Relaxing On Local Waters - Kayaking At Belcarra Park

If you're looking for some relaxing time in the sun, surrounded by cold, salty waters and abundant aquatic wildlife, then look no further than your local kayaking destination. For me, that was at Belcarra Park in Anmore.

My cousin was in town with his favourite squeeze, and my brother suggested this surprisingly fun and relaxing activity. I'm not much of a sports person myself. I'm clutzy and prone to disaster, but when you choose a double kayak, the person in the back (my brother) is steering using foot pedals. Since he's already paddling away, I just have to pretend to paddle (and take lots of pictures).

I would highly recommend this water sport even for the non-sports person. Once you're out in the water, it's so refreshing! The water is icy cold and feels great on your skin when you stick your hand into the water, while the sun was bright and warms you up. Because of the high salt content of the water, salt crystals actually formed on my arm when the sun dried up the water. I found that kind of neat. I guess this is how people easily collected salt in the olden days (but probably not on their arm.)
We ducked under docks from private homes around the water's edge and discovered brightly coloured starfish clinging to the rocky, barnacle-covered ledges. They looked so beautiful! I touched one that was above the water and it was rough and sort of spiky, but not dangerously so. I found that surprising since they look like soft sponges in the water. They attach to surfaces with tiny, translucent sucker feet.
Seals bobbed their heads out of the water to inspect our kayaks from a distance. It was very exciting to have them so near, until we discovered one lounging on a rock that we happened to pass right by! It was so lazy that it simply waved one flipper at us, as if to bat away an annoying fly, and resumed napping.Our original plan of a two hour kayak soon extended to a happy four hours. Jellyfish in white and deep red floated past, and we stopped at a secluded beach that seemed accessible only by water.
It was nice to be out on the water, away from the worries of every day life. I hope you'll have the chance to enjoy it while the weather is still lazy and good.

Have a great day!

Finding the Perfect Job is Hard Work

I have decided that finding the perfect job is hard work. On the flipside, finding any old job would probably be easy. I guess the question is just how hard I'm willing to work to find that elusive magic pay cheque.

Ah... the magic pay cheque. The one that's big enough to pay all your bills PLUS purchase all of your needed and unnecessary goods. The one that's big enough for you to save to buy a house, save for retirement, and even save for a relaxing or exciting vacation. Yes, THAT magic pay cheque.

I want it.

To be truthful, I used to have a magic paycheque before I was laid off. Well, it was close anyways; I was saving for retirement, saving for vacation, and I could buy things I wanted as long as I didn't spend too crazily, and spaced out my purchases. No, I couldn't buy a car, and I couldn't afford a house, but I could afford a bus pass and rent and that was close enough.

But it wasn't the perfect job.

I wasn't really happy with that job. After almost five years of working at it, I could probably do my job in my sleep and I was getting awfully bored. There was nothing really new to it, and I couldn't really envision a future with it. I guess it just didn't inspire me. So I did a good job each day, put in a little extra effort, and would go home at night wondering why I'd just wasted a whole day doing something that wasn't making a difference in the world. I just couldn't find meaning in my work.

I'm reading a book now called I Don't Know What I Want, But I Know It's Not This, and it's really helping me. You should read it too if that title calls to you, like it called to me. "Eureka!" I thought, "That's EXACTLY how I feel right now!"

The book is a step-by-step guide to finding gratifying work, and it's written by Julie Jansen. Julie has made five career changes in her life in order to find work that really fulfills and satisfies her personal and professional needs. Now she coaches and consults to individuals and companies, helping them to be successful in their work.

The book helps you to determine what kind of work situation you are in right now. It then moves into finding out where you want to be, by examining your values, attitudes, and change readiness. There are lots of handy-dandy tests to help you figure this out. When I narrowed down my values to my top ten, and compared it with my ex-job, I discovered why I wasn't happy there- my values didn't match my job. So, now that I'm looking for a new job, I have to keep my top ten values in mind to make sure that there is room there for me to be happy.

The book then examines your personality prefences, your interests, and your favourite skills. I found favourite skills to be an interesting idea since I have a lot of skills. The book wants to know what your favourite ones are because you might have a lot of skills, but you might only want to use a few of them- and it's true! I DO have some skills that I'd rather not use! Hehehe...

After all these tests to find out more about yourself, the book talks about how to get there to that elusive gratifying job. I can't tell you about this section and the rest of the book because I haven't read to that part yet. Instead, I took a break to read Eat, Pray, Love, One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. This is also an interesting book, and more of a personal revelation of her struggles to find meaning in her life and to make sense of her personal desire to pursue things different from the ordinary expectations of a woman.

So in the midst of all this reading, I still need to apply for jobs and think about what I really want to do next. There's also laundry, watering the plants, feeding the fish, and other menial chores in between. I've been spending more time with friends, meeting up with out-of-town visitors, and trying to do some good to make up for lost time spent making a magic paycheque instead of being useful to humanity. For once in my life, I feel calm inside. There's still a lot going on, but I feel like I can finally change gears and make the pieces of me line up with the pieces of what's around me.

For the character in Eat, Pray, Love that moment of epiphany and harmony was followed by a gauntlet of unpleasant experiences and suffering. I hope that I won't have to go through the same, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised if I'm thrown a curve ball. Life's funny like that. "Hee hee hee, let's see how we can mess up her life now!"
But I have hope now that I didn't have before. I think good things are happening, and I'm working towards taking better control of my life and my situation. If I can find out more about who I am and what motivates me, then I can find satisfying work that will be meaningful to me. I would like to have a meaningful life, and not necessarily by anyone else's measurement. I'd simply like to feel good about myself and what I've done with my life by the time I die. I don't think that's too much to ask.

What do you think? How important is meaningful work and a meaningful life to you? Or is the magic paycheque enough?

Welcome To The Laid Off Club!

So, as some of you may have figured out from The Laid Off Song, I was laid off last week from my job. I had been there for almost five years, so it was a bit of shocker. I'll have to find a new job now, and the prospect is a bit daunting, but it holds promise for change and something possibly exciting.
In order to facilitate my job search, I've had to work on my art portfolio. My old portfolio was from 2005 so it needed to be updated. This is why I was experimenting with photo gallery widgets on my previous post. Right now, I'm using the slideshow widget from Good Widgets on my portfolio. It looks pretty good, but it's a little bit slow in loading. You can check it out HERE. Do you know of any other good photo gallery tools and widgets? Let me know if you do!

Now my days are just a continuous flow of "Find Job, Apply" and it's not so bad yet because I have only done it for one week. I figure I'll be pretty stressed out about it in a couple more weeks when I start worrying that I'll never find a new job.

For now, I've just been doing a lot of thinking and spending time with friends and family. Events like this in my life tend to push me closer to those that care about me and want to help me. They are my support group. I'd say life support, but I don't feel like I've died just because I've lost my job. I think there are those that identify themselves more with their job, so they are probably taking being laid off with much more difficulty.

It's funny, I feel like I've just been inducted into some kind of private club- the laid off club. People in the laid off club know all about secretive rituals like applying for EI (employment insurance). "Don't worry, " said my fellow laid off club member conspiratorially, "I'll show you how to apply for EI!" EI sounded like a very important and mysteriously unbelievable gift.

"So... while I'm not working, the government will pay me money?"
"Yup! But don't think of it as free, you've been paying premiums for this all along."
"Oh... "

EI sounded like a pretty good deal to me. I didn't have to work and I'd still be paid. I started to wonder what other cool deals I'd been missing out on by being the average, steady worker.
Other laid-off club members greeted me with enthusiasm and shocking encouragement. "You're laid off? Great! You can go travel now!" What about saving money, I thought. Why aren't these people worried about money? But they seemed to think being laid off was the best thing ever. It was a chance to relax a little and do all the things they couldn't do when they were slaving away at their underpaid-overly demanding jobs. It was a treat in the midst of the busiest time of the year - the time of the year when every one else was working at full-tilt to avoid getting laid off. How peculiar, I thought.

So now, here I am re-examining my life, wondering what there is in store for me. Should I continue working in video games? Should I change careers and become a teacher or a nurse? Should I just get an average 9-5 job so I can pay the bills and not worry about a "career"? What should I do? It's amazing how many choices there are and the simple fact that I can choose again.
I think that somewhere out there is the perfect job for me. Do you ever feel like that? That maybe, just maybe, you were made for a purpose. That all your experiences would one day culminate into one glorious profession or purpose that would be the sum of your existence and the meaning of your life. I think that would be really cool.

Photo Widget Test

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The Laid Off Song

Wobble, wobble, wobble
Is the sound my heart makes
As my head is spinning at
the changes I didn't choose to make

Wobble, wobble, wobble
So unsteady is my path
But I will regain footing and
I'll recalculate the math

Tossed out into the alley
Meeting secret in the dark
I see the faces I will miss
The place I'd made my mark

But they have not forgot me
and I take with me the tools
I gained in five long years of work
by following the rules

And now I'm free to choose
my path, and I feel good and right
I know a door is opening
to my left and to my right

I can make the choice
that I forsook for what I thought
was stable though a bore
and now that boring thread is cut

I fell but it was not on thorns
I found a road to take
And where it wound, I did not know
But wobbly heart did spake

And sang me songs of
happiness, of freedom bright and light
Of taking risks, of making friends,
Of fighting the brave fight

So though I'm sad that
things have changed and I
do fear what comes, I turn
my eyes towards the light
I won't give in, I'll hold the fight
I know my value, have the sight
Good-bye, dear friends, good-bye!

--Marie Tai

Fun With Fishies - What Bored Artists Do At Night

It all began with a quick update on the fishies.There was a delightful picture of one red baby platy peeking out from behind some sword fern. It was bright, it was nice. Very tame.
Then I brightened up a pic of two baby platties waiting for food near the surface of the tank. Ah yes, they are getting bigger. It is a happy thing.
I took a close up of one of my favourite fish. Her name is Skinny, and she is a real sweetheart. She always swims up to the glass when I talk to her and seems to like the company. She was one of Killer Mom's kids. Her other sister, Bubbles, died in an unfortunate high suction filter accident. We try not to think about it. Bubbles used to be my absolute favourite because she was round like a Bubble and very social.
Look at this great close-up of our new fish, Toad. I gave him a speech bubble to introduce himself.
Take a bow, Toad!And then, um, I gave Pineapple bun a helicopter hat. It just looked right. Actually, she looks pretty funny :P Hee hee hee!
And then Toad became a toad, and Pineapple Bun became a ballerina. Bwahahaha! I love it.

I hope you have a wonderful day. Now you know what you can do with pictures when you get bored at night :D

Fun In The Garden - What's Growing Now

Welcome to my garden! Here are some more pics to give you a peek into what's growing now, and how they look.
First up is the Cosmos. There are five Cosmo plants in this cluster, and they look stunning with their bright magenta flowers! There are some pale pink ones in this mix, but you can't see them in this picture. The key to keeping Cosmos looking good is to cut off all the wilted flowers. The Cosmo plants will keep blooming non-stop, and you won't have unsightly dead flowers making the blooming ones look unhealthy. Cosmos also grow quite tall, and don't have dense foilage. Plant lots of green, leafy plants around them to provide support and background foilage to set off the bright flowers. You can see a white stake in the picture that was necessary to support one stem that fell over.
I like to grow vegetables like tomatoes, but I hate to leave the vegetable patch barren and boring. To remedy this problem, I planted a row of impatiens in front and marigolds and pink dahlias behind them. The impatiens haven't been flowering as densely as in the springtime, but they have been growing bushier, which is nice too to set off the bright orange and pale pink.
This very flowery dahlia bush is the parent of all the pink dahlias that I propagated and put into planters. It seems to grow best in the ground. This is probably because the ground is cooler and wetter compared to the potted versions which tend to dry out and heat up during the day. Dahlia plants look best if you remove all the dead and wilted flowers. The wilted flowers snap off easily so you don't need to cut them off. If you keep the dead flowers removed, the plant will keep flowering and look more lively and healthy.

You can do the same with marigolds that have faded, but don't throw marigold heads away. Instead, dry them and save the seeds for the next year. All of the marigolds in my garden were grown from seeds saved from last year.
These are some of the snow peas growing in my garden. Snow peas are cool in that you can eat both the peas and the young shoots. Early in the season when your snow pea plants get tall and lanky, cut off the top young shoots. This will cause the plant to grow new shoots from all of the leaf joints. Flowers grow from young shoots only, so this means more beans from your now bushy plant. The tender, cut off shoots can be cooked and eaten.
Here is a snow pea that has grown old. Notice how it is swollen and is turning yellowy. I am going to let it get a bit more old before I pick it and save the peas to plant next year. About half of the bean and peas in my garden are grown from last year's seed.
Finally, here are some vine tomatoes in various stages of ripeness. If you haven't eaten home-grown tomatoes before, you're missing out. They are much more flavourful and tasty than store-bought tomatoes. This might be because you can pick them at full sun-ripeness in the garden whereas store-bought tomatoes are picked earlier so that they can have a longer shelf-life. Tomatoes are one of the easiest vegetables to grow, just water and fertilize them well (manure is best). They are like weeds and tend to grow lots of fruit, which is fine by me! They can also grow in containers well, as long as you give them a really big pot with lots of rich soil.

I bought two tomato plants this year, cherry tomatoes and roma tomatoes, but I have about five tomato plants growing in my garden. I think some extra tomato plants grew from tomato seeds in my kitchen and garden compost. This leads me to believe that tomatoes grow easily from seed. I wonder if they can be propaged easily as well? Hm...

Well, that ends my quick, whirlwind tour of my garden. I hope your garden is growing well too!

Have a happy long weekend!

Beans and Tomatoes - Gardening for Food

I wanted to show you what I harvested from my garden the other day - beans and a tomato! There are snow peas and some kind of green bean. I actually grew them from seeds I saved from last year's crop. You just let the beans get old until the beans get really big and the pod turns yellow. Then you pick them, let the seeds dry, and plant them the next year! I do this every time I forget to pick the beans and they get a bit too fibrous to eat :)

What I realized recently before the beans were ready to be picked, was that I'd starve if I had to survive off my garden. I have so many flowers, thanks to obsessive propagating, but really very little that I can eat. What I'd be subsisting on is chives, rosemary, basil leaves, and something gross like dandelions. For a few weeks, I'd have strawberries and blueberries. I think I should grow some lettuce and salad greens next year. Then I could at least eat those in case of an emergency.

Now I know how canning and jams began. It was probably to sell to negligent farmers like me that not only grow more flowers than food, but also occasionally forgot to water their potted plants during the hottest days of the summer. Eeeps! That would be me the past three days during this hot spell. Luckily, I only lost a few of my propagated flowers. They look so shivelled and sad now. I'm watering them feverishly now in hopes that they'll sprout a few green leaves from some magical, hidden life source inside the crispy brown stem.

Plants I Want To Grow Next Year For Food
1. Beans - (summer-late summer crop) Plant more than you think you need, and many varieties. They grow fast, and they have a non-stop crop for a good few weeks. Eat them while they're fresh, but you could probably can them too. Be sure to save seeds for the next year - the more the merrier.
2. Tomatoes - (late summer-fall crop)Buy a few plants, or start them super early in the season from seed. Grow both cherry tomato varieties and the larger ones. You can eat the cherry ones while the biggers ones are still ripening, and there are usually lots of them. Get roma tomato varieties for small-medium sized tomatoes earlier on. Eat them fresh for great flavour, but you can also can them and make tomato sauce.
3. Lettuces - (late spring-summer crop)Grow from seed and eat the leaves all growing season in salads and sandwiches. Grow many varieties, or choose the mixed seed packets.
4. Herbs - (spring-late fall) Basil is annual so you must buy a new one each year, but rosemary should last through a mild winter. Chives also come back each year. Cilantro/Chinese Parsley can be grown from coriander seeds from your spice rack, but most seeds will not grow so sow densely. Rue is perennial.
5. Zucchini - (late summer-fall crop) Buy at least 2-3 plants so that they can cross pollinate with each other to produce maximum zucchinis. You can also manually pollinate them with a paintbrush or cotton swab to increase crops. Once they start to produce zucchinis, you will have too many. Plan to share them with friends, to eat a lot of them, and to bake zucchini bread (mmmm).
6. Squash - (late summer-fall crop) also buy a few plants to increase cross-pollination. They tend to produce male and female flowers at different times for the same plant so it's good to have other squash plants to increase possibility of male and female flowers being open at the same time. The good thing about squash is that it can sit around for a while after being harvested. This increases the chance that you'll still have it around for winter months.
7. Strawberry - (summer-late summer crop) self-propagates to give you more plants each year, can survive through mild winters. Plant lots to give you lots of fresh summer fruits. Make jam when crop is most plentiful to last you year-round.
8. Blueberry - (late summer) only blooms once so keep more than one plant around in order to get more blueberries. Enjoy fresh, and make jam to last year-round.

Are there any other vegetables or fruits that you would recommend growing for food?