Grand Boulevard Residents Association

IN PRAISE OF WALKING, by Shane O’Mara (2019)

I have to admit, it isn’t often that I get validation from a scientist to indicate that I’m on the right track to live a long and healthy life (if I don’t get hit by a bus, first! Ha-ha!). As a child, in the primary grades, I was too busy to sit still. I can remember kids being told to “sit on your hands” (in order to pay better attention). That was a struggle. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I couldn’t think unless my body was moving. Nowadays teachers realize that small children need to move to learn. So Shane O’Mara’s message hits home.

As a neuroscientist, Shane goes into great detail about the positive effects of walking, on our brain health, through the spinal cord, and on our lung and heart health. He goes to the cellular level in the hippocampal formation of the brain, which is responsible for memory and cognition. For example, neurogenesis—the growth of the network of tiny blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients to brain cells—happens in the hippocampal formation, when actively-working muscles (arms, diaphragm, abdomen, neck and legs) produce a certain molecule which is Continue reading →

Hi Neighbour,

I’ve been thinking. Why do I favour non-fiction books? Curiosity about the real world? For sure, I admire writers who take on a BIG question and investigate the topic until they’re satisfied that they’ve exhausted all the angles to find the answer. In the past fifteen months, I’ve read and written a blog about eight non-fictions and I’m working on my ninth:

• James Clear’s Atomic Habits (2018),
• J.B.MacKinnon’s The Day the World Stops Shopping (2021),
• Travis Ruskus’s The Rock Balancer’s Guide (2019),
• Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs (2011),
• Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep (2017),
• Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity (2016),
• Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937), and
• Lisa Genova’s Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting (2021).

Actually, I’ve also written about Paul Hawken’s DRAWDOWN: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming (2017), but it’s like an encyclopaedia, a reference book that you pick up now and again to learn about another way to increase your Continue reading →

Hi Neighbour,

I can’t believe how much reading I have done during my relatively quiet pandemic time. I am now reading In Praise of Walking, by Shane O’Mara (2019). More than a year ago, I couldn’t find it at any local library, so I put a hold on it, at the downtown Central Branch of the Vancouver Public Library. For more than a year, I waited for them to tell me that the book was ready for pick-up. I didn’t see any other holds on it, and my hold on it wasn’t deleted, nor was I given any reason for the delay, but no book appeared. I don’t know what the problem was, but I think it might have been ‘lost’, and maybe the library had to order another copy and, with all the pandemic issues, it could have been difficult to get. I dunno.

Then a few weeks ago, I got an email notice telling me that Continue reading →

Memories of a Candystriper

As a teenager, I really enjoyed my weekly candy striping in Evergreen House at Lions Gate Hospital. Basically, it involved just hanging around with the seniors who lived there and received end of life care. I got to know and love each of them individually. My “responsibilities” occasionally involved feeding someone, but usually I just talked with them, sat with them, and sometimes sang a song.

One lady I remember was extremely cantankerous and her main activity consisted of scanning the yellow pages and phone books to find the number of someone she was going to call to rent a house and get out of this place she hated so much. She couldn’t eat by herself so I had to try to get the food in her mouth while she kept pushing back at me and reaching for the phone book. Sometimes, I would sit there and leaf through the pages with her. Her plight really touched me. Continue reading →

COUPONS AND REBATES

Hi neighbours,

I’m wondering if any of you have the same experiences as I have had with coupons. When I was a young parent, when Internet and smart phones weren’t used to compare prices, I collected coupons from publications, like magazines and store flyers. I didn’t understand the marketing ploy at all. I only bought what I felt my family needed, and cut costs where I could. Some women even filed their coupons in a wallet of sorts, all the while watching the expiry dates. It was quite a procedure.

Fast forward to products being advertised on websites, and coupons disappearing from printed publications. Businesses started to offer savings if potential customers downloaded an application onto their phones or other devices. Then coupons could be sent directly to the customer’s Inbox. Of course, today we can still pick up printed flyers at Continue reading →

RENAISSANCE ART

On Friday, February 11, SFU’s Liberal Arts and 55+ Program presented a free lecture by Efrat El Hanany called Splendours of Florentine Renaissance Art. I have never been to Italy, so it was fascinating for me to see the marble sculptures from 14th- and 15th- century Florence.

At the beginning of the 90-minute lecture, Efrat focused on one famous building, the Florence Baptistery, also named for St. John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence. It was built between 1059 and 1128, of marble. It’s hard to imagine anything taking 69 years to be built. Equally shocking, is that it still stands today, almost 900 years later. Apparently, the Medici family and other important Renaissance people of the 14th/15th century Florence, were baptized there.

At first we learned about the sculptors of Continue reading →

REMEMBER: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting (2021)

Lisa Genova has written a book that isn’t too scientific, for the layperson. She approaches the subject of remembering and forgetting, by first explaining how we make memories, sprinkled with examples of memory lapses or senior moments. I laughed when I read and could identify with some of them. There are a few different parts of the brain that are involved in creating and saving memories.

In case it’s been a few decades since you went to school, maybe one of your kids brought home the knowledge of the parts of the brain and their jobs: the hippocampus collects the perceptions, the language and the Who What When Where Why (W5) and How of an event; the prefrontal cortex keeps what you see and hear, plus emotions and language, for less than 30 seconds, making sense of it (pun intended), before passing it to the Continue reading →

BOOKLOVERS

What’s your relationship with books, since the arrival of personal computers? If you’re like me, that paradigm shift involved a lot of catch-up… and frustration, trying to troubleshoot inexplicable problems. And the trend isn’t going away anytime soon.

Well, if you would like to revive your love of sitting down with a physical book, I have a suggestion of a great place to explore for old favourite books. And the price is right, at maybe 20% or less of the cost of a new book, not to mention the additional cost of delivery of your new purchase.

On the North Shore, there’s currently only one used-books store. A decade ago there were ony two, but only one has forged Continue reading →

Part 2 of a special memory.

Do you know what carpenter ants are? No? Neither did I, when we bought our first house. But I soon learned that they can destroyed a house, in about 15 years. When we had our house raised, we were told that it would be the perfect time to inspect the foundation and beams for signs of carpenter ants These are very large ants—up to 1.5 cm—that usually build their nests in moist wood, but also in dry wood. You can sometimes see signs of their work, as they push out the excavated sawdust. Unlike termites that eat wood, carpenter ants are meat eaters, preying on other insects. They need to leave their nest to search for food in the garden. The honeydew produced by aphids is a favourite food.

Well, what better time to inspect our house than when it was Continue reading →

Hi Neighbour,

This week, I’m in the mood for a brief personal memory. In this case, it’s fun to relive a moment in my family’s history, from the POV of a young mother. At that time, I probably knew more details than I can recall at this time, but it still amazes how it all happened.

When we bought our first home, it was very old and had been a rental property for quite a few years. We knew nothing about the neighbourhoods of North Van, and were a very busy young family. My first-born was not yet in Kindergarten. With the help of my retired father, a widower, who researched things from his home in Vancouver, we found a house in the Grand Boulevard area. It’s wonderful to look at the black and white photos taken at the time of our BIG LEAP into home ownership, home insurance, mortgage payments, city and school taxes and utility charges… We didn’t know WHAT we were getting into! So we trusted the system to be fair and welcomed Continue reading →