test blog 5

It's been a while. 1. Mom went home. My mom went home two weeks ago, after spending seven weeks here. I was sad to see her go! We had a great time, and it got better as we went along and settled into a routine. The dogs must especially miss her. They loved to hang out in her room, and she adored them. 2. I took union training. I was in Nanaimo this week, participating in some training with my union, the BCGEU. I had three days of courses, plus a full day of travel each way, so I was gone for the whole work week. My workplace has an interesting union model. All the frontline staff are members of CUPE, and the professional staff -- librarians, senior librarians, and library managers -- belong to the BCGEU. This means I'm the only BCGEU member in all five of my libraries. However, there are BCGEU members in many other workplaces in my area. It's a very diverse union that represents social workers, administrative staff, BC Liquor and BC Cannabis workers, correctional officers, ...

As we enter the last week of my mother's extended visit, we took one last day trip, out to Grant Bay, on the west coast. As I've mentioned, there are no paved roads to the Pacific coast in the North Island. In fact, only two roads on the whole island go to the Pacific coast. In the North, the west coast is only accessible either by backcountry hiking or on logging roads to a few isolated beaches. We've been to San Josef Bay (Sanjo) several times, and I'm sure we'll go again, but we were very curious about Grant Bay. We heard it was a smaller version of Sanjo. This turned out to be true. We also heard that the beach was a five-minute walk from where you park. This turned out to be false. It's quite a bit longer, but not so long as to be prohibitive. So first there's the long, slow, bumpy drive on the logging roads -- about 2.5 hours, a bit closer than Sanjo. Then there's a short hike through a lovely bit of rainforest. Not knowing what we'd find, we ...

The pictures tell the story this time -- all Allan's. It was an amazing experience, far better than I expected. We also learned a lot about whales. It was such a privilege to be around these magnificent animals. We weren't out 10 minutes before we saw orcas, humpbacks, and porpoises. Once we learned to identify their blows, we saw humpbacks everywhere! Our guide identified each orca by markings on its dorsal fin. This is a Humpback surface feeding. Several times we saw several whales at once, all around the boat. Steller sea lions -- very big! A whale and the sea lions in the same shot. We saw an epic battle over a salmon. I hope he was able to keep it. Prince of Whales Tours: highly recommended!

This week's day trip was fascinating, meaningful, and so much fun. We went to Alert Bay, toured the U'mista Cultural Centre (us for the second time , my mom for the first), and participated in a traditional salmon barbeque through Culture Shock . Know before you go: residential schools and the potlatch ban On the drive down to Port McNeill, where we get the ferry to both Sointula and Alert Bay, we gave my mom some context for the U'mista exhibits -- both the residential schools and the potlatch ban . We have talked about it before, but I felt a review of sorts would make the day more meaningful. After taking the Indigenous Canada online course through the University of Alberta, I feel more confident summarizing the issues -- a concrete benefit of the course. If anyone reading this doesn't know about these two horrors of colonization, I encourage you to learn about them both. I'll briefly summarize the issues at the bottom of this post. U'mista Cultural Centre...