Lise's Ramblings

 Agnes clings to her adoptive dad Gru in "Despicable Me" (image cropped from movie by Universal Studios)  Someone enters a room and spots you at a distance. When your eyes meet, the other person lights up and bounds across the room to you. Now that's a great sensation. This week has shown me that the only way to improve on that is if the person is very young, measures less than two feet in height, staggers while barrelling across the room, shrieks and giggles uncontrollably, then wraps arms tightly around your knees.       AWESOME!

Ever since 1999, January 27 th has marked Family Literacy Day in Canada . Family literacy is meant to help bring children and adults together to develop and maintain language skills. Families have many options available to them; they can choose to read books aloud, sing songs, play board or online word games, write letters or cards, type text messages or emails, visit library programs, and take part in other formal or informal activities to support listening, comprehension and literacy.   During the past few weeks, I’ve seen my sister, brother-in-law and mom reading English and French stories to my 18-month-old niece. She counts along, mimics sounds, anticipates parts of her favourite books, bonds, wiggles, giggles, touches, etc. According to non-profit group Literacy BC, kiddos are likely to enter grade school “with several thousand hours of one-to-one pre-reading experience behind them” if they’ve been raised by literate families and caregivers.   So my niece

Health scares can take many forms and strike at different stages of life. Think of: children as they imagine mysterious ailments when a beloved adult's physical appearance changes; that teenage girl who pees on a stick and prays it doesn't turn blue; a couple eager to hear back about fertility tests; anxious parents who await their child's xray images; colleagues who queue up for access to an MRI; or friends and spouses who count down the days for biopsy results.  Most of us have seen loved ones struck by disease and experienced our own share of health scares, so everyone can appreciate how it feels to get news that confirms someone you care about is in the clear. The relief is beyond        AWESOME!!!

Earlier this week, as I sat idling in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I was pleasantly surprised to smell grilled steak. (I was rewarded twice over, because it also confirmed that my frost-bitten nose still functioned.) When in a car, you expect to smell exhaust, damp shoes, tar from construction projects and other nasty odours, so food scents are most welcome. On the Island, we get to smell hash browns and fries whenever we pass a Cavendish Farms plant. And if you've ever driven by a strawberry field in mid- to late-June, then you know exactly how inviting it is to have food scents blowing in through car vents.       AWESOME!!!

During the next three months, hundreds of thousands of Canucks will flee long, dark days and snowstorms to seek out sunshine and warmer locales. Aside from the weather, one of the best benefits of visiting the tropics has to be the fish. I don’t mean fish as an entrée, but rather as a fascinating diversion. Snorkelling and scuba diving open up the underwater world to us. I dare anyone to try to forget that first time spotting a school of hundreds or thousands of colourful fish switching direction in a synchronized and swift motion. It’s like swimming inside an episode of a nature documentary…            AWESOME!!!  I'm not anywhere warm, so these are tropical fish I spotted in the Mahogany Salon & Spa's aquarium.

Wet snow sticks to every surface. All is quiet. None of that squeaky, it’s-minus-freakin’-thirtysomething-degrees-Celsius nonsense. Your white carpeted surroundings carve out a silent zone to buffer you from the rest of the world. Yes, snow that muffles sounds is          AWE Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh OME. 

The only thing better than nieces wearing pyjamas ― the ones with feet... Flipper Slippers over top of said PJs.       Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhwesome!

Use one foot or both feet. Jump up or down. Jump in or on. It's exhilarating no matter how you approach a jump. My friend Marlena is a master jumper. The photos below are examples of Malena's many air shots as shown in her blog header. How could anyone look at these pictures and deny that jumping is fun?   Even if you're not up for leaps into the air, you can experience a similar rush by watching the joy in someone else's eyes as they jump around. This blur is my niece jumping during her Wiggles and Giggles class. How about: a baby in a jolly jumper or an exer-saucer?  a toddler who experiences the freedom of jumping on a trampoline? a child or an adult in one of those bouncing inflatable areas at a fair? anyone who jumps into a warm pool or a refreshing lake? Yes, the sheer variety of ways for jumping to be fun makes it evident that jumping ranks as       AWESOME!

I remember tearing up when a young woman sang “Oh Canada ” on Parliament Hill to kickstart the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation’s CIBC Run for the Cure back in 2002. Granted, that is a particularly emotional run. Cindy and Kelley at Friday's performance Sometimes the lyrics of a song can overwhelm you. Other times, the way someone sings a tune can open the floodgates. On Friday evening, I had the pleasure of experiencing the perfect storm…beautiful lyrics belted out by an incredibly talented songstress, PEI ’s Kelley Mooney. Opening for another PEI artist, Catherine MacLellan , at the Moncton Press Club, Kelley outshone the headliner. Not only did she perform a number of original pieces from her current album (Tomorrow) , she also sang her version of a classic Leonard Cohen tune. Now K.D. Lang, Jon Bon Jovi and many others have covered “Allelujah,” but Kelley takes it to a whole other level. She rewrote the lyrics to tell the Easter tale, and even Leonard Cohen has given

Primary colours contrasted against white backdrops. Now bring on the iguanas, bunnies, hummingbirds, lovebirds, hippos, owls, fish, ducks…all grooving to catchy beats. By consistently mixing memorable melodies with cute critters, across multiple channels, Telus has a recipe for advertising success. I’m not endorsing the phone carrier for its services, but there’s no denying that the company’s catchy ads are well integrated (e.g., corporate website, in-store contests, TV campaigns, print ads, billboards, Facebook and other media). Telus even has tie-ins to its activities for corporate social responsibility and community relations. Taking it a step further in mid-2011, the company embraced the power of social media to involve audiences in voting for what the next critter would be to grace the company’s future ads. Luna, the saw-whet owl garnered the most votes, so she starred in the late-fall and Christmas ads. For my niece Makayla and my friend Sarah Jane, both of them owl fans,

According to Google Analytics, my most viewed blog entries of 2011 were:  1 - Handlebar streamers   2 - Birthday traditions   3 - Creative invitations   4 - Aiming high  5 - Ironing boards with quiet mechanisms   6 - A Kodak moment   7 - Making a difference   8 - Peeking into the past   9 - Baby pudge 10 - Punctuation 11 - Free drinks Number five puzzles me. That ironing board entry was one of my least inspired pieces, but hey, who am I to say what will generate traffic to my blog. In addition to most of the ones in the Google list, here are 11 others, in no particular order, which I most enjoyed scribbling in 2011:   1 - Chancing upon another author  2 - Finding an old haunt relatively unchanged   3 - Easy-Bake ovens   4 - Honouring those who have served their country  5 - Initiation into a polar bear swim club   6 - When someone gives you an upgrade   7 - Spotting exotic wildlife in its natural habitat   8 - The OED   9 - Campfire ditties 10 - Protective mother

Scour the beach for just the right stone. One that's smooth and small enough to hold. Take up your toss stance and then skip, skip, skip, skip, sploosh. Living in a place where there is still open water in January, so that you can skip stones...        AWESOME!