When B.C. Ferries’ announced its employee health and fitness incentive last month, consumer organizations quickly condemned the initiative.
B.C. Ferries is offering each of its 3,000 unionized employees $300 to help pay for gym memberships or fitness equipment. The benefit, officials say, is part of an injury-reduction and employee-wellness program at the corporation….
A friend started a long-planned vacation last week. I interrupted her last-minute preparations with a phone call to wish her a happy and safe journey.
“You must be really looking forward to this.”
“Umm, well…. I am…. Now.”
“Just now?”
“You know, I’d booked the essentials almost a year ago, but I haven’t thought about it much since. With everything that’s been going on at work, I just haven’t had the time.”
Alas for my friend, in neglecting to nurture anticipation for her vacation, she has cheated herself out of some key holiday-related happiness. Psychologists have been trying to nail down the effects of vacations on emotional wellbeing for years. The verdict to date is that taking vacations boosts a person’s overall level of happiness only slightly and only over the very short term. However, a person can engineer an early jump in their vacation gladness—they can extend the holiday-happiness window—if they consciously feed their own anticipation for the getaway….
Some friends organized a hike to Sugarloaf Mountain, near Sooke, this last weekend.
On the second day our government sat in the B.C. Legislature, Speaker Linda Reid admonished then-unelected premier Christy Clark for passing notes to a cabinet minister during a debate. Clark had not yet won the Westside–Kelowna byelection, and so was relegated to the legislature’s public galleries.
The incident made me harken back to my years in middle school, which I doubt was Clark’s or Reid’s intent. In those olden times, many notes written on paper changed hands anytime a teacher turned his back on a class.
Of course, that was before there was a smartphone in every pocket and a computer on every desk. When a desktop was the flat, horizontal surface which supported the paper you wrote your notes on. When a notebook was a collection of bound and ruled paper.
Not that those low-tech methods of communication—note-passing included—were superior to today’s methods.
The Kremlin might disagree with me on that one. In an effort to prevent National Security Agency-style cyberspying, the Kremlin’s secret service recently decided to revert to using old-fashioned typewriters and paper to write and store official secrets.,,,
“Incredible,” she said. “It’s evening, we’re eating outside, and THERE ARE NO MOSQUITOS. We’d never be able to do this down east. We’d be eaten alive.”
“it’s Victoria’s secret,” I told her. “If the rest of the country knew how few and how lame our mosquitos were, we’d be overrun.”
When Nature Boy and I moved to Victoria from Small Prairie Town, Alberta, we marveled at the lack of window screens in houses here.
It wasn’t until summer that we learned the reason. Victoria, we discovered in our own screenless home, boasted many annoying flies, huge spiders, and endless trails of tiny ants, but few nippers and biters.
Hooray! Nature Boy cheered, and promptly went out and fired up the barbecue. He’s one of those useful people the rest of us like to have around in mosquito-infested territories. The bugs love him above all other warm-blooded animals within carbon dioxide-sniffing distance. It’s just part of his animal magneticism.
We’d discovered another reason to be smug about living here.
But we don’t talk about it. Not only would the rest of Canada not believe us, but we wouldn’t want to call down the wrath of the gods by boasting about our good fortune or anything.
Victoria recently licensed 26 mobile food vendors to ply downtown residents and workers with grab-and-go lunches. Although a far cry from the 114 wheeled eateries licensed to operate on Vancouver’s downtown streets, it’s a welcome start.
Whether we’re eating tacos from the Puerto Vallarta Amigos truck at Yates and Wharf streets, snacking on a perogy sandwich from the Hungry Rooster on Courtney Street, or buying lunch from other vendors set up on private, and now city, property, we’ve long credited our mouths for our ability to taste. The tongue’s taste buds are tiny locks awaiting to be fitted with the sweet, sour, salty, bitter or umami (meaty) keys that are now considered the five major taste groups.
However, our sense of taste contributes only the broadest brushstrokes to what we call flavour. Flavour, say researchers presenting at the American Chemical Society’s annual shin-digs, is a complex, intricate, sublime sensation–combination.
(and let me know if this link doesn’t work)
We can’t help ourselves, it seems. Every time disaster strikes, we humans feel compelled to watch. Once. Twice. Again. And again. And again.
It’s as if by looping through the experience vicariously, we’re trying to imprint on our brains the images we find horrifying.
Yet weirdly and somewhat twistedly, we’re mesmerized by those images, too.
I’m speaking, of course, of last week’s pictures from Alberta and southeastern B.C.: of houses swept under bridges, towns and cities sitting deep in water, cats and their people swimming across raging rivers that were once roadways.
During a recent walk through John Dean Provincial Park, Nature Boy encountered his first Calypso orchid of the year.
He was so excited, he called the rest of us back to crowd around and join the admiration parade. He dusted off his annual Calypso orchid lecture: blah, blah, blah, and so on and so forth.
I’d long thought this little orchid with its spiky purple flower was named for the Greek nymph Calypso, whose youth, beauty and — ahem — other charms waylaid wayward Greek hero Odysseus for umpteen years on his way homeward after the siege of Troy.
The orchid’s other names similarly hint at ability to beguile and enchant. Venus lady’s slipper, fairy slipper… the names for this wee flower imply a big reputation.
