April 2012 found me in Halifax for the CCFP exams with a stipend instead of a cost
Here were the food options that I made my list:
Fid slow food Paris trained lunch and breakfast 902-422-9162 the courtyard 1569 dresden row
Chives canadian bistro 1537 barring ton st
Jane's on the common
Wooden monkey
Vegetarian heartwood bakery and cafe 11-2000
Two if by sea 1869 upper water st 7:30 to 6 best cafe 2011
Halifax seaport farmers market waterfront pier 20 tues to fri 1-5pm
1 Rideau Street
Booking 2 nights 1 room Friday 25 OCT 2013 15:00 - Sunday 27 OCT 2013 noon
1 double room with 2 double beds - non-refundable
CAD 334
Special Requests: preference to overlook river or parliament buildings, prefer higher floor, preer quiet area away from elevator
Public parking CAD 26/day Private CAD 35/day
He was as precious to males as he was to females.
He wasn't a He-man. He wasn't She-man. He was to her as he was to a man.
He was Herman!
My tapestry has many unknotted threads. It's overdue to clear my cache.
After a trip to California, where there were groves of trees that provide so much of our food even this far away that were growing in near desert conditions. This article gives the perspective of this that took me a drive through the San Joaquin Valley to realize.
Did you know that the stories Frankenstein and Vampyre were both created in a villa in Switzerland in 1816, the year that was called "the year without summer". This was due to the volcanic eruption called Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before. Lord Byron rented the villa, and was visited by friends that included Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin(to be Shelley).
I saw this fish on a sunny day paddle boarding along the St. Laurence "Lac St Louis". It was a thrill compounded by seeing a Kingfisher on the same trip, and the fact that I didn't fall down (or stand up!)
I have spend many hours exploring the art and architecture of the metro system, and I was surprised to see a concrete design in the De L'Eglise station attributed this artist I knew well from pop art that I first saw with vibrant colours raincoats and umbrellas, mostly from Quebec City.
Similarly, this artist has done remarkable artwork for the metro. In this case, his Citius, Altius, Fortius (Faster, Higher, Stronger) mural in the mezzanine of Pie IX metro. This is the motto of the Olympic Games adopted by Pierre de Coubertin since its renaissance in 1894.
I found him in the foyer of Place des Arts during an entracte at Les Grands Ballets. I suspect I have seen his work on doors somehere in a church.
Notably, his biography notes that he was born in Barcelona, and died where he had set up his studio in St. Hilaire on Christmas Day.
This female textile artist has a piece along the windows of the Place des Arts called Curtain of Light.
My one foray into Georgia was a day trip to Savannah from Hilton Head. There are many highlights including this museum tour, and I love that I can visit from afar and relieve the architecture tours of the Jepson Center and the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarter's.
Clue in a balloon
Oil on glass
Bold letters in a chocolate box menu
Invisible ink - lemon juice, oil on glass
Padlock a pair of scissors
Set a broken clock or watch as a combination clue
Cypher on popsicle sticks
Lockets
Photoshop a framed picture
Write in a foreign language
Craft a cryptex with styrofoam cups
Bilingual law language
Massey Lectures to listen to on Ideas
Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution
Nobel Peace Prize, credited with saving over a billion people from starvation
The Difference between dilly dally and lollygagging
Dilly dally, from "dallier" in French, "to amuse oneself slowly". Today it refers timewasting and indulgent. The pair of words doubles the effect, called reduplication.
Lollygagging, from lally. Also timewasting, but usually describes the way two people in love would act around each other, sometimes referring to bawdy public behavior between couples
The Evolution of the Nutcracker Ballet
Achalandé English bustling (full of people) or well-stocked (store)
Antidote writing assistance software - get hi
Stonewall Riots 1969, Greenwich Village bar, mafia run, haven for LGBTQ, police raid leads to mob, no injuries, 1970 First Gay Pride parade begins from Stonewall
Raëlism Rael was a French born self-proclaimed profit, announcing the future arrival of extraterrestrials called Elohim. A connection to Quebec of this Swiss based "UFO" cult was a branch that moved near Valcourt in 1992, with a museum opened called UFOland (closed as financially unviable). A female "secret society" formed called the Order of Raël's angels (1998). A claim was made that the first human clone, named Eve, announced by Rael's partner and successor Bousselier in 2002. In 2004, Raël's Girls were the subject of Playboy issue.
Who By Fire Leonard Cohen song (spanish guitar and poetic paradoxes), Who shall I say is calling?
W. H. Auden
Herman Melville (quoted by Louise Penny's Gamache in Still Life)
Evil is unspectacular and always human
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
CEGEP program (technique de bioécologie) I hoped for my budding naturalist
McGill's Ciphers of The Times (Victorian Agony Column Game)
Mayan Number to Decimal/Arabic converter
Lectin - found in food, carbohydrate-binding proteins
Governing Security: The Hidden Origins of American Security Agencies, by Yolanda and Alberto's son, f, now a scholar and leader
English words of Arabic origins T-Z
E la verita - sung with a dementia patient and her daughters
Pluvio restaurant - nice food with big prices, diminished by the company who was rude and irritable and made a scene
This is one of the most inspirational books I have read in a long time. I have enjoyed reading Elizabeth Gilbert on a few occasions, but this nonfiction book about « Creative Living Beyond Fear » is my favourite.
I was like many others, being introduced to the author with her autobiographical hit « Eat, Pray, Love », which was a travelogue as much as a good story made into a great movie.
After that, I read another autobiographical nonfiction called Committed, which explained her complicated international monogamous status, and gave an even more intimate look at her personal life.
Next, I read her fiction « The Signature of All Things » , which was a opus that was both beautiful in its details and a little strange (some might find it sacrilegious or too sexual).
« The City of Lost Girls » was a disappointment to me, in the vein of fictitious hyperbole that I disliked in « The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugh ». Set in New York, I found her characters unemotional and vapid.
16 years ago, Ms. Gilbert gave a TED talk about creativity that I found inspiring. Now, reading her treatise on creativity, I am even more inspired!
Very early on, her stories allow the skeptic in me to embrace her hypothesis. Creative living is a choice, and its « Big Magic » is waiting for an open channel to use to allow genius to occur. It’s compelling to embrace her line of thinking, and suspend disbelief in the logic that can prevent my imagination from growing and inventing new ideas.
The table of contents flows well, starting with courage, moving on to enchantment, commenting on permission, recommending persistence, developing trust, and ending with divinity.
Highlights include:
« Done is better than good. » p.176
The Tutsi are a Bantu-speaking ethnic minority from the Africa Great Lakes (Horn of Africa/Rift Valley). At the time of the Rwandan genocide, they were the minority ruling class.
When Belgian colonists (colonialists) conducted censuses in the 1920s, they defined Tutsi as anyone who owned more than 10 cows(a sign of wealth) or the physical features of a longer thin nose, high cheekbones, and over six feet tall.
The Hutu are a Bantu-speaking ethnic minority
Rwanda was ruled by Germany from 1897 to 1916, and by Belgium from 1922 to 1961.
The Hutu majority in Rwanda revolted against the Tutsi in 1962, taking power and killing up to 200, 000 Hutu. Rwanda and Burundi declared independence that same year. While many Tutsi fled, exile communities gave rise to rebel movements (Rwanda Patriotic Front was primarily in Uganda).
In 1990, with Ugandan support, and experience from the Ugandan Bush War, the RPF attacked Rwanda with the intention of taking back power, sparking a three year civil war that ended with the Arusha Accords on August 3, 1993. Intended as a negotiation to share powers between the rebels and the government, it favoured the RPF.
In 1993, Burundi’s first democratically elected president Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu, was assassinated by Tutsi officers, sparking a genocide in which Tutsi and Hutu losses were each as many as 25,000.
In 1994, the Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, a Hutu, was shot down in an airplane flying to Kigali, while the UN Security Council presence was initially 2,548 soldiers. This was a catalyst for the Rwandan civil war/ genocide, which spanned 100 days and led to over 1 million deaths, at least half of which were Tutsi. The genocide was markedly violent, with neighbours often murdered and murdering each other, and sexual violence with up to 500,000 million women raped. The war ended in the RPF defeating the government, and many Hutus involved in the massacre of Tutsi fled to Zaire (now DRC or Democratic Republic of Congo), contributing to regional instability and triggering the First Congo War in 1996.
Since the 2000 Arusha Peace Process, Burundi has a more equitable share of power betweeen the Tutsi minority and Hutu majority.
A dacha is a Russian country second home that’s often used in the summer. They can range in size from a small shed to a grand villa. The word means gift, originally referring to land allotted by the tsar to his nobles. In the Soviet Union, land for gardening or growing vegetables were similarly given to good workers as a reward.
I have long been obsessed with ultra runners, having first read Born To Run and Natural Born Hero’s by Christopher McDougall, as well as Scott Jurek’s Eat and Run. I listened to a number of inspiring Ultramarathon podcasts, so riveting that I still remember where I was for some of the inspiring and sometimes crazy interview.
Recently I have fallen into some other resources thanks to YouTube’s algorithms that have kicked me back into training videos on running, like the Running Channel and an Australian group of trainers for runners over the age of 50.
The biggest change in philosophy that I have adapted is that running needs additional strengthening to stay uninjured. What I used to do was just run, with a few sparse activities as “cross-training”. Being younger, I mostly got away with it, but I did stop running a couple of times from a self-diagnosed meniscal tear in my right knee. I stopped for a prolonged period of time after the marathon in part because I wasn’t prepared for the down side of the marathon.
What I learned watching those videos is the concept of zone 2-3 training. The concept is basically that when you push your body to its limits, you can avoid injury if you spent a large part of your training in a low impact zone instead of pushing your limits constantly. Here is a nice summary of the concept:
The basic proportion is 2/3 1/3, with the goal of building endurance by staying in the cardiac aerobic zone of 60-75% of maximum heart beat for 60-75% of the activity.
R2D2
Romance Movie on Global Freeplay
1. Signal interest - flirtation, intention
2. Connect meaningfully - life goals, dependability, humour
3. Demonstrate worth - share dreams, crack defenses, respectful
4. Establish trust - consistency, reliability, openness
First date
Movie, Coffee, Picnic
Second date
Leave comfort zone, physical activity
Third date
Discover new things together
Fourth Date
Show romantic side to partner
Fifth Date
Meet the family
Sixth Date
My boyfriend and I went to the Strom Spa located at "Saint Sauveur" (Piedmont), 74 km away, that used to be the Polar Bear's Club. The deal was a good one, but it was a little complicated. We bought gift certificates in advance, which appeared full price for thermal entry fee but only cost $47.83 for a November weekday Mon-Thu. It was well explained, and extensive. It was also the first time that either of us had taken seriously the spa cycle of heat, cold and relax.
Highlights for me were the eucalyptus steam room, a hot tub with a grotto behind a waterfall, a cold dip in the river, sitting outside by a fire watching ducks during the daily, watching the rapids from a warm room, and eating a really nice pretty meal in a bathrobe!
It was hard not to be annoyed when people were talking, but it was not easy to be quiet when you had decisions to make. I had brought a book and pen, so we could write in those moments.
It was such a hit, that we had researched prior, so here are the fruits of our search so that we plan the next visit!
Strom St Hilaire 43 k, Ile-des-Soeurs,
La Source Rawdon 70 k
Mon-Thu 17-20 $42 5h from 10-17 $69 18-21 $52 5h from 10-18. Bring your own robes.
Balnea Bromont 99 k
Forena, St Bruno- whisper baths
Nordic Station Magog
Amerispa Morin Heights
Scandinave Mt Tremblant (old port)
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Montreal
Bota bota
Beaux Reves - ladies (Yo's idea) lunch and yoga Wednesday $99
Spa Finlandais Rosemere 4 hours Mon -Thu $54 Bring robe and towel or pay $10
It is clear from neurodevelopment and behavioural psychology that the only way to change is to overcome old habits and create new ones. Will power is a finite resource that requires a lot of energy. Habits are key to personal growth.
"You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems." - James Clear
Ali Abdaal has a productivity youtube channel with simple life hacks and book reviews. He models a practice of achieving goals that are evidence based on how to achieve good habits. He breaks them down into:
Quarterly Quests, Weekly Reset, Morning Manifesto (Daily Review/Journaling).
This comes from How to actually achieve your goals in 2025 (Evidence Based) that lists the references in the shownotes.
