I haven’t read much in the way of blogs, I haven’t been writing here either (duh). What I have been doing is lazy blogging on my Tumblr blog. Just reblogging other people’s stuff. Sure there have been a few independent posts, but they weren’t so much about my life as about me. They were about racism or feminism.
Let’s see. Other than being ultimately lazy in my blogging and remiss at attending to this blog, I’ve been working. Yeah, such an exciting life. Work is still quite excellent. We have more people residing at the half-way house than last year and that trend is not going to decrease, despite the new law that is going to have men and women serve longer times. We have several higher risk offenders. I don’t feel that I’m at risk…right now. The future will tell.
I’ve been spending time creating my “bible”. I’ve been writing either inspiration quotes or quotes that appear to be more real life than optimistic. I’ve got a lot of them gathered right now. I’ll be editing them down to a more manageable number with the distillation being how I feel about life, about relationships, and all that shit. However, I’m spending a lot of time on it. I don’t know quite the reason why it’s important right now, but it is and I’m learning to follow my needs.
I’ve been making a lot of friendship bracelets. I have 10 or 15 of various colours made. I’m making rainbow coloured ones right now. I want to make enough to supply one to each staff at AIDS Saskatoon and the Avenue Community Centre for Sexual Diversity for the next Pride week.
Bran and I went to the Pride parade again this year. I got to see a bunch of people that I’ve not seen for an age (or at least last year). I took a lot of photos. Sadly, I forgot to check the ISO on the camera and it was set at 3200. Being a fine, brightly sunny day having it set that high was something of a not good thing. The photos are somewhat grainy. I’m not as pleased with them as I was with last year’s photos.
I managed to get quite a sun burn on my forearms (I was wearing a t-shirt) and my face. My forehead nearly glowed. That’s the first sun of the year. Oddly enough, my legs didn’t show any sign of having been exposed to sunlight. Because of this exposure to sunlight, I picked up a straw hat with a wide brim. All I need to do is get a ribbon onto it so that I can tie it own.
My health is good. I had some kins of stomach thing a couple of weeks back that I donated to Bran for the week after my recovery. Otherwise we’re all healthy here.
I got a lovely vase and mug from VUBOQ some time back. The mug is used to hold my fountain pen (I love my fountain pen and it needs a nice place to be) and my reading glasses. The vase is used to hold other things that I need at my desk but that tend to fall about and be general in-the-way clutter. I <3 them a whole lot. Thanks, Steven!
We've been out on two out of town trips for photography. One trip was up to Batoche because I wanted to go to the Batoche graveyard. That’s where the memorial is for those Metis people who fell during the rebellion as well as later, and those around the community. Unfortunately, the park (run by Parks Canada) was only open 8-4, Monday to Friday. How stupid is that? We arrived after 4 pm and didn’t want to end up being locked inside the gates.
So we headed back to Rosthern and then home. We stopped at a small community graveyard on the way back to Rosthern. That area is generally seen as a German Mennonite area. As expected, there were lots of German surnames. However, there was one large grave marker dedicated to a Scottish family.
I got some nice photos at the Rosthern cemetery. There were old stones, and of course new stones. That’s where we found this:
Yeah, I bet you didn’t know that Fred was buried in Canada, or that he was married to Vera. 
There were also some hand carved stones. The stones themselves appear to have been mail order types, but I could be wrong on that. The writing is definitely hand carved by someone of limited carving skills, probably with inadequate tools. They were both for the same family. Here they are:
The next trip was to Regina for Boy’s birthday. We went to the Saskatchewan Science Centre. It’s also the only place in Saskatchewan where there’s an IMAX theatre. We didn’t see a film. I was tempted but we didn’t. Instead we got a DVD (in which I was profoundly disappointed paying so much for a video that was less than 30 minutes long – I won’t be making the mistake of not checking time length again). Boy got a large, fluffy stuffed snake. It’s laying atop his two monitors. Then we came back and ate at Red Lobster.
I got some good photos at the Science Centre, but I was somewhat disappointed that there wasn’t more to do with the prairies and there wasn’t more oriented to adults. It was nearly exclusively devoted to children. Next trip I want to go to the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. I originally knew it as the Natural History Museum when I went to it with my parents when I was a kid.
I’ve had some training through CSC. The latest was a two-day workshop on suicide prevention. It’s called the ASIST program (Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training). While the training itself was quite good and the knowledge I got was quite useful, the workshop was somewhat sloppily run and the format too rigid. The people doing the workshop apologized for that stating that if they didn’t follow the format to the letter they could lose their accreditation for instructing. This meant that instead of having a table in front of us to put our coffee cups, to put our papers on so we could write, were like an audience in a proscenium theatre. It was less than comfortable, especially since we were encouraged to take notes and have refreshments nearby (which meant that there were unfortunate spills on the floor when feet knocked over cups of coffee). I fail to see the usefulness of such rigidity in the physical environment.
Regardless, I’d like to continue on with the next step of training for that. I’d also like to attend some kind of crisis intervention training. Considering the offenders we’re moving toward having reside at the half-way house (not just higher risk to reoffend, but also higher risk of acting out violently). That would give me invaluable information and skills. They have the potential to life-saving.
That’s my life. I’ll try to update more often, but I can’t guarantee anything. I still tend toward being lazy.
