Entries Tagged 'random thoughts' ↓

Had a great time last Saturday at the Steveston Tweetup!

Posted the pics over on Raul’s site as a part of the blogathon.  Check them out. He’s raising money for the BC Cancer Foundation.

I’ve always had a love affair with boats and water and I rather fancy the working boat rather than a fancy yacht.  Thinking Grandfather is to blame for that, as he bought me my fist ‘Timmy the Tug Boat’ book.  It is for these reasons that when I moved to Vancouver, I found myself a home near Steveston, a lovely, historic fishing village in Richmond.

I love my fishing village and feel like showing it off in it’s summer splendor, so I’ve decided that its time for a Steveston Tweetup:

• to show off this marvelous village
• to make the rest of you a bit more cultured in BC history
• because we all spend too much time at the same drinking holes in Gastown
• so I can meet some of my local neighborhood tweeters
• but most of all because I think its everyone else’s turn to drive across the bridges

Here are the details:

Date: Saturday July 18th

The Plan:

• meet at the top of the fisherman’s dock ramp at 5 pm
• enjoy a walk along the water
• grab some fish & chips from Pajo’s or Dave’s
• retire to Gundrun’s for wine / beer & cheese / dessert

Now the beauty of this plan is that you can come and go whenever you please.  I’ll have my iphone on me & will post where we are at & reply to messages of any lost souls. My twitter handle is @EricaHargreave & the hash tag is #StevestonTU.

And if you want to come out to Steveston earlier in the day theres lots to do, including:

• great shopping with many local artists featured
• a farmer’s market
• bartering with the fishermen on the dock
• Britannia Heritage Shipyard
• the Gulf of Georgia Cannery
• London Farm
• kayak rentals
• bike rentals
• whale watching

For those of you needing transport, Steveston does have it’s own bus exchange or might I suggest carpooling.  If you have a car and room for passengers, please comment below (preferably with your twitter handle).  Similarly if your looking for a ride, please drop a note below.

Look forward to seeing you on Saturday!

Erica

Loving this post of @hummingbird604

read more | digg story

Full Disclosure: The Green Chain’s producers, Tony Wosk and Mark Leiren-Young are friends mine, but that does not mean that I’d automatically like their movie.  And to be honest I didn’t like it ….. I loved it!  I knew Mark was a good writer, but this isn’t just good writing, this is great writing.

If you don’t know what The Green Chain is about, here’s the synopses:

The Green Chain is a powerful, funny and thought-provoking film about the conflicts between people on both sides of the battle who love trees — and are willing to risk anything to protect their personal visions of the forest.

‘Powerful’ is the perfect descriptor for this film.  It really hit a chord for me and rang so true to many of my own experiences.  I’ve worked in the forestry industry, am a biologist and been an environmentalist, and I saw so much of the dialog and characters in myself and the people I met along the way. It’s uncanny how Mark writes them so perfectly. In my late teens, I was the kid that would have found it to be an adventure to live in the tree and as a biologist I would have been there for many of the reasons that the Raging Granny shared.  As I matured and spent more time in the smaller towns of BC, I discovered that my youthful ideals were a little naive.  It doesn’t matter that I now recognize that the story has more sides, to the forestry workers in the small towns I will always be seen as an educator and one time forestry researcher, and they’ll be too busy defending their right to log to hear me say, ‘I understand’.  My cousin will get into actual fights with me where I don’t say a single word, because in her mind I’m still that scrappy, tree hugging, granola eating, 19 year old, who’d still love to live in a tree (I’d be lying to say I’d never considered it).

I love the way in Mark’s account of this age old story, all the characters touch each others lives.  He does this so seamlessly, but so that it really pulls at the heart strings of our own connectivity, just like that of the ecosystem.  And the beauty is this isn’t just a story about logging.  This is a tale that speaks to many small towns and natural resource based industries. Speaking from the BC perspective, this story could just as easily be fish or rocks.

Oh and I don’t think you have to be an uber science geek like myself to enjoy The Green Chain.  It is simply a good story and I’ll be the first to admit I am a critical audience.  I’m critical of science stories as I am a scientist and storyteller.  There’s nothing to be critical of here, it’s just a darn good story and accurate.  And unlike some science stories, it’s far from boring.  In fact, I will likely watch it numerous time, as I enjoyed it that much!

Go see it!  You still have time to make the late show!  It starts at 9:10 pm.

Failing that, the daily show times of The Green Chain at Fifth Avenue Cinema, between now to Thursday March 11th, are 1:30, 4:45, 7:10 and 9:10 pm.

Don’t miss the WIFF New Media Day in Vancouver on March 4th. Great line-up of speakers, exhibits, and applications. Interact, gain new ideas and learn from our Social Media Team how to play in the emerging market space. Oh and theres free beer at the end of the day. Thanks to BC Film and Molsons for the sponsorship!

read more | digg story

Like a respectable Canadian gal, I love the snow!  It’s my version of winter magic. I love writing away and hearing the little girl next door as she steps out for the first time in the morning and exclaims in awe, ‘Oh look Daddy!!!  Isn’t it beautiful!!!’  I still feel like that little girl. So I am in a state of delight and awe this morning as I look outside and see the beautiful white stuff falling.

What I do not like about the snow, however, is Vancouverites in it and their incessant whining about it.  Vancouver - the rest of the country complains about our citizens being cold and about us being unneighbourly.  Well I have a theory on this.  My theory is that in Vancouver our climate is very mild and unlike the rest of the country, we rarely get snow.  As such we have missed out on the snow bonding experience that the rest of the country gets.  We’ve missed out on meeting our neighbours as we shovel the walks and teaching our young people to help out the elderly neighbour across the street.  Well nows our chance.  Rather than grumbling - lets embrace the true beauty of the snow - the beauty of being neighbourly and building community.

Snow Etiquette for Vancouverites (inspired by a snowy afternoon tweets on twitter and encouragement of @hummingbird604 to make this a blog post):

1) Buy a snow shovel and don’t leave home without it.

2) Dress for the weather! Honestly people, this isn’t your first snow day of the year, you think you would have learnt by now.

3) Dress your kids for the weather - boots, hats, coats & mitts.

4) If you live in a townhouse or condo and there is only one caretaker, would it kill you to help a little with the shoveling.

5) Just because they’re calling for rain doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shovel. If the temperature drops the snow or slush will turn to ice.

6) Courtesy of @yoyomama_van If your tires slip day 1 in the snow, they will slip on day 10 too. Get all weather tires or leave your car at home

7) Courtesy of @kulpreetsingh If you can’t get sand or gravel, keep a bag of cat litter in your trunk in case of ice.

Courtesy of @WinnieYeo If you don’t have salt, gravel or kitty litter and are stuck, you can use the car’s floor mats. Just be careful they don’t shoot out from under your tires and hit someone.

9) Courtesy of @petequily If your wheels are spinning on ice, flooring it = more ice.

10) Courtesy of @CrunchyCarpets Leave early, look around, slow down and chillax!!

11) Courtesy of @CrunchyCarpets Please pick up dog poop..snow or no snow. It doesn’t disappear under the snow. It just becomes a poohsicle and when the snow disappears, a smelly, slimy mess for someone to step in.

12) If you’re going to open schools on a snowy day, then plow the staff parking lot. First school day of 2009, I just spent an hour digging cars out of an unplowed, iced over school parking lot.

13) Parents: Your precious little deers can walk a few feet through the snow. They are children, not witches and will not melt from touching ice crystals. Don’t drive your car into an iced school lot where cars are already stuck.  Thinking this should be common sense, but based on the number of parents I’ve seen do this, I feel it is worth noting.

14) If you see someone in need of help and you can help, then do help. And teach your children to do the same.  Teens kept walking by their teachers digging and pushing cars in the aforementioned lot and not one stopped to help.  Huge failure on societies part in my mind.

15) One of the joys of the snow is in building a sense of community by helping others. Don’t deprive your kids of that joy. Take them out (yes - even the little ones) and get them helping you to shovel the walks. Have them help an elderly neighbour. The small ones don’t need to be all that useful, but this will build a sense of social responsibility in them.

Off to help the caretaker at my place by doing a bit more shoveling today.  Loving the fresh air and exercise!

Photo by Jen Hong

For the first time in my lifetime, it looks like Canada is being given the gift of a white Christmas across the entire country!!!!  Despite having to listen to masses of Vancouverites complain about this on twitter, I think it is a beautifully magical gift.  Thank you Merry Old Kris Kringle!  Snow slows us all down a little.  Rather than chasing about the countryside after that ‘perfect gift’, we stop running about and do what is really important, which is actually spending some quality time with the people we love.

Snow pulls us together in another sense too - it causes strangers on the streets and subways to smile, laugh and talk with one another.  We remember to play and be young again as we are all taken in by the snows magic and have a snowball fight, make a snow angel or slide down a hill on a makeshift toboggan. We meet our neighbours as we dig our homes and our cars out of the snow.  We help our neighbours and for once the young actually remember to help the elderly.  And we pull together and share as we take on the hardships that snow poises on our lives.

I make fun of Vancouverites in snow, because they seem so overly dramatic about even the littlest bit of snow, but the reality is they live in a city thats unprepared for the snow - whether it is planes being able to take off from the airport or the many people that unlike myself don’t have a home or warm clothes and live on the streets in Vancouver.

Enjoy the snow this Christmas, but take a moment this holiday season and see if there is something you can do to help those less fortunate.  Whether it is donating warm clothes you no longer need, helping to bring safety and communication to others by donating old cell phones through campaigns like Fearless City, or spreading a bit of holiday joy with organizations like Beauty Nights.  And for those of you that are sitting in airports trying to get home to loved one, I do hope that you are indeed able to get to your destination.

Wishing you all a happy, safe holiday season filled with love, warmth and beauty!

If you have a project that uses emerging technologies to tell a story you should submit before Friday December 5th 2008. Entry is free.

read more | digg story

Twitter campaign to put the giving back in Thanksgiving. TweetsGiving demonstrates the power of social web by raising $10.000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania.

read more | digg story