technically, I started a week later because of an overlap with my old Summer Program job, but the agency still counts my anniversary as being August 28th. They sent me flowers and a $75 Indigo gift card.

I also get an extra week of vacation going forward.

More importantly, it was also Lee-Anne's first day of work. She's back at the CNIB, the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, where she finished an extended paid internship about half a year ago. Her new position has more potential to be a long-term thing, as it's a one year contract with a three month probation. That's pretty standard, it's how I started at WALES. It took me a couple years to go permanent.

She's doing something slightly new now. She's providing employment supports for people with vision loss. She didn't want me to announce her job on here until she'd signed her contract and done her first day, which I understand.

It's cool that our work anniversaries are on the same day (even if I started work a week later).

To keep the good feelings rolling, we went to City Hall and got our marriage license. Still needs to be signed by an officiant. Our ring pillow thing came in the mail today too. We went out for dinner to celebrate everything.

Less glamourous but almost as important, we finally got a plumber to come in and look at some things. 

I also got stung by a wasp today. Pretty eventful day.

Social Media Branding

I made a post last year expressing my disdain for Artificial Intelligence, specifically regarding the image generator Midjourney and the language learning model ChatGPT. At that time people were most upset about Midjourney but now ChatGPT has taken the helm.

Google has been slowly rolling out their own language learning model, which they're calling BardAI. I've got to say, with access to these near-omniscient artificial minds that can conjure all of human knowledge and produce optimized creations in seconds, you'd think the branding would come across a bit more transcendental. 

ChatGPT is painfully literal, like the CEO asked "So what's this technology? A Generative Pre-training Transformer? And what does it do? Chat? So call it ChatGPT". BardAI sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons nerd came up with it. The Bard class is a musician anyway, so you'd think it would be used for a music-producing AI (which exists). Lee-Anne didn't know what a bard was, which is a bad sign for its public appeal. Also, Bard sounds like "barred", as in, to have your autonomy revoked, a horrible implication for AI and what Lee-Anne initially thought it meant. It also sounds too close to "banned", and "bad", both negative words.

Branding in general seems to be taking a weird turn. Germany tried making an alternative to Twitter (which has rebranded simply to "X", which its consumers have essentially ignored) called "Mastodon". To me, three syllables seems too many for a popular brand, especially a word that translates to "nipple teeth".

If I were to come up with a name for a language learning model (which I wouldn't, because I hate them), I think I would call it "Polly" and the mascot would be a parrot. Research has shown that humans respond better to female voices and identities when it comes to electronic assistants. This can be seen in the examples of Alexis and Siri. In addition, a parrot is known to be an animal that can mimic human language, but doesn't possess the ability to comprehend it, which makes it unique but unintimidating.

Taking the example of Mastodon, I would rebrand it to Mammoth and its mascot would be a woolly mammoth simply referred to as "Woolly". Shorter name, also the word more easily implies a sense of largeness, which I'm guessing was the reason for the name Mastodon. A social media platform is better the larger the network of people on it is, so the slogan I would use would be "Mammoth: the giant of social media". Posts would be called "SoundOuts" and have the image of Woolly trumpeting. I thought about calling them "Trumpets" but unironically I believe that it's dangerous to use a word that contains "Trump" in it during this specific point in history.

I should probably offer the caveat that maybe "Mastodon" works better in German.

Anyway, these are the competitive branding decisions that I've come up with using only my primitive, mono-conscience human brain.

I've always hated the format of Twitter. Even before Elon Musk took it over, back when it got popular when I was just out of highschool. I always thought it was the very worst social media platform. At the time, Facebook was the predominant social media, and Twitter was literally Facebook reduced only to its status update function. Literally, all Twitter did was reduce functionality to only allow for your thoughts to be presented in small sound bites. I resent so much that it became the platform used for political discourse.

I had a Twitter for a bit and found that it brought out the worst in me. I would unconsciously spit out my most controversial hot takes and offer no context or nuance. To my additional horror, it quickly became the platform I was most popular on, with people referencing it when I talked to them in my personal life. I set my account to private and never looked back.

I think Elon is deleting all accounts that have been inactive for a certain period of time, which my account assuredly qualifies for. I'm grateful to Musk for his horrible business decisions, which appear to be erasing the worst of my online presence, and also destroying the worst social media platform online. He's also losing a ton of money, which I'm also happy about.

This was going to be a post on Artificial Intelligence, but it's devolving into a tirade against social media in general.

Right now I've got an account on Facebook and InstaGram. All I use them for is posting major life updates and to say how many sunflowers I managed to grow that year. Facebook has become so consumed by bots and scammers pretending to people that you know that I don't trust any friend requests until I make voice contact with the person.

In fact, there have been two instances where someone has made accounts with my name and image and has been friending people. They both got reported and taken down.

Apparently Facebook is now known as the platform for "old people" of which I am one. InstaGram is where the young people are.

Except they're the exact same platform. They're both owned by Meta, they both use the same Direct Messaging system, called Messenger, and they both do exactly the same thing. Literally, they both offer you the option of syncing your updates so that they go to both platforms. Despite having a reputation for serving different demographics, most people have accounts on both platforms, and most people sync their updates so both their profiles contain the same content. It's pretty well just a filter, a simple cosmetic difference differentiating the two. The idea that they're different products is completely and totally an illusion.

I've considered playing around with some of the AI systems, but at this point you still have to make an account and either pay them money or agree to review the quality of their work, and I'm just not willing to support them in that way.

The closest I've gotten is with Goblin Tools, a free online service with a bunch of different tools. It's main thing is "MagicToDo" which takes a task and breaks it down into smaller steps, paired with an "Estimator" that lets you know how long it should take to do something. You can also use a "Judge" which detects the tone of a message, a "Formalizer", which converts your text to portray a different tone, making your message more or less professional, emotional, direct, or sarcastic. You can also select the degree to which you want the message altered by choosing between one to five levels of intensity using peppers as a symbol. There is also a "Chef", where you enter ingredients you have in your house and it conjures up a recipe, and a "Compiler" which takes a "brain dump" and converts it into steps.

This seems to be marketed toward people with cognitive disabilities living independently, usually people with ADHD or autism. We've begun using it at work. There's a motion to advocate for it as a tool to help people figure out what to cook at home, and I used it to edit a cover letter. The person I was supporting wrote a cover letter, and the Formalizer converted it to be more formal. Then I edited the script the formalizer came up with (it needed it).

As far as branding goes, this seems like the smartest of the examples I've given in this post. For some reason, neurodivergent people seem to compare themselves with goblins a lot. Also, the use of peppers was smart, because the term "neurospicy" as slang for people that process information differently has gotten popular, and it introduces the Formalizer as a tool to convert "spicy thoughts". I know "Goblin Tools" is three syllables and I said to avoid three syllable branding, but maybe chunking it into two words helps, because it doesn't feel as clunky as "Mastodon", at least to me. 

It doesn't advertise itself as AI, but it is. I've seen people on the ADHD subreddit advocating for the use of AI as an accessibility tool to help with writing emails and cover letters, to act as a prosthetic for their broken brains, or to convert boring tasks into exciting missions. Remember, I have ADHD so I'm involved in this discussion. I find the idea of filtering your voice through artificial intelligence disgustingly disingenuous.

I'll probably make a blog post playing with the Goblin Tools. That was going to be this post but my unfiltered spicy goblin brain got side tracked and so you get this for the time being.

Encampments Part 3

There have been some developments since the last time I spoke on our homeless encampment situation. My last update was September last year. We had two encampments, one by the train station, and one on Roos Island in Victoria Park. The city's plan was to let the weather get cold enough that the residents would leave. That didn't work. 

There were talks on whether or not to evict them. At the train station they went as far as issuing a notice to leave by the end of the month, but no one complied. So they did this thing where they would extend the eviction deadline by a month at a time for awhile before they eventually stopped bothering. 

A while later there was a discussion on whether or not to move out the Roos Island residents, and it was eventually decided that they couldn't because the city didn't have any alternative shelter options available.

A public discourse was held on whether or not to take down the statue of Queen Victoria in Victoria Park. That may sound unrelated, but Roos Island residents issued 13 demands concerning affordable housing, drug laws, and oppression toward marginalized groups. One of the demands was the removal of colonial imagery, starting at Willow River Park (their proposed name for the park). The largest local colonial symbol is that statue of Queen Victoria. It has routinely been used as a medium for people to express their distain toward Canada's roots, specifically regarding the residential schools, by splashing red paint on it and by putting children's shoes around it.

Some locals complained that a decision would be made with bias in favour of the encampment residents, especially because the mediator said that she would prioritize marginalized voices. At the time I thought that this might be a token effort on behalf of the city to show good faith to the island residents, as it would be a nod to one of their demands. But it's easier to take down a statue than it is to create affordable housing or change drug laws, and it didn't come with a promise to further decolonize.

It all went out with a fizzle though, as indeed the discussion seemed in favour of removing the statue, but it's still here today without further pursuit of the topic. At some point, a plaque was added at the base, saying that the city acknowledged the harm done to the Indigenous peoples.

Eventually, some more shelter options were developed. Single room houses with communal washrooms which allowed the city to say that they had provided an alternative to the encampments before making moves to evict. The new space is next to a dump, a detail that gets mentioned by the unhoused and the housed alike whenever it's brought up. Some people voluntarily took advantage of the new shelter, but many felt the location was less convenient due to it being further removed from resources.

So residency on the island didn't dip as much as the city had hoped, and they resorted to a classic Canadian trick.

They decided to "renovict" them.

In Ontario, we have renter protection for anyone living in a residential unit constructed before 2018. That means rent increases are limited to a certain percent per year. Because housing has increased so drastically and so quickly, that means that people who have been renting for longer are getting nicer and nicer deals compared to anyone that needs to move currently. So landlords typically are not fond of long-running tenants, because they know they can jack up the price if they move out. To get around the renters protection, it's a classic move to go with what is popularly known as "renoviction". This is the act of providing renovations to the unit. If the alterations are significant enough, they can justify a rent increase that bypasses the usual rent limit, often to an extent that renders the unit unlivable to the current tenant.

In these pictures, barricades have been placed in front of both of the bridges that act as sole access to Roos Island. Apparently they've got plans to renovate both bridges at once, fully cutting off access to the island. In the meanwhile, they just have fences up as a symbol of their future promise to construct.

It's still not quite as drastic a move as fully and completely cutting people off. They stationed security guards at each gate, and they allow for residents living there before the gates went up to continue to access it. They don't allow new residents to move in though.

It did make living there uncomfortable enough that the residents slowly moved away from the site. Right now, there is one lone resident occupying the entire island, constantly monitored by four security guards.

Less action has occurred at the train station encampment. Residency there has decreased by about half, and it looks like the city has paved over about half of the previously grassy space. This could be the key deterrent, as it's hard to pitch a tent on pavement.

Take The Heat Off Complete

For the past three weeks I've been teaching de-escalation to firefighters. I talked a little bit about it in a previous post after we'd workshopped a presentation and done a run-through. 

Our head of training was approached by a firefighter that caught wind of the fact that we had a crisis intervention training, and wanted to know if we could develop a more targeted workshop for firefighters. I was asked to help with developing and facilitating the presentation, as I am one of the people that teaches the training that earned this request. Very important to point out here that what we came up with was an amalgamation of our general knowledge as it applies to firefighters. We did not use any material from our crisis intervention training.

We named it "Take The Heat Off" as a play on their role of putting out fires, and the goal of the training, which was to cool down fiery emotions.

I'm not going to go too in-depth about my experience for confidentiality reasons. There were sixteen sessions total, and I taught nine of them. The people tasked with developing and presenting the material were myself, another person that facilitates our crisis intervention training, and then the person who is head of training that received the request in the first place.

Our head of training did (almost) every session, while me and the other facilitator traded days. This was because I still have a day job and I can't just peace out for several weeks to train firefighters full time. To emphasize this point, the other facilitator is not only a crisis intervention trainer like myself, she also works at the same branch of our organization. That leaves my main gig stretched pretty thin for staff, so it was agreed that only one of us would be training at a time. Although I did sub in once when the main trainer couldn't be there, which is how I wound up teaching an extra session.

I'm sure we annoyed the other staff quite a bit with our absence, but the agency was pretty highly incentivized to make this happen.

It was cool to work with the head of training. She used to work at the branch that I work for now, and through absurd chance, I've never worked with her before. When I came on as a student, she went on maternity leave the day before I started. When I completed my placement, she came back the day after. When I came back as a paid employee, she left for this training position the day before I started! That last one isn't such a strange coincidence, I was hired because a position opened when she left.

I won't share the material we used, but in general, we explored biases and stigmas, we offered de-escalation techniques and resources, and we covered compassion fatigue. The demographics they work with most are the homeless population and people with addictions, which often overlap. This is pretty topical, as we've got those two tent cities that I've blogged about twice, and which I need to make another update on.

It was kinda peculiar that we were called in to do this, since our main demographic is disabilities, and while that can and does intersect with poverty and addictions, there are definitely agencies that address that more directly. Still, we used the knowledge and experience at our disposal to provide as much relevant information as possible.

The compassion fatigue piece was the most popular in general. We were initially barely going to touch it, as it's only tangentially related to de-escalation. But after doing the runthrough, it came up as something people wanted more of, and that proved to be consistently true.

The first four or so sessions, I came away with suggestions on how to tweak the presentation to be more relevant. I really wish I could redo my first day, because we ended a lot stronger than we began. A lot of it was just learning specific examples of what they go through, learning their lingo etc. Also, learning my co-facilitator, her stories and what she brings to the table. She said that whenever I'm co-facilitating, she tried to fill the void of the other facilitator, and when I wasn't there, she tried to use my style. She said she thought of me as the "science one" and the other facilitator as the "story one".

The reason I developed that reputation is because we talked a lot about brain science and fight-flight-freeze reactions. I got pretty comfortable about speaking on studies and stuff.

At the main office, people that I'm not that close to know me as a firefighter trainer. Our CEO is apparently really happy that this happened. 

Regardless of how we were received (and I think we did okay), I certainly learned a lot. And I can now say that I am not just a Community Facilitator and Crisis Intervention Trainer, I'm also a Workshop Developer. People pay for my thoughts, I don't just present the thoughts of others. Even if it's only happened once.

Clay and Glass Art Gallery

Kitchener has a place called the Clay and Glass Art Gallery. It's one the places to see if you're in town. I'd been to it once before when I was doing direct support work many years ago. Despite it being next to one of our walking routes, me and Lee-Anne had never gone together. We finally got around to it.

This is a recreation of one of the terracotta warriors from Emperor Qin's tomb in China. I'm not going to be able to give context for each of these.

This one was supposed to be ironic, as cornucopias represent abundance, but when one is filled by additional empty cornucopias, it evokes a sense of scarcity.

I think this was in the machine made section. Works done with newer technologies. I remember there were displays made with CNC machines, and there were 3D Printed works, among a few other techniques that I don't remember. 

That piece in the back was pretty mean on my mild trypophobia.

I liked these circle glass ones. I think this was in the gift shop, which was full of work by local artists. Easy to confuse with the actual museum itself.

The art gallery is right by Waterloo Park, so we went for a walk there after and I got another picture of a crane.

There's a little outdoor zoo there as well. Last year we missed their llamas, but this year they were back

And they had their donkeys and miniature horses as usual..

I'm pretty sure they had peacocks one year, but we didn't see them.

While I'm sharing pictures, I'll mention LORENTZ

That's a bad pic, but trust me it says LORENTZ. On the Iron Horse Trail, there's a train bridge that runs overhead at one point, which serves as a canvas for graffiti artists.  It gets painted over regularly, but it doesn't take long to get redecorated.

One reoccurring tag was LORENTZ. We became fans and I started a collection of his work (I'm assuming male because of the similarity with the name Lawrence).

These two are older pieces, as tragically he appears to have stopped producing almost immediately after I started keeping track of them. You can still find some of his tags in places that don't get painted over as frequently.

The good news is, I feel like he's continued working under a new tag, L8Z.

My reason for thinking this is because L8Z started appearing almost immediately after LORENTZ stopped showing up. They both start with "L" and and in "Z" and one of the first L8Z tags that I spotted had a spider web, while the last LORENTZ used one as well. Since I didn't make the connection at the time, I didn't get a pic of it. I'll be making sure to appreciate all future L8Z appearances.