I Have Been Boosted, Hopefully Not Busted

Not much to say except I got my COVID booster, so take that, piece of crap Omicron variant…and all the other variants too. I was lucky. I could walk to a pharmacy who was giving out boosters, so I got an appointment and zoinked one. I had to get Moderna, so now I’ve had two Pfizers and a Moderna. Let’s hope I don’t fall over in a side-effect riddled heap. So far, so good but I’m only two hours in.

One thing to note: Once you get your booster, they send you a new qr code in your email. You don’t need it right away because two shots is considered fully vaccinated, but I downloaded the sucker for if/when the rules change. But some people might think that their qr code would just magically update to reflect the updated records. Apparently not.

I also asked if I shouldn’t use my new qr code for two weeks because it might flash a yellow warning because my latest shot, the one I got today, is less than two weeks old so it might say I’m not fully vaccinated, but the pharmacist said it shouldn’t do that because this is my third shot, not my second. I also asked him if, if I travel anywhere for the holidays, if a rapid antigen test would give me a false positive because of this vaccine and he said no it won’t. So that’s good to know.

And about those travel plans. We’ll have to see, but they might be snookered. I think our group might be slightly over the 10-person limit if everyone comes that we’re expecting, so…boohoohoohoo! Plus my folks are anxious about us taking the train, even though everyone on the train and working it is fully vaccinated, so that’s safer than lots of other things we could do. It’s also way safer than my parents driving down to get us, driving back home, and then driving us back. That is too much driving. I didn’t want to see two Christmases ruined in a row…but after a good cry, I’m ready to face whatever decision is made.

Two more silly thoughts before I disappear. I guess I had more to say than I thought. First, why the heck is COVID designated to be a feminine noun in French? I don’t want to be the same gender as that stupid disease, even though I know they only have two choices to make. Maybe they decided it was feminine because COVID’s a bitch. That was mean.

And thanks to Steve, that son of a bitch…er…COVID? Whenever I hear them talk about the Omicron variant, I hear this song.

Mamma don’t catch that Omicron, mamma don’t catch that Omicron, mamma don’t catch that Omicron today.

And now I’m out of here.

This Is Good Wine…For Me To Poupon

Grey Poupon wine now exists
Pretty sure I’m more ok with this development than I am with that Frosty cereal, honestly. No way in hell I’m plunking down the $30 it would take to buy a full bottle of the stuff, but if someone were to come up to me and say “sir, try a sip of this here,” I think I would. And there’s a chance I might not even hate it. A slim one, but it’s there.

The full-bodied wine is infused with Grey Poupon mustard seeds and uses Viognier grapes from southern France. Kraft Heinz added that the wine features “bright hints of spice and pronounced citrus” and “floral characteristics” making it ideal to pair with charcuterie boards, sandwiches or even Grey Poupon itself.
Yes, it’s a stunt wine — but it’s earning solid reviews. Trade publication The Drinks Business called La Moutarde “well structured and well-made,” adding that it would be a “fine match with most poultry dishes.”

Blind People Don’t Play Games Or Support Charities, Apparently

Now and then I take a quick glance at the ads that appear on some of our pages. I figure it’s nice to have a sense of what’s being shilled on our behalf, plus if there’s anything scammy looking that people might need to be warned about I’ll be able to check into it.

Google’s ad banners are generally a mix of text, photos and text, and photos of text. It’s that last category that makes things fun. I’m sure Carin and I have gone over this a time or 12, but the TLDR version is that pictures of text, like screenshots for example, are no good to a screen reader user. The best chance we have of making any sort of use of them is to run some OCR on the image in question and then hope for the best. NVDA (my screen reader of choice) makes it pretty simple. I press numpad 0 and R at the same time, it quickly runs the OCR function built into Windows and displays the results in a small window for me. Sometimes it works great, sometimes it sort of works, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all.

Well, today some of them worked, and one of them was completely frigging ridiculous and personally insulting.

It was an advertisement for, of all things, CNIB’s catch the ace game. No, really. I, a blind person, would never have known this had I not made the effort to figure it out. To the screen reader, you know, the accessibility software we all have to use, the entire thing is a graphic that reads like a jumble of nonsense numbers and letters. An organization purporting to help the blind approved this. Well done, guys. Well done.

Thanks for whatever ad revenue we happen to make during your campaign, but do me a favour and never talk about breaking down barriers again since you’re out here erecting them now.

We Went And Did Stuff. I Hope We Get To Keep Doing That


I have no idea how good that picture is or isn’t. I just decided that a special occasion like being out amongst strangers for a common purpose for the first time in nearly two damn years called for the taking of a blind guy photo, so I took a shot into the crowd from my seat at Centre in the Square before Steve Patterson And His Very Funny Friends took the stage.

Yes, we went to a show. No, I do not want to hear about the rise of Omicron making that an irresponsible thing to have done. You know what else is irresponsible? Not being vaccinated. We are, as was everyone else in the building. We had to prove it when we came in. And the building wasn’t even close to full, which is one of the reasons we chose this particular show as a good time to maybe stick our toes back into normal life lake. There’s no way in hell we’re going to anything like sports or a concert where people are packed in like sardines whilst drunkenly yelling and screaming directly into our faces, but a limited capacity comedy show in a large theatre where the crowd isn’t going to be particularly rowdy? That we’ll try.

And I’m glad we did.

The night was a lot of fun, but also a little bit strange. Not the screenings or the sitting there all night with a mask on so much, but just the over all energy of the room. The crowd was very…quiet. Part of that is simply that it wasn’t anything resembling a full house. They only sold part of the theatre as general admission, so the crowd was understandably small. But it was more than that. All of us who showed up were absolutely there to be entertained, but it seemed like a lot of us had forgotten exactly how that was supposed to work. I think the best way to describe it is subdued and somewhat tense. People wanted to laugh, but was that ok? Should they clap? Will a poorly timed woo get me tossed out or start the spread of the next variant of concern? They wanted to have a good time, but they were intent on doing so within the confines of etiquette rules that were hard to remember and a safety standard that had never been set out for them. The mood got better as the night went on, but I was left with the sense that even though we did an almost normal olden times thing, a lot of folks felt anything but normal about it.

Would I do it again? Yeah. Yeah I would. But selectively. I’m not going to buy tickets to anything that looks half way fun like we used to, but if the right show comes along at the right time, chances are we’re there. I’m happy we did this one just to know that it’s possible.

Home Is Where The Job Isn’t

I wouldn’t expect your average fella on the street to know this, but someone first elected to council in 1997 who eventually went on to be the mayor for three years should probably have a better handle on the rules of his office than now ex Mayor of Brockville, Ontario Jason Baker apparently does. Like dude. Seriously. How does this even happen? I wish I was more informed about the goings on in Brockville. That I’m not tells me that the place must be better managed day to day than the impression I’m left with here, but holy hell.

The mayor of Brockville, Ont., has resigned after buying a “dream home” outside the city and inadvertently disqualifying himself from holding the office. 
In a statement posted Wednesday on the city’s website, city council announced Jason Baker had stepped down as he was “no longer qualified to hold office due to his non-residency status within the city of Brockville.”
Baker was quoted in that statement as saying he didn’t realize the home purchase would render him ineligible for the job.
“It has been an absolute honour to represent this beautiful city,” Baker said. “I regret that the purchase of my dream home has unknowingly caused this issue and will keep me from finishing some of the work that we all started together.”

Something The Unvaccinated Can Do That Isn’t The Usual Thing I Tell them They Can Do

The willfully unvaccinated aren’t high up on the list of folks I would expect to knowingly do something for the good of others, but this is still handy to know.

Canadian Blood Services is encouraging people to donate blood, even if they haven’t been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. 
Gina Leyva, the territory manager at Canadian Blood Services for Waterloo region, says her team has received a lot of questions from people asking whether they can donate blood if they are unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated. 
The short answer is “yes, they can,” said Leyva.
While Ontario now requires people to show proof of vaccination to access some non-essential businesses, such proof is not required to enter a blood donor clinic.
On its website, Canada Blood Services notes that the novel coronavirus is a respiratory virus. 
Dr. Steven Drews, associate director of microbiology at Canadian Blood Services, said in a March 2020 statement that there is “absolutely no evidence of [blood] transfusion transmission for COVID-19, or any other coronavirus,” including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and other influenza viruses.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration also says on its website that “respiratory viruses are not known to be transmitted by blood transfusion and there have been no reported cases of transfusion-transmitted coronavirus.”

If you’re able to donate blood, please do. Donation levels haven’t been great this year, according to the article. This is especially important now that elective surgeries are revving back up again.

It’s Awful Out. Let’s Go For A Swim

My brain hurts. But on the bright side, at least it works. That’s more than I can say for the sludge dumps in poor disguise that whoever came up with this have to work with.

A householder on the outskirts of Edinburgh wants to create an “innovative” underground tunnel to the outdoor swimming pool in his garden.
The City of Edinburgh Council received the application from Mr Ben Molyneux to construct an underground link to his outdoor swimming pool outside his home at 64 Johnsburn Road in Balerno.
Mr Molyneux was granted permission by the council in March to create an outdoor swimming pool in his garden but now he wants to create the tunnel.
On the planning application it is explained that this is because the household “requires to have a means of accessing the facility without having to suffer the often poor weather conditions whilst in swim/gym wear.”

It Sounds Like A Miserable Holiday

For years, around Christmas, I would hear this song, but I’d always catch it way too late. I would hear it say something about throwing stones, and then I would hear creepy drums marching off into the distance and it would seem sinister and evil. I would always wonder what the heck it was called so I could look it up and listen to it fully. I kept thinking it was by the Beatles. It turns out it isn’t. I finally found it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hQ1HQh9_JM

And I still don’t get it. But at least I know what it is.

Christmas Is Saved!

I have needed to sing the praises of Mastermind toys for a long time now. Let me be clear. I need to sing the praises of the people who run the stores and the people who manage the website and run the chat on it. The rest of the site design, despite the fact that they use one of those dumpster fires called accessibility overlays, is an electronic disaster and I wish they would fix it because everything else about the place is glorious.

Ever since I discovered them a couple of years ago, I love going there to pick out a birthday or Christmas present for the nephews. It’s amazing because I can walk in there with super vague ideas and the person working there will find just the right thing. They’re so patient. One time, I went there to pick out a toy for one nephew who I didn’t know too much about his interests, and we threw around tons of ideas until finally I settled on one, and they didn’t mind! There was no sense of “Are you done yet?”

And the cherry on top is they will wrap stuff for you. I suck at wrapping gifts, so this is awesome! Every time I’ve been in the store, they have wrapped stuff for me and put the names on it and everything! And they have way cool wrapping paper. I was sorting out whose gifts were whose this morning, and the Aira agent was describing them and it sounded amazing! There were robots with santa hats on them and sleighs and things written on it like “Lump of cool” and “yule rules” and all sorts of stuff. The agent couldn’t stop talking about this amazing wrapping paper.

Last year, with the pandemic and needing to shop from home, I couldn’t touch stuff or ask questions. But the chat people were super patient with me, solving problems ranging from mailing mishaps to questions about website issues to simply answering questions about how something looked. Later, I got Seppa’s birthday present from there, and they did all sorts of dancing to connect me with the store so we could arrange to have it picked up because their instacart store wasn’t fully set up. And then, when I was on the phone with the store, the girl from the store remembered me, even though I hadn’t been in the store for a year and a half. She’s either got a really good memory, or my laugh is so annoying that it scarred her for life. I’m going to say she has a really good memory. My ego will survive better that way.

So this year, when I was sure that this Christmas, we’re screwed, I started planning to hit Mastermind Toys, and early. Then I found out we got a store dangerously close to us and I was off!

They were just as awesome as the other store. I walked in there with skeletons of ideas, and they found wicked gifts for each of the nephews that I’m sure they will love. I was done in no time! They wrapped them all, and made sure they had all the right names on them. I came home with this heavy bag of presents, and without thinking about it said “Christmas is Saved!” Every time I look at them, I giggle thinking about how much the kids will like them.

Mastermind Toys is the best. Don’t ever go away and don’t ever lose your ability to find awesome employees with all the passion and all the patience.