Voting Info For The Municipal Election, The Stuff That’s Still Useful

I need to come up with more creative ways to say the usual “Hi. It’s me. Remember me?” because that’s getting old. Either that, or I need to show up more often. Either way, it’s municipal election time, and I’m going to try and put some useful info up here.

Unfortunately, because life lifes and municipal election websites are confusing, I have already missed putting up the advance polling stuff. They ended yesterday, and that makes me sad. It makes me especially sad because they had an advance polling location suuuuuper close to us. Plus, all the advance polling spots were supposed to have the talking machine that lets us vote independently. If only I had felt prepared to vote by yesterday, we could have just walked over and done it. But sadly, I did not.

So here’s the part that prevented me from posting this sooner. When I went to the where to vote page, after some hickups, I was able to look up my ward and figure out where all the polling places were. But then I wondered how I was supposed to know which places would have the machines. There’s a sort of helpful accessible voting page, which has become more helpful since I looked at it on October 3 when I originally wanted to post this. Back then, it just said there would be machines at all advance voting locations, and one station per ward on election day, but neglected to indicate which one. I even had someone look at the screen and review both the where to vote page and the accessibility page, and they never saw the list of places. Now, there is a list of places, and it matches the ones I squeezed out of the poor employee who answered the phone when I called them and asked how I’m supposed to find these magical machines if they don’t tell me where they are. Am I supposed to play roulette? Well, squeezed is an exaggeration. They were very nice and gave me all the locations for all the wards. They did say all that information is on the website, and I said I looked and didn’t see it. Could it have really been there all along? I’m going to hope not.

But thankfully, either because they updated the website, myself and the other person are confused, or maybe my call had some effect, no roulette is required, and I don’t have to do fancy HTML to make lists or tables with the wards and polling spots with machines because they’re right there on the page. Woo! If they weren’t there, it would have been nice to have a message there that told me that that information was going to be populated later, and maybe tell me when so I don’t keep checking back.

Also, in case you’re like me and never received your voter information card, here’s the list of acceptable types of ID. Phew, I have a few of them.

I’m happy that a couple of weird things that happened to me when I last looked at the site aren’t happening any more, but one little oddity still is. Every time I hit the control key on its own, it opens the admin panel for the election website. This is a thing I see often with government websites. I know it’s supposed to be a shortcut for admins, but here’s something people don’t realize. Screen-reader users sometimes hit the control key to get the screen-reader to stop talking. So every time that happens, the admin panel opens up and I have to click back and try to consciously prevent myself from hitting control. This is especially annoying if a webpage has steps to complete in a process, such as looking up which ward you live in. Sometimes having to click back to the page makes the whole interface mad.

I hope this helps someone, and I hope our voting experience is better than the last one. Usually they are. Here we come…just as soon as I figure out all my choices.

A Note For The Chatty Fellas Behind Us At The Grapes Of Wrath Show Last Night

Thank you for eventually piping down. It was nice that only two people had to ask you. Maybe it was more, but I’ll give you whatever credit that calls for because I only noticed the woman in front of us and the man who I believe came from somewhere off to our left. I think Carin might have been getting ready to be the third, but thankfully her services were not required. That’s thankfully for you, by the way. I’ve said it before, but it never hurts to repeat it. Carin is one of the loveliest people you could ever be lucky enough to meet in your lifetime, but take it from me, you dooooooooo nooooooooot want her upset at you. And if she is upset at you, in around 96% of cases that’s entirely a you problem. Your case was not one of the other four percent, just to be absolutely clear.

I hope that you learned something from last night’s experience and that you had a pleasant evening when all was said and done. We certainly did, in spite of your efforts. But just in case you didn’t and also for the benefit of others like yourselves, here are a few things to keep in mind for future outings.

  1. None of us paid to listen to you flap your yap. If this news comes as a surprise to you, here’s a simple way to keep it straight. If we had, you’d have been on the stage where the men with the guitars were rather than in the audience with the rest of us.
  2. If I’m not directly beside you but can hear you over the people that we did pay to listen to, your conversation is too loud.
  3. You also, I assume, paid your money to listen to that same band. So shut up while they’re performing, dummies. It’s not just our money you’re wasting, it’s also your own.
  4. It’s great that you want to hang out and have a chat. But if that was your plan, why not take it to any of the other dozens of bars or restaurants in the area? I’m sure they’d have loved to have you. We, on the other hand, would have loved having you removed.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Who Are These People? 2026 Waterloo Region Public School Board Candidates Edition

Here is an extremely helpful 2026 Waterloo Region municipal election guide courtesy of Citified. There are a few editor endorsements and whatever the opposite of endorsements is, along with a variety of links to various resources to help you figure out the whens, wheres and whos of everything.

The most useful bit, for me anyhow, is the breakdown of the school board races. Those are important to me as they should be to you even if, like me, you don’t have kids in the schools. We’re paying for those schools regardless, so it would be nice if they function properly. And as I’ve said before, your kids impact my life on the daily, so it would be nice if they too function properly. Thanks to this, I’ve gone from knowing 0 things about 0 candidates to having a decent enough idea of which names to consider and which to avoid, which is all most of us can realistically hope for, I think.

Goodbye To One Of You

Am I the only one who heard that Skip the Dishes and Instacart were going to team up to offer each others services through both apps and wondered which one of them is about to be bought out? That has to be the goal here, right? How does it make any sense otherwise? Cannibalism is only mutually beneficial if at least one of you has agreed to be on the menu, and cannibalism is exactly what this is.

My guess, which I should make clear that I’m basing on little more than the fact that my brain works, is that Skip is in trouble. If you use it, you’ve surely noticed that they’ve spent years trying to become more than just the takeout guys. They expanded into alcohol which seems like a natural fit, but they’ve also added places like drugstores, Walmart and M&M Food Market, which is a clear attempt to break into the grocery business. If that attempt were going well, why would they suddenly hand all of that success over to Instacart?

Instacart, though, does have something to gain. Unless they’ve done such an awful job of it that I haven’t noticed, they haven’t been publicly trying to crack the restaurant market. But if they wanted to make a run at it, starting out wouldn’t get much easier than finding a friend with a long list of clients. And if that friend just so happens to also have some money problems, all the better. Negotiating is much more fun when you’re the one in the position of strength.

My prediction is that by this time next year if not sooner, we’ll be calling Skip the Dishes Instaplate.

Skip and Instacart have announced a new partnership. Starting today, Skip customers can start ordering grocery and retail products through the Skip app. Instacart customers can access Skip’s network of more than 50,000 national and local restaurant partners.
Also, Skip+ members can get $0 delivery fees on Instacart-powered grocery and retail orders. Instacart+ members can also get $0 delivery fees and reduced service fees on Skip.
On Skip, you just need to open the app and tap the grocery icon. In the grocery section, there are more than 130 retail banners and more than 9,000 locations in Canada. And on the Instacart app, you can tap on the restaurant icon and browse through 50,000+ national and local restaurants.

Two Things I Can’t Stop Thinking About

First is this song. It’s fun having something in your head that you can’t sing out loud because you’re spending the weekend with small children and old people. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way.

I like the idea of writing about how much your own band sucks to save everybody else the trouble. I’ve been told I suck doing this more than I ever was playing music, but it has happened. My response, when I was in a position to offer one, was just “thanks.” Sometimes I think it would have been fun to ask for specifics, but then my smart brain kicks back in and reminds me that nothing useful would have ever come from that.

It also reminded me that I don’t just come on here and bury the absolute hell out of shitty songs anymore. Those were some fun times, but I think I might be getting too old and mellow for that now. It’s either that or there are just way too many other things to get angry about these days, and you can’t always be upset, even for fun. I think it’s a little of both.

I can’t think of a decent way to transition out of this, so let’s just go ahead and say that I’ve also been thinking about my new underwear.

I’m not a big brand loyalty guy when it comes to these things. With underwear and socks my main criteria is “How many for how much?” so I just tend to grab whatever makes sense at the time. but I’m not sure how much sense my most recent purchase makes in retrospect.

They’re comfortable enough, at least based on the one pair I’ve needed to use so far. But they’re going to present a big problem eventually and I’m not sure how I’m going to solve it.

Some day soon, I’m going to have to wear these things in public. And at some point while I’m there, I’m going to have to use the washroom. If I can find a stall, there’s no issue. I can just whip down the pants and go to town. But that’s not always going to be an option, and that’s where the trouble is. Because these things, which for the record are Athletic Works Men’s Boxer Briefs, feature, or perhaps I should say do not feature, an extremely important feature. there is, for whatever reason, no frigging dingdong hatch on the front! Never in my life have I encountered this, and I don’t know how I’m supposed to deal with it. Did I get a package of defects, or has this become a thing and I’m only now discovering it? And if it is a thing, why? Who sits around designing underwear and says to himself “if only there were a way to make these less convenient”? Like I understand if maybe you don’t enjoy using urinals, but making sure that doing so is utterly impossible seems a tad extreme.

I can’t return them, so I guess I’m going to have to do my best to get used to the concept of having around the house underwear. What a weird thing to have to plan for. I give myself a week before I forget to plan for it.

Municipal Election Vote Compass

If you’re living somewhere that has one, I hope that you’re planning to vote in your upcoming municipal elections. Here in Ontario, they’re on October 26th.

If you want to vote but aren’t sure who to vote for, I don’t blame you. Municipal politics is hard. Provincially and federally it’s generally pretty clear what the main parties are all about, and you only have to pick one person. But locally, things are a lot different. Depending on where you are, you can wind up voting for a lot of stuff. Here in Kitchener, for instance, we have city councillors, regional councillors, a mayor and school board trustees. We would normally also have to pick a regional chair, but Doug Ford has decided that what we really need is an appointed town puppet whose job will be to ask “How high?” whenever he yells “Jump!”, so we no longer vote for that because who needs local democracy or accountability anyway, amiright? And when it comes to all of those positions, there are no official party lines. It’s just a whole bunch of people with a whole bunch of opinions, and it can be difficult to sort it all out in a way that makes you feel good about your choices.

That’s where the Vox Pop Labs Vote Compass might be able to help. Tell it where you live by postal code and it will ask you a bunch of questions (I got 30 of them) about where you stand on various issues. It will then give you the names of candidates whose views most align with yours. Sadly it doesn’t help with the school board vote, which is the one I’m having the most trouble with. But it most definitely did give me something to chew on.

My best choices for city and regional council landed about where I expected they would. There were obviously some new faces because the field is different each time, but there were plenty of folks that I’ve either voted for or thought about voting for on my list. But the mayoral race was a different story. My thought was that while I don’t agree with everything he does, that I would likely vote for Berry Vrbanovic again because he’s largely done a good job. But according to the compass, he should be my sixth choice out of the six options it gave me and I really ought to consider Cindy Ward as my front runner.

Alrighty then. Seems I’ve got some more research to do. But that’s not a bad thing whatsoever.

And a note for screen reader users. If you’re not in the mood to futz around with people’s broken accessibility, skip the optional questions at the end. The lists where you can select more than one option work fine, but the radio buttons? Hoooh boy. You can’t read them in or out of forms mode and the only way to tell which one you’re on is to pick one and then tab and shift tab around until it reads it to you. That was my experience with the latest Firefox and NVDA, at least.

American Dictator

This sounds like all kinds of fun and I want to play it.

The London, Ont., teenagers behind “American Dictator,” a board game inspired by Donald Trump’s second term as U.S. president, are celebrating a major milestone. The team of 19 neighbourhood kids has sold more than 20,000 copies of their game to buyers in both Canada and the U.S. CBC’s Kendra Seguin speaks with two of the co-creators, Adam and Will Palma, about how they are keeping up with the demand and their latest Trump-inspired “questionable decision” playing cards.

Kids. They’re smarter than you think.

I’m On Bees

For all I know, bee bed therapy could be the greatest thing ever. Maybe it really does do wonders for the body and mind. But personally, I’m skeptical. I can’t recall a single time when the sound of a swarm of insects has calmed me down and bees generally scare the crap out of me to begin with, so I can’t imagine deliberately putting myself that close to them regardless of how unlikely it is that I’ll get stung. I know me. I’d spend the whole time trying to convince myself that I’m not going to get attacked and then leave even more amped up than I was when I got there.

If you’ve done it and it worked for you, that’s honestly great. If you want to go again, you can have my spot.

Inside a small hut on Diana Graham’s 28-hectare Comber-area farm, where she runs Bees and Bloom Wellness, four beehives are underneath each of two wooden beds, with screens separating the insects from clients who lie over them to experience bee bed therapy.
Graham and others who offer the therapy say it can be beneficial in reducing anxiety and stress.
But there’s still a dearth of scientific evidence around it.
Graham said sleeping while surrounded by bees is therapeutic, and her visitors have reported feeling “amazed” and “breathing better” after spending time in the presence of bee pheromones. She said it’s built perfectly safe, so the insects can’t sting her clients.

“The pheromones from the bees help with your immune system, lungs and their buzz, the frequencies, helps with anxiety, depression, PTSD, sleep disorders and overall health,” Graham told CBC News.
“Your anxiety will go down because the hum of these bees is absolutely amazing.”
The air inside the cabin is rich with honey and beeswax scents. Graham said it adds to the wellness.

Putting Some Local Back Into The Local Mall

Clearly I need to spend more time over at the mall. A new, rather fun sounding store opened there over the summer and this is the first I’m hearing of it.

The Local opened on Saturday in Fairview Park Mall, bringing together about 80 Canadian vendors in one space.
Co-owners Lorenz and Rizzy Manaig started the store to help vendors build their businesses at a local scale. 
They say their inspiration for the store drew on personal experience in a “super competitive” online market. 
Rizzy started her own online business in 2018, and found online platforms like Etsy often force vendors to lower their prices, due to the high competition with international sellers. 
“We want to bridge that gap between, How do we help a vendor scale up their products? and also, How do we help them be confident with their pricing?” Lorenz told CBC News.

With tariffs forcing some vendors to close their online businesses, Lorenz says local vendors need another option.

The new spot in Kitchener is their third (they opened stores in London and Port Stanley last year), so I’m guessing things must be going reasonably well.

I’ll be checking it out for sure. I imagine it coming in especially handy come Christmas time, but I love the concept and hope it does great all year long.