a community united

I stumbled across this earlier in the week when I was catching up on the news and I think it is worth sharing.

The Canterbury region has been at the mercy of Mother Nature for nearly two years now and have suffered through countless earthquakes and aftershocks since the major quake of 4 September 2010.  But despite everything, a small group of people in a little town called Lyttelton have come together to create something enduring and positive for their community.  Cooperative businesses are not new but they think it’s the first of its kind in the grocery trade.

I’ve shopped in a few craft-type cooperative businesses and I have always been impressed and inspired by the creative products they have available to buy.  So I wish this new organic grocery business in Lyttelton every success.  Personally I think NZ$365 is great value for money and if something similar came to my local suburb, I would definitely want to be involved. But for now I must settle with supporting my local farmers market. It may not be a co-op but it gives me the ability to support small business owners.

six weeks to OMG

Yeah right. I read a review of this book so I thought I’d download it to my Kindle for my train-trip reading pleasure. Now I am fairly broad-minded but some of the things the author tells me to do are a little eyebrow raising.

I’m not even half way through the book and so far each morning I have to take a cold bath submerging myself for about 15 minutes, drink black coffee with no sweetener (real or artificial) and then exercise for between 30 to 60 minutes.  You would think by this time I could eat breakfast but no, the first meal of the day cannot happen until midday… are you kidding me? But it gets better – if I blow up balloons every day (standing up mind you!) my stomach will get flatter.

Apparently all these things send the right messages to one’s body and tells it burn stored energy (a.k.a. fat). Thank goodness I did not pay very much for this eBook! If it had been a paperback, I’d be lamenting my wasteful extravagance. But I suppose these books must hit a target market somewhere… but really – cold baths each morning?  I live for my hot shower after my early morning walk.

how places shrink

I was catching up on the news of some old school friends on Facebook and someone mentioned my first school. What you call them will depend on where you grew up – elementary school, primary school, grade school. Me? Well I went to a primary school and the older I get the smaller the school seems to become.

Once upon a (very long) time ago I thought my primary school was the biggest in town. Even today I can still remember thinking how big the school grounds were. Two massive expanses of lawn – the front grounds and the sports grounds behind the classrooms. But now, each time I drive or walk past it, they seem so much smaller than when I was young.

Perhaps it was because I was young and everything in the world seemed so big. Even my high school grounds seem smaller. Now I look at them and laugh at how foolish I was to think the teachers would never catch us smoking out the back paddock.