Once again this year, I am steering a dragon boat in the Ottawa Dragon Boat Festival for the Algonquin College Singapore Slings.  And like the other teams in the festival, we’re taking part in the pledge challenge raising money that will go to support the charities selected by the Ottawa Dragon Boat Foundation. These charities do very important work in the Ottawa area and are worth supporting.

If you’d like to help my team reach its pledge target and thus help the various charities selected by the ODBF, please consider clicking here or on the link at the top of the right column, and sponsoring me.  All donations of $20 or more automatically receive a tax receipt and you can request one for donations of less than $20.

Many thanks for reading this and thinking about it.  And a special thank you if you do sponsor me. 🙂

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the imminent archiving of about 300 geocaches in Gatineau Park. Based on the information being provided by one of the geocache reviewers based in/near Quebec City who is responsible for caches in western Quebec, it appeared that the NCC had requested the removal of all geocaches in Gatineau Park before the end of June. The reviewer in question sent an email to all owners of geocaches in Gatineau Park that contained the following:

The National Capital Commission (NCC) wishes to control Geocaching in the Gatineau Park.  Therefore, it is currently setting a procedure for caches within its territory, and is asking geocachers to archive all caches in the park.  They are requesting the cooperation of concerned geocachers to pick up all the containers.

Since then it has been determined that the National Capital Commission has contacted neither Groundspeak (the company that runs geocaching.com) nor the reviewer in question. Rather, the reviewer apparently took it upon himself to issue the email, without actually reading the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan.

The local geocache community is, to say the least, extremely unimpressed. The actions of the reviewer have seriously undermined the confidence some cachers have in the reviewer system in general, and in the reviewer in question specifically. Especially in the reviewer.

There have been some calls to have Gatineau Park removed from the area of responsibility of the reviewer in question and given to a reviewer who lives closer to the national capital region. Personally, I think there’s merit to this suggestion and hope that this is what happens. There two or three reviewers who are closer to the national capital region who would be good fits, though one is active in the local geocaching community so they might be too close. But either of the other two would be good choices.

I’m glad that the NCC isn’t the culprit in all this. Regardless, they’ve probably taken some flack that they don’t deserve. I tried to be fairly restrained in my previous blog entry about this topic, but I still pointed the finger at them and for that I apologize.

There are still some geocaches that are going to have to be removed because they’re in integral compensation zone (ICZ), but the number of affected geocaches is around 40, and nowhere near 300.

Hopefully, the local geocaching community and the NCC can work together with respect to geocaching in Gatineau Park. I know that I, for one, am interested in this and I’m almost certain that other members of the geocaching community are, too.

The last couple of days I’ve felt kind of crummy. The kind of crummy that often precedes a change in the weather.

If you’re in Ottawa, then you know that we’ve had unsettled weather since Wednesday morning, which corresponds to when I started feeling crummy.

This isn’t the first time that I’ve commented on this phenomenon. The last time was in October 2008 when a big low-pressure zone blasted through Ottawa.

The graph shows the pressure in Ottawa for the last day or so. And during this times I’ve felt varying degrees of crummy.

When the weather was clear sky and warm earlier this week, I was feeling great (and not just because of the sunshine).

Do you feel the weather?

As things like pesticides are being legislated out of existence, landscaping becoming an increasingly important part of construction projects and sustainability being on the minds of planners everywhere, all of which lead to an increased demand for horticulture technicians, one can be forgiven for wondering why Algonquin College is looking to cancel their horticulture technician program.

Obviously, Algonquin probably feels the need to cut their budget and identified the horticulture program as a low-profile program. Who cares? They’re just gardeners, right?

Wrong.

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