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The Titanic Exhibition in Victoria

I went to Victoria over the weekend to see the Titanic Artifact Exhibition at the Royal BC Museum, and I highly recommend it for anyone who might be interested. My friend has been a huge fan since doing a project on the Titanic in his childhood years and he was insistent that we had to see this once-in-a-lifetime exhibit. Admittedly, I wasn't as thrilled about the Titanic since my only experience with it was through the eyes of Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, but I agreed to go since any vacation was a welcome one. Let me tell you about some highlights of the exhibit.

Upon entering, you are given replica Titanic boarding passes with the name of a real individual who boarded the Titanic in 1912. I was thrilled to be a first class passenger while my friend was unlucky as a third class passenger. He brooded about this throughout the exhibit since I always pointed out the much less classy conditions a third class passenger lived in compared to the sickeningly luxurious quarters of a first class passenger. There are real artifacts including dishes and clothing in glass cases collected from the rubble surrounding the Titanic and tons of information on the Edwardian time period and the building and conditions of the Titanic. It was shocking for me to discover that the Titanic was built so quickly that builders later heard hammering and knocking in the now-sealed bottom walls of the ship. It was possible that someone had been sealed into the ship structure and left to die (since no one opened it up again due to time constraints). This was only one of very many bad omens surrounding the building of the Titanic.

There are volunteers in the exhibit that have lots of great information and stories about the Titanic and I was sad to hear that the life jackets were made of cork which would have become water logged and heavy over time in the water. I'm glad that we've come a long way from cork life jackets. At the end of the exhibit there is a wall-sized list of all the individuals who were aboard the Titanic in 1912. The 3 classes of passengers are listed separately and they tell you if that individual lived or died. You can compare your boarding pass to this list and children ran to their parents announcing whether they had lived or died. It was a curious feeling to think that individuals just like us had been aboard that ship and had really lived or died depending mainly on whether they were first class, second class, or third class. The group of individuals that actually lost the most lives was not third class, but the crew members.

If you plan to see the Titanic exhibition in Victoria, BC, I recommend seeing the IMAX film, Titanica, beforehand. It gives you an overview of the Titanic story and some perspective into the collecting of the artifacts shown in the exhibit. It is interesting to note that none of the artifacts are taken from inside the ship. Because the ship is considered a grave site, only artifacts that fell in the rubble areas around the ship have been collected for preservation. It is also interesting to note that there are no skeletons left to be seen. Even the bones have dissolved in the calcium-depleted waters around the sunken Titanic.

Giant bag of coffee grounds

My dad brought home a GIANT bag of coffee grounds yesterday. I topped up the remainder of the existing compost bucket, and was able to fill up a second bucket. Afterwards, the entire garden area smelled like coffee. It was really quite nice. The best part is that the annoying fruit flies which have started to colonate in my compost again recently will be moving house quick. Gotta love those coffee grounds. Perfect in the morning, and great in the compost. I've heard of some offices putting an empty coffee tin beside their coffee maker to collect the coffee grounds for use in the garden later. Coffee grounds can be put straight into your garden to be used as a slow-release nitrogen source if you don't have a compost. Free fertilizer - you should cash in now before they start packaging and selling them.

Sleep well, and be healthy

Watch out for the bug going around. Co-workers have been falling like flies around me. I think we're down about 5 today, and the count is still climbing. Even the birds have been looking sickly. Their feathers are all fluffed up and I noticed 2 birds SNEEZING the other day. I thought that was rather odd.

So sleep well, eat healthy, and try not to let your body get too stressed out. In the case that you do get sick, I've heard 3 people mention oil of oregano as being helpful for getting rid of their illness. They apparently swear by it and have been dealing it out like drugs around here. The good news is that their test subjects have actually gotten better. So it might be worth a try for you too.

We make a lot of garbage

After only 2 days of making collecting scraps from the kitchen easier, my giant bucket of compost is almost full to the top again. I'm going to need a second bucket! This has brought to my attention just how much garbage a family can produce each day. If everyone started a compost, the landfills would be a lot smaller. If you add recycling to that, the garbage strike in Vancouver would hardly affect anyone.

I went on a Treetops Tour in Whistler, Vancouver about a year ago and the tour guide talked about how Whistler residents compost, recycle and reuse in order to heavily reduce the amount of garbage they produce. There's no such thing as easy garbage disposal up there, so the residents take extra care to reduce how much garbage they need to transport to the landfills. You can call it lazy, but being a little bit lazy is helping keep Whistler environmentally friendly. Perhaps if the garbage strike keeps up, more people will start to compost and recycle to keep their level of garbage down too. That would be a very good side-effect to the unsightly garbage strike. Have you seen the alleyways in Vancouver recently?

I love composting!

I am happy to announce that my first "batch" of compost has finished decomposing and was added to my garden this weekend. The coffee grounds from Starbucks did wonders for getting rid of the fruit flies (it really worked!) and speeding up the composting process. The coffee grounds also neutralized the smell. Every composter should go to their local coffee shop to pick up a bag of coffee grounds!

I've also been trying to find a better way to collect food items to add to the compost. So far, the best method has been using a large yogurt container with a lid. You keep it in the kitchen and just add all the peelings and such to the container while preparing meals. The fact that you can seal the container after adding contents means no smells or yuckiness. Then, at the end of the day, you just take the container to the garden and empty it into the compost. Remember to add a shovel-full of dirt on top to cover up the new additions. Every once in a while, use a long stick or shovel to give the compost a good stir. It will help add air so that the compost works faster.

Composting is a lot of fun and it reduces the amount of garbage that we produce by a lot. I hope every gardener and environmentally aware person starts one.

Cheers!

Thanks for your feedback!

I just want to send out a big thank you to all of those who responded this weekend to my survey on how well Mytutorlist.com is performing for you. There were some that have had great success with the website so far and those of you who have not had the same results. I will be looking further into how well the site is performing and taking steps to help the site grow faster and become more effective.

In the meanwhile, if you are a current user of Mytutorlist.com, please let us know how Mytutorlist.com is working for you. We'd love to know if you have had any responses to your postings and if you have any suggestions on how to make the site more effective.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Marie

Thinking about Life

I've been reading Think Like a Billionaire by Donald Trump lately and I've learned a few things. First of all, billionaires work hard, but their work is not all that different from any other typical managerial/foreman position. Meetings, phone calls, decision making, reading letters, talking to people and family... it's kind of amazing how much they're making to do something many of us do every day for so much less. Second, billionaires can be quite full of themselves and they make a lot of money by promoting themselves and their business every chance that they get. I can't help but wonder how much money and extra advertising Trump is getting through talking non-stop about how great all his buildings, restaurants, and employees are. The entire book is basically a massive advertisement for everything Trump. That's pretty cool. He just got a LOT of people to actually pay for something that is meant to sell more to the purchasers. And every time someone talks about his book, they're promoting both his book and his stuff. I love it! That's fantastic and amazing business thinking. Maybe I should write a book about Mytutorlist.com :P

What did get me thinking, though, was Trumps view that billionaires don't take vacations. Trump thinks that if you don't love your job so much that you never want to take a vacation from it, then you're in the wrong position. What do you think of that?

You need ledges to land...

There was a pigeon frantically trying to fly through a pane of glass in the stairwell at the skytrain station today. Smash! Get up! Panic! Fly at glass, smash! Instinctively, I reached down and scooped it up. I walked back up to the top of the sky train platform to see if I could drop it off near one of the nesting areas. Finding none which looked safe, I walked back down to the main area where the pigeon would have open space to fly away. I first examined it to see if it looked damaged in any way. The pigeon had been quite cooperative as I had walked around with it, but upon being examined so close to my face, it was scared and struggled. It looked fine so I put it down on the ground. It immediately tried to fly away - straight into another pane of glass. Ouch! Luckily, there was little acceleration, so it was fine.

It walked off a distance from me, regained its composure and took off into the air. Round in a little circle (very unsteadily), look for a landing spot... oh yeah, that straight pane of glass looks like a good place to try and land... nope, can't fly through glass... oh yeah, that cement wall looks like a good place to land... nope, no ledge... This was not the brightest pigeon in the coop. It finally came back to land in the same spot on the ground. I stood and watched the bird, and it looked back at me as though it was my fault that it couldn't fly through glass and land on vertical walls. I pointed at the nice ledge above us in the opposite direction it had flown and it looked up, but didn't fly. Its tail feathers trembled and I guess the earlier flight had shaken it up a little. Since it could clearly fly, albeit unsteadily, I figured it would be okay and continued on my way to work. Hopefully, it will have learned its lesson and will give up it's wall-scaling, spiderman days. Cuz even Spiderman can't fly through glass...

3690 Users Strong!

I ran statistics on Mytutorlist.com last night and we're up to over 3690 unique users per month! That's great news. We were at 2440 users strong last month. I'm always excited to see the site growing. Welcome to all our new users, and thank you to those of you who continue to support Mytutorlist!

Building a Compost

I've been trying to be more environmentally friendly lately, and I've started a compost in a very big and tall bucket. I started dropping fruit peelings, plant cuttings, leaves, and dirt in, and the compost is slowly growing. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I drop quite so much fruity things in there, there are A LOT of fruit flies. They rise like a rapidly spreading cloud when I lift the lid to the compost and I have to bat at them with my stirring stick to ward them off. I read that it was important to stir the compost once in a while to add air to the mixture and combine the "ingredients". I've got to do something about those fruit flies, though. It seems very unsanitary and it's very annoying to have them zipping around me as I work on my very colourful and disgusting pile of muck. I like to think that it will all become wonderful, rich, and nutritious soil for my plants one day, so I put up with it all. Building a compost reminds me of my childhood when I used to create imaginary soups and meals with collections of flowers, dirt and other things from all around me. I think I added worms and bugs if I found them too.

Today I picked up a bag of used coffee grinds from Starbucks. Coffee grinds are supposed to be a good source of slow-releasing nitrogen for plants, thus making used coffee grinds a good fertilizer for the garden and a great addition to a compost. Coffee grinds also help balance the pH of the soil. The coffee grinds look like very dark coloured dirt. It definitely LOOKS like it would make good soil, and it smells of coffee, which isn't so bad. I'm going to collect a bag every once in a while and add it to my compost. Here's to hoping that fruit flies hate coffee.