Sunday, May 1, 2011

Health, Life, Love and Food

Every day is an experience.

My nature is a little Pollyanna-esque.  Actually, it's very Pollyanna with a little dash of practicality, a pinch of whimsy and a dollop of twisted thrown in for fun.

The always look on the bright side of me really does see every day as a new adventure and an opportunity to experience as much as possible.

Today was a celebration of health, life, love and food.

It started off as most Sundays do with an early morning bike ride through Niagara.  Today, eight of us showed up and we had a great ride (minus the funnel bugs that kept getting stuck in my eyelashes and lipbalm. Disgusting beyond belief.  On our ride, we saw all sorts of uprooted trees and I learned after last Thursday to never ever plant blue spruce.  For those of you who don't know, last Thursday we were hit with a terrible windstorm that ripped a roof off of a school, uprooted hundreds of trees, tore the huge letter A off the casino sign in Niagara Falls and shut down the Queenston Lewinston bridge for the first time in history.  The wreckage is everywhere and shocking to see.  It looks like a war zone in some places. And I learned from this experience that the root systems of blue spruces spread out rather than down so it doesn't take much to topple them.



Don't plant them!

The ride itself was great - just a little faster than comfortable but I pushed hard and kept up the pace the whole time.  The blood sugar gods cooperated as well - always an added bonus. After our bike ride, we rushed home to watch the Ridley College students march right past our door - in full uniform complete with marching band.  Not sure I would have wanted to do that at 13 but it was fun to see.  Especially the poor kids with no rhythm who couldn't seem to march to the beat.

This afternoon, we were volunteers at the annual Hike for Hospice.  Hospice is a wonderful place that offers end of life care for residents of Niagara.  In a place that you would expect to be full of pain and sorrow is a hidden world full of love and life.  Tears flow of course but so does love.  I had the honour of photographing the event and spent the afternoon trying to capture the day without intruding on private moments.



The new Food and Drink magazine came out this week and, as usual, it's chock full of recipes just begging to be tried.  So Japanese Chicken Curry was tonight's culinary adventure.  Pretty tasty and the house smells like a gourmet restaurant. The best part about it was that I learned how to make real curry.  Mixing about 10 different spices together to produce a delicious curry powder is pretty cool considering that, until tonight, I used to just buy premixed curry.  Even the mortar and pestle were put to use.

Health, life, love and food.

Another good day in my books.

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