Ehlana and Ethan:
Happy 22nd Birthday, Lindsay Faulkner!
Happy 3rd Anniversary, Martin and Kimberly Rice!
We did a short vid-chat with our cousins and gifts were sent, but that was our only involvement in those celebrations; and we left it up to family and friends to take care of making today special for Lindsay, Martin, and Kimberly.
Our day started before dawn again for the drive to Montreal; and we again got right to work with a multi-tasked breakfast once in the city. While Cassie and Michael had a lot of work to do today; we are also happy to be in town during the world-famous, Just for Laughs comedy festival. The Montreal Comedy festival runs for the entire month of July too; so there are a lot of comedy entertainment opportunities and brings millions of comedy fans to Montreal. That, by the way, would have been a problem for us for accommodations if Cassie and Michael hadn’t booked early for our stay in the city. We’ll have more on that part of our story over the next couple of days, but will mention that the teens in our group will not be able to attend any of the club events for those festivals, but there are outdoor, free events that we will be able to check out during some of our breaks between the work. We haven’t done that yet today, but do plan on doing that a few times between now and when we move on again late tomorrow night.
We’re currently writing this while taking a work break to get checked into our rooms. This will be a short stop and we need to get going soon; so let’s speed this up a bit. After that breakfast-work meeting, we had a morning site visit to a logistics warehouse; a finance meeting in a downtown tower; a charity lunch; and then another site visit to an inner-city clinic and health and social services center. The need for those services is different in countries like Canada because they have a social safety net that we don’t have in the United States, but there are still many needs that either aren’t covered or take too long to get through basic government services; and expertise is also needed to help low-income people navigate the hurdles and paperwork often required to access those medical and social services. That was my favorite stop of the day thanks to the clinic side of that facility, but we all had fun with the tour; talking with the staff and clients; and learning a lot about a social services system that is very different from ours but also one that has unique challenges related to scarcity and regulated costs. This hotel stop was next on our schedule, but we still have another meal meeting to get to soon and more work and fun to enjoy this evening; so we need to get going soon.
On the world news front, the Iran war rages on again, and we did not like seeing reports of attacks on Iranian food infrastructure like grain silos and flour and bread storage and production facilities. That is a new kind of war crimes that only targets the poorest civilians, since the elites and military will always have food first; and we hate seeing our leaders making those choices. President Trump is again threatening to destroy Iran’s power plants and energy infrastructure; that would be yet another terrible mistake; and ‘we’ obviously haven’t learned from horrors our country committed in the past along those lines – like the major hydroelectric dam in North Korea that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people downriver from that dam when it was destroyed. There are very good reasons why these acts are supposed to be war crimes now, but if the top world military powers can’t be held accountable; then those international laws are meaningless.
We need to stop there, so we’ll save the Ukraine war updates for tomorrow; and we really need to offer other news from around the world too – even if those stories don’t get much media attention. Stay tuned for that – and our next personal news update; and we’ll get out there and live the adventures we’ll write about tomorrow starting right now.
Until next time, live with love, fellow Magi of the Light!
