Great Strides

Cystic fibrosis (CF) is the most common, fatal genetic disease affecting Canadian children and young adults, 1 in every 3600 children born in Canada! It is not a disease you of hear much and there is no cure. It is a multi-organ disease, primarily affecting the lungs and digestive system.

The life expectancy is steadily increasing with the amazing improvements in treatments and care, from 2000 to 2008 the life expectancy from 32 to 37.4! How amazing is that, but they still have a long way to go for a cure.

My beautiful, smart, and energetic little seven year old niece has CF. This is year will be my second year participating in the Great Stride walk, and yes I’m asking for donations! You don’t have to big everything little bit helps! You can contact me directly, go to my sponsor page, or even just give directly to the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. That is also a great place to learn more about the disease. If you can’t give right now please take a few minutes and learn a little bit more about CF.

A Little Disbelief

The great thing about downloading television shows is being able to re-visit your past, as sad as it may be. I’ve started to re-watch Seaquest DSV, not the best show coming out of the 90s but I admit I had a crush on Jonathon Brandis, plus this was my ‘I want to work at Sea World and train killer whales’ phase, and there was Darwin the talking dolphin as an added bonus.

Watching it now is kind funny, I know you have to suspend your disbelief to watch sci-fi and just enjoy, but they took it over the top. You have cryogenics, aliens landing on earth a million years ago and talking dolphin, pre-historic giant crocodiles unfreezing from glaciers (alive and laying eggs), psychics and so much more!

My favourite part has to be when they refer to the past, which was the ‘distant’ future when they shot the show and is now our present. In 2010 Seaquest time, all beef is outlawed because cattle farming degrades the atmosphere, and we’ve established underwater colonies (aren’t we just special). I do have to give some credit they have a great green message, the underwater colonies, mining, oxygen generators, etc are all necessities because we destroyed our world, so thumbs up for that.

I am willing to throw science out the window for some shows/movies, especially the really really bad monster movies (Ex: Shark Attack 3: Megalodon, Kracken: Tentacles of the Deep and the upcoming Sharktopus (can’t wait!)), but not everyone is. An American physicist is calling for Hollywood producers to tone down the fanciful science, and allow only one major suspension of disbelief per movie.

This would mean no megalodon or kracken, well if believe in monsters is considered suspending disbelief and what about ghosts, angels, gods, devils, Spiderman/ superman etc (all very unscientific). With this we would be left with romantic comedies, because in reality action movies, comic books and even cartoons (how many talk fish do you know) all need more than just a little disbelief. I appreciate where he’s coming from and more movies with good science can always be used, but I think he's suspended all disbelief if he thinks this is ever going to happen.

The guilty former vegetarian

I was a vegetarian for over ten years, and because of circumstance and physical requirements I started eating poultry and fish. Recently its only red meat I shy away from, not so much because of ideology but because of taste. I would love to go back but I have really loved the variety that eating chicken (especially) has given me.

Today I bought some vegetarian pepperoni, I knew I used to love it and found out still do. The flavour is great and it is so much healthier (although I was never a veggie for health, but for my ideals). I was made fun of, had a hard time finding appropriate substitutes, and eating out was a nightmare. But now I think that a veggie life is all about commitment, but I’m not sure I can do it anymore. Eating chicken etc has become so easy I think it would hard to go back.

Today was my first step... I have to finish all the chicken in my freezer first, because I think nothing is worse than wasting food, but after that I’m going to consider my choices.

Piggy, Piggy, Piggy

When I was reading through my old entries, I saw this one post that I had to comment on. We were search for pigs (actually pork, but we did understand the women when she was asking), because of swine flu! This was back in July of 2007, before the global panic; I didn’t even know what it was. At the time they were more concerned about the transfer of the virus to other livestock and had no concern for people in the least, funny how a year plus can change so much.

Back in the fall everything was about the H1N1, how to prevent it, who has it, how many have died. These days there is only remnants of the wide spread fear. Old signs up in the buses, the anti-bacterial gel bottles here and there, no one seems all that concerned anymore.

The death toll is nearly 16000 for 2009, but keep in mind in the US alone over 40 000 die per annum of the flu, so comparing the whole world to the US statistic (as we usually do) not so bad. Want to know why we freaked out... I'd say the media attention but hey what do I know :) . I do realize it was also because it was taking the lives of young healthy people as well, but the reality of it we need something to freak out about (war, virus, terrorism) for ratings so 2009 was all about the swine flu freak out. How many of you as of today are really all that worried about Swine flu? Not many I expect as its not being thrown in your faces every 2 seconds.

A nice cheerful subject for my first post... :)

A New ‘Interim’ Beginning

I started reading through my old entries, and I enjoyed the reminiscing immensely. So I thought a collection of new thoughts for a new ‘interim’ beginning. A new beginning in a new/ old place even if it’s only for a short(ish) time, I’m still living my life and still thinking so what else is a girl in the 21st century to do?

I do not know how often I will update this blog but I think it’s important, it became almost a diary of sorts. There were events, albeit minor ones that I had completely forgotten about until started to go through my old postings. So here we go again...