My Reimagined Spaces: Toronto and Hamilton House and Condo Renovations

Existing features dictated what style direction each reno would take

Home redesign has always been a passion for me and my family.

Over the last 20 years, we have renovated several condos and houses that we lived in and then sold. We redesigned and fixed them up gradually, outside of our full-time jobs. 

Whether reenvisioning an elegant, spacious condo in midtown Toronto or a suburban house nestled in the majestic landscape of the Niagara Escarpment, each of our renovations uncovered hidden beauty that was already there. Here are a few of our transformed spaces:

North York condo renovation

- This transformation included new hardwood flooring throughout, new paint, new appliances, new plumbing, and new electrical switches

- We tore up the old parquet floor and laid rich brown hardwood flooring ourselves with the help of a friend, and did all of the painting ourselves

- We focused on the flooring, warm paint color to make this large 2-bdrm condo feel more inviting, and new lattice on the 2 balconies overlooking the urban landscape below

High Park condo painting

- We repainted one wall of this new build a brilliant vermilion to create a distinctive look

- The large west-facing balcony was great for gardening and brought the outside in

East Hamilton house renovation

- The extensive work completed on this reimagined space included new hardwood flooring throughout, new paint, new lighting, replacement of old lead piping, and a new A/C system that replaced a window fan

- We laid all of the sub-flooring ourselves and most of the hardwood flooring, strapping construction kneepads to our legs for protection

- We prioritized the flooring, the new soft white paint color that restored the space as a peaceful sanctuary, the 3-bedroom house's historical features, and the view of the lush yard

Downtown Hamilton loft painting & re-lighting

- Fresh white paint throughout, new unique light pieces, and new gold paint on the exposed pipes accentuated the gorgeous wooden beams and ceiling in this character loft

Dundas house makeover

- We tore up all the wall-to-wall carpeting and uncovered beautiful hardwood flooring throughout

- The tall fir trees in this large treed lot tend to dwarf humans

- Dundas Valley Conservation Area trails are a short walk away

The way to make a home renovation stand out is to accentuate and develop the existing features that first took your breath away when you bought the place. Your vision will develop on its own from there.

National Ballet of Canada Welcomes Live Audiences Back with Chords of Mysticism

 When Dance and Spirituality Go Hand in Hand

from national.ballet.ca

When you witness NBOC's first live ballet performance in 20 months and hear the striking intros to two ethereal Tchaikovsky numbers, you know that spiritual power will be talking to you in this opening program.

And it does. George Balanchine's Serenade, Jera Wolfe's Soul, and Crystal Pite's Angel's Atlas are all transformative ballets that touch on our mortality, impermanence, and microscopic size in relation to the vast universe. There's a subdued mournfulness standing right beside passion and perfection in each of the works. Moreso, there's deep honesty and humility running right through the whole National Ballet of Canada November 2021 program.

Dance has never seemed to perfectly express its era better than right now - or, at least, during the past century. You can see it just by observing how dancers' arm movements have changed over time, regardless of whether it's a classical or contemporary technique that the work is set in. While dancers in Serenade, choreographed in 1935 just after the Depression, confidently spread their wings in arms that perpetually point up to the sky, in Angel's Atlas, choreographed in 2020, they collect and draw the vast energy around them towards themselves using their elbows, in a lostness. And in Soul, choreographed during the pandemic in 2021, the dancers' arms intertwine with each other in the depth of love and all of its complex subjectivity. 

Angel's Atlas

The first time I saw Crystal Pite's Angel's Atlas with a friend, I was a busy, tired commuter and the experience was apocalyptic and jarring. It was February 2020, literally a month before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world. Now, seeing it again as part of the National Ballet of Canada's Welcome Back season, it seems reverent, humble, and overwhelmingly eye-opening. 

Tchaikovsky's sacred Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, Opus 41, No 6 Cherubic Hymn sets the tone of the ballet before any of the dancers start to move. Together with Tom Visser's lighting design and Jay Gower Taylor's reflective light backdrop concept, Owen Belton's music affects the audience in a very profound way. The hymn's words speak to humanity laying aside all cares of life to receive the King of All, invisibly upborne by the angelic host. While the words are sung in Old Church Slavonic, the feeling of one's own soul opening up is evoked from a combination of things. It's both the music and the mystical wall of light that displays the slow discovery of a vast and unknowable universe. 

The dancers are barefoot and dressed identically in loose black pants. Slowly they start to move in unison from their crouched positions where they were spread like shells across the stage. As they get up, they seem to be discovering their world and who they are in relation to everything else.

There is both joy and anguish in the movement throughout Angel's Atlas. A couple discovers each other and lives a form of life, then they part. Movement is repetitive and elbows seem to lead, where humans eke out a more primitive existence. The music evolves into flowing, abstract harmonies with bells, the black pants become long skirts swishing freely, and graceful, fluid movements start to form a visual culture onstage. At points, there are two groups who each move exclusively in unison, and sometimes the groups are divided by gender. This made me think of Pite's earlier work, Emergence.

Serenade

Sourced from national.ballet.ca

A circle is closed. The storm has passed. A song resolves in its final chord. Everything is OK. Powers greater than us are in place, and we feel them. Resolution. 

This is what screams out at you when the curtain opens after the first couple of bars of Serenade for Strings. 17 female dancers in blue hold their hands up to the moonlight, both signaling it and shielding themselves from it. You feel the abstract power of human resilience.

When Balanchine choreographed Serenade and it was performed in 1934 by the School of American Ballet students, he had no idea that almost 100 years later it would become a lasting, emblematic piece of inner power featured at post-pandemic theatrical re-openings. Its lasting quality is in its balance of surprise and inevitability. 

Serenade still looks modern and is known for its technical difficulty to execute. Most of the movement and jumps are executed "en arabesque" (with the back leg stretched up high), requiring a lot of back strength. The intricate pointe work includes turns of the whole body executed on the toes with a sudden lift of one foot up to "retire" (pointed down at the other ankle) when the dancer faces front, and then down again to the top of the toes for yet another turn. And it's all done fast, to music that flies along quickly.

Balanchine's difficult technique was danced flawlessly this week by the National Ballet's Sonia Rodriguez, Jurgita Dronina, and Calley Skalnik in the principal roles. The choreography expresses harmony, goodwill, and togetherness. Serenade is Balanchine's elegy to women, but the ballet ends sadly and mystically. One of its themes is mortality yet it also suggests collective strength.

The Welcome Back Performance Touched Audiences Collectively

As we searched for the patterns in dance movements that were executed quickly and collectively on stage, the performance had already tapped into our subconscious. Controlled chaos. Resolution of forces. Connection to a wild beyond. 

These are the common themes of all the pieces billed as NBOC's Angel's Atlas in this season's opening program. I still have Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings going through my head every morning when I wake up. It feels like a good thing.

The Meaning of Farm to Table

Declining Number of Fruit Farms in Niagara Region Affect Supply

A lone tree reaches across the expanse of a Niagara-on-the-Lake field

Whenever I eat a fresh peach, cherry, plum, nectarine or pear in Niagara in the summertime, I notice how much better it tastes than the fruit I buy at home in Toronto stores, just an hour and a half's drive north.

If Niagara fruit farms still exist (which I found they do) why can't we purchase their produce in the urban outlets in Toronto? When I tried to find out more, I found a great list of fruit farms in the Niagara area, as well as another helpful resource about where to pick your own fruits and vegetables in the Niagara region, but no real explanation of why this natural wealth isn't part of the major distribution networks supplying our urban supermarkets.

Grapes on the vine in the July Niagara-on-the-Lake countryside

It turns out that many of the various fruit orchards that filled the Niagara countryside have become endless rows of grape vines. If the larger Niagara fruit farms were supplanted by the needs of the grape-growing and winery industries in the Niagara peninsula, I don't remember hearing who made the decision. Why can't we have both the Niagara winery and fresh fruit industries succeeding side by side? Was there ever a public consultation about it?

When I was growing up in Niagara Falls in the 1970s one of my favourite summer jobs was strawberry-picking at Tregunno Farms. I would ride my bike the 20-odd kilometres along the Niagara River Parkway to Niagara-on-the-Lake and hit the fields with my fellow fruit-pickers, eating as many strawberries as I could while I worked. Happily, Tregunno Farms is still in the same location and managed by the fourth generation of the family. But now their main crops are peaches and grapes and they are trying to grow plum-apricot hybrids currently shipped to us from the U.S.

One of the many palatial wineries that dot the Niagara-on-the-Lake countryside

Food Giants McCain, Saputo and Maple Leaf Helped Grow Canadian Food Sector

The more I dug for information on who is really in charge of the quality of fresh food available to put onto my family's table, the less I found out it was a story of small or medium sized business success. A couple of years ago a Globe and Mail article described the Canadian food industry sector as being the largest manufacturing industry in the country in terms of sales, surpassing auto parts or high-tech gadgets and achieving sales that quietly passed that of textiles, paper, machinery, and aerospace combined. It goes on to describe how "giants like McCain, Saputo and Maple Leaf" helped the sector to expand over the past decade and keep growing even in the recession when most other sectors slumped.

I'm still trying to find out what farms exactly, are producing our local food. According to Statistics Canada, 70% of our food comes from our own country and only 30% of the food we eat comes from somewhere else. A full 80% of meat and dairy products and 76% of breads and cereals are produced here, and imports account for 40% of all fruit, vegetables and fish we eat.

When I looked at the Farm and Food Care Foundation, I found Sobey's, Ontario Pork, The Centre for Food Integrity,  and Cargill writing and distributing consumer-friendly brochures from the voice of Canadian farmers. The messaging was that "big corporations have not taken over Canadian farms, and more than 97 per cent of Canadian farms today are still family-owned and operated." But the brochure did not stipulate the most important point: What percentage of our food do these family-owned farms actually produce?

"Made in Canada" Choreography for National Ballet Transcends the Classics

Mesmerizing Ode to Lawren Harris

Image via https://www.instagram.com/nationalballet/

Lawren Harris, Robert Binet, Lubomyr Melnyk, and dancers of the National Ballet of Canada, will the dreamers ever leave you? 

The Company's final performance of Made in Canada yesterday at The Four Seasons Centre in Toronto was a testament to the power of nature in the Canadian psyche. Canadian choreographers, composers, lighting designers, set designers, costume designers and dancers came together to celebrate a bond that we Canadians innately feel but rarely articulate. 

A pre-performance announcement by Artistic Director Karen Kain expressed gratitude towards the indigenous people of yesteryear on whose land the ballet company now operates at the Lake Ontario waterfront. When you look south across the lake from where the company's astounding artistry is now created, you can almost see Lewiston, NY beyond what is a relatively new border. After you've seen "Made in Canada" choreography however, you'll probably agree that our bond with the land emerges as a much more primal force than nationalism. What you see is the connectedness of land to water over time, not different countries. The dreamers are alive and well.

Opening to choreography by Binet in Dreamers Ever Leave You, the flowing, continuously meandering music of Melnyk takes centre stage while cool shades of blue envelope pondering dancers. As if on a kinetic moon walk, their outstretched arms yearn toward something beyond themselves. Stark sets of smooth ice chunks slowly move across time and space, and dancers become individualistic silhouettes on symbolic Harris ice mountains. 

With porte de bras marked by hands inverted outward at the wrist, dancers enact and seek majestic heights in a reverence. Seldom in unison, individual dancers intertwine within space and with each other, pursuing inner heights of the Harris mountains. As the dramatic, soaring cadences of the music reflect both dancer and our collective knowledge of Harris, we follow a river flowing emotionally into turns of minor keys and peaks. 

Kudelka Freshens the Baroque with a Timeless Story

Image via https://www.instagram.com/nationalballet/

Second on the program was James Kudelka's The Four Seasons, set to Vivaldi's well known score of the same name. Kudelka's genius never lets you down, and there are few ballets as consistently satisfying as this resident choreographer's creations always are. With full integration of musicality, sets, costumes, lighting and movement, Kudelka is all about the staging. His dancers fill the stage in wonderfully balanced compositions that incorporate all artistic elements in equal measure.  A duality exists in the soloists' expressionism and corps de ballet's commentary that resembles a Greek chorus, each level telling their story simultaneously. Few other choreographers achieve such theatrical balance, and you can see it in Kudelka's "czarist" style Nutcracker too.

The Four Seasons' story is about aging, and in the Spring concerto the dancers are Venetian courtiers in taupe silk crossed with Alberta youths who could be freely riding around the prairies in a borrowed pickup truck. With hopeful expectation, their arms jut upright like waiters with no trays, and they tumble around on stage energetically in a hopefulness. In the Summer concerto, passionate love is strikingly choreographed in signature movements that fly by quickly; one reemerging motif has a woman commanding her lover in a sweeping downward arm movement that later reappears as she commands herself with that same move. It's like Kudelka captures the subconscious at times. 

Everything works in concert: the taupe-themed Baroque-inspired costume has now become a romantic sheer, and Monet-like sets have transformed from subtle green lilies to passionate reds and maple leaf oranges of November. The Autumn concerto brings a panicked kind of energy as dancers fly through the air doing grand jetés - and you cannot help but know what's ahead in this trajectory. In the Winter concerto the Venetian courtiers are back, the grand jetés are gone and no one is flying through the air anymore. One female dancer wears a hat like the Queen wears, and you almost expect to see her start waving. A formalized, ancient tiredness pervades everyone's movement and death takes centre stage.

Amphibian Humans

Image via https://www.instagram.com/nationalballet/

Humans are mammals, but in Crystal Pite's Emergence it's never been clearer that we strongly resemble amphibians in social ways. Pite is an Associate Choreographer of Nederlands Dans Theater, and as anyone who has seen that company can attest, her last minute decision in rehearsal to add dancers' whispering to the staging of her choreography here marks her style with a distinctly European trademark. 

Emergence constructs abstract modern choreography within balletic structures. When Pite's female dancers prance like grasshoppers across the stage en masse, they are "en pointe", and when her shirtless male dancers show their backs marked by identical spider tatoos crawling across their shoulders, they literally look like the shells of bugs crouching in collective impulse. In this ballet instinct not only rules, it reveals all - and groups are divided by the sexes like separate lines within wolf packs. 

In one scene a long line of women strung from upstage to downstage moves across the stage, hypnotically whispering uneven bars of  music to counts of 6 and 11. Individual males regularly "impregnate" females by ejecting a movement and then withdrawing. In what may be a subtle comment on sexual politics at one point, one of the males tries to run through the long line of women in attempted escape, only to be prevented from breaking through the female chain by their unassailable solidarity. 

This brilliantly visceral performance of Emergence was flawlessly executed by dancers of the National Ballet, while abstract cricket sounds in the score composed by Owen Belton droned in the music. 

As with any artist's oeuvre, Pite's beliefs can be seen in what she has created through subtlety and subtext. Although Emergence is abstract and its music primal and raw, the work nonetheless reassures you with an undercurrent of natural rules that prevent our self-destructiveness. 

In Pite's vision, everything will be OK. Her women protect the species with a bond stronger than anything else, and her men believe in each other and the life and society they've created. They may be figuring it out as they go, bug-like and collective, but it's correct as long as it remains instinctual.

Millennials we spoke to after the performance were blown away by Emergence. Well, droning music and abstract dance explorations have been part of the baby boomers' genres since before the 80's, so we were not surprised. Yet the superb performance of this amazing choreography by the highest quality classically-trained dancers from around the world, assembled by the National Ballet of Canada, definitely left us speechless. 

Read about Crystal Pite's 2020 work, Angel's Atlas.

Made in Canada is compelling in its display of the National Ballet's virtuosity and diversity. This program should be toured to schools and universities as a fundraising strategy to build a millennial donor base to replace the current senior one.

Stress Management Over 40

Revisit Your Own Idealism to Handle Work Stress

Revisiting idealism can help you survive the stresses of work life

What are the best ways to handle stress as a baby boomer still dealing with demanding clients, high-pressure days and daily operation in the thick of the rat race? When your kids are grown up, when bar-hopping after work with colleagues is too unhealthy an option, and when retirement is not in your plans any time in the foreseeable future, how do you unwind? The answer may be to revisit who you were at 15 or 20. The seeds of old dreams are still there, sitting in time capsules waiting to be opened and reclaimed. The difference now is that you can actually pursue them.

Dialing Down Stress Means Focusing on Positive Mechanisms

The "fight or flight" instinct that helped you respond so well to emergencies and perform so well at work for so long is actually on a timer. The stress response has an effect on our bodies in a way that can compromise health and well-being in a very big way. According to the American Psychological Association, "the long-term activation of your body's stress response impairs your immune system's ability to fight against disease and increases the risk of physical and mental health problems."

This means it's time to get creative about coming up with ways to transform stress into inspiration. This can involve doing many of the things that never quite fit into our super-practical way of life. It also means dedicating some time, effort and funds to exploring them. For some it's a year of travel, for others it's starting a second career that may not make much money but is fulfilling creatively, intellectually or in terms of its societal value. For still others, it's going back to school while still enjoying one's career. One of the best resources to explore the rekindling of your inner creative is Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book Women Who Run With the Wolves - Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (oh so 80s but still so useful).

Tactics to Handle Stress Better

Aside of aspiring to do things you've always wanted to do and cultivating your own wild creativity, here are some other constructive ways to handle stress:

• meditation - incorporating this into your daily routine can go a long way in managing stress
• exercise - an hour of exercise three or more times a week is recommended, even walking
• yoga - take a class or do it at home with the help of some online classes or guides
• dance classes - contrary to popular belief, you don't have to be a dancer to join a class
• community involvement - engage with anything you are interested in or care about
• diet - you can't go wrong with more fruits and vegetables
• go out - take in sports, culture, or anything outside yourself
• chemicals in food - avoid them wherever possible, even though it's pretty difficult
• pampering - treat yourself to hair appointments, manicures, massages, and spas 
• socialize - make a practice of drawing people you like closer to you

Walking in a Wildlife Sanctuary Across the Lake from a City

A Bird Sanctuary as Well as a Healthy Getaway for City Dwellers

Tommy Thompson Park offers a healthy alternative for wildlife and urbanites alike

Have you ever walked just outside a city's perimeter where the air is so fresh that you feel dizzy? At Leslie Spit/ Tommy Thompson Park on the waters of Lake Ontario, it is possible to completely escape the air pollution of 3-million strong Toronto just a short distance away. You are literally on the water looking into the city from across a lake. The fresh breeze that blows across the lake feels fresh and pollution-free.

Tommy Thompson Park is a former dump site that grew into a wildlife bird sanctuary on an isthmus in Toronto. It is entirely human-made.  As described in its history, "the natural processes that evolved during the long construction and planning of the site had shaped [the park] into a truly "accidental wilderness".   A map from toronto-wildlife.com shows where the park is situated in relation to the City of Toronto.

A map from toronto-wildlife.com shows where Leslie Spit/ Tommy Thompson Park is situated

Leave It For The Birds

Eventually it was decided to leave the park for the birds. Visits to the wildlife sanctuary are allowed during restricted hours.

If you walk the 2+ hours to the end of the Spit, you end up in what feels like the middle of Lake Ontario. Now a popular destination for bird watchers, cyclists and conservationists, the only sounds you can hear as you walk are the chirps and songs of numerous species of birds rarely seen elsewhere.

How to Handle Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)

The Effects of Sun Deprivation

Walking the sunlit trails in Earl Bales Park in Toronto is a good antidote to winter sun deprivation

After getting through the -25 C (-13 F) cold spell last week, conversation among a few of us who live in the world's northern hemisphere turned to SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder. The effects of sun deprivation in the long winter months can include:

• loss of energy
• decreased desire to socialize
• short-term memory loss
• fatigue
• depression

We don't always need to read an article to know that our energy levels are waning annually around mid February to early March. But Seasonal Affective Disorder is very real for people who experience prolonged depression every winter. Approximately 2-3% of Canadians experience the full effects of SAD, and 15% experience a milder form of it. It is estimated by NHS Choices that SAD affects about 2 million people in the UK, and more than 12 million people across Northern Europe. According to Psych Central, approximately half a million Americans are affected by SAD.

Sun deprivation is also associated with Vitamin D deficiency and declined serotonin levels. Hormonal Fitness explains that the sun is the main stimulus for serotonin production as well as critical for the production of Vitamin D. It describes further that "discoveries have been made recently about the effects of vitamin D and the consequences of deficiency - particularly in connection with immunity, osteoporosis, heart disease, and cancer. An article at lifestylelaboratory.com even suggests that "lack of sunlight probably kills many thousands more people in this country and others at similar latitudes than skin cancer."

How is SAD Treated?

Skiing in the middle of the city at Earl Bales Park ski hill in Toronto

Treatment for SAD usually includes medication or light therapy. But the Tech Times offers great solutions to dealing with Seasonal Affective Disorder and the winter blues that are more natural. Natural remedies that avoid prescriptions or the use of light boxes are:

• taking advantage of the natural light whenever and wherever possible
• getting regular exercise
• opening up the blinds during daylight hours
• going out for a walk during the day
• doing yoga
• embracing the snow and enjoying it

Enjoying Winter

One of the best perspectives on how we really enjoy winter in Canada is a great documentary entitled Life Below Zero.

But stepping out to your local city parks in winter can offer some very interesting surprises. On Family Day 2015 I discovered an uptown urban ski hill that is a mere 20-minute walk from our home. This facility rents ski equipment and has a canteen. It may not be challenging enough for the advanced skier and, while it's true that skiing down it only takes a minute or two, it's a great way to enjoy the city sun in winter months.

Anger and Social Change

Angry Film Characters in Winter Sleep and Corbo Profoundly Affect Those Closest to Them

Haluk Bilginer in the Turkish film 'Winter Sleep' and Tony Nardi in the Canadian film 'Corbo'

In two completely different films produced in different cultures about different political eras, a deep-seated anger spills over to affect and take root in central characters who dominate the story. These two films share the same root element of misplaced anger causing social change that goes wrong. The anger, pain and disappointment in the protagonists slowly move central characters into zones of irrationality, while their own repressed anger causes them to carry on unaware of the effect that they have on people around them. The two films were screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in January 2015.

In Winter Sleep, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and set in a small village in Cappadocia, a failed actor controls others through his education and amassed wealth as a landowner, oblivious to the debilitating poverty around him. He has a particularly suffocating effect on his young wife. In Corbo, directed by Mathieu Denis and set in Montreal, a repressive father who was formerly discriminated against in Canada as an Italian immigrant after Mussolini declared war, cannot understand why his 16-year old son is not appreciative of the wealth and stability he provides the family as a lawyer. (The son, the main character in Corbo, becomes involved in the underground pro-French independence movement and later a radical terrorist in the FLQ).

How Anger Can Cause Things To End Badly          

The people who affect those who move the story along in both films are angry. The films are about a lot of things other than anger, yet without the rigidity and lack of communication engendered by anger these stories would have been very different. The complacence of these characters plays a part in the suffering of others around them, and when enlarged to a view of a whole society, is the very same complacence that provokes the desire for social change. But enacting social change doesn't work very well when inherited, repressed anger from unrelated sources is fueling it.

In Winter Sleep, it is difficult not to surmise that the arrogance of the angry character played by Haluk Bilginer is a direct result of his earlier failure as an actor. One wonders when his openness to ideas and people stopped. He acknowledges that his wife no longer loves him but lacks the flexibility to understand why.

Similarly, the repressed father in Corbo, played by Tony Nardi, actually believes that his sons will absorb his learned Anglophone liberal middle class values without absorbing his anxiety about having suffered at its hand as an Italian immigrant during WWII.

The theme of painful suffering developing into powerful control of others runs as a subtext throughout both Corbo and Winter Sleep, two totally different films produced by different generations and countries. Whether reacting to the dominant English culture in Canada or the crushing poverty of rural Turkey, it is the people affected by repressed anti-heroes who express the truth - a young wife crushed by a self-hating husband, or a young son angry without knowing why. We find out there are no easy answers in their personal stories.

Both films are well worth watching. Corbo is about the search for French identity in Canada. Winter Sleep is about the class struggle in the steppes of the Central Anatolia region of Turkey.

How Our Own Wellness Involves the Wellness of Our World

How Greenpeace Helps Save Our Forests

Our personal wellness is inextricably linked with the wellness of our planet

Canada recently emerged as the world’s worst country for loss of intact forests, largely in the Boreal Forest. After putting it off for quite a while, I decided to join Greenpeace and do something to help change this. I wanted to help save our forests and raise awareness of what we need to do to help slow down climate change too. 

Many Canadians Feel the Same Way I Do About Urgent Environmental Concerns

At the end of November I took part in Greenpeace's Best Buy activity to stop the store's current purchasing arrangement from Resolute Forest Products, which sources its forest products from the Boreal Forest in an unsustainable way. Resolute Forest Products is a controversial Canadian pulp and paper company that has previously been exposed for logging in endangered forests and for repeatedly violating forestry regulations.

Our Greenpeace group talked to people on the street outside the Best Buy store at Yonge and Dundas streets in downtown Toronto. I found that all of the people I talked to were generally open-minded and supportive of saving the Boreal Forest through our activity. If so many Canadians feel strongly about this, why was Best Buy still buying over one hundred million pounds of paper annually from a company that sources almost exclusively from the Boreal?

How Best Buy Changed Its Policy

It turned out that Greenpeace's two week campaign mobilized over 52,000 supporters across North America. On December 9th the world’s largest electronics retailer, Best Buy, announced major improvements to its paper supply chain to better protect Canada’s Boreal Forest, one of the lungs of our planet and a vital buffer against climate change. For its paper purchases from Canada, Best Buy will shift business away from Resolute Forest Products and now require Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper from this supplier.

Affecting Change About Something Greater Than Ourselves

I believe that wellness of ourselves also involves the wellness of our world. The two are not really separate. There were also some unexpected personal benefits that my participation in Greenpeace's November campaign gave me:

• A sense of accomplishment in affecting change about something greater than ourselves
• The reward of really connecting with people on a busy downtown street and changing their minds about something important to all of us
• The warmth and responsiveness of my team members, who were much more encouraging and helpful than many people who cross my path on a daily basis
• A sense of having a voice that was being heard
• The knowledge that if we keep trying, we can stop the dangerous environmental spiral we are currently on

Who Defines Our Cultural Attitudes?

If older people stay engaged with mainstream society, experience will become a valued commodity

Making Life Experience Count

The large cities where we live are meccas of people from all over the world, yet our cultural attitude towards ageing is still dictated by a 1950s Madison Avenue advertising culture that slowly removed people over 40 from its depiction of relevant consumers. And that is still where we sit. According to our billboards, online or print ads, videos and articles, we are all perpetually somewhere between 21 and 38.

Taking Back Mass Media

The only way for people over 40 to see ourselves addressed by our own culture, is to take back the street. Keep working. Do not go and stare at a sunset somewhere - unless it's on a holiday. If you're in marketing, stay engaged in your brands and change the copy and the design to reflect your own demographic somewhere in the market, as you get older. Stay engaged at your clubs, restaurants and open spaces until you become a visible force. The more people over 40 are reflected in the mass media and included as a demographic in marketing, the more the elderly will slowly be looked upon as a group to respect. Since we are a consumer culture, each segment has to stay engaged with the marketplace just to earn a psychological place within it.

Countering Ageism

Whereas Native Canadian, Asian and many other cultures celebrate the wisdom and intelligence of their elders, in the dominant North American culture our underlying tendency is to consider non-earning members of our society as irrelevant to the marketplace - and therefore irrelevant to us. The upshot of this is that boomers control a huge portion of current spending whether they are currently earning or not. According to Mass Mutual Financial Group, senior women age 50 and older control a net worth of $19 trillion and own more that three-fourths of the nation's financial wealth. You would never know this by the representation of senior women in either our mass media or targeted messaging in our brand-oriented culture. Perhaps the brands currently serving the over-40 consumer group are quietly enjoying the financial rewards somewhere on a beach... and keeping the secret to themselves.

Massage Therapy is a Great Way to Stay Healthy and Manage Stress

Be Proactive About Wellness & Stress Management

As the autumn gets underway and work and family stresses build up again, massage therapy can go a long way toward maintaining your wellness and helping manage your stress levels. Whether you are in pain or just want to relax, regular massage therapy can help you achieve greater wellness.

Along with mindful meditation and yoga, massage therapy is an effective way to improve blood flow and breathing, give you an increased sense of well-being, and increase your range of motion. 

In Canada, a Great Place to Get a Massage is LifeMark Health

A couple of weeks ago I had a very restorative experience at a LifeMark clinic on Bathurst Street in Toronto, which is right near my neighbourhood. LifeMark has around 100 locations across the country that offer different health and wellness services. Their experts work holistically in the areas of physiotherapy, massage therapy, cancer rehabilitation, dizziness and imbalance, and more. 

I hadn't had a massage in 8 months. While it was no surprise that my sedentary job with my right hand on a mouse all day was the culprit in the severe tightness of my rotator cuff muscles, it felt fantastic to have them worked on. I was told that these muscles are overworking to keep me in balance while I'm manipulating a computer mouse for seven or eight hours a day. (Why can't hardware companies invent a replacement for the mouse so that we can work without causing harm to our bodies, especially as we age?...).

Improving Your Immune System With Massage

Many people don't know that a massage also strengthens your immune system. According to Holistic Medical Massage:

Your immune system is affected by your emotional state—whether you are elated, angry, fatigued, or stressed. Stress actually decreases natural defenses resulting in less efficient and slower healing, and a greater susceptibility to infection.

So how does massage help your immune system? Massage therapy boosts immune system by stimulating “natural killer cells” Since therapeutic massage decreases cortisol that destroys natural killer cells, your immune system gets a boost. An increase in white blood cells and natural killer-cell activity better prepares the body to fight off possible invading cells. Massage even boosts immunity in those people with severely compromised immune system, such as breast-cancer patients.

Taking Time Out For Yourself

Individuals who have health insurance coverage through their employment can be entitled to up to 6 registered massage therapy sessions annually, depending on their plan and the price of the services. The idea is that you don't wait until you're super tense and stressed out to go - instead, you go for a massage every couple of months for proactive health maintenance, incorporating it into your routine just like you go for a regular haircut, work out, walk regularly, and take time out of your routine just for yourself.

Check out these articles to find out more about how massage therapy can help you:

Benefits of Massage Therapy

Types of Massage

Massage and Anti-Aging

Climbing Dubrovnik Steps For Health

Climbing the Steps of Dubrovnik: an Adventure in Health

Looking at Dubrovnik's Old Town and the Adriatic Sea from Dubrovnik Steps

For any traveler, climbing steps in Europe is an adventure in health as much as a beautiful, historical wonder to experience. Just like doing a step class at the gym, step-climbing on real stairs or steps uses up many more calories than walking, is good for your heart, and is a quick way to get your legs into great shape.

An article by the Huffington Post describes how someone lost 96 pounds by climbing six flights of stairs a day, and the Times of India reports that in addition to maximizing your cardio efforts, climbing steps increases your core muscle strength, tones and sculps your body, and provides a good low-impact workout.

Walking Up the Dubrovnik Steps

Walking down the Dubrovnik Steps from Villa Klaic is beautiful!

The Dubrovnik steps to Villa Klaic, 15 minutes on foot (walking straight up the steps) from the Old Town on the Adriatic Sea  are a case in point. The first time I climbed them a month ago, it felt like a lot longer than 15 minutes. I was so out of breath once I got to the top that I could hardly breathe, but afterwards I felt fantastic! The second time I finished the climb I was slightly less out of breath, and the next day my legs really hurt. But when I looked around at all of the other 40+ women in Dubrovnik, I noticed that they all have toned thighs and are slender. Who wouldn't be, climbing those steps all your life?

More Breathtaking Scenes Walking Down the Dubrovnik Steps

Beautiful doors line the walls of the Dubrovnik Steps

Pondering the beauty of Dubrovnik while walking down the steps was truly breathtaking too. People's homes, gardens and terraces are all encased by thick 6-foot or 7-foot high stone walls. It is these walls that provide the entry point to the homes, and many homeowners took special pride in installing gorgeous doors.

Gardens inside the walls of the Dubrovnik Steps

Peering inside homeowners' open gates was a marvel. Fruits I had never seen grow on trees before were everywhere - lemons, oranges, olives, and something that I thought might be pomegranates...

Climbing Steps Wherever You Are

A view of Dubrovnik's Old Town from a different set of steps

It's easy to get sidetracked by the beauty you can see by looking across whatever scene you see when you arrive at the top of some steps wherever you happen to be. But the most important part is to just climb them.  Livestrong has come up with an interesting way to calculate how many calories are burned by climbing steps:

Divide the number of calories you burn per mile by the number of steps it takes you to walk a mile. The result is a unique-to-you conversion factor you can use to calculate how many calories you burn from the number of steps you take as you walk. For example, the calculation would look like this for a person who burns 99.75 calories per mile and walks a mile in 2,200 steps:

Conversion factor = 99.75 calories per mile / 2,200 steps per mile = 0.045 calories per step

Venetian Vivaldi's Inner Order

Finding Inner Order: Revisiting Vivaldi Concerto Op. 3 No. 8 

Summer is often a time of clearing out the old, going through attics, clearing cottage relics, selling off contents of family estates, or just clearing out one's mind to find something new again.

Mining teen dreams that were packed away can inspire new projects as a baby boomer now

One of the best summer strategies in cleansing out what's old and renewing your energies with new inspiration is to return to what you loved before you reached adulthood. There lay hidden, unmined and often unrealized passions and dreams. If you touch back on something you experienced as a teen that was not quite of this world, you can probably absorb it now and make it work positively in your life. Since Vivaldi invented ritornello form where the theme keeps returning to the main line, returning to his music now seemed very understandable.

How Rediscovering Music That Touched Us Before Can Be Rewarding

Vivaldi's Double Violin Concerto in A Minor is Light and Bright with Soaring Phrases

That is what happened with me and Vivaldi's Double Violin Concerto in A minor, Op. 3, No. 8 in the recording by David and Igor Oistrach. This recording informed several of my early teen years, rehearsing a ballet competition quartet at age 14, riding bikes and soaking blistered toes from pointe shoes, and watching our ballet choreographer translate Vivaldi's sustained phrasing into 8 outstretched arms reaching across the room horizontally in a perfectly-balanced continuum. How, as young dancers, we wove and intertwined like leaves with golden ribbons and bent torsos - then back to the continuum on which all things in life rest - not quite of this world. If wellness is about maximizing natural health within the framework that we've each got, what could be of more value to it than a perfect teen influence that had been folded into the recesses of the subconscious?

What Is It In Vivaldi That Is So Uplifting?

Embracing the Platonic classicism of baroque music enriched our ballet quartet then as much as it does now. What is it about Vivaldi that is so uplifting?

Well, Vivaldi was a priest and worked in theatre, for starters. He worked extensively with tonalities in all of the music he wrote for different instruments. According to James Leonard, Vivaldi transformed music of his time. "Preceded only by a set of Trio Sonatas in 1705 and a set of Violin Sonatas in 1709, Antonio Vivaldi's first published set of concertos, called "L'estro armonico," was the most influential and innovative collection of orchestral music of the first half of the eighteenth century. "L'estro armonico" (roughly, The Genius of Harmony) was published as his Op. 3 in Amsterdam in 1711 by Estienne Roger and quickly completely changed the form from the more weighty Roman model of  to the lighter Venetian model of Vivaldi."

There is something easy about building and sustaining wellness when Vivaldi speaks to the calm of self-knowledge. This recording of Vivaldi offers the clarity of an order that helps us to feel calmness and peace. Its soaring with perfectly balanced violin lines blending in harmony is not easily forgotten.

Eating From Your Own Garden Promotes Wellness

Home-Grown Peppers and Tomatoes Keep You Healthy

Eating food that you grow yourself promotes your health and well-being

One of the best ways to promote health is to eat fresh from your own garden. Eating your own garden produce not only keeps you well physically, it also grounds you and promotes emotional health. Whether you live in the country or the city, there is nothing quite like the smell of fresh tomatoes, peppers and chives ready to be picked. And one day when Google invents wearable noses that convey scents online, we will have the bonus of being able to share the special aromas of fresh chives, dill, tomatoes, basil and sage with each other.

Growing Your Urban Garden on a Condo Balcony

Waking up to the dawn of the city surrounded by lovely flowers is a good way to start the day

A balcony garden is a feat, a fight to survive against the car fumes wafting up from the urban thoroughfare below. The glorious petunias in various shades of pinks and purples welcome you each dawn, a separation from the waking city beyond. For optimal results, nurture your balcony garden with high-grade potting soil, water it when the sun is down, and if you have southern exposure water it more than once a day.

Starting an Indoor Garden in the Autumn

Adapting outdoor garden techniques to an indoor garden takes skill

 Every summer as we get into August, thoughts start again about how to preserve this unique beauty that is an urban balcony garden. Will it be possible to continue my flowers indoors? Will vegetables grow inside a home? Should I get something that resembles a small greenhouse? Will my cat be safe nibbling at the leaves, and will my produce be safe if my cat does what cats do?

According to Pikes Peak Area Garden Help, the best way to create an indoor garden is the following:

• choose plants that can live on little light
• choose plants that will survive dry conditions
• grow herbs such as sage, basil, marjoram, oregano, and thyme (in sunny areas)
• cut most plants regularly
• give plants ample drainage, lots of water, and lots of light
• vegetables need a minimum of 6 hours of sun each day to thrive
• tomatoes, peppers and eggplants can all grow in potting soil, which is lighter than garden soil or topsoil and won't become too compact
• lettuce can grow indoors all year round, from seed
• some house plants act as air purifiers, like English ivy or spider plants

We would love to hear about your field gardens, balcony gardens, urban gardens or deck gardens. Send us your pictures and we will share them on our next post!

Ageism in the Workplace

Over 45 and Struggling At Work? You're Not Alone

Ageism discrimination against mature workers exists within corporations, despite what we think

You can find anti-bullying, anti-smoking, anti-racist and anti-discrimination groups of all kinds online, but regardless of how hard you look you will find little information on age discrimination laws that are in effect across every province of Canada. According to a 2013 joint CARP-Ceridian study, “ageism discrimination against mature workers exists within the Canadian corporate culture, despite how far we like to think we have come.”

In the U.S. the Age Discrimination in Employment Act forbids employment discrimination against anyone at least 40 years of age, and in the EU a ban on age discrimination was introduced with varying consequences.

Age of the Worker Does Not Define Capability

There is no truth in the assumption that our flexibility, capability and knowledge is defined by our age. When I first studied Multimedia Computer Design Applications over age 35, I was concerned that my age would preclude my being able to achieve a successful career in multimedia, but I forged on anyway because I loved the creativity of the digital design field.

After working in digital design for six years in a medium sized city, I moved to a larger city and had to start at the bottom again. I had a design portfolio of decent print and web work that I showed to prospective employers, but initially I could only find work as an administrative assistant with some design responsibilities thrown in. People at the downtown consulting firm that first hired me made it clear that my boss had had an affair with my predecessor, and it was inferred in my hiring that they would be safer hiring someone my age.

Determined to refute any accusations that my worries about ageism appeared victim-like, I forged on with a positive attitude. However I did not experience much that was very different over the next decade even though I upgraded my digital design and marketing education and kept honing my skills. I studied web design and digital marketing management at both Ryerson University and the University of Toronto. After designing corporate engineering brochures that were promoted to all architects across town, I moved on to design the websites and brochures for an established window fashion firm, then a series of flash websites for a national property management firm, then handled all digital marketing for a reseller of barcode scanners, printers and industrial automation devices. I optimized hundreds of magazine articles for SEO for a publisher, project managed client interactive work, managed e-marketing campaigns in the corporate logowear industry, blogged, built social communities, managed organic and paid search campaigns for brands and sub-brands. In every normal sense, this would be called building one's career by performing good work and improving one's own expertise.

Ageism in the Workplace: A Builder of Personal Character?

By my late 40s I was a digital marketing manager with a strong digital design background, and I can definitely attest to the existence of ageism discrimination in the workplace, however subtle and difficult it is to either prove or change. Since everything has a positive side, ageism in the workplace has definitely been a builder of my personal character.

Most people my age do not change jobs or work on a contract basis, but I had established a solid marketing network and was convinced I could overcome the now-familiar biases. I was also a baby boomer operating in a field that I knew was created by and dominated by millennials, who I found refreshingly unconventional. But if age discrimination laws are in effect in Canada, why can't competent, experienced people over age 40 pursue careers of their choice in fields that they are passionate about and good at? There should be room for everyone to contribute in some meaningful capacity, and biases and prejudices should not rule.

It is clearly up to our corporate leaders to set the stage for people of any age to be able to pursue their careers in the corporate world and not experience ageism. Unfortunately, the field of digital marketing is one of the few fields of which corporate managers often declare their ignorance and then proceed to appear almost proud of the fact. There is no explanation for corporate management over age 45 who didn't grow up with "digital" showing such little intention of ever becoming acquainted with it. Digital marketing and digital media are, after all, primary tools used in the way the world works now and in the way their companies work. The result of ageing senior managers abdicating digital and glibly remaining in this comfort zone is that digital marketing is up for grabs or takeover by anyone, regardless of their knowledge or qualifications - as long as they are young. 

Ross Mayot, vice-president and general manager of CARP, a Toronto-based association that advocates for people age 45+, said “Mature professionals are often overlooked based on assumptions that they are too old to keep up with the times and may cost a company more in terms of benefits.” But those assumptions aren’t true, he said. “Employers need to realize that the age of the worker does not define capability, negate the willingness to learn or adapt, or automatically mean increased benefits costs,” he said.

For information on ageism discrimination against mature workers please see:

The Workplace Institute

Grey Matters

Top Employers for Canadians Over 40

CARP

Age-Discrimination Lawsuits
50 Is the New 65
Is Your Workplace Ageist?
Forced Out, Older Workers Are Fighting Back