Wintery mix

Wintery mix of weather. I had never heard the expression until being in Nova Scotia for my first winter, and we have seen it in the forecast a few times, and expect more on Wednesday. A wintery mix is snow, rain, sleet or ice pellets, and varies depending on how the air aloft mixes with the air below (the warm air aloft mixes with cool air below and things start to freeze). Have to keep an eye on the window and try to shovel any snow off before the rain hits it in case it freezes into a solid ice chunk. Except when there is a lot of warm rain to follow, which melts the snow in no time provided the sun doesn’t go down and take its warmth with it.

Ah the joys of a Canadian winter. I sure am looking forward to Spring!

The Blueberry Patch

I read today that Canadian’s eat a lot of bananas. Interesting, since we actually grow a whoppingly huge number of blueberries. Weird, because most of those blueberries get exported. Canadian’s eat about 13kg of bananas per year per person. Now I have nothing against bananas, in fact I love them. They are loaded with potassium and they stand in for breakfast anytime that I am in a hurry. They even have fibre (and we can all use a little more of that!). But in contrast to the way that the average Canadian eats about 13kg of bananas every year, we only eat about one half of a kilogram of blueberries. There are about a million people in Nova Scotia, and so that would mean that we should be eating 500,000 kg of blueberries, and yet it does not seem to be the case.
Blueberries, like many other berries, are like a super vitamin. They are packed with phytochemicals (the same thing that makes cranberries a urinary tract infection fighter). When we look at aging and the fight to maintain our cognitive prowess as well as memory, blueberries are a winner. In lab studies, Dr. James Joseph from Tufts University at Boston and his colleagues founds that rats who were fed an extract of blueberries, strawberries and spinach showed improvements in short-term memory. The blueberry extract was the only one that also improved balance and coordination.
In another study, rats fed the equivalent of half a cup of blueberries a day for two months actually reversed age related decline in motor skills. They are still working to establish exactly which compounds are responsible for the effects, but the proof is not disputed; blueberries have incredible health benefits.
Now, bananas are also incredibly good for you. The thing is that to get a banana to Nova Scotia it travels a lot of miles, usually from Costa Rica or Brazil, coated in a commanding amount of pesticide and burning barrels of fossil fuels to transport it at the right temperature so that it remains unspoiled before it gets purchased.
Blueberries grow right here in my home province of Nova Scotia, before 85% of them are shipped off to other places. Buy them here at home and very little transportation is required, and if you include a trip to a local farmer’s market or U-Pick, all kinds of local treasures are available to you. Growing blueberries is a long term commitment. It takes about three years before they produce fruit and up to six years before they are fully productive.
I like the Italian system, personally. I have some Italian in me, and I think it is partly responsible for my love of tomatoes, but that is a different post. It is reported that the Italians keep their best products in Italy. I do not have the translation ability to know if this is actually true or not, but I think it makes a lot of sense. Keep the best foods, the most outstanding products, close by the people who will most benefit from it; the local grower’s and their community. What better way could there be to advertise the benefits and quality of what is nearby but to share it with your neighbours and have all of them advertising for and with you?
There is an increased awareness and some demand for local produce, but in order to make it most effective we actually need to be much more demanding. As a community, we have to learn to enjoy local food when it is in season, to do what our grandmother’s did and freeze, preserve and can fresh food. Pulling out a jar of your own jam is a delight, and you will know every ingredient that went into the jar. Enjoying those delights during the off season is fabulous.
In the bigger picture, buying local produce and supporting our local farmers means that we are also supporting the local economy, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and leaving a smaller carbon footprint. That’s a recipe I can definitely get into.

My failure

Well folks I finally did it. Flunked as a cook, that is. Here I was invited to a potluck, and I promised I’d bring dessert. Normally I love to bake and so dessert means something rich and sticky and hopefully with chocolate. The pic you see here is of a Pecan Bakewell Tart that I created last year. No time at the present for that kind of stuff.

Today and yesterday I have been up to my eyeballs in other stuff, so I did not have time to cook. I mean it – I really did not have time. I have not cut any wood either (although we moved some!) have not done any dishes and, oh yeah, I didn’t shower today. I have been writing like crazy and I think my eyeballs are going to bleed, but domesticity has not exactly been on the radar.

So my good friends had to endure a fruit plate and store bought cookies. Now I know that Bev would be okay with that because she likes store bought cookies over the home made kind, but she wasn’t there. I think everyone else was okay with it because we ate so much in the appetizer and dinner phase that there was little room for dessert anyway.

Sometimes I would rather be one of those people that no one knows can cook. The kind that can appear at a party with buns and a small tub of spreadable butter and everyone oohs and ahhs adoringly, because they know she doesn’t know how to cook, and so there is no expectation that she would cook anything.

My sister is kind of like that. She does not cook. She can cook some stuff; it’s not as though she starved when she lived on her own. The point is that she hates to cook. She would in fact rather do dishes than cook (and normally that’d be her at the window after dinner, doing the dishes). She ooh’s and ahh’s appropriately over my cooking, which I normally appreciate. Except not tonight. I left the house in a hurry, did not cook for anyone at home, and all I can see around the kitchen is an empty TV dinner box. That means one of them ate – probably my daughter. Well, if a TV dinner counts as eating that is.

It’s like my friend Sandra told me several years ago – that I should never have showed anyone I could cook. That way they would never have expected it of me. I wonder how I can get to the point where they all forget that I could cook and we have someone in every night preparing wholesome nutritious meals – and chocolate. Maybe that guy will double as my personal trainer. Yeah, that’ll work, and just might be good for some sweet dreams too. Maybe instead of cooking this weekend, I’ll start working on that as my next writing assignment. The new novel – personal trainer who doubles as a cook and whatever else you need. Hmm. Sounds enticing.

Lotsa stuff in my brain

The Daily News was shut down this week. A big surprise to most people, especially the staff. The Daily News was Halifax’s number two paper, and now we are down to one, The Chronicle Herald. Sucks to be any of the 95 or so people that just lost their jobs; I really feel for them. I wonder how many of them will leave here and move west to find a job, since the ‘paper’ that will replace the Daily is actually going to be an advertising tabloid? My friends that I spoke with last night lamented its loss, since the little paper started out as a community paper belonging to Sackville and Bedford before it grew to take on all of Halifax, and we all live in Sackville.

People are still leaving here in significant numbers to take up jobs out west, the most recent one was just last weekend and he has found a job already. It’s hard to encourage people to stay in the Maritimes when the lure of the west is so predominant (sounds like the old days when young men were moving west to homestead or be cowboys!). In many ways I completely understand their desire to give it a try. The Maritimes are beautiful, but the employers do not pay the money here that folks can make out west, despite that everything else out here is just as expensive (except the initial cost of a home). Property taxes, groceries, gas, utilities all cost more in the Maritimes. Provincial health care is free (yahoo!) but HRM has this weird 1.5% title transfer tax when you buy a new house, salaries are significantly lower and HST is 13%. Four litres of milk in Edmonton is $3.90 or so and out here it’s $5.63 on a good day. The price of meat is higher too, which I get since they are trucking a lot of it in from Ontario and West. There is a movement to produce more food locally and to focus on buying and supporting local growers, but the movement is small and the costs are quite high. So as usual, it all comes down to money.

Have you noticed, though, that despite groceries getting more expensive, less people are actually learning to cook? As a result there is far more freezer space in the stores that is devoted to “prepared” foods like chicken fingers/wings, pizzas and frozen Chinese food. Now you can even buy prepared pot roast. Why? All you have to do is spend 10 minutes on cutting up some stuff and you can do your own pot roast for half the price and no chemical additives. I don’t get it. I keep thinking I should set up my kitchen to do some cooking classes for the young and hapless or something.

Today we are in the midst of our fifteenth winter storm. Fifteen. Good grief; I cannot remember the last time I experienced a winter with fifteen storms, and since this is my first winter here I’ve had enough. Stop the snow already! I love the way the TV meteorologist introduced this latest “weather event”. Cindy Day said that it would snow today, but if you don’t like it hang on and there would be ice pellets and if you didn’t like them there would also be rain. Right now it smells like wet dog and smoke from the wood fire burning. I like the smoke smell; it reminds me of camping and the great outdoors. Wet dog is not a pleasant smell no matter what you do. Thank goodness for the bottle of Febreeze by the back door.

Well that’s the kind of week it’s been – kind of disjointed, so lots of disjointed thoughts. Let me know what you think – leave me a comment below. Just remember to hit “publish” so that it posts itself, OK?

Cheers!

Employing Empowerment

I was up plenty early to get some things done, picked up a book about negotiating skills and sat in front of the roaring fire to read for a bit and drifted off in to that place where you are not quite asleep but only barely awake.
It’s this entire career/job/writer issue that has me going. One of the benefits of working for someone else is that I do not have to work as hard; I know that. The downside is that I really hate working for other people. I have burned out twice doing that, and do not want to go down that path ever again. Working for myself suits me, allows me to control my own future, allows me to benefit from the fruits of my labour. Let’s me work into the wee hours of the morning, which I quite like at times, instead of showing up to work at 8:00 AM all bleary eyed and grumpy because I did not make time for breakfast. Working for myself also avoids the problem that employers have when it comes to coping with my eccentricities and foibles.

Downsides

-renewing my mortgage. Banks really do not like giving you credit when you run your own company, even when it’s profitable. Why is that?

-reliability/security. Really this was a bigger issue to my now ex-husband. He had a hard time dealing with the sometimes cyclical nature of business and it was really tough for him to accept the fact that as long as their was plenty of work around, it meant there were plenty of cheques in the mail, or credit cards being applied to my company. He owns that problem much more than I do, however, it does cross my mind now and again.

Upsides

-renewing my mortgage or buying a new car with cash. Ha!

-realizing that my outcomes are the result of things that I have done, relationships that I have fostered, cool people that I have helped and worked with

-if I decide there is a project or something that I’d rather not do, I do not have to. Ha!

-I get to work with people that I love. Ha!

Well clearly this list is going to have way more upsides that down. Ha! Speaking of eccentricities and foibles, I am running two ideas for new books, in addition to developing a speaking and training program.

Hmm, lots going on. Guess I had better quit blogging and get some things done!

Musings

Do your best ideas come to you at night, or first thing in the morning? Sometimes just as I get into bed and start settling in for the night I find that my mind starts to work on some of the stuff that has probably been pushed to the back during the day. I have learned over the years to keep a notepad on my nightstand, and at least one pen (I tend to pick up the pens, or they roll behind the nightstand, so having a couple is helpful). Of course it also happens like today, where I am laying in bed in the morning, still dozing but not quite awake and all of a sudden WHAP – an idea is registered.

I have been working on a shawl for my grandmother, and having a difficult time deciding how to finish it off, but this morning it hit me. Now a trip to the craft store is in order (not much of a hardship, truth be told), and then this evening during my knitting time I will finish it off. That should get it to her only a week past her birthday…

The Next Chapter

So I have some decisions to make. Big ones. Like what kind of work I want to do. And how I want to do it. At my age, and with my background you’d think I’d have a good handle on this. In some ways I think that I do, but on the other hand, there are a lot of doors open just now, and I feel just a little like a kid in the candy store. I have my allowance to spend on anything that I want but I need to choose before the store closes or the good candies are picked up by someone else.

I have considered a million options and chucked most of them out, fostered a couple but then I do not make a decision and start working on a couple more.

The thing that I do keep coming back to is writing. The clickety clackety of the keys, the rhythm of my fingers. The emergence of words in the window screen of my computer, softly lit and mesmerizing.

“Wow, you’re an author? That’s so cool,” people say, sometimes wistfully. “I have a book inside just waiting to get out! I just can’t get it started/find the time/get past the first chapter.”

No, I am not an author, I think to myself. Not a writer, surely. Until a friend of mine introduced my as a writer, I had not considered it as gainful occupation for me. It’s true that I have written many things for previous employers, and for myself one project was a novel.

Writing, for me, is a lot of work. And a lot like work. Writing manuals, policies, training programs, articles, newletters and books takes a lot of energy. It isn’t all about being romantic and sitting by a window waiting for the muse to strike. It isn’t holed up in a log cabin with a fireplace blazing and steaming hot chocolate beside me (although that does sound nice, doesn’t it?). It takes focus and dedication, as well as a willingness to talk yourself into doing things that you don’t always want to do, which can happen with any job. I remember sitting in my former office and needing to create an entire program, but abandoning it to sort through my rolodex and enter all the contacts on my PDA. The program itself was not just daunting, but uninspiring. I am sure that people thought I had lost my marbles (oh wait – I had lost my marbles!).

The novel was a lot of fun to write. When I first started really working on it, I travelled out of town for a conference and tacked a few vacation days on afterward to work on my book. The wind blew relentlessly outside and the windows rattled (it was hurricane season, and a busy one at that). I got to know the guy who delivered room service, and he got to know that I really enjoyed the risotto. His name was Adam. I got a good chunk of the novel written, and that was a lot of work too.

So I think for now that’s what I shall be doing, is writing. Lots of writing I hope, among other things (let’s see what pays the bills and then moves me into the lifestyle in which I intend to become accustomed).

Yours in words,

Pam
One who scribes (or scribbles as the case may be).