I am not a golfer... but I am a published writer!

Here's a recent article I wrote, a review of some golf lessons I had taken, for the Chamber's Golf Links publication:

Helpful tips abound at Chamber Golf Academy

By Jennifer Hopper, Halifax Chamber of Commerce

I am not a golfer. I may look like one, with my own clubs, pull cart, shoes, glove, and ugly-golf-chic pants, but the problem is, I don’t have the game to back it up! To be fair, I have only been golfing since last summer, and I certainly enjoy the game, but unfortunately I’m not very good at it yet.

Thankfully, the Chamber Golf Club has a solution to that: Chamber Golf Academy. I had the chance to participate in a recent Academy hosted by The Links at Montague, a Chamber Golf Club Partner. Kevin and Craig, two of the great golf pros on staff at The Links at Montague, spent four hours giving us tips and tricks to help improve the three basic areas of the game, beginning with putting, moving on to chipping and finishing big at the driving range.

From tips for the very beginner (like ‘here’s how you hold a club’ and ‘to chip try an 8 iron’) to fine adjustments for those who know the basics and are looking to improve their game (like ‘turn your wrist a tiny bit sooner’ or ‘move your foot an inch to the left’), the pros were willing and able to give us what we needed.

As someone who has only played a handful of times, it was also handy to have a refresher after a long, golf-less Nova Scotia winter on things I’m sure I knew last year, like the ideal foot position for chipping, and when to put the ball closer to your left foot versus more centered.

Other helpful tricks got thrown in too. It’s always good to learn useful tricks such as how to read the green by holding up your club in front of your dominant eye, blocking out the ball with the shaft of the club and looking where the hole is in relation to the club. Golf etiquette tips are great too, such as not scuffing your feet across the green. And one member of the group even got a suggestion to have his clubs lengthened a bit, along with information on how to go about doing so.

The driving range is where I personally need the most practice, and was where I learned the most during our lessons. Craig took one look at my swing and told me about 5 things I was doing wrong! He immediately spotted the reason my drives always head right: turns out the way I was swinging caused my club face to be turned to the right at the point of contact. I’m still not going to be hitting any 300 yard drives any time soon, but hopefully now they’ll stay out of the woods!

Overall, though, my favourite tip – and the one that made the most difference to my swing – is simple: RELAX. After all, this thing called golf is supposed to be fun!

Jennifer Hopper is the Member Services Manager (and sometime golf networker) at the Halifax Chamber of Commerce.

Read the whole issue...

Maybe I should be a gardener...

There's something about walking into a greenhouse and inhaling that first lungful of moist, warm, dirt-scented air that just instantly lifts the spirits - especially in the middle of winter, but the effect is the same in the middle of May.

This weekend I went to the open house that Halifax Regional

Municipality hosted at its greenhouses, where it grows all the plants for city parks. We got to wander through a number of greenhouses, see plants in various stages of growth, view some displays about bugs, community gardening and compost, and generally take in the smell of good dirt and the beauty of plants in full bloom in May.

Most of the plants were obviously for eventual transplanting into outdoor parks (some were even labelled already for which park they were going to), but there were also some (like this giant man-eating cactus) that had clearly been in residence for a while!

It was also a great chance to get some colourful close-ups - one of

my favourite kinds of photography! All in all I was definitely glad we stopped by. And it got me thinking... maybe I should work in a greenhouse all winter? Warmth, amplified sunshine and plant life would certainly be good for the soul in January!

A Mother's Day Brunch Feast!

First, an apology. For a while I had decided that I would only post when something was new, different, "newsworthy." That led to not posting for way, way too long. I have now decided that I will post about interesting, creative, me things (while still avoiding the annoying stream-of-consciousness blog that was my original intention to not write).

So. Cooking, while never on my I-could-do-this-for-a-living list, has always been a definite interest of mine and something I (almost) always find enjoyable, relaxing, and a chance to express my creativity. My fiancé's summary of dinner is often something on the lines of "weird... but good!"

This past weekend my sister was in town (to go wedding dress shopping with me, as it happens) - and we realized that this meant she would be home for Mother's Day for the first time in about 8 years. We decided that of course we should do something to celebrate.

We briefly considered our options for a dine-out brunch, but decided that a) any good local brunch spots would be packed that day, and b) it would be more fun to do it ourselves! So, with some mad cross-country emailing and some across-the-cubicle advice from my coworker and the lovely writer of With Bite, we came up with a scrumptious brunch menu:

• Lattes (although I have been informed they are more of a cafe au lait since they aren't actually made with espresso): I made a pot of coffee so my Dad could have his black, then nuked half-mugs of skim milk, frothed them up with this great battery-operated frother my best friend gave me for Christmas, added vanilla syrup and topped with coffee, then sprinkled the foam with a little bit of cocoa. In deep blue mugs it had a very dramatic effect. (Perhaps a career as a barista is in my future?)
  
  
• Smoked salmon: I couldn't decide on hot or cold smoked salmon so I got some of both, from Willy Krauch's Nova Scotia smokehouse. Yum!
  
  
• Fruit salad: We combined strawberries and mango with cucumber to compliment the salmon, then added fresh mint leaves. We poured a bit of champagne and orange juice over the top to let all the flavours blend, and garnished with a sprig of mint. It was beautiful!
  
  
• Chocolate crescents: A sweet garnish for the plate, we only made enough of these for each person to have a taste. A roll of frozen multigrain pastry dough was improved immeasurably by the addition, in the middle of each crescent roll, of a square of Just Us! fair trade milk chocolate.
  
  
• Scones: At my sister's insistence our main carb for the meal was scones, made by her from our mother's go-to recipe. One half of the recipe was mixed with frozen raspberries for a delicious purply treat. The other half was up in the air until I looked in the fridge and caught sight of a bag of shredded Italian cheeses: cheese scones it was! Brushed with garlic butter before baking, they made a great compliment to the cold smoked salmon.
  
  
• Heart-shaped eggs: This started out as a bit of a joke by my sister but I thought, why not? I bought a large heart-shaped cookie cutter (with a "comfort edge" on the top which gave me something cool to grab onto) and placed that in the frying pan as I cooked the eggs one at a time. The eggs were from a local "hobby" farmer in my hometown, and have delicious bright yellow yolks! I had gone with my mother the previous weekend to the farm to pick some up and had seen the happy chickens pecking away in their run in the yard. Things always taste better when you can see where they come from! A dab of Nova Scotia-made pepper herb jelly was the finishing touch.
  
  
• Mimosas: What fancy brunch would be complete without some champagne and orange juice? Ours were served in fancy flutes and garnished with a frozen strawberry and some leftover mint leaves from the salad! One of the funnier moments of the morning was when our mother, drinking her latte and waiting for the food to be ready, called innocently from the other room to ask where the champagne was for her orange juice! Little did she know...

Brunch was delicious and the company was grand. To top it all off, there was a cheeky card (from papyrus, referencing how only such a fabulous mother could have daughters as fabulous as us), a mini rose bush (a throwback to the years when we gave her a real rosebush each year) and a one-of-a-kind Creations by Jennifer necklace. Needless to say, we were pretty proud of ourselves!

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!