Garden 2023

This year we got eight sunflower blossoms over eight flowers. Beats last year when we got five blossoms over three flowers.

The only surviving flower from our original batch. Squirrels did a pretty thorough job of digging up the seeds, so I put a green mesh weighted by rocks to protect the survivors. But every night I'd find the rocks removed. Eventually I managed to put enough weight that whatever was getting at them couldn't get through, but by that point there were only a few left. Those remaining were bent and weak from having to grow under the mesh and in the end only this one made it. It turned out to be the tallest, perhaps because it had more time to grow, but it wasn't the first to blossom.

Our second batch was grown in jiffy pots and transplanted after they'd matured a bit, becoming less appealing to squirrels. Glad to see they managed to blossom despite being planted late.

All the seeds came from the same pack, but there seems to be two distinct varieties. There are deep yellow ones with kind of stringy petals like the first, and there are paler ones with fuller petals, like this one.

Good examples of the difference.

After our first blossom, Lee-Anne noticed that this one looked like it was next in line. I saw that it's neck was broken and the bud was hanging on by a thread. Somehow, it still blossomed. It also might give us more, as it now has six additional buds! I suspect this might be some kind of emergency reproduction measure. It sensed that it had detached from it's initial bud and so it's sprouting more to compensate. The newer buds are dark green, unlike the light green of all the initial ones. Last year we got a couple late-stage buds, and they were a darker green than the first round as well. I don't know why this is, but it seems consistent.

This one was a surprise. I'd been tracking our flowers all summer, but it wasn't until they started blossoming that I noticed this little guy peaking through the back. He snuck up on us!

We didn't just grow sunflowers, we also attempted tomatoes, peas, cucumbers, lettuce, and radishes.

Our best crop were the peas. Once they started producing, they continued to do so for the rest of the season and continue to do so now, although the plants themselves are looking a little sad. We never got such a huge crop that we were using them as stirfry ingredients (I only reached that level once, on my last year of student housing), but we got to munch on them regularly.

The tomatoes weren't quite as bountiful but I'd say they win the most-improved award. In the past I've done well growing cherry tomatoes but the regular ones have matured late, leaving me with the delicious problem of resorting to fried green tomatoes in late fall. This year I learned the technique of "pulling the suckers off" (a term that makes me queasy every time I hear it) which helps them develop faster. Also, these were Early Girls, a breed specifically meant to produce early. So between the type and technique we managed to get a decent crop of red tomatoes. The only drawback is that we don't have a good batch for fried green tomatoes.

Our cucumber plants were large and sprawling, which is typical of their nature. Somewhere through the season they began to look sickly, but they still managed to produce a small crop for us.

The lettuce never grew. Our radishes were vital but didn't act like I expected of them. They became tall, viny, and had some bean-like growths. I doubted that they were radishes at all, but after digging them up it looked like they were trying, as thy had reddened at the root and some had begun to grow rounder.

I'd seen radishes grow pretty successfully when I helped out at the WALES community garden plot. They had poked out of the ground without the huge stalks that we had produced. My neighbour thinks we must have just planted them too close together. Maybe I buried them too deep.

All in all, this was our most ambitious garden at the place we currently live. I know some people with more successful sunflower patches, but this was one of the better ones for me, and we might yet get more. I've had better and worse crops of peas. This is my personal best for tomatoes. I've done better with radishes. Never tried lettuce before, and maybe I won't try again.

The Wedding

On September 16, me and Lee-Anne got married

It was on Lee-Anne's parents property in Brampton. It was sunflower themed, partly because of the season and partly because of our shared love of sunflowers. Main colour was purple, because it's my favourite colour while Lee-Anne's is yellow which gets worked in with the sunflowers, and they contrast. We had it 11:30 AM to 4:00 PM.

Lunch was sandwiches, wraps, potato salad, and bean salad. There were lots of desserts, mostly made by Lee-Anne's mom. Instead of a cake we had a tart tower. For drinks, we had mimosas, Caesars, beer, wine, and Grand Marnier. I don't know where the Grand Marnier came from, I think someone just slipped it behind the bar.

There were a lot of spacing concerns. We had invited about 70 people, and looking at the backyard, I thought it would be a little cramped. A professional had come through and verified that it would be sufficient and I thought to myself that it's a good thing we have experts, because I don't have a good vision for this type of thing. I showed up at the site a day early, and a tent had been put up, dividing what I already thought was a small size in half.

Plans for the location of the ceremony were changed the day before the wedding. Lee-Anne felt the second part of the backyard was too hilly, so we shifted it to a small park right outside their gate. Apparently you only need a city permit if your event is for 250 people.

This worked out, as the park was more visible from the vantage point of the church that had agreed to lend its parking space. Most people saw the altar and crowd while they were parking and made it over that way.

Since it was outdoors, we were vulnerable to unexpected shifts in the weather, but it turned out perfect. Neither too hot nor too cold. That didn't stop me from sweating bullets during the ceremony. 

I was holding Lee-Anne's hands and didn't want to break form. If I wiped my forehead, I'd have to touch her hands and get them sweaty, and if I wiped on my clothes I'd mess up my outfit. Couldn't do it covertly with everybody watching. I tried to endure but it got too noticeable, and feeling it was the lesser of two evils, I broke form and quickly tried wiping my forehead. The crowd laughed. Then, Lee-Anne broke form and, laughing, wiped my forehead vigorously.

Somehow, a lot of people felt touched by this. Someone cried when she was describing to me how Lee-Anne she reached out during the ceremony to clean my forehead. I don't really get it.

We were in direct sunlight. Lee-Anne's light sensitive so she was really squinting. Later, she would say "I was squinting, you were sweating".

We ended it with a tree-planting ceremony. Well, the small tree was technically already in a pot, but we took soil from my grandparents place in Northern Ontario, and from Lee-Anne's grandmothers farm and poured it into the pot, representing the union between the two families and new growth in the family tree.

That was workshopped between us and the person that performed the ceremony. When we talked to her beforehand, she was looking for shared interests and knowing that we both like to garden, she threw it out as a an idea and we ran with it.

People went back to the tent while me and Lee-Anne stayed back and had pictures taken. I'll have a post on my Gallery blog with the photos when we get them. We already have a bunch, and I've included a few at the top of this post. When we had our engagement photos done, the guy sent us a sampler package really quickly, but it was basically half the final collection. I'll still hold off until I've got all of them.

After the photos, we came back to the tent where everyone was having lunch. Turns out there was enough space for everyone to sit comfortably.

Speeches were done by Lee-Anne's dad, my Grandpa Rob, my brother, one of Lee-Anne's friends, and me and Lee-Anne shared a finishing speech. We hadn't written a script, but we had "sections". So Lee-Anne started by thanking everyone for coming, and the work put into organizing things, then I talked about the people that couldn't make it and people we wanted to remember, then she talked about what the symbol of the sunflower meant, then I went into our specific sunflowers, she talked about our cat Kieran convincing her of my quality, and I talked about how I adopted Kieran to impress her, she spoke to how my family invited her in, then I spoke to how hers did so for me, and then we both declared that we were looking forward to living the rest of our lives together.

As for the people that couldn't make it, a close family friend on Lee-Anne's side passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack. It was recent enough that she'd been aware of, and looking forward to coming to the wedding. One of her aunts also had a heart attack, and lived but wasn't in shape to attend. This happened as she and her husband were travelling to Brampton.

On my side, I spoke of a close family friend that used to always say she couldn't wait to come to my wedding. I used to tell her not to get her hopes up, as I was a natural introvert and comfortable on my own. I held this stance with her even after I met Lee-Anne and was intending to ask her out. Unfortunately, she passed before mine and Lee-Anne's first date, so I hope somewhere she knows she was right. I also mentioned my granddad, who is alive but with significant dementia.

As for the sunflowers, when me and Lee-Anne were dating, I finally managed to grow one in the backyard of the townhouse I was living in at the time. It was my first success after two years of failure. We dated throughout the summer and I got it in my head that if I could make the flower blossom, then the relationship would work out.

On the morning of the wedding, I got a Facebook notification for a memory. Turns out, the flower blossomed on September 16, same day as the wedding. We hadn't even thought of that.

Otherwise, our first sunflower of the year blossomed while we were having our wedding shower, and when I left Kitchener, it looked like our last sunflower would blossom on the day of the wedding. Unfortunately, this turned out to be false. We had three sunflowers set to blossom before I left, and on coming back two had blossomed. So I'm just going to say the one that is still working on it is a promise of future happiness. I know I'm playing with the rules a little here.

There are a few other things that happened at the wedding. My grandma got me some literature on our family history, and Lee-Anne's sister in law brought some kittens to be adopted by my mother and brother.

We got Finn from the same person, and in fact these new kittens are his half-siblings (at least). I thought it might be too soon after Cassidy, but these two were in need of a home before Cassidy's passing. Mom and Duncan were aware of them, and the fact that they they would be in the same place as Lee-Anne's sister in law felt like fate.

They're at home now. The black one with the stubby tail has been named Castor and the tuxedo cat is Pollux. I'll have to do a post dedicated to them.

After the wedding, me and Lee-Anne stayed over in a hotel in Brampton. In Pokemon Go, my buddy gave me a bouquet as a gift. I'd never seen that gift featured in the game before. Felt like a wedding present.

 The next day we visited Granddad since he couldn't make it. The uber driver dropped us off in slightly the wrong spot, but it was okay because he put us in front of a sunflower mural. It felt kind of fated

Granddad can't speak for the most part, but when he saw me he shouted and reached out to me, smiling. Pretty well the best I could hope for. We had lunch with him, Oma, and two of my uncles that had flown in for the wedding.

When we got back to Kitchener, we found a red rose taped to a post on our home street, welcoming us back.

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.