We’re back in studio, where a few hiccups happened with this one because things sometimes happen when live, but it’s a new month, the month of November, and it’s Indigenous Disability Awareness Month (IDAM).

Also, Radio Western just celebrated forty years on the FM dial, and they were broadcasting live over the weekend. Both of us didn’t make it and we explain why, but we also wish CHRW Radio Western a happy birthday/anniversary and acknowledge the positive influence it, as a community/university radio station, has on the local London community. And now, with the Internet, its reach is global. We at Outlook owe them bigtime for giving us a platform to speak to listeners about our perspectives as Canadians who are blind, along with sharing outlooks from as many others as possible with those with disabilities such as blindness.

On this week’s episode, we talk Halloween and tactile costumes, podcast Monday’s and being stuck in a 90s time warp, lack of sports for blind students who are integrated and a mention of goalball (the Quidditch of the blindness adaptive sports) though played firmly on the ground/no flying involved, and Brian speaks about his newly found hobby of playing fantasy hockey with a group of guys and the accessibility of the app.

And finally, Brian attended most of the 2021 Connecting the Dots CNIB Conference, while Kerry didn’t and kind of regretted it (fomo) fear of missing out. This year had sessions and topics such as coding, micro certificates/micro credentials, and the initial rollout of Lego Braille Bricks, which we’d love to have access to, but currently only places such as schools have them. Lego is one of those things that’s always been more of an accessible toy/game for us and here’s to any integration of products, accessible for all, inclusive product production to becoming the norm one day.

A big theme throughout the conference was mentorship, but we discuss how, until these last four years or so, both of us always had each other. We’ve always just been siblings with a shared life outlook and since we had each other to lean on growing up, we really didn’t see the need for many more mentors, but most people don’t have another blind sibling and children, young people, and those of us at any age can always use more mentorship. This year’s Connecting the Dots keynote speaker was Paralympian Megan Mahon, born in northern Ontario but now living in Alberta and working at the Canadian National Institute For The Blind there, Lead Children’s and Youth Programming which is important for career development and improving employment for the blind.

It was the appearance, at the end of day one of Connecting the Dots, where CNIB’s President and CEO John Rafferty spoke. He said very little, we wonder and we ponder why he didn’t say more, but we have a problem with the CEO of the CNIB being sighted and making so much off the lives of blind Canadians in the first place; at least they have a few women (blind) near the top, in positions of power with him which is something.

And so, as this year enters its second to last month and we turn \the clocks back again here, we review recent Outlooks and give a brief summary of what we’re planning, for both these final months of 2021 (art education for children who are blind/book review/finding community), and for 2022, here before we all know it.

So that’s it for episode 133(Harry Potter references included) where we discussed a bit of Radio Western history and you can find more about that here:

https://radiowestern.ca/about/history

Stuck in the 90’s by Moxy Fruvous:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1W80EOOMEo