Next Monday, Oct. 16, voters will head to the polls to elect their choices for Big Lakes County and Town of High Prairie councils.

At least they will be voting in Big Lakes for the wards that have candidates. A few councillors were elected by acclamation as nobody challenged them.

In High Prairie, there are candidates for both the mayor’s chair, and for the six seats on council. There are also four people contesting the High Prairie School Division’s two seats that are available in the community.

Read the candidate interviews in this week’s newspaper and online at southpeacenews.com.

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As mentioned in this week’s editorial, there is a new source for information about the candidates. You will find this at highprairie.alberta chat.com.

By the way, there is no “www” before that website address. It’s just straight highprairie .albertachat.com.

At the same location, or at albertachat.com, you will also find many of the questions that were asked at the forum, as well as more questions. You might want to add your own questions.

We hope candidates will take the time to look at the questions and add their own answers or thoughts where appropriate.

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Speaking of “take the time” this seems to be no priority for some candidates running in High Prairie. A couple of candidates, including one running for mayor, didn’t bother reading the “Candidate Information” sheets given to all candidates. So, their signs went up without a contact phone number!

While it seems like a trivial thing, it sort of goes to show you that sometimes, some people just can’t be bothered with following rules, or even bothered to find out what the rules are! Sad, isn’t it?

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This week’s South Peace News is the last paper before the election next Monday, Oct. 16.

If there is any breaking news concerning the election, you will find that at southpeace news.com. The website is updated several times during the week so it would be very encouraging to the hard-working folks at SPN if you check the site out.

Plus of course, the above mentioned Alberta Chat.com website.

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Nice fall weather means harvest activities are going full blast.

Or, at least that was the case just before the weekend just over. Crop quality is figured to be better than last year.

But, the bad news was the heavy rainfall a few weeks ago that was very slow in drying. As a result, the Sept. 26 report from Alberta Agriculture said that only 40 per cent of the crops in the Peace Country were in the bin. This compares to just over 32 per cent in northeastern Alberta [St. Paul – Lloydminster area], and a staggering 14 per cent in the northwest [Drayton Valley – Edmonton region.]

Those are the numbers from back then. New numbers are not out as of this writing, but our own reckoning is at least 80 per cent of local crops are now in the bin, and probably more.

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Crops are in, but the entire Peavine Metis Settlement council is “out”.

Elections for our three Metis Settlements were held last week, unlike other municipalities which don’t vote until this coming Monday. Ken Noskey is back as chair of Peavine, a position he held several years ago before losing.

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One of the world’s five richest persons, Warren Buffet, has the diet of a six year-old.

Seriously. Says Buffet, 87, “I looked at the [statistics] and saw the lowest death rate is of six year-olds. So I figured I should eat like one.”

So that means about five cans of Coca-Cola a day, lots of See’s Candies, not too many vegies.

Check out the link for Quirk News at the southpeacenews.com website for the whole story of a fellow who ate like Warren for a week.