CATS, CRYPTIDS, PSYCHICS. ALL IN ONE WEEK.

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Happy Wednesday friends,

Short week after the long weekend, so thankful for it. I hope everyone had a great time. Plenty to share with you in this edition 🙂 happy clear skies today before the rainy week.

with love,

your friendly neighbourhood goose 🦆

Should we keep this map?

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CONVERSATIONS & CONNECTIONS

Excited to meet after skipping July! Can’t wait to make new friends at the August 20th Dinner Club.

Notes from the last dinner:

❝

"This was a great way to meet people in our area! We have already set up another group dinner with our new friends at our table. Thanks for a fun evening!"

Come become friends with your neighbours, the wonderful people who make this place beautiful. For our friends who are not familiar, this is how it goes:

✦︎ Take a quick quiz about your interests, food preferences, and the kinds of people you'd love to share a table with.

✦︎ Get matched with a few other Waterloo Region Rhythm community members based on your answers.

✦︎ Receive your invite the morning of the dinner - restaurant details included, no guessing required.

✦︎ Show up, eat well, meet people. Then follow everyone to a secret after-party spot, revealed at the table.

GRAB YOUR SEAT

REGION’S RADAR

Kitchener installed 30 free sports equipment lockers across its parks. Basketballs, soccer balls, frisbees and other gear are inside, and anyone can borrow them at no cost. The city launched them July 29 with Equip Sport and Canadian Tire Jumpstart. Read more
The Kitchener Market building will be closed for several months. The city says the July 12 fire left damage extensive enough to need full remediation and restoration before indoor vendors can return, and it has laid out how it plans to support them in the meantime. Outdoor markets are still running. Read more
The province is putting $3.4 million into rural transit here. The money introduces or expands service in Woolwich, Wellesley, Wilmot and North Dumfries, the four townships with the thinnest coverage.
A Waterloo startup is building planes with nobody in them. Ribbit, co-founded by Waterloo PhD grad Jeremy Wang, makes small autonomous aircraft that navigate by onboard sensing and land on the gravel and dirt runways northern communities already have. Taking the pilot seats out means far more room for cargo like food and medical supplies. It is past prototypes and holds contracts with Transport Canada, National Defence and the National Research Council.
The Aud is getting a real sit-down restaurant. Kitchener selected Rolleman Restaurant Group, a local operator behind several other restaurants here, to run Club 51, a full-service sports bar opening later this summer.
The University of Waterloo was recognized by the Scarborough Charter Inter-Institutional Forum for its work against anti-Black racism in Canadian higher education, alongside more than 50 other institutions in the network. The programs behind it include the Black Student Opportunities Fund, Sankofa Pathways to University and the Pan-African Initiative for Research.
Cricket is getting permanent space at RBJ Schlegel Park. Kitchener mortgage brokerage Grow with Nav is putting $100,000 over ten years into the new Grow Nation Cricket Nets at the Cowan Recreation Centre.
Cambridge is letting residents pick the new playground at Hill 60 Park. The city put the design options to a public vote rather than choosing one in-house. Read more

ROLL OUT ROOTS

Work: multiple roles added today, University of Waterloo

Volunteer: Event Volunteer, Waterloo Busker Carnival

House of the week: 1859 built by Thomas and James Dalgleish, master stone masons whose hands shaped much of Galt's enduring character

Adopt a pet: Cooper is reporting for official best friend duty

AT HOME IN THE REGION

Perfect timing for part two of Cheryl’s getaway picks. Most of you said last week you are staying put. This weekend, and Labour Day.

Six places, then. A country house hotel twenty minutes from you. A fully restored historic hotel in our own downtown. A living history village on sixty acres. And a water park, if the kids get a vote.

Missed part one? The seven getaway picks are in last week’s newsletter and linked at the end of the list today.

Cheryl's Six Getaway Picks →

Staying put. So what sounds like the best plan?

A CAT IN THE DOG DAYS

I was putting this week's list together and had to stop for a second. A cryptid market, a room full of psychics and crystals, a cat video festival and two separate trinket markets, all in the same few days. It felt like the calendar had a theme nobody told me about.

So I went looking, and here is the part I did not know.

Back in 2012, someone at an art museum in Minneapolis suggested a cat video festival, mostly as a joke. They set it up on the lawn and ten thousand people turned up. It tours the world now, and it lands at the Princess this week.

Also in 2012, a Disney cartoon made up a fake holiday called Summerween, where a town loves Halloween so much it celebrates twice and carves melons because pumpkins are not ripe yet. One episode, one gag. Hershey now makes candy for it, and more than half of adults say Halloween is not a day anymore, it is a season. That is roughly why there is a cryptid market in August.

My favourite one is the oldest. Saturday the 8th is the date the crystal and tarot world builds its year around, and it comes from Sirius rising just before dawn. The Egyptians watched for that same rising to know the Nile was about to flood, and the Greeks blamed the star for the heat and called that stretch the dog days. So the thing you say when it is too hot to move comes from the same star as the psychic fair.

And August 8 is also International Cat Day. Right in the thick of the dog days. Nobody planned that, which makes it better.

RIDDLE ME

Last week’s trivia: only 11% got it right. 134 of you said Cambridge, which is right about the man and wrong about the holiday. Galt was renamed for John Galt in 1827, but Guelph is the city that put his name on the long weekend.