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Social Media Suggestions for High School Reunion?

My 30 year reunion is coming up this fall, and I've said I'd pull together a website. Any suggestions for a good combination of web tools to help people post information, sign up for events, share photos, and generally stay informed about plans?

I'm looking at various wikis as possible platforms for most of the information. And I was assuming I could possibly piggyback on a platform like Facebook, a photo sharing site, or something like that.

Any suggestions would be gratefully appreciated!

Leave me a note here, or e-mail me at eggertson (at) gmail. (dot) com.

Tags: reunions, wvss, high school, wikis, blogs, websites, west vancouver

Fairy Tale with a Twist - Kelley Jo Burke's Charming and Rose at UofR

Kelley Jo Burke's Charming and Rose: True Love is playing Monday and Tuesday night (April 30, May 1) at the University of Regina's ShuBox Theatre.

Since I'm married to the playwright, I'll avoid bias and just say this is a superb play that tackles the myth of the perfect woman as defined by controlling men.

Rose is a fairy tale princess who falls for Prince Charming. The results are dramatic. I'll be there Monday night.  Looking forward to seeing Kate Herriott as the fairy godmother, Greg Ochitwa as Prince Charming, and Talitha Cuthbert as Rose.

Language and sexuality warning, blah, blah.  Call the UofR box office at 585-5500, for tickets, or bug the Theatre department.

Here's Kelley Jo's website (just three pages so far, but more to come).

My Winter Ordeal (10 Feet from the House)

Twenty minutes ago I was stumbling around in the snow, ice crystals coating my glasses, my fingers getting colder and colder inside my leather gloves. 

The car battery was dead, and I was trying to convince our mini-van to move another four feet, so I could stretch the jumper cables through the hedge from the van idling in the neighbour's driveway.

By getting both vehicles as far into the snowbanks as possible, we finally were able to stretch the cables far enough to get the engine started.

I'm sitting inside, nice and warm now, but for a few minutes I was reminded what's it's like to be out in the bitter cold, fighting with a piece of equipment, or trying to coax a vehicle out of the snow.  There's a point where you feel so damn cold and exhausted, you start to work out a survival strategy for getting to cover and staying there until someone can get you.

I was a long way from that point, plus I had a cell phone in my pocket and was 15 feet from the front door of the house.  But as I was blindly shuffling in the snowbank trying to get my hands to grasp the jumper cables correctly, I had a flashback to times I've been off the beaten path in bitterly cold conditions.

You get this intense focus on the task at hand, to keep your mind from running scenarios of sliding the car into the ditch, or missing the footpath you need to take back to safety.

When I worked as a reporter in Whitehorse, CBC Radio's Peter Carr told me about the time he was headed across a small Yukon lake on showshoes.  The ice started to open up behind him.  His frantic, exaggerated movements helped keep him moving forward in the snow, ice and water enough to get to safety. But he was one misstep away from becoming an item in the news the next day.

Every winter a few people get stuck in the snow on the Canadian or American prairies and are found dead within a mile of their car.  They cops tell us to stay with the vehicle, but something about the human mind convinces us the simpler solution is to just hike to the main road for help.  If we were young and fit, and dressed in parkas, ski pants and snowshoes like Peter was, we probably could get to the road and flag down a passing car.

You see the solution not far away.  You can't imagine how draining the cold and the wind and the snow drifts will be until you're too far away from the car to get back safely.

Last week, we couldn't believe the weather was above freezing.  This week, I'm glad I'm not on the road.  Hell, I'm glad I'm not in the driveway.

Oh, and thanks, Joan, for helping with the boost.  I owe you a nice bottle of wine.

The Tech Toy Revealed

Dave Traynor wants to know what the technology present is, mentioned in my last three posts.  For Christmas this year, I got a Nokia E61 smart phone, but as I alluded in the last three blog posts, the phone is somewhere between Toronto and here.  ETA is today, the first business day since the package was last sighted in Ontario.

I'm pretty pumped about this, partly because I'm into technology gadgets, and partly because I'm hoping it will reduce the amount of time I spend in front of a computer trying to recreate the ideas I had earlier in the day or week.

Kelley and I have been experimenting with chosen presents lately.  We still get each other surprises, but often big purchases that are a bit of a luxury get wrapped into Christmas, birthday or anniversary. 

Does knowing what's coming spoil the fun?  Not really, because it's precisely the thing I wanted.  There's still plenty of room for surprise and delight in our lives.

Now, to get writing our annual Christmas e-mail, that often goes out in January...

Previous posts: Christmas Present Takes a Genealogical Tour; If a  Present Is Still in Truck, It's not Really Present, Is It?,  Christmas Shipping Saga: The Maps

Christmas Present Shipping Saga: The Maps

Chapter 3:

Eric Explores an Alternate Universe, Where You Move Away from Something in Order to Get Closer to it

I'm still hung up on the item being shipped from Bloomington Illinois that is struggling to find me.  I had no idea where this particular Bloomington was, so I consulted Google Maps.

Here's how Google thinks my package should have travelled:

In this universe, Chicago or Minneapolis would be the hub for the courier company, and the parcel would go north to Winnipeg.

Maybe in the days when trains were the dominant form of transportation this would make sense, but we all know that Toronto is the centre of Canada, and packages going to Canada are much more likely to be destined for a thin strip of land adjacent to the U.S. border somewhere between London and Montreal.

So the courier company's view of the trip looks like this:

In this universe, items headed for Canada get sorted at a few central hubs and are distributed from there.

As a customer, this neither surprises me nor particularly disappoints me.  If this thing absolutely had to be here for Christmas, I would have paid the 100% markup on shipping.

Previous posts:  Christmas Present Takes a Genealogical Tour; If a  Present Is Still in Truck, It's not Really Present, Is It?

Christmas Present Takes a Genealogical Tour

The bad news - the present that was supposed to be here for Christmas was shipped to the greater Toronto area, where it's been languishing for two days.

The good news - it's very close to my great-grandmother's birthplace of Stouffville, Ontario.

Minnie March grew up in the Whitchurch-Stouffville area, and ended up moving to Saskatchewan with her new husband David Curtis.  They ran a dry goods store in Wolseley, then moved to Findlater, southeast of Regina, where he was badly injured while working in a grain elevator.

They ended up living at 2039 Retallack Street in Regina, about seven blocks from our house.

If the package takes a short detour on the way to Regina (and why not, it's already gone far enough from here), it can swing by where the old family farm was.

The map on the right shows a red star where my package was at 3:37 this morning.

Merry Christmas to the March family relations in and from Stouffville.  I've never visited, but I'm not dead yet, so you never know.

The package will eventually go through Wolseley, which was a little different when Elsie was born there in 1903.  For one thing, it was still part of the Northwest Territories then.  Saskatchewan didn't become a province for another two years.

Here's a shot of the grain elevators in early Wolseley.  My grandparents briefly ran their store in a triangular brick building that's now a credit union branch.

My mom sometimes talks about her aunt Susan, who married into the Banbury family in Wolseley. Susan's husband Robert was related to Edwin Banbury, a co-founder of Beaver Lumber.

I've got a few March family photos from the turn of the last century on Flickr.

Thanks to the University of Saskatchewan archives for the photo.

If a Present Is Still in a Truck, It's not Really Present, Is It?

Every year there's something in transit for Christmas.

 

This year it's a big ticket electronics item, ordered from a "Canadian" website.

 

The package shipped December 19, and thanks to online tracking, I'm able to watch it wend its way east.  Should I mention to UPS that I live in Western Canada?

 

The package originated in Illinois, which is not in Canada.  This would have been good information to know before I ordered.  Does this mean I'll get dinged for import duties?

Fortunately, Illinois is only a few states and an international border away from Saskatchewan. 

Watching UPS track my package into Michigan and then Ontario doesn't fill me with confidence.  It's heading east!

 

The last tracking point was Windsor.  That's a good sign, I think.  At first it looked like it would end up in Toronto for sortation, but if it was headed for Toronto it would have got there long ago.  I guess UPS popped it on a truck heading to western Canada.  Either that, or it's still sitting in customs.  Life was easier when you couldn't track the progress.  You just had to pray to the postal gods.

If I knew it had to cross borders to get here I would have paid extra for faster shipping.  Just because there's a Canadian flag on the web page, doesn't mean the company has its warehouses in the country.

I'm pretty sure UPS doesn't deliver on weekends in Regina, so if it's not here by Friday afternoon, I doubt we'll get it for Christmas.  One of the presents in the house is going to be represented by a print-out from an online catalogue.

If you see a UPS truck heading west on the Trans Canada Highway, let me know!

Saskatchewan Bloggers Featured

A feature article about Saskatchewan bloggers gave a peek at some of the province's blogs Monday morning.

Being one of the only Regina bloggers interviewed, I was fodder for a photo and a couple of quotes.  That's me poking up at the top of the front page of the Regina Leader-Post.  I was going for the serious, professional look, but photographer Don Healy wanted the grinning enthusiast look, so I obliged.

I commented about the interactivity of blogs, and that editorial rules for bloggers vary much more than they do for journalists.

A companion article focused on political blogs and how the parties approach social media.

In addition to the usual suspects Kate McMillan, Lance Levsen, John Murney and Saskboy, the L-P talked to Prince Albert pastor Randall Friesen and political strategists Mike Stefaniuk and Reg Downs.

For a look at most of the active blogs in the province, visit the Saskatchewan Blogs Aggregator.

Did I get a spike in traffic from the Leader-Post story?  A bit, but not as much as from a link this week on Laura's Playground Transgender and Transsexual News site.  Goes to show that a mention in electronic format that has a link built in leads to more visits than a mention in a print publication that doesn't include a URL.

And congrats to Saskboy for his Off the Grid being voted best science/tech blogger from the Canadian Blog Awards.  He also came third in the best progressive blog category.  Kate McMillan's Small Dead Animals and Schmutzie's Milkmoney or Not Here I Come were in the top three for best conservative blog and best Canadian blog, respectively.

Tags:  saskatchewan, socialmedia, promotion, blogs, saskblogs, regina

Transgender Kids - No Easy Decisions

This piece in the New York Times caught my eye.  It's about kids who identify strongly with the other gender.  Some parents are letting their kids cross-dress, but it's not an easy decision.

In the past, that sort of behaviour was treated as a psychological problem.  Now therapists aren't so sure.  They wonder if the depression and suicides seen in adults who see themselves as transgender could be avoided. 

Given the amount of verbal and physical abuse a transgender pre-teen or teen would get in your average North American community, I'm not sure anyone's going to be able to avoid psychological distress.

About 15-20% of boys who grow up identifying themselves as girls will want to change their sex when they reach adulthood, says a Toronto psychologist.

Transamerica

Speaking of trannies transsexuals, I watched Transamerica recently.  The beauty of the film isn't that Felicity Huffman plays a transgender man.  It's that she plays a messed-up person who happens to be transgender. 

You can catch a good interview with writer-director Duncan Tucker on the Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcasts (February 2006).

The best part of the interview is Tucker talking about meeting Huffman's husband William H. Macy, who asks if there's "anything I can do to help."  It took Tucker several hours to realize that it wasn't one of those empty offers.  Macy became executive producer, and helped get the indie film in wide distribution.

Upate: Check out the comments.  Some good additions to the discussion, including a correction that Huffman plays a transgender woman, not a man.

Tags: transgender, film, psychology, gender, transamerica

We Met 24 Years Ago...

Kelley turned 21 the day we first went out.  I showed up at The Ubyssey production night to take her out for a hamburger at 2 a.m.  Her ex-boyfriend tagged along.  It was her birthday, and (after we dumped Glen) I kissed her on the back doorstep of the house where she was staying on a foamie in the basement.  We moved in together four weeks later.

Evenings out for food have been a touchstone for us ever since.

Tonight we went to Zest, where we had Mahi Mahi with some Monkey Bay chardonnay.  I hung on her words and her energy, just like 25 24 years ago*.

Happy birthday, Kelley Jo.  Happy anniversary.

Photo copyright Ian Smith, Vancouver.

* (I checked Kelley's math, and it was 24 years.  Big party next year, everyone!)