Semi-Professional Stuntwoman

This past Friday was my birthday (yes, gifts will still be accepted!), and the haul was pretty darn good, but the best gift by far came from my boyfriend: on Friday, at about 5:30, I jumped out of a perfectly good Cessna at 10,000 feet, strapped to the front of a short French guy wearing a parachute!

The Atlantic School of Skydiving is located in Waterville in the Annapolis Valley, a nice hour's drive outside of Halifax. If you go, be prepared to wait: I was scheduled to jump at 3 pm and finally got to at around 5:30. I really should have brought my book, or a board game, to keep me occupied while I waited with nervous excitement! Then, finally, they got me into my sexy skydiving outfit - which made me feel like I was about to climb into a fighter jet with Tom Cruise, Top Gun style!

Then we crammed ourselves into the teeny tiny Cessna - a pilot, wearing a chute of his own which made me a tad nervous; two instructors; me; and a 13-year-old kid who was going with the other instructor. It took about 20 minutes to climb in a big slow circle up to 10,000 feet. From there you can see the whole Valley (the North "Mountain" looks like a little ripple), the Bay of Fundy and the New Brunswick coast, Chester Basin and even Halifax.

Once we got to the proper spot and I had been tightly strapped to my good buddy Kenny, they opened the door right next to me and told me to stick my leg out and brace my foot on the platform above the wheel. That was the scariest part of the whole thing! Once I was arranged, Kenny counted 1, 2, and on three he pushed me head first out of the plane! I let out a good scream as we tumbled for a few seconds, with my viewplane consisting of sky-land-sky-land-sky-land before we levelled out for the rest of the freefall. Freefall is a strange feeling. You can tell you're moving very fast (220 kph apparently!) and the wind is rushing by you (and it's cold!), but you don't feel like you're falling as such because the ground is still so far below you. It's more like floating in a wind tunnel. After perhaps 30 seconds of this, he pulled the chute and we began the slower, gentler part of our descent. He pulled the cords and spun us around a few times so I could see the 360 degree view, and we zigzagged down toward the ground, where I watched the tiny specks of people getting bigger and bigger, before we gently landed in exactly the right spot in the field between the two runway strips. I'm pretty sure the grin on my face reached from ear to ear as I walked back toward Trevor.

I highly recommend the tandem jump here. For one thing, with a tandem jump you can get video since the instructor straps a camera to his wrist. But more importantly, knowing I wasn't responsible for pulling the chute, or navigating the landing, made me feel much safer and much less nervous!

Now if only THEY'd pay ME to do it again!! But I will be doing it again.

Foodie for a Day

On the weekend I had a chance to check out the Catch Seafood Festival - because I wasn't about to say no to a whole festival about seafood! I met up with my foodie coworker Kristen, the lovely and talented writer of With Bite for a morning or fishy yumminess. I have never seen anyone get quite excited about food, and Food Network stars, ass Kristen, and I must admit some of the excitement rubbed off on me. The first thing I checked out, before Kristen arrived, was a talk by Dr. Alex Richardson of Food and Behaviour Research in the UK. She, aside from being quite funny, gave a fascinating talk about why fish is good for the brain. Among the tidbits she shared were some stats about maximum-security young offenders in the UK who showed significant reduction in antisocial behaviour JUST from being given a multivitamin and essential fatty acid supplement, and stats showing that the children of women who ignored the "for heavens' sake don't eat more than 2 servings of fish a week while pregnant or your kid will have mercury poisoning" recommendations and ate as much as they wanted had a significantly lower chance of having suboptimal IQ. Really interesting stuff - check out the website - with the moral of the story being, eat fish! So I did.

They had this weird system set up where you bought 10 tasting tickets for $10 and then used 1 or 2 tasting tickets to buy samples at each booth. Some booths gave you lots for your 1 ticket - like the booth where I got to try smoked shrimp (yum!), crab leg, crab dip, and two flavours of smoked salmon, all for 1 ticket - but the amount you got for each ticket varied hugely from booth to booth. That aside, I did try lots more yummy stuff, including a delicious chowder from the Annapolis Basin Conference Centre, complete with whole mussels and big chunks of scallops. I also tried lots of different smoked fish, including both hot smoked (Cajun flavoured) salmon and cold smoked salmon rolled with salmon cream cheese; cold mussels in blueberry maple sauce; a delicious mini lobster sandwich on a squishy white roll; some hand-churned fresh butter; a quahog (did you know they harvested them in St. Margaret's Bay?); and some sea cucumber - which I expected to be mushy, but apparently that's just the outside, and the inside is orangey-pink and has a smiliar texture to squid! For dessert I had a delicious maple cream. Once I had had my fill, I went back to the main stage to watch the famous Anna Olsen of the Food Network. She prepared a delicious-looking salad with scallop skewers and fresh local strawberries, and then some lobster tacos which looked delicious. 4 lucky people got to try all this out on stage with her. She chatted the whole time she was cooking, which would cause me to mess something in my recipe up but which of course she is paid to not do - the point being she gave some interesting tips along the way. Including, she always adds garlic LAST, which is the opposite of what I always do which is to add it as soon as the oil is hot.... hmm.

Once Anna was done, and Kristen had run home to charge her camera battery, I decided I was full of enough fish and I headed home. Then, later that night, I went to another coworker's house for a BBQ and was treated to.... mussels! Made from a recipe from the Food Network, no less. So, I got enough Omega-3's for a whole week, but had a delicious fishy day!

Look for Kristen's post about the festival, which I am sure will be full of much more technical foodie terms than mine, as well as, I hope photos which I do not have, coming soon on With Bite I am sure!

A Taste of Teaching

This week I had the opportunity to play teacher a little bit by volunteering for Junior Achievement. I visited a Grade 6 classroom for a total of 4 hours over 2 days to teach the "Our Business World" program. This program is a great introduction to business for 12-year-olds, covering what you need to know to create and staff a business, produce goods and market to your audience. This was a great chance to interact with the kids, get to know their names and a bit of their personalities, and see what kind of cool stuff comes out their heads. They were asked at various times to create company names, figure out how much rent would be, and create an ad for their product. I was very impressed at some of the ideas the kids came up with, and also with the media savvy of some of them - they already seem to realize that advertising does not necessarily equal truth, which is awesome. It is very interesting to watch them work through things, like when we were discussing how much to charge for hypothetical skateboards at a hypothetical skate shop we were opening. Using a very simple cost-per-skateboard model, we decided that if we bought the boards for $50 from the supplier we would need to sell them for $300 to make a profit once we paid for staff, overhead etc. For some of them this seemed to be quite a revelation and you could almost see the gears turning - very similar to how my dog looks as she is trying to figure out what I want her to do in our obedience class. I love seeing the learning process happening before my eyes. I also found myself wanting to spend more time with these kids and get to know them better. One girl asked me at the end of the presentation if this was my first time doing it and she told me I did a good job, which is appreciated from a girl who showed during the class that she wasn't afraid to make her true opinion known! I'm now wondering if volunteering in a school would be enough to scratch my teaching itch, or if it will simply make it worse...

Outdoorswoman extraordinaire... do they pay well for that?

This weekend the boyfriend, the dog and I went for a walk/hike in Hemlock Ravine, a hidden treasure in Bedford. I like, on the weekends, to try and walk somewhere other than the usual weekday half-hour loop, and the Ravine happened to be close to the Chinese place I wanted to go for supper. As we walked I was playing nature guide for Trevor, with "name that bird" and "name that tree" and "hey look at that!," observing the forest recovering from Hurricane Juan, and playing nature photographer. It got me wondering if I would enjoy a job that allowed me to work outdoors and/or with nature. The answer is a qualified yes: on warm sunny days. However, on rainy days (like about 10 minutes after we got back to the car, when it started to downpour)... not so much, thanks!

... but not fine arts.

And now, a post about things I am NOT good at.

Tonight I went to a junior high fine arts cabaret. Aside from once again being in the school environment, which I really enjoy, the kids were AMAZING! I felt so inferior watching a 13-year-old girl who has been invited to the National Ballet School summer camp doing a ballet piece, listening to a girl play guitar and sing a beautiful practically radio-worthy love song, listening to a very accomplished grade 7 flautist, and more and more and more! The kids were fabulous. (And Trevor's improv team did a great job too...). It makes me wish I had had the opportunity to explore music, dance and art in junior high but then I think, I already have too many interests - I don't need any more! Plus, I tried to learn to play the guitar once and discovered that my fingers and especially left wrist do NOT bend that way. So, I guess I will stick to marveling at talented teenagers.

Being at the school tonight also made me excited to start volunteering with Junior Achievement, facilitating the "Our Business World" seminar with a group of grade 6 students. It should be very interesting to see what they come up with when asked questions like "where do you get the money to start a business?"

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Amazing Race Party!

Last week was the season finale of one of my favourite shows, The Amazing Race. When I was in England a group of us would get together in my dorm room every week to watch the show. Two of the girls live in the city so I invited them and their boys over to watch together. Which, of course, gave me a ready-made excuse to indulge my creativity. I bought some bright red and yellow felt and made replica Race route marker flags to hang on the outside of my house, to mark important areas like the tv room and the bathroom, and to hang on the tv for decoration. I also made a trip to the Freak Lunchbox, an awesome candy store, and bought some “creepy crawlies” to imitate some nasty food the racers had to eat during a previous leg. Some chocolate covered ju jubes served as larvae, served up on a skewer. Gummy spiders, also on skewers, were in place of the crickets and scorpions the racers had been asked to eat. Next door at Pete’s Frootique I bought some cheddar Babybel and a wheel of brie, to serve as miniatures of the huge wheels of cheese the racers had to carry on their backs in the first leg of the race. Along with Cindy’s “Happy Amazing Race Day” cake, it made for quite a feast!

Back to school... sort of.

From the time I was in high school, people have told me I should go into teaching. Mostly it was the teachers at my high school, who I think were trying to a) give my unfocused intellect some direction and b) recruit new members to the cause, and the parents of the kids I taught in swimming lessons. I always resisted, thinking I would hate it. Then I moved in with a teacher, whose brother and sister-in-law are also teachers, and my best friend became a teacher. I was suddenly surrounded by teachers, and all of a sudden I could see what it was like "from the inside," as it were. I watched Trevor marking papers, saw student work, started meeting and spending time with other teachers, and volunteering at the school, chaperoning dances and school trips.

After the demise of the proposed MUN-Dal partnership which seemed to be the perfect program for me, teaching seemed to get pushed to the back burner. This year, Trevor is a literacy coach, so there are fewer stories about classes and students, and no marking being done at home. He (and therefore I) has chaperoned fewer dances this year simply because he is working at three schools instead of one. Combined with a promotion at work, it has all served to push the idea of teaching toward the back of my brain.

However, this weekend my interest was rekindled, through something as simple as a yard sale. The yard sale was put on by the Grade 8 class at one of Trevor's schools to raise money for their class trip. Last year we had gone to the sale and enjoyed it, so this year we decided to buy a table and sell some of our junk. Being at the school, interacting with some of the students, and even helping to carry tables after the sale was over all reminded me how much I have come to like being in the school atmosphere. So much that I didn't even care that we ended up spending more money than we made!

Yet another possibility... sigh.

Smoke on the Water

Today provided a hard-to-resist opportunity for photography. There are some pretty big brush fires across the harbour (which unfortunately are apparently also consuming some houses) which are creating some pretty impressive smoke plumes. They can be seen all over the city, including from my office and from the beach at the end of our street. So, Loki dog, my roommate and I went down to the beach to a) enjoy the unseasonably summery day and b) take some pictures of the smoke.

Loki didn't seem fazed by the smoke; she was just happy to be running and chasing seaweed and digging in the sand and running. Here's hoping they get the fires out soon.

Last Thursday was one of the biggest events of the year for the Halifax Chamber of Commerce, the Spring Dinner. While I am not techincally part of the events team, on days like this I get to indulge my event-coordinator side and help out. We spent most of the morning tying chair covers onto 600 chairs in the room. It's impressive to see the room come together from bare tables and uncovered chairs to a fully set, green-and-champagne, film-themed spring "zen garden," as I called it. And the food and speaker were pretty good too - with a beer company sponsor, everything was cooked using beer, and Steven Brandman was really interesting talking about the film industry in Halifax. Unfortunately, he didn't bring Tom Sellick with him (Brandman is the procuder of the Jesse Stone series which shoots in Hali). But, RBC did bring the real Olympic torch (right)! It is admittedly a great advantage of my job that I get to try and experience such a variety of things. Not many jobs offer you the opportunity to get experience planning and executing large events without that actually being your job! More photos can be seen on the Chamber's website.

And as an ending point, as a follow-up to my last post: today's sporting event on tv as I write is Canada vs Czech Repubic World Championship hockey, on repeat on TSN.

Jenn of All Trades Was Taken....

When I was in Europe studying for six months in 2005 I blogged about my trip. I had built-in things to write about since there was a field trip of some sort almost every weekend and I was seeing and doing new things every day. Since then I have missed writing regular updates, even if the only people reading them were my family members. So, at the encouragement of a blogging coworker (check out With Bite!), here I am.

I have been musing recently about the direction I would eventually like my life to take, and have been spending a lot of time making mental lists of the things I enjoy doing and/or am good at. The problem is that the list of things I'm interested in is long and hugely varied, from writing and jewellery making to database management to a burning desire to drive a rock truck before I die. These things are pretty hard to successfully combine into a career (unless you manage to get a job as a tv show host on the Discovery Channel), which is probably why I went into university as a Bachelor of Arts student not knowing what I wanted to take, and why I ended up with an honours degree in German and History (do you want to hire me now?).

A huge advantage of my current job is that I get a chance to do and try a pretty decent range of stuff and no two days are really ever the same. I have pretty much come to the conclusion that most of the things I enjoy can be successfully pursued as hobbies, and hopefully some of the stranger 'bucket list' items can be accomplished through my rapidly expanding and varied network.

So, that is what I hope to write about here: the miscellany of things in which I am interested and my efforts to pursue, engage in, and learn more about those things.

In that spirit, here is how I spent my creative energies today:

This necklace of ribbon, freshwater pearls, faux pearls and various sizes of chain was inspired by a design in Nathalie Delhaye's book beads buttons and bijoux which my parents surprised me with as an "I couldn't resist it at the bookstore" present the other day.

I often spend the evening either watching, ignoring or pretending to ignore sports on tv (depending on the sport: if it's Ottawa Senators it's watching; everything else is ignoring or half watching) while spreading my beading supplies out over the whole sofa. Today my boyfriend was watching the Toronto Blue Jays lose and I was working on this.

This is part of the collection I am trying to build up so I can sell some of my jewellery at a) my hairdresser's salon, since she so kindly offered to let me put a display there, and b) at Christmas craft sales next fall. So far I have 3 necklaces and 2 pairs of earrings - a slow start, but it's coming along!

Phew. I thought this was going to be a short introductory post. So much for that!