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My healthy brain

Posted on September 29, 2015

A few years ago, I was a volunteer for a study at the Baycrest Health Centre in Toronto of the impact of hypertension and diabetes on seniors’ brain health. Three hundred people were studied. This is how I imagine my brain – all brightly coloured and sparkling with neon ideas. Luckily for me, I was part of the Healthy Control Group. I’m bragging today! I have scientific proof that my brain is in good condition. The study was a collaboration between several funders who subsequently developed an online test you can take to assess brain health. Here is the blurb: The test is marketed by Cogniciti Inc., a for-profit brain health solutions company co-founded by Baycrest and MaRS Discovery District. The development of Cogniciti…

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Categories: Modern life

Autumn bounty

Posted on September 24, 2015

Where is the time going? It’s hard to believe that Thanksgiving is around the corner.Gobble-gobble. The weather is fabulous – warm (no, hot) days and cool nights. I ventured out to ‘The Tree’ and picked my first bag of apples for the season. After lunch, I sat on the deck washing, slicing and piling them into the crock pot to simmer down into apple sauce. The fruits are crisp and sweet-smelling, and after cutting up the first couple of dozen, perfumed juice runs down my wrists. In the dark of winter, when the winds are howling outside, we’ll crack open a bottle of golden, cinnamon-scented applesauce, ladle it on our potato pancakes or pork chops and remember today’s blue skies and skin-puckering sunshine. As…

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Categories: Modern life

TED Talk: Compassion, Empathy, Altruism and Happiness

Posted on September 14, 2015

“In 1972, Matthieu Ricard had a promising career in biochemistry, trying to figure out the secrets of E. coli bacteria. A chance encounter with Buddhism led to an about turn, and Ricard has spent the past 40+ years living in the Himalayas, studying mindfulness and happiness.” The talk touches on leaving the modern world to seek wisdom, peace and mindfulness. We have a relationship with the world but it takes work and time and focused attention to find happiness. He also speaks about ‘altruism’ – an especially important concept these days, when politicians tussle about making ‘commitments’ to people fleeing catastrophe but then don’t actually put the mechanism in place to get them out of their desperate plight. But it’s not everyone who can get through the eye…

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Categories: Did you know

A gift for a Queen

Posted on September 10, 2015

I’m continuing my slog through the piles of paper that I packed after my mother’s funeral in July 1998. Today, I found a letter dated 3 July 1939 to my mother from an official from the Governor-General’s office. She’d sent it the week before to the Prime Minister of the day. William Lyon Mackenzie King – Canada’s 10th Prime Minister, is remembered as a secretive, cold and excessively ‘spiritual’ man who employed mediums so he could keep in touch with his dead mother, appears to have annoyed a lot of important people, including the Allies during the war years. John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, was our 15th Governor General. Like my mother, he was enthusiastic about literacy, he was a writer and a proponent…

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Categories: Remembrances

Treasures and Memories

Posted on September 8, 2015

I finally got around to cleaning out the scarred green trunk of memorabilia we moved from my Mom’s house in Calgary after she died. Although she passed away on July 4th, 1998, the grief is still raw. Until recently, touching things that were hers was actually painful – my head would get fuzzy and my eyes would fill with tears – so I just didn’t. It was time, though, so I loaded a historical romance onto my iPod, turned on my Bluetooth speakers and drowned out the sorrow with stories of lords and ladies from another time (my, but they were a horny bunch) where there is always a happy ending (in both senses of the phrase). In a wrinkled brown envelope, I found…

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Categories: Modern life, Remembrances