“Time is an illusion.” – Albert Einstein

• First the latest episode of Council Conversations is available for your listening pleasure. This week I speak to Eric Beauregard, Councillor for Ward 2 in Port Colborne.
  • A teaser for next week episode with Neil Anstett, Ward Councillor for Listowell in the Municipality of North Perth.
• Last week’s post on incomes and housing affordability generated an interview with CBC Windsor’s Chris Ensing which you can find at the 14:15 mark of the March 8th live stream.
  • It was a great conversation the one nitpick that I have is the graphic that showed the change in housing prices and incomes side by side did make my eye twitch a little.
• A year in review, from Statistics Canada on COVID was released this week. This page then links to a ton of data and research!
• The City of Windsor’s traffic calming policy is available for comment until Monday the 15th of March.
• This special episode of Rose City Politics with Sarah Mushtaq and Dr. Decker was very good!
  • I would suggest listening the podcast but the actual report is an interesting read.
• A short NPR story on whether the Simpson’s lifestyle is attainable in 2021. Spoiler alert it isn’t.
• This week saw all sorts of drama over a wetland in the GTA where it was revealed that Amazon was a potential tenant. Amazon eventually pulled their plans over the growing backlash.
  • Meanwhile the 413 is also facing trouble as pretty much all of the municipalities along the route have come out against it.

• Building off of last week’s discussion of income, 2019 Taxfiler data has started to be released. Median wages rose by 2.4% from 2018-2019 just as the housing marketing in our region, saw the average price of sales in December 2019 rise by 11.89%. So affordable for whom?
  • Housing is a crisis in our community and for political reasons we aren’t really willing to do much about it.
• It has been a year, we have all gone through ups and downs. Somethings have changed, others haven’t. As I write this today just shy of a calendar year from the first “A Few Thoughts” post, I really don’t feel anything. Certainly there is a feeling of accomplishment, the thoughts of the many messages of appreciation that have occurred through this blog over the last year (as well as some of the complaints that have happened). I also think of the time and effort that has gone into what started as a bit of a curiosity during the opening days of the pandemic, became a bit of a chore at points and other times became a outlet for frustration or a process to channel excitement.
  • Some stuff I just sort of gave up on:
    • I was tracking my progress through the 30 seasons of the Simpsons. I stopped watching in season 17 cause it got boring.
    • There were somethings that I really didn’t talk about because my day job. I have many thoughts that could be shared about the charitable/NFP sector and the pandemic. I have made a few illusions in various posts (particularly early on in the pandemic) but I have largely become disenchanted with that.
      • The pandemic did bring hardship and suffering but also an opportunity for renewal and transformation for those willing and brave enough to take it action.
    • I am still waiting on a number of activities that I commented on, this for example, to move forward.
• I certainly know that 2021 will be a different year than 2020, some of that being of my own design but I am honestly torn as to what the next step on this series is.

• Looking at the numbers above, It was certainly more “work” than I expected. All that work did lead to some traffic here: 6,257 visitor and 11,497 page views. I don’t know if that is good or not, but it certainly seems like a big number given that the majority of them come from Essex County.
  • I have a new found respect for media people, who toil away writing and don’t really get paid for the content that is created.
• I honestly don’t know what my plans are going forward so if you are a reader, (and still reading) feel free to reply on FB or Twitter to this post and let me know your thoughts. I do have many projects on the go that, if I stopped writing this could be accelerated but there is also a comfort and almost cathartic process by just sharing thoughts into the ether that is the internet. Honestly I don’t know what will happen, I will wake up next weekend and maybe start writing, whether are Week 53 or something else is the questions.
  • To be clear the blog will not go away, research and other posts will still come up here but the weekly posts could stop.

• So our case numbesr are still floating with a 7-day average in the mid-30 cases per day range we seem to be caught in a “red zone” limbo.
  • We have to remember this level of cases being reported is comparable to the peaks we saw during wave 1 and the migrant worker outbreaks. Although it is easy to point at the outbreaks in the homelessness community as the cause here