A couple of days ago, I posted about the Prince George couple who found a lottery ticket they got for Christmas, discovered they had won $10,000 and then discovered the ticket had expired. Well, there’s a new twist — the ticket was not, in fact, a winner. The details on that link are scant so here’s what I found out: the ticket was part of B.C. Lotto’s Clue game which, as you can see on their YouTube has somewhat convoluted rules which honestly I still don’t understand but which apparently made it pretty easy to think you had a winning ticket when you didn’t and, I’m told, will not be run again because of the confusion it caused. So idk! It’s probably something of a relief for these folks to realize that they didn’t miss out on a life-changing amount of money by a matter of days but I also can’t quite imagine the rollercoaster ride of emotions of going from “We won $10,000!” to “We won $10,000 but the ticket expired and we missed out!” to this. I honestly hope they win $10,000 next Christmas but also I’m not sure if gifting them lotto tickets would just be cruel.

Anyways, this woman from Mackenzie won $364,000 which is enough to buy a couple of houses there.

Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn

The Citizen has a story on the hospitality industry’s labour shortage, but I wanted to pick out this tidbit:

That’s a lot of hotel rooms! Greater Nanaimo has more than 115,000 people compared to about 90,000 in greater Prince George and yet we have nearly three times as many hotel rooms? I actually wrote about the growing number of hotels in the city back in 2018 and at the time I was contacted by someone building even more to tell me about what a great market it was and how much people in the industry were interested in setting up shop here. Here’s a game for you: Can you guess which Prince George hotel has the highest user rating on TripAdvisor? I didn’t.

Meet Bad Pun Mr. PG

Yesterday I went to log into my Tumblr account to find out it had been inexplicably deactivated. This is too bad because I’d had it since around 2011 and I had recently started getting into using it again because of ~things~. Fortunately, though, I was able to retrieve this little gem from circa 2014 which I put together in Microsoft Paint using images sourced from, I believe, Tourism PG and a cake the airport made? I think I had made more but they are lost to time, I suppose.

Quick news:

• The Prince George Post published a feature on a peer support worker on the front lines of the city’s toxic drug crisis.

• In forestry news, the province is roughly doubling its old growth deferral areas and its funding for wood manufacturing.

• After failing to pay his property taxes for three years in a row while being the city’s finance chair, coming nowhere close to getting elected back to council three campaigns in a row, and failing to disclose his election expense forms on time this year, Cameron Stolz says he won’t be running in 2026.

• The city wants to borrow $2.7 million dollars for new equipment and if you don’t like that idea you have until March 30 to try and stop them.

• Councillor Kyle Sampson is interested in finding ways to reduce the amount of waste showing up in our landfills.

• I like this story about a group of women who built a snow-senior outside a care home, particularly this line: “The snow in the Bowl was just too icy so Sarah Bonnar, Samantha Dube and Rene Wade got together and filled their recycle bins with fresh Hart-quality snow to create their Agnes masterpiece.”

• 2,400 children in Prince George were living in poverty in 2020, according to a new national report card.

• Two Prince George mail carriers have sustained workplace injuries due to icy conditions, according to their union.

• Tourism Prince George and the library both need board members.

• Speaking of Tourism Prince George, they’ve released the second video in their Local Legends series, this one about Olympian Tony Fiala who narrates the piece and shows off his 1992 mustache.

• The Relay for Life may be cancelled, but MP Todd Doherty will be walking it anyways.

• Doherty is also trying to introduce a private member’s bill to change the way we treat assaults on first responders.

• An interesting write-up from hiker/author Mike Nash on the dangers of balloons in the wilderness.

• The Shoplifters opens at Theatre Northwest tonight.

• More details on the Prince George family hosting an event encouraging 20-second hugs in memory of their 13-year-old child who died last June.

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