A collection of stuff

This is a very enviable achievement, one that requires special strength of character, clarity of vision, and unfaltering will. Of course, only a possum could have done it, setting a very high bar for the rest of us mammals that wish to follow in its footsteps. I wonder how much food I’d need to sleep for a year…

Possum breaks record with year-long snooze.

This ravenous beast broke into my house with obvious murderous intent (you can tell by the beady eyes and low forehead). After a battle to the death (it ate a spider) I was able to trap it with a bed sheet and took it out.

So, reviewing the results of the election published in The Star, we have a Liberal majority again (66% of the seats) with 46% of the vote, while the NDP gets 9% of the seats with 17% of the vote and the Conservatives 24% of the seats event though they had 32% of the vote. The Greens got 8% of the vote but no seats.

It’s a very big difference. Although the Liberals can rule as if they had a clear mandate from the people, the proportion of voting they got shows that it really isn’t that clear. This is something that people have been aware of for some time now, and they want a change, just not the Mixed-Proportional Representation (MMP) proposed by a citizen’s assembly and that was the subject of a referendum on the same election day.

MMP lost, and lost badly. Although the conditions for it to be accepted were, quite frankly, ridiculously high (it had to win 66% of the vote and a majority in 64 ridings) it didn’t even come close to a simple majority. Just one third of the voters said yes to the proposed system, the rest opting for the winner-takes-all approach that has been in use since forever.

Although the system is not perfect, I bet that the differences in representation wouldn’t be as grossly inaccurate as with the current system. However, would the communities be as well represented with MMP? or would MMP (or other system of proportional representation) shift power to the parties? Is MMP a less imperfect system than first-past-the-post, or more imperfect?

We didn’t have it planned, but the day we picked to carry the training in KW happened to be the start of the Oktoberfest. So, after we delivered our training Stella and me decided to see what it was all about. We parked on King St and then walked along it to what seemed to be something. There were some sausage stalls, a cart with beer kegs, souvenir shops, but we expected to see more people. Maybe because it was the first day and it wasn’t that late we didn’t see a very large crowd. The place didn’t seem that big either, only a couple of streets had been closed and we only saw one festhall.

So, we went into a tent to see if there was more going on there. And there was, but there were not that many people either. The music sounds a lot like the traditional northern Mexican variety since there was some German migration to Mexico a while ago, and apparently there is an Oktoberfest in Monterrey.After drinking some beer and Stella being asked to dance we went back outside to eat sausages and we met a parrot!

More pictures:

Oktoberfest2007

Stella and me went to Kitchener-Waterloo to deliver training on The Mentoring Partnership to the mentoring project there which is being delivered by the KW YMCA and WRIEN. With us were Marilena Benak from YMCA and Helen Chen from WRIEN.

In the first part of the training Stella showed them how we conduct our program, the way we recruit mentors and how we assess them and the mentees. We went through the different forms and procedures that we have developed. They had many questions and although they do some of the things differently, they realized why we do things the way we do, and why some things had worked and others hadn’t. Some of what we do is because we have many more partners, but much of the stuff they thought really useful.

Then we went for lunch. To a nice family restaurant. We all had schnitzel! And it was very good. I was the only one who finished the whole thing. Take that, you skinny girls!

The second part of the session was on the matching application that we use. We went through how to add a new mentor or mentee, how to manage them, how to create new pairs, and some of the situations they might encounter when matching. They didn’t have too many questions right now, but I’m sure most will come when they start using it. We told them about the Coaches Corner and how they will be able to ask questions, download forms and share their own experience there.