For three days just before the New Year, we stayed with Marie and Jack at this cabin near the Buffalo River for a quiet retreat.
On a scouting mission looking for a town to live in, up in the Muskoka area, we soon realized that the dots on the map we hoped indicated towns were actually just little marinas or supermarkets. We won’t be moving to the Parry Sound region until we can afford our own island and the means to get away from it in winter.
Posters on an apartment in Guelph sharing political opinions:
I didn’t take very many photos on our 3 day trip to check out Owen Sound. We were busy stalking the houses for sale whose MLS descriptions we’d printed and stapled in street number order (we were very organized about this). The photos I wish I had taken include:
Here’s what I did take:
It’s already been a few weeks since we went to hear Elizabeth May campaign at the University of Guelph. I hesitated to go because the “Get Out and Vote” event was targeted at students, but since it’s not every day party leaders are in town I changed my mind and dragged Eric out with me.
The crowd was small and the meeting was short. An organizer of U of G’s student vote mob discussed being ejected from a Conservative rally.
It’s disturbing that you may not be allowed to hear your Prime Minister speak if you don’t belong to his political party, yet unwanted Conservative campaign material can legally show up in your mailbox at any time. Today I received this prize:
Second up, John Lawson explained what motivated him to run as the Green candidate for Guelph and the need to move beyond your comfort zone when advocating for your beliefs. The comment stuck with me and I later decided to volunteer at the local Green Party office. However, I didn’t want to knock on doors, call people, or otherwise behave intrusively (very narrow comfort zone). I guess in the end they couldn’t find any tasks to match my skill set because after one phone conversation, no one ever called me back. (Or maybe I just sounded Harperishly uncooperative?) Note to self: Remember to make a list of Factors Which Cause Me Grave Demotivation.
May spoke about “voter suppression” as a tactic used by American Republicans, and now also by Harper Conservatives. I’ve since heard the term thrown about by Ignatieff and in the Globe and Mail. So while anti-democracy is trending, I transferred all my unvolunteered excitement and voted on the first day of advanced polling.
Here’s a brief and incoherent video of the rally (snippets only because the ‘youths’ kept walking in front of me):
Being the first time Sage and Abbey have a lawn, it is also the first election in which they could choose a lawn sign.
Last Sunday, a van pulled up and some guy put a Liberal sign in our yard and a flyer in our mailbox. While he was still parked there, I went and pulled the letter out and read the first sentence: “Thank you for supporting the Liberals and allowing us to put a sign on your property…” Then I stood and stared in his window.
When he rolled it down, somehow this weird sentence came out of my mouth: “This isn’t a Liberal property anymore”. What? That sounds ominous. I only hope I pronounced it with a capital “L” so that he doesn’t think we’re right-wingers or Marxist-Leninists or anything. He very politely removed the red sign.
Today we picked up our John Lawson endorsement.
More from the May 15th trip. Being the passenger in a daylong city exploration adventure, I had a lot of time to wonder what the signage says about a place:
Sage found this on a morning walk. She loved it!
