Knitting in the Round Lesson 1:

Knit the outside, not the inside.

Knitting in the Round Lesson 2A:

When picking up your newly free needle, make sure you grab the right one.  From which follows:

Knitting in the Round Lesson 2B:

How to pick up and repair dropped stitches.  (Useful for all knitting as well)

Elizabeth May, leader of the federal Green Party of Canada, was coming to town to speak at a Conservation Council of New Brunswick event.  Various other events were therefore scheduled around this, including a talk at UNB.   As a member of the local Green Party EDA (Electoral District Association) board, my family and I were invited to a meet and greet dinner on Friday.

The dinner got off to a bit of a late start, as Elizabeth was taking a live interview via telephone for a radio station in her new riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands.  It was only supposed to be a few minutes, but stretched to nearly an hour.  As impatient as we all were, we could hardly begrudge an interview like this.

Finally, though, she was free, and to great applause and smiles she joined the party.  There were probably 50 people there, adults of all ages and many young children.  Hippies, preppies, and businessmen alike.  And so we set to eating.

Her time was very limited, so there wasn’t time for everybody to have indepth conversations.  But we did manage to grab her for our few moments, and to snap this photo of her and Flipper:

What a great homeschool field trip that was!

In our all-too-brief conversation, we found Ms. May to be genuinely warm, personable and sincere, not just the polite vote-for-me civility of most politicians.  We told her about how hubby ran for the Greens back in the 2004 federal election (when we were living in Ontario), to help meet the ground-breaking goal of having a candidate in every riding across the country (something that the mainstream parties don’t even always accomplish!)

If you haven’t considered voting Green before, now (between elections, but with one possible at any moment given the current Parliament) is the ideal time for you to do a little reading on why you should.   Apparently, Green is the majority party of preference among young voters, and is the second-choice party for a vast number of Canadians of all ages.  Not to mention, the millions of voters that would like to go Green, but feel the need to “vote strategically” instead, giving election winners a false sense of the strength of their mandate (lesser of two evils rather than legitimate preference), and further indoctrinating the undemocratic fallacies of our first-past-the-post system.  It’s a self-perpetuating vicious circle.  As more people are afraid to vote their conscience, it drives even more people away from their preferences as they feel their votes becoming more and more ‘wasted’.

No vote is ever wasted.  Every single vote for a “losing” party provides funding for that party, to strengthen them for the next election.  And it sends the message to the winning party that they are not all that popular, not as much as they think they are, anyway.  And if the losing party you vote for receives more votes than it did in the last election, the growth will not go unnoticed, and more people will be confident enough to vote for them next time.  And lo and behold, before you know it, this “losing” party is now winning!

No, I’m not at all passionate about electoral reform, couldn’t you tell? 

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