Canadian girl out and aboot

This Saturday, I went to the Edmonton Permaculture convergence, which was hosted at a local community hall. The day was supposed to give participants a taste of permaculture and only cost $35. I've heard of permaculture due to some of my food security courses and wanted to learn more.

Here's a brief definition Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies. It was developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and their associates during the 1970s in a series of publications.
The intent is that, by rapidly training individuals in a core set of design principles, those individuals can design their own environments and build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society's reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that Mollison identified as fundamentally and systematically destroying Earth's ecosystems.

I am mainly interested in the food security components of the concept. I was expecting about 30 people to be in attendance, but I walked into a room of about 120 people! I ended up sitting at a table with the keynote speaker, who is known as The Urban Farmer . He conducts workshops on how to grow food in your backyard, and also hosts tours to Cuba to learn more about organic agriculture or permaculture in the country. I found out that there is funding available to handle the costs of one of these tours! I also talked to a landscape naturalizer, a dance artist who was creating a memorial garden, and lots of other interesting people. The sheer number of people was simply overwhelming, as I wasn't prepared for it, so I spent a lot of time listening to the other people around me.

There were sessions on backyard chickens, keeping and maintaining bees, food projects and gardening in schools, picking fruit trees for urban backyards and creating eco-sustainable communities. All in all, it was a very informative day.

I should also mention that there was a potluck and everyone had to bring a food item, clearly labelled with ingredients. As a nut allergic person, I can't say how much I appreciated this! I'm going to ask for this at any event that I organize. Anyway, the food was phenomenal. I had some cold soba sesame noodles and spent part of yesterday looking for the recipe so I can duplicate it at home.

The day after my reading, I went down to the Art Gallery of Ontario to look at the King Tut exhibit. This was a National Geographic exhibit and it was utterly fantastic. It opened with a short video narrated by Harrison Ford, and then you walked into an area where you could see some of the treasures of the pharaohs prior to King Tut. Then it went to the history of the discovery of the tomb, then a tour of various rooms of the tomb and some of the treasures found in the tomb. Following this, I toured some other galleries in the Art Gallery of Ontario and looked at works by the Group of 7, Henry Moore and other famous Canadian painters. I didn't see the whole museum as the museum is huge and I can only handle museums for about 2-3 hours.

Following this, I met up with [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com], sarcasma and [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com] and we went for dinner at Fresh, then a walk, and then a tour of Whole Foods because I had never been and enjoy grocery store tourism.

The next day, I took transit to the airport and hopped on the plane in record time. My flight was non-eventful, except for the fact that I was EXHAUSTED. I took a cab from the airport to my house, and ran to my last dance class. We practiced our tribal fusion piece and everyone was wearing their costumes. My costume is awesome, except I managed to snag my fishnet glove on my seashell bra during the practice. After dance class, I picked up Fergus from my friend Mari's house, and then picked up A from his bus.

The long weekend was pretty awesome- A and I watched movies all weekend, took Fergus for walks and went for Chinese food and dim sum.

Tonight is my dance recital. My friend was going to come see me dance, but her car is dead and she has no way of getting out to the recital, which is in a suburb. I'm pretty disappointed, but what can I do? It just seems to be a bad night for people. Perhaps next time.

1. NOT Working and catching up on movies.

I spent a lot of the weekend NOT working. Instead, I did a bunch of errands on Saturday. This included stopping by the craft sale in my neighbourhood and the farmers' market. I also had a delicious palak paneer wrap from the coffee shop near my house. The art house movie theatre in my neighbourhood was showing "An Education."

I'd highly recommend "An Education." It's a great story, an interesting moral premise and all the acting is wonderful. I was a little surprised by how much Carey Mulligan (the main actress) looks like one of my cousins.

2. Sunday, I taught my teen writers group. Since we are having a bunch of guests for the next few meetings, we just did a bunch of exercises and talked about books including Tolkien and Twilight. I love the teens and we have great discussions.

3. I woke up early to go to a preview of "Fantastic Mr. Fox". Mari took me to the preview, which was at 10 a.m. There were only 4 of us in the theatre; Mari, and two other writers who we both know. So we sat in a row in the theatre, talking about movies, books, music and theatre. We ended up sitting there for an hour because the manager couldn't get the projector working. She tried to make us come back the next day, but we refused and just sat there until she could get it to work.

"Fantastic Mr. Fox" is truly wonderful. It's funny, cute and interesting and it looks absolutely amazing. I kept on wanting to touch Mr. Fox's face, because the fur looks so lifelike and soft. The actors were well cast, the music was great and the script was fun. I think it'll be up for some Oscar noms.

4. After this, I came home and did a bunch of work and wrote some stories about alpacas.

5. Today I woke up to a very nice e-mail from a woman that I'd interviewed. I went by her booth at Agritrade last week and we did a story about a software that she'd created to help farmers do their accounting. She sent me an email saying that various people stopped by her booth because they'd received the email news and were interested in her product because of what I'd written. Since she created the program to help farmers and is the sole owner and creator of her business, I was thrilled by this, and really happy to have helped her out. Plus, it's just nice to get positive feedback.

6. It was plus 17 and sunny today, which was delightful. I had to go to Ikea to pick up some things for friends. I live on the same side of town as the Ikea, so it's not a bad trip for me. I also love that I have the freedom to go on a week day, because there is never anyone there and it makes it really easy to shop and browse.

After this, I went downtown to do a few things. I tried a new coffee shop, and went to see an exhibit at the Albert Gallery of Art called "Museums of the Contemporary World." I'm glad I saw it, but it wasn't really my thing. It was an excellent exhibit, but I'm just not into looking at floor plans or architectural designs for buildings I may never get to go to. Still, I do have some museums that I'd like to add to my list. I really want to go to the Art Gallery of Ontario next time I'm in Toronto. Then I went to check out a mall that I'd never been to before. I went to the mall specifically to buy MAC, but also to get a lay of the land and check out what stores they have. All in all, a very productive day, and a nice change from spending the day in front of the computer.

I'm completely in love with this.

Adam Marenko's mysterious world of bees

Some creative neighbours down the street created a snow house in celebration of inauguration day. When I first saw the house, it was graced with a paper American flag, and cut outs of Barack and Michelle. I'm not sure if the house was vandalized, or if the people decided to take Barack and Michelle and put them away until that fateful day.

You can see pictures of the flickr set here

Look for Sasha and Malia.

Coincidentally, my mom is having an inauguration party at her house in Saskatoon. She's serving hot dogs as a quintessentially American food ;)

I attended the Grande Prairie Art Auction last night and was blown away by all the artists from the area. There's a ton of them up here. It's really sort of amazing.

Internationally renowned artist Peter Von Tiesenhausen lives here. I'd never heard of him, but our graphic designer told me that he studied Peter's work at the art school he attended in Halifax.

Apparently Peter carved these six foot tall wooden figures, and then drove around and photographed them in various locations. He carried them across the country in his pick up truck.

You can see them here .
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In other news, I was driving home today and was startled by a moose on the side of the road. This is the second moose I've seen up here. I love seeing them; it's such a novelty and I love how strange and beautiful they look. I think it will be a long time before moose sightings start to get old.

On Friday, I did this very cool story about a woman who decided to start a small film festival in GP. She made a short, which was shown in the Edmonton Film Festival. While she was driving home, she decided that GP needed a little film fest, so she talked to a bunch of people and created one. There will be filmmaking workshops, and programs of various shorts, including the Oscar nominated shorts for 2007. I think this is really cool, and it actually reminds me of Saskatoon.

In GP, artists seem to just decide that they are going to do something, and then do it, which is very similar to the way Saskatoon was when I was growing up. I think this process made me more active, more creative and way more aware of possiblities. As a teen, I was comfortable contacting people to bounce ideas off of them, and that has carried over to my life as an adult.

Artists being pushed out of city

This is a story that I can relate to. Vancouver is a fabulous city to live in, but it's a very expensive place to live. Sometimes the sheer cost of rent, etc, is enough to make me think longingly of Montreal. This also explains the number of artists and writers that I know of who used to live in Vancouver, but who now live in the prairies.

While walking in Boston Common, we came about this bizarre sculpture . I immediately asked B* to snap a pic of it since it was one of the more bizarre statues I've seen. Does anyone know the history of it?

Another person on flickr took a photo that offers a better view