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.

Met the Landlord and Saw a Drone Show

We finally met our landlord in person. When we checked out the place for the first time, the guy that gave us the tour was the tenant moving out. We received our lease over email and made our legal arrangements remotely. We moved in without seeing our landlord or hearing his voice, although we did wind up talking to him on the phone a couple months in, because our laundry room flooded.

He's been pretty quick to accommodate, but arrangements had only ever been made over email or occasionally by phone. I'm not really complaining, he's been far less intrusive and much quicker to help than my previous landlord. I just haven't been in a living situation where I'd never seen the person I'm renting from face-to-face before.

But recently we've been having an issue with our shower. Probable mold due to worn down caulking, bloating the baseboards outside the bathroom and staining the trim at the base of the wall. Apparently our maintenance guy decided to make a career shift and there isn't an obvious person to replace him, so our landlord decided to come take a look at it himself.

He lives in Toronto. He brought his wife and one of his kids. We learned that he's only owned the place for about four years, so the guy that lived here before us was the first tenant and only stayed about a year. Our upstairs neighbour wound up running into us that day, and it appears that they had met our landlord before, so it's only us that had never met him.

They fixed a closet door that had come off it's frame, and they trimmed the branches off of a couple trees that were getting close to the house. 

The same day that we met our landlord, our local hospital was hosting something called Rally for Health. Bunch of food trucks, The Strumbellas were doing a concert, and there was a drone show.

I'd never been to a drone show before. It was pretty surreal

Each point of light is an individual drone hovering in the night sky. Apparently they were being operated from the football field of a nearby highschool

Still images don't quite do it justice. They were all in motion. This syringe was pumping itself.

This is for mental health. We were standing in front of a guy who was very enthusiastic. He seemed to be involved in setting it all up. So we overheard him mention what this symbol meant

The guy behind us shouted "WORLD'S LARGEST KIDNEYS! IT'S TRUE!" when this one came up. Don't know what that references. Maybe the world's largest kidneys came through Grand River Hospital? Maybe he's just talking about this drone show display?

This says "Care Never Stops" It's their motto. From this vantage point you can only see "Care Never Ops"

Engagement Photos

Me and Lee-Anne had engagement photos done. The entire album is pretty substantial, so we narrowed it down to 17 and I posted them on my Gallery blog. Here's a link: https://gryphonsgallery.blogspot.com/2023/06/engagement-photos.html 

This is not the kind of thing I ever thought about doing. I don't even think I knew what engagement photos were before I was told that we had to book them. Now that I see the finished product, I can recognize them as something I've seen other people post on Facebook. But I just thought of them as pretty couples pics, not considering the effort that had to have been put into making them.

Going through the process of having them done, I also realize that I've definitely seen people having them taken on the Iron Horse Trail and in Victoria Park. We had ours done in a little park near where Lee-Anne's parents live, one that we've walked in a lot. It's a cute spot, but the photos make it look like paradise.

As an aside, Brampton is really good for its network of parks. It also has a huge number of community centres, generally with really good resources. The city doesn't have the best reputation, but in these two categories, it's very strong.

I didn't know how to dress for the occasion. Lee-Anne told me to pick something that wasn't too dark, to avoid something pattern-heavy, and to avoid green because I'd blend into the foliage. I tried to bring a bunch of clothes so that we would have a selection, but she told me I was going overboard. Once we got to Brampton, she wished that I'd brought one of the shirts she'd told me not to take.

So we went shopping and I got four more shirts. Of them, she said I looked best in a dark green plaid. Seemed like it went against all previous guidelines.

We took these a little after we were flooded with wildfire smoke, so I was worried that we would be working through a haze. Thankfully it had mostly cleared up by that point. The photographer said that he had been taking pics in the smoke though. Wonder what that looked like.

The photographer scoped out the place a little before our session, as he'd never been there before. He found the bridge that's in some of the better pics. It's a tiny thing, maybe only eight feet long over a creek, but he used it for all it was worth. We weren't even aware of it when we requested the location.

One of the arguments that people use for the legitimacy of AI generated art, is that when photography was invented many traditional artists opposed the technology because it was able to capture the beauty of nature, which previously could only be done by artists that had committed their lives to the craft. Over time, our legal systems decided that photography could be done in a way that used enough human creativity to be considered art, and now this is relatively unquestioned. The idea is that the outrage, followed by eventual acceptance of AI art as a valid form of human expression is inevitable.

That argument mostly just turns me off of photography, but listening to the person that did our photos and his process, there definitely was an artistry to it.

He gave us a lot of prompts. He told us how to hold hands. For the walking pics he told us to bump into each other intentionally. He had us tickle each other. He told us to tell each other our favourite date stories etc.

This picture was surprisingly uncomfortable to take, but it looks really relaxed.

In this one, she's sitting on the railing of the little wooden bridge. I'm scared of heights, and even though it really was just a slight elevation over a creek, I had to work through some nerves. She was fine though.

This one isn't in my collection of 17. Lee-Anne told him about a bridge she used to walk on with her dad when she was young, and that it had recently been renovated. So we took a detour and checked it out. The photographer felt a creative inspiration. So, because of the improvisational nature of this shoot, I really like it conceptually. I don't feel like it quite bore out in execution.

For some of these shots, he had me lean against the safety rail. Terrifying.

Here's one where she looks like she's just falling into my arms, but this actually took some muscle on my behalf. Not the way I would choose to lift her normally either. Good for visuals but not efficient on a biomechanical level.

And then I just really like this one.

Canadian Wildfires 2023

 There were a few things I wanted to blog about, but I guess I've got to talk about the wildfires.

Due to the dry weather this year, forests in Nova Scotia and Quebec have come up in flames. The fires have spread rapidly and gotten out of control. The resulting smoke has wafted into many nearby cities. In Kitchener, a haze formed over the sky and there's been a kind of campfire smell. 

Our family Whatsapp chat has been popping, with everyone exchanging notes on how bad the smoke has been in their respective areas. I have family in Toronto and New York where the air quality is said to be really bad. My New York connections have said that it is indeed as bad as the press makes out, whereas the people from Toronto say they've avoided the worst of it. I've got people in Guelph, Brampton, and Northern Ontario also saying that they've been effected.

Wildfires are not new to Canada, and indeed we had some pretty nasty ones in recent years, but this is the first time that I've experienced such a sensory impact to city living. I'm not being chased out of the city or choked out by smoke, but the effect is still unignorable.

It's interesting to see people re-adapt some of the COVID measures without being told to. A lot of people are wearing masks again to filter the air, and some people are staying home to avoid exposure. I don't think these things would have been instincts pre-pandemic. I guess this is how we respond to natural disasters now.

In 2020, Australia dealt with some really destructive fires, and in the following years the Southern US had the same issue. I guess it's our turn.

I used to think that climate change would turn Canada into a tropical paradise before it burned us up, since so many places are warmer than we are and they're able to sustain life. It would obviously be bad globally, and people would migrate away from the more impacted areas creating issues of population density. Canada would eventually suffer the same as everywhere else, but I thought it would take us a while to get there.

I suppose the difference is that those warmer places had a much longer time for their environments to adapt to that climate, whereas the ecosystem here is equipped for colder temperatures and it can't keep up with the speed at which we're warming.

Despite having a low population compared to our size, Canada hasn't done great in terms of environmentalism. I've heard that we're heating up twice as fast as the global average, and that we were the worst in terms of emissions among the G7. This is partly due to the fact that we're such a vast and sprawling country, so things need to be travelled over longer distances, and we're also a major oil producing nation.

I'm getting some mortal pangs, similar to the feelings of early COVID. In a way this is even worse, since the pandemic was a threat to humanity, whereas this is a threat to all life on Earth. 

We live on a planet that is home to the only carbon-based life in the Universe that we know of. Our proximity to the sun and our abundance of water is nothing short of miraculous. We consider ourselves the most sophisticated animals for our self-awareness, compassion, and innovation, but while almost every lifeform contributes to the ecosystem, humans are the only species that inhibit it. If we cause the end of the miracle that sustains all life as we know it, think what losers we'd be.

Gardening 2023

 Last week was the Victoria Day weekend, which is the traditional time for Canadians to start gardening. Our neighbours gave us some more backyard space so we're getting a little more ambitious with our planting. They're trying to grow a few things as well.

We live in the basement and have upstairs neighbours, so our first summer we felt it was still too early for us to ask for some space, although by the summer we felt comfortable enough to ask if we could plant some flower bulbs in the front yard. Both households walk by the front yard, so it felt more shared, compared to the backyard which their apartment opens into but ours doesn't. 

Last year, we asked for a bit of space to grow a sunflower patch. I planted 60 seeds and wound up with three flowers with five blossoms total. We also got some pots and tried growing some other stuff in those, but they didn't have any holes in the bottom so we wound up drowning the seeds.

We haven't really taken any more land, but we pounded holes in our pots and got three more planters. So we have three pots, three planters, and a patch of land for sunflowers. We're trying to grow cucumbers, tomatoes, peas, radishes, lettuce, and sunflowers. We've become ambitious enough that if we have a little success, I think we can call what we have a garden.

I dug out last year's sunflower patch. I'd tried to pull out the gravel and I mixed the dirt with potting soil. This year I fully dug it out and replaced the dirt with potting soil, so hopefully that helps.

Our upstairs neighbour told us that he learned from someone else in the neighbourhood, that the reason the backyard is so gravelly is because the previous owner of the house had a dog. I don't really see the sense in that though. Would it be to discourage the dog from digging? Did they actually mix gravel into the soil? Seems like that would be a lot of work.

Unfortunately, the day after we'd planted the sunflowers, we found holes in our patch and seeds had been pulled up and shelled. It was very difficult to determine how much damage had been done, so we just replanted in full. We asked Lee-Anne's mom for tips and she said to put cayenne pepper on the ground, because apparently squirrels avoid it.

It felt funny seasoning the ground. Lee-Anne brought red pepper flakes as well and it felt like I was cooking for the squirrels. We also put a mesh that I got from the dollar store over them, and so far it seems like they haven't been disturbed again.

I don't know if raccoons eat seeds as well, but it might be that instead. I've sighted a raccoon twice this year, but I've failed to get a picture. Now I know why people have so much trouble taking pictures of Bigfoot. In lieu of a raccoon pic, please accept this picture of a heron that I managed to get this year.

Lee-Anne finds it funny how excited I get about seeing the raccoon. She's from Brampton, and apparently they're really common there. My memory may not be totally comprehensive, but off the top of my head, the only times I've seen raccoons were when I was at Camp Impeesa for the EaF Summer Program and I saw a family of them in the dumpster, and in Brampton at her parents place where I saw one on the roof. So in the past week I've doubled my raccoon sightings, and in a much more concentrated period of time.

I've also seen a dead one on the sidewalk near where we live. Pretty sure I've seen roadkill too. I think I've seen more dead raccoons than living.

First raccoon sighting this year, we were gardening and I saw it tiptoe along our neighbours fence. Second sighting, it was morning before work and our cat Kieran got really agitated by something outside. I went to look and a big fat raccoon was slowly and seemingly aimlessly sauntering around the backyard. I was so excited that I woke up Lee-Anne to look at it, but she declined.

Anyway yeah, maybe the raccoon is messing with the seeds instead of the squirrels.

Another tip Lee-Anne's mom gave was to soak the peas overnight before planting them. I found this curious, as I've had some success growing them in the past and I've never done this.

We're growing the sunflowers, radishes, lettuce, and peas from seed, and we bought partially grown plants for the cucumbers and tomatoes. I've had some success with each of these plants in the past, except for lettuce which was a pick by Lee-Anne. I would have gotten zuchinis instead of cucumbers, but the place we went to had sad looking zuchinis, whereas the cucumbers looked more resilient and the two plants have a pretty similar growth pattern.

I've had bad luck with tomatoes developing late in the season, leaving me to make a lot of fried green tomatoes. This year we're growing Early Girls, which supposedly produce fast, and now I know that I'm supposed to "pull off the suckers", which I hadn't been doing. I hate that phrase for some reason.

I don't have a ton of faith in the potted stuff, except for maybe the radishes, but we'll see what happens. It looks like the pots are draining properly at least. 

Growing stuff in pots and planters reminds me of when I was desperately trying to get into gardening as a kid, but we lived in an apartment so I had to grow everything on the balcony.

Here are some photos of what we've done this year:

Tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, peas

Cucumbers

Sunflowers

Mother's Day, Mom's Birthday, Last Doctor Visit

This past weekend was both Mother's Day and my mom's birthday. I've probably mentioned it before, but it's pretty convenient to have a mother whose birthday lines up so neatly with Mother's Day.

Me and Lee-Anne came down to Guelph. We brought dinner and a few gifts. I got her a backpack from a military surplus store in downtown Kitchener. It's the same place that her last backpack came from. Back when I was in college, my mom was talking to a friend of her's about wanting a sturdy backpack and she mentioned this location in Kitchener, where I happened to be living.

Almost ten years later, the pack is beginning to fray around an arm strap. So they aren't invulnerable, but still have a pretty good longevity. I got a pack from the same place but mine didn't last nearly as long as Mom's. What's the longevity of a backpack supposed to be? I've heard three years with regular use. So both surpassed that length. I'll probably have to get another one for myself at that place.

Going into military surplus stores kind of sketches me out, just because I'm very disassociated from anything military. Generally, they're more "function over fashion" stores and the military grade is supposed to be a guarantee that the product will withstand whatever you require of it because it's built to survive literal war.

The shop owner was the same guy that sold to me the other two times I've been in. He's a very loud, very engaging person that involves himself in your purchases. Seems authentic enough, as one time he talked me into buying something less expensive than what I was looking at, since he thought the cheaper item would better serve my purposes. In general, I don't really appreciate "help" when I'm looking around a store. I prefer to get a lay of the land, think through what I want, and then ask for help if I need it.

We also got some stuff to put in the backpack. Mom loves Bulk Barn, but they don't live near one, so I got some spice mixes that they wouldn't be able to get from their grocery store. I got shawarma, souvlaki, Jamaican jerk, and Korean BBQ. I also put a container of homemade toum, which is garlic sauce, that I made to go with shish tawook. Put it all in a glass jar from the Bulk Barn and gave that to her too.

This past weekend strayed a little from my usual diet. I guess that's okay. I had my quarterly doctor's appointment on Wednesday. I've been having a cheat day the day after my doctor's appointments because then I have three months to correct myself before getting assessed again. My results weren't as dramatic this time around. When I was first assessed I had an A1C of 10.5. In three months it dropped to 6.9, then 5.9, and I've lost 25 pounds. This time my A1C and weight haven't changed much. 

My dietician said she suspected that I only became diabetic inside the pandemic, and that's why my body was responding so quickly to the medication. The body tries to return to what it's used to, not what's most optimally healthy. This is because it's programmed to survive to see the next day, not thirty years later, and it knows it has survived in it's "average" state for a long time. So my body probably was eager to return to its pre-pandemic state, but it's reached what it's used to, but I want it to keep changing. So I'll probably have to work harder to change the psychology of my body from here on out.

At least my C reactive proteins fixed themselves. There are a lot of numbers that go on inside the body. Last time, only two of them weren't in target. One was my C reactive proteins and I forget the other one but she didn't even test for it this time around, and if she's not worried about it neither am I. So my C reactive proteins, after not changing much in six months, decided to fully correct themselves these past three. My pulse was also lower than usual, but that must be more psychological than anything as my pulse seems to be a lot higher than my average when I'm at the doctor's office. I suspect I've just been doing this enough at this point that I've become desensitized.

I guess we finally got rid of our last mask mandate. Long after the public mandates were over, you still had to wear one when visiting medical sites. However, when I had my bloodwork done there were a handful of people not wearing masks, even one of the nurses. Going to the medical centre, my doctor and one of the nurses were wearing masks, but the people working intake and one of the nurses weren't.

The biggest lifestyle change I've made since the last time I saw my doctor is implementing a regular body weight workout. I've been trying to implement lifestyle changes between appointments. My first change was cutting out carbs and added sugars. After that I made a daily cardio goal, and now I've been trying to get back into strength training. 

My doctor was kind enough to say that even if I haven't lost weight these past three months, some of it might be coming through in muscle. This is the thing everyone trying to get into fitness while in rough shape tells themselves, but it feels a little bit less like wishful thinking when a doctor says it.