Grand Boulevard Residents Association

Hi Neighbour,

Do you know about the Halloween event that the City of North Vancouver (CNV) is planning to have on October 30th? The Community and Partner Engagement Department chose Grand Boulevard as the venue for a first-time Halloween event called The Great Grand Boulevard Pumpkin Walk. It’s happening from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 30th.

As mentioned, it’s the first time that CNV has had a Pumpkin Walk. It’s going to take place between 13th and 15th Street along the central path of the Boulevard. The Sutherland Family of Schools, which includes Sutherland Secondary and Queensbury, Brooksbank and Ridgeway Elementary Schools, and Grand Boulevard Residents Association (GBRA), among others, were given some pumpkins to carve. So, if you want one, contact admin@gbrra.org and ask for a free pumpkin to be carved next Thursday or Friday and delivered to Grand Blvd between 12:00 and 3:00 p.m. on Saturday. The City staff will put a battery powered tea light inside it, and you can place your jack-o’-lantern beside the central path. At 7:00, you can take your pumpkin home with you.

There are quite a few partners in this event, including Continue reading →

Third Quarter – Done!

Well done, I say! It’s fun to think that we’ve managed to keep TGIF on the Boulevard going for three quarters of a year. Who could have predicted this? It began as an experiment last December, and now it’s looking pretty good. Not to mention how much I, personally, have learned.

Looking at the blog posts over the last 9 months, they’ve covered quite a few topics:

• Grand Boulevard today, during COVID-19 and some of its history,
• North Shore items, including Grouse Mountain’s grizzlies, our forests, trees and rock balancing,
• Home improvements, gardening, lifestyle, family and foods,
• Book reviews:
  • Atomic Habits by James Clear
  • Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens
  • Anxious People by Fredrik Backman and
  • The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B.MacKinnon,
• and a few odd topics, such as Continue reading →

Hi Neighbour,

Are you feeling the cold creeping into your days—and bones—with the clear message that our September Indian summer is over? Well, I have felt it for a few weeks. But I didn’t want to believe it. Hope springs eternal, but the rain dampened my hopes and brought an unwelcomed chill.

To add to my difficulty, every year, as part of my way of trimming my household expenses and reducing my use of natural gas and electricity, I turn off my furnace from May 1st until October 1st. And when October 1st arrives, I try to go a few days longer before turning my furnace back on. I put on a sweater when I’m inside, add a blanket to my bed and learn to adapt to the temperature change. I believe it’s healthy for our bodies to adjust to seasonal changes, rather than being coddled by ideal regulated temperatures in our homes all year round.

So I’ve managed to delay turning on the furnace, for a week so far. The funny thing is that it has kind of forced me to Continue reading →

MY APPLE, Part 2

After I wrote My Apple, Part 1, I finished reading the book “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson, which was published in 2011 and printed again, with an added epilogue, in 2013. In case you don’t know who Steve Jobs is, he was the co-founder of Apple Inc. He died, in 2011, at the age of 56, of cancer. I was feeling very sad, as I read the book, learning about his life, and the development of electronics, because I didn’t wake up to the ‘latest and greatest’ in technology until the late 1990s. I had been too busy with my family and my career. But I was ready for an Apple laptop, when the kids were grown and when Jean-François introduced me to the PowerBook G4 in 2005.

At Christmas, 2006, I was expanding my horizons and bought Continue reading →

My Apple, Part 1

I’m happy to say that I’m an Apple person. Most of you, readers, would immediately understand that that doesn’t mean that I really like apples. Just seeing the capital ‘A’ explains that I’m not talking about the fruit. My life took a turn for the better when I bought my first Apple laptop computer.

When my kids had finished school, I said that the first computer I’d buy for myself would be a laptop. I really didn’t need one at home, because I had access to a desktop computer at school and in the public library. I wanted something compact and easy to bring with me on my travels. In the late 1990s, my daughter was planning a trip to Asia, starting in Thailand, and she told me, in no uncertain terms, that I wouldn’t hear from her unless I Continue reading →

August Shutdown

If you’ve been watching, you might have noticed that I didn’t post any articles in the last month. Well, our illustrious photographer and IT person, went on a trip to Germany, so we took a break. Not a bad idea, since we had a few weather and climate issues and the beginning of a short, 36-day federal election campaign. I’m healthy and happy, after the August shutdown (not a lockdown).

This week, our school kids got to go back to a physical classroom. What a relief! Even if it means that the kids in Grades 4 and up, and their teachers and the school staff, need to wear masks in most classes. That brings me to a question: why are people thinking that young school children need to be Continue reading →

PARENT TALK

Lately, I have been thinking about the expressions that my parents brought to Canada from the UK and Ireland and the new ones we kids often heard growing up in Canada. Admittedly, two of us started Grade 1 in Canada, so we were VERY Canadian. But certain expressions stick in my mind, not to mention those said by my father in his strong Irish accent. The word ‘toilet’ sounded like ‘tie-let’; the word ‘duty’ was ‘juty’; and ‘idiot’ was ‘eejit’, with the accent on the first syllable. I remember the word ‘halfwit’ (= a stupid person) being thrown around, but I’m not sure if we, kids, brought it home from school or if it came from our parents.

My mother often said: “Jesus, Mary, Joseph!” in frustration, but other Irish adults said “Janey Mac”, a euphemism for Continue reading →