Bummer my espresso machine doesn’t make perfect lattes. and its old, wahh. first world problem- my coffee drinks cant be perfect.
my boss said these cookies have to be thrown out because they are slightly too dark and a bit miss-shaped. But we have food. in the first world restaurants and stores often throw out food based on appearance.
Oh no my sink is leaking. At least I have running water thats also potable.
January 5th
Week 1: I had surgery and I did not put forth very much work in school for this first week. I learned which project I would be working on, and via facebook saw/kind of met a few of my group members. but other then that I did not do very much except lie on a couch read some books and play video games.
January 12th:
I came to class and I got to meet my group for the first time in person, I don’t think we talked much at all about the project though. On Thursday we met together as a group in one of the Buchanan rooms. I was pretty behind on any thing related to the project. so just about everything we were talking about, besides what the Social Planning Council was and where Williams Lake was, I was pretty lost. Our group decided to try and continue a project from last year: setting up a carpool system from a few communities about an hour outside of Williams Lake (Horsefly and Big Lake). we talked a bit about issues and obstacles and then called up the coordinator for the Social Planning council- Jessica Knodel and told her we would continue this project from the year prior. she seemed excited.
Then we divied up some tasks for everyone, I don’t remember what they were, but I remember mine was to create/print some maps of the area and Williams lake and possible routes. so over the weekend I first read all about Williams lake, and read everything from last years Social Planning Council blog website project. Then I looked at some pictures of the community, maps, road types, populations etc. just to get acquainted with the communities a little bit. Then I printed out a few maps of Williams Lake, Horsefly, Big Lake and the general area surrounding the three towns/cities and the best rout to get to Williams Lake from Horsefly and Big Lake (and vice versa).
January 19th
On Tuesday Our group met up, and I gave Adele my maps but had to attend to a personal issue and wasn’t able to actually meet with the group. hopefully my maps helped? but I don’t know.
Later on facebook, I think on the same day Bridgette asked/hinted that I type up the stuff under the ‘Background’ tab. Which consisted of a tab for Williams Lake and for the Social Planning Council.
I typed up a 700 word brief history of Williams Lake. I included the history of the indigenous people whom had lived there for thousands of years, up threw the gold rush and up until now. I included current employers and a bit of their history, and when mining and forestry became very Prevalent in Williams Lake. And which companies are there today.
Not Knowing that the background of the Social Planning Council tab was supposed to be written by Kianna, I quickly made a small page for this as well based completely off of the Social Planning Comities website. I then felt bad because I took her job and thus she felt bad because she didn’t have anything to contribute. woops.
January 26th (ish)
Our class was introduced to myriad online sources pertaining to geography. Many were statistical websites. We were given the task of using a few for our project. I used one that gave area and postal codes for different regions of Canada. I used it to locate and show where the major employers in Williams Lake were located. However I could have just done this on Google Maps, I was trying to use the program in a way that made sense, and could potentially help our project. Although now, this seems like it may have been a waist of time because our group has decided to diverge from figuring out carpool systems for employers (because the people working at those places (the mines, lumber yards, lumber headquarters, etc) probably already have transportation to those places or else they wouldn’t have a job there… we think.
February 1st (ish)
Sometime last week we met up with a woman named Stella whom had been working on our project last year. I will not go into details about this, or our finding because its all on our group blog post.
On Monday I did the observation exercises (our weekly assignment). I went to a Sauder School of Business class and audited it, and I opened doors for people at both of the main campus libraries. The Sauder School of Business class was on property rental and statistics, or something like that. It was like a geography course except far more boring (to me) and all on the business and economics side of things, rather than on the humanist and geographical side of things. I am glad I went, even though not much of what was talked about pertained to me in any way, just because I am only in University once (probably) so going to all sorts of classes, especially ones that I wouldn’t find myself going to in any other circumstance (except something like this exercise) was interesting. I feel like I got some free education from ubc, even if it was just for an hour and a half.
The door holding thing, was about what I expected it to be. Most people thanked me, one didn’t. Nothing really weird happened.
The month of February
quite a few things happened, but I cant quite remember the order in which they occurred. So if this is out of order forgive me.
Any-who we were directed by Jessica to work with the sugarcane tribal group for figuring out a shuttle system or carpool system for them to get into Williams Lake. Adele was able to contact the band leader and proposed our idea. However, we hit our first major road block of the project that made us reconsider our direction. The Band leader said that the people hitch hiking were probably hitching into town to purchase alcohol and were mostly drunks (not my words). and continued to say that people that worked in Williams Lake mostly had access to vehicles and the elderly mostly did as well. She basically said there wasnt much we could do that would be worth while for the band. so basically all the work, or research we had done wasn’t in exactly the right direction and we changed course.
Bridgette got a hold of a guy at a youth planning thing and they had a shuttle and possibly funding for kids fresh out of high school to go get jobs. we contacted him agian and we have started thinking about this as a path
go to the high schools? find some youth that would give them a good program