My grandmother is the most wonderful woman in the world. No contest. Don’t even bother nominating your grandmother, wife, mother or sister in the comments, the debate is over, my Nan wins.
She went in for her 2nd knee replacement this week, a week earlier than scheduled as there was an opening. Normally Z goes to see my mom on Mondays, but since Nan was in surgery, mom would be with her. My grandmother actually wanted to apologize to Z because she was taking a day with his Nana away from him. Are you kidding me?
The point of the story is my grandmother is kind, generous, loving, and kicks all kind of ass (in the beautiful, gentle, heartfelt way).
She was given blood during her surgery, and needed another 2 units after to get her motor up and running full steam.
If you give blood, thank you. Thank you for giving the greatest woman in the world the gift of life.
If you don’t give blood, why not? I’ve been advised it’s not the best thing for me to do while I’m in the midst of my Team Diabetes Disney World training, so I will be heading down in mid-January after my event to top up the supplies.
Last weekend we checked out World of the Weird at the Vancouver Aquarium.
World of the Weird runs on the weekends, with a spooky hallway all decorated up in the bowels of the Aquarium, along with special creepy crawly gross and ghouly stations throughout the facility.
Here’s what they have to scare the pants right off ya:
1. HAUNTED HALLWAY TOUR – Explore the inky bowels of the Aquarium and prepare for a STARTLING view of what really goes on behind the scenes.
2. HANG WITH OUR BATS – A fun little game similar to TV’s “Jeopardy!” educates you on the wonders of BATS and dispels common myths.
3. PICK YOUR POISON – Learn to distinguish between VENOM & POISON (no, we’re not talking about 80’s recording artists Venom and Poison)
4. FRIGHT FACTOR – Chow down on a cheddar flavoured meal worm or a salt ‘n vinegar flavoured cricket. If you have the GUTS, that is…
5. CREEPY CAMOUFLAGE – Learn how OCEAN PREDATORS use camouflage to “sneak up” on prey … and you just might fall prey yourself, as you learn!
The haunted hallway was a little too old for Z. He didnt really notice anything was going on, except that it was dark. He actually didnt get scared. He did, however, totally dig in to the cheddar flavoured meal worm. Yup. My son ate a maggot.
January 29, 1920. The day the production, importation and sale of alcohol was banned across the United States. Prohibition.
December 5, 1933. The day it all ended and the booze flowed once again.
As Prohibition became increasingly unpopular, especially in the big cities, “Repeal” was eagerly anticipated. On March 23, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law an amendment to the Volstead Act known as the Cullen-Harrison Act, allowing the manufacture and sale of “3.2 beer” (3.2% alcohol by weight, approximately 4% alcohol by volume) and light wines. The original Volstead Act had defined “intoxicating beverage” as one with greater than 0.5% alcohol.[11] Upon signing the amendment, Roosevelt made his famous remark; “I think this would be a good time for a beer.” The Eighteenth Amendment was repealed later in 1933 with ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, on December 5.
When repeal of Prohibition occurred in 1933, organized crime lost nearly all of its black market alcohol profits in most states (states still had the right to enforce their own laws concerning alcohol consumption), because of competition with low-priced alcohol sales at legal liquor stores. [wiki]
In 1934, the first vintages from California’s wine country were released and the whole area erupted in celebration. Something now branded in a wine called Festival ‘34.
First thing you’ll notice about Festival 34 is the labelling. In an increasingly competitive wine market, we’re tasting wines with our eyes before it ever hits our nose or tongue. The art on the labels is great, with some of Jen’s stores and restaurants even asking for full sized posters to hang.
The label’s approach carries through to the Festival 34 website with newspaper headlines tracing prohibition through the years.
Oh, and the taste? Right.. I almost forgot, the marketing and package for this wine is so good. The juice inside, however, stands up to the hype.
TASTING NOTES
2007 Chardonnay
The grapes for this bright Chardonnay were selected from our renowned Santa Barbara vineyards, where the cool breezes and fog from the Pacific Ocean provide ideal maritime conditions for growing Chardonnay. Our winemaking team wanted to highlight this beautiful coastal fruit; in doing so, they chose primarily stainless fermentation with a small portion barrel-fermented in seasoned French oak barrels. The resulting wine is quintessential Coastal California, bursting with bright tropical fruit aromas and flavors.
2006 Merlot
The grapes selected for this luscious Merlot come from California’s Central Coast, notably Monterey and Paso Robles. The wine was aged for nearly a year in a combination of French and American oak imparting spice nuances. The winemaking team chose to blend in very small amounts of Malbec, Petite Sirah and Cabernet, crafting a satisfying Merlot that delivers on the nose, in the mouth and through a long finish.
Try with:
Cheese: Provolone, Fresh Chèvre, Parmesan
Appetizers: Crab Cakes, Ceviche, Shrimp Cocktail
Main: Chicken Marsala, Pot Roast, Grilled Hamburgers
2006 Cabernet Sauvignon
The grapes for this fruit-forward California Cabernet come from Monterey and Paso Robles, two highly regarded wine growing regions. The majority of the wine was aged for over a year in French and American Oak to add layers of complexity and to mellow the tannins. Our winemaking team blended small amounts of complimentary varietals, including Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petite Sirah to create a wine boasting rich aromas and flavors.
The evening guy at 95 Crave, Kiah Tucker, likes to write songs. He’s an Aussie who likes to rap. He doesn’t read blogs, and so he wrote a rap about it.
The video is conveniently subtitled due to his thick accent.
The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?
I am a pretty strong believer in personal responsibility.
So don’t expect me to be crying a river this morning for a couple who have lost all their baby photos.
Jimmy and Tamala Lapointe were shocked to discover that their laptop had been stolen from a Vancouver parkade — but their shock turned to a sinking feeling as they realized that their irreplaceable baby photographs were on the computer’s hard drive, and nowhere else. [The Province]
There are two rules about baby photos. 1) Back them up. 2) Back them up.
External drives have sunk to $100 for 1TB of storage, Apple offers Mobile Me with 20Gb of storage for all Mac users, countless other web services exist to get your pictures off your hard drive and into the cloud or onto a duplicate drive.
It’s easy. It takes seconds. It can be free. There is no excuse.
Let me repeat that. There is ZERO EXCUSE not to have a duplicate of any file you deem to be important in your life. Jimmy knows it too.
“I kept on thinking, ‘I should get that backed up,’ but we knew we were going to make a photo album,” said Jimmy. “It was dumb that we didn’t have a backup.”
Yeah, very dumb. So don’t be dumb like Jimmy, here’s how you can back up your photos easily, quickly, simply and without a lot of effort.
Flickr is a great place to store photos and short video. It’s free for a small number of uploads a month, $30 a year if you go FlickrPro and you can have unlimited uploads. The files are secure, and you don’t have to feel weird about posting your child’s picture on the internet as there are many layers of protection. You can make them public, only visible to friends, only visible to family, or only visible to you.
This couple used a Macbook. Having a Time Capsule as a backup would have been dead easy for them. It’s a dedicated hard drive that works with Time Machine within the Mac OS to copy and automatically back up your files. You can keep the Time Capsule at home, take the Macbook with you where you need to go, and then sync the two when you get home.
Apple’s Mobile Meservice also would have served this couple well. It’s an annual service that offers 20Gb of storage that you can access from any computer connected to the internet.
External hard drives are cheaper than they’ve ever been. Prices have tumbled as low as $100 for 1TB of storage in the US. That’s 1000 Gb of data. To put that in perspective, Z is 16 months old, I take photos and video of him every day. So far this year I’ve used 15Gb on 3000 images and files. 1TB of storage would be enough to hold 50 years of photos and movies, all for $100.
Then there’s Facebook, YouTube, Blogger and other social networking sites. You lose some privacy and rights protection with things like YouTube and Facebook, but at least you have copies you can get at it if something happens.
Even if you have been smart and you have made backups, there’s one final thing to remember. Keep the backup copy far away from the original. If you burn baby pics to a cd, keep one copy at home, and one at your parents. If you dump them to hard drives, keep the drive at work, while the computer is at home. Having duplication only works if the duplicate is away from the danger that could affect the original. There’s no sense having backups sitting next to the computer when your house burns down - they all get destroyed.
So Jimmy didn’t make a copy, and now he’s on the front page of the paper begging for his baby photos back.
“They can keep the laptop — we can replace that,” said Jimmy, 34, a hair stylist who also teaches hairdressing.
“All we want are the photos. They can e-mail them to me at jimmylapointe.com, or they could put them on a disk and take them to Axis Hair Salon at 1111 West Georgia, or in the Sinclair Centre, no questions asked.” [The Province]
Flickr is Baby Photo Insurance. Do it and don’t be a Jimmy.
Check out the comments for more tips and links to other stories people are writing on the topic.
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A few months back, when Tim Horton’s was rrrolling up the rrrim, I lamented that contests like this, while fun, do nothing but encourage people to buy disposable cups. Even when I would bring my own mug to the drive thru, the clerks would hand over an empty cup, because it was the game piece.
The worst part is the cups are unrecyclable. Check that - Tim Horton’s cupswere unrecyclable. Check out what they’e done to the garbage bins inside my neighborhood Tim’s.
I LOVE this approach. Canadians are usually pretty good at cleaning up after themselves, and the sealed bins really hammer home the point that you don’t have to put everything in the garbage. While the bins are all sealed up, tent cards are scattered around the restaurant pointing people to the recycling bins which are now available for the cups.
So the Tim Horton’s cups in North Vancouver are recyclable. Good. Now Starbucks needs to get on board with the program. It’s red cup time in a few weeks.
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Despite the fact that I write about Vancouver, hockey, cooking, my son, Team Diabetes and politics, the most viewed pages on this blog are those pertaining to Bisphenol-A (BPA) and how it has been used in the production of children’s bottles. Avent, for example denies the impact of BPA and even sits on the board of the pro-BPA lobby.
If you have children, please re-read the my posts about BPA, what it is, where it is, and what you can do to find products made without it.
That final step could become a lot easier as soon as this weekend, as the federal government is set to place BPA on Canada’s list of toxic substances as soon as tomorrow. [globe]
This will make Canada the first in the world to declare Bisphenol-A as dangerous and toxic to humans.
Most Canadians “need not be concerned” about the health effects of bisphenol A, (Health Minister Tony) Clement said at the time. “This is not the case for newborns and infants.”
The government’s final decision will appear in the Canada Gazette, which publishes the official regulations of the government.
Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence and co-author of the forthcoming book Slow Death by Rubber Duck: How the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Life Affects Our Health, said the expected declaration is a “good start.”
But he said new evidence continues to pile up, pointing to the detrimental health effects of bisphenol A on adults.
“There’s new science coming out on a weekly basis pointing to this chemical being a health concern for adults. Baby bottles are a good start, but the government now needs to take a look at getting this chemical out of the lining in cans.”
The latest research, the first large BPA study in humans published last month by the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association, found a “significant relationship” between exposure to the ubiquitous estrogenic chemical and heart disease, diabetes and liver problems. [canada.com]
Quickly after the original announcements in the spring regarding BPA, many stores in Canada removed them from their shelves, with London Drugs going so far as to have an amnesty on BPA bottles offering full store credits for their return.
The bottles are more difficult to find on shelves, however places like Starbucks still carry BPA products.
The same goes for stores in the US.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is under fire after determining last month in a draft report that BPA was safe for food storage. On Thursday, the Washington Post published an editorial arguing the FDA’s final recommendation, expected this month, could be “seen as less than fully independent.”
The influential newspaper cited the recent donation of $5 million to the University of Michigan’s Risk Science Center from Charles Gelman, the retired head of a medical device manufacturing company and outspoken proponent of bisphenol A.
The acting director of the university centre is Martin Philbert, a toxicologist who is also head of the FDA advisory panel poised to deliver its risk assessment of BPA.
Philbert did not disclose the gift to the agency as part of the disclosure process when he was appointed to the panel; he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel he did not need to, since he does not stand to gain from it. The FDA is looking into a possible conflict of interest. [canada.com]
Some states are trying to rally against the FDA decision, by petitioning the manufacturers directly.
Attorneys general from Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware sent letters Friday to 11 companies that make baby bottles and baby formula containers, asking they no longer use the chemical bisphenol A in their manufacturing because they said it was potentially harmful to infants.
The Food & Drug Administration has tentatively concluded that BPA is safe based on a review of research, and some manufacturers have already said they would make BPA-free baby bottles.
But Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal criticized the FDA for declining to take action after a preliminary study last month drew a possible connection to BPA and risks of heart disease and diabetes.
“Unfortunately the federal agency, the Federal Food and Drug Administration, has been asleep at the switch, in fact resistant to respecting the scientific evidence that grave harm can result in use of this product,” Blumenthal said. [boston.com]
BPA does bad things to the body when in high enough concentrations. It’s true. Whether you believe the concentrations are high enough to do damage is up to you, but why take the chance?
We LOVE taking Z to the Vancouver Aquarium. Honestly, the membership there ($125/yr for a family) is one of the best values any parent of a toddler can find in the city. There are plenty of things for the kids to run around and see, and even as Z was just a few months old he loved to stare at the sharks, turtles and salmon. Oh - and the belugas too.
Vancouver’s newest beluga was born on June 10. It was touch and go for a while, as the mortality rate for beluga calves is as high as 50% (both in captivity and the wild). So the team at the Vancouver Aquarium held off on naming the new addition until she was out of the danger zone.
She made it and more than 5500 entries were received in the Vancouver Aquarium’s contest to name the baby beluga!
A Vancouver Aquarium committee made up of the marine mammal care team and other departments reviewed all entries and made a shortlist, based on finding a name to match the personality and characteristics of our baby beluga, as she’s developed since her birth on June 10.
Here are the shortlisted names:
Sura – means new life Shiya- means snow falling at dawn Mira - short for miracle and is also a star Kuvia- means joy Tiqa- made up name using the first letter of Tuesday, the day she was born, plus the first letter from each of the other belugas in her family - Imaq, Qila and Aurora.
Personally, I voted for Raffi… you know, cause of the song and all, but it didnt make the short list. For the next few days, Vancouver Aquarium members will be voting on the new name.
The voting deadline is October 21, so I’m guessing an announcement on the new name (I’m actually voting for Tiqa) will be announced soon after that!
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