It's started here....banging of pots and pans and cheers.

It's pretty cool and so important. It was pretty silent here and we really hesitated to start it but so glad it happened tonight. Yes, thank everyone who keeps this all going. So thankful.

Blast from the past...Dec 2006...John wears a party hat.

https://janicesextonart.blogspot.com/2006/12/party-hats.html

Blast from the past

http://janicesextonart.blogspot.com/2007/11/my-latest-painting_19.html

A bit of humour from "Bored Panda"

Can’t Explain To My Cats The Gravity Of What They’ve Done.

 Richard and Grace are fostering a very cute cat from Café at the moment....hope it doesn't do this:)

Bought 60 Doughnuts For The Office Today To Celebrate My 20th Birthday, Only To Be Told I Need To Self Isolate/ Work From Home For The Next Week.

Art Portfolio 2001

Just wondering if this will work. This is my very beginning artwork...drawing and using pencil crayons and felt pens. Perhaps I should go back to that since it doesn't make a mess!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jsexton/albums/1672891

From Linda's Blog

Linda has always had a great sense of humour and she's posting lots of funny things these days along with useful information about what's going on. It's really worth checking out every day. I loved the riff on Margaritaville today....of course, Coronaville.

https://lindaandcec.blogspot.com

From the blog of Susan K.

Susan has been painting up a storm lately and it's really been making my day to wake up to see another wonderful flower painting....wow!  I haven't quite got around to getting back to my art yet...still trying to figure out a way to paint without making such a mess...

Flashback

And I've decided to do a "flashback" of my blog for a while. I just chose this at random but is seems rather appropriate to the current time.

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2012

The Season of Miracles

I've been thinking a lot about two movements that have begun to gain momentum as 2012 winds down.  It would be a joyful irony if real progress was made on these issues at the exact time when the world was apparently supposed to end according to the Mayan calender.

"The Idle No More" and the brave actions of Chief Teresa Spence to address the disastrous state of Aboriginal health and living conditions on First Nations reserves.

Progress on gun control in the US.

These two issues seem almost to have no solution and yet I am reminded that those of us who grew us with the Cuban Missile Crisis,  imminent Nuclear Annihilation,  the Cold War,  and the Iron Curtain never felt that situation would change and yet the "Wall" came tumbling down.

It is the season of miracles.

Baking..from Fern...wonderful!

Hi Janice,
Funny you should mention bread making.  I recently baked these, bread and buns.  Also made brioche buns but no longer have the photo.  The aroma in the house lasts all day.

I just had to pass on Carol's blog today....so funny!

Great video, John, and love the music!

http://mountdunbar.blogspot.com/2020/03/amusing-ourselves-in-covid-times.html

Rethinking academic conferences

I thought this was an excellent article in The Tyee and along with saving the environment it means that a more diverse group of people can attend.

An excerpt from the article:

Geoffrey Rockwell, professor at the University of Alberta and director of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study, has since 2013 been helping conduct a yearly Around the World Conference on carbon reduction that is live-streamed globally and archived online.

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The original reason was the climate crisis. “Flying is one of the worst things you can do for the environment,” he told The Tyee. 

But he said he’s discovered another key benefit — online conferences can be more diverse and inclusive. 

“Every time I go to a conference in my field, it’s the same type of people,” he said. “It’s white men and women from first world universities that have budgets to send them.” 

He said the virtual nature of the Around the World Conference allows him to include bright minds from all corners of the globe. In some cases, the academics could not have afforded to travel or would have been denied visas.

https://thetyee.ca/News/2020/03/25/Virus-Rethink-Academic-Conferences/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=250320

Photos from Benjamin in Palm Springs

Well, no worries about social distancing....wow, that's pretty impressive walking!  I would be surprised if they closed all hiking trails but who knows? For the moment they remain open but social distancing is required. I think tennis courts are open but since everyone is self isolating, tennis is  no go at the moment.

From Benjamin; Photos from my days walk in The Cathedral Canyon. 13789 steps in 2.5 hrs.

So glad Adrian Raeside is doing cartoons for the TC again

Closures in our southern paradise...

Coachella Valley cities and Riverside County are clamping down on desert golf courses that have remained open despite restrictions inspired by COVID-19, or the coronavirus, as California draws to the end of the first week of Gov. Gavin Newson’s stay-at-home order.

“Riverside County has issued the closure of all golf courses, short-term rentals, hotels, motels and home shares as they are considered non-essential business,” said a newsletter from Cimarron Golf Resort in Cathedral City to members late Tuesday. “While we consider golf to be essential and a safe social distancing sport we must follow the guidance of our local government.”

Cimarron had been one of a dozen or so public golf courses that remained open in the desert in the last week despite Gov. Newson’s order last Thursday as well as local orders from desert cities. Katie Myers, general manager at Cimarron, had decided to stay open in the last week, but shut down her course Wednesday morning.

The Purple Room got creative and perhaps there are more entertainment venus doing this. Good on them!

Join Michael and Darci Daniels tonight at 7 pm for a Facebook live performance Swinging to the Tunes of the Rat Pack Era.  And to get the full Purple Room experience, call in your order and carry out in time for the show!
We now offer a Three Course Dinner for Two special from our menu below for just $49. Also, all bottles of wine are now 1/2 OFF!  
Call in your order starting at 4 PM and we’ll have it waiting curbside at the Purple Room!

Did our walk yesterday along 11th in West Point Grey

And came across this lovely Zen garden in a front yard...beautiful.

Richard sent this along. Obviously a joke but something he could have written.

Well, looks like they just might have been hoarding:)

It's very interesting times and I've tried not to buy more than I need but it is discouraging to see empty shelves of pasta, rice, spaghetti sauce, soup, and canned tomatoes at Save-On. Well, of course, TP and sanitizes aren't available anywhere. I decided to go to my local IGA yesterday and found pasta, spaghetti sauce, soup, and canned tomatoes. It was heartening not to see empty shelves of these products. Perhaps it's when you go is critical but who knows when that will be.

Diversions

My cousin, John, has made a couple of funny litle videos...I hope he keeps it up!

Can't be too careful when I head up to Stongs to shop for groceries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGS3C6jzkwE


Hi Janice,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDUp2SC2AvM

Just thought you might like to see how we're amusing ourselves on Mount Dunbar.


Linda posted Cec playing the piano. He just plays by ear. Something I could never do even with all those lessons I had. I think you have this knack or you don't.

https://onedrive.live.com/?cid=6A09C3527041CCCF&id=6A09C3527041CCCF%2133014&parId=6A09C3527041CCCF%21109&o=OneUp

My (part-time) Paris Life

I was in the library the day before they closed and picked this up as a "Staff Pick". The book may be quite interesting too but I decided to go on her blog and that is particulalry interesting at the moment as Paris and I guess all of France is in lockdown since March 17 so she's giving her experiences day by day.

Blog:
https://myparttimeparislife.com/2020/03/18/lockdown-in-paris-day-1/

Photos on her blog.

They can only go out for essentials and have to have a form filled out that they can present to authorities. She mentions that people really aren't generally hoarding since they have small fridges and are used to shopping daily and the French aren't very keen on processed food.

I'll probably follow her blog during this time and probably read the book as well. It seems like she hasn't been posting for a while since she's been working on a pet project called "Save the Paris Café".  It seems many cafés in Paris have closed along with other small businesses due to skyrocketing rents. It sounds like a familiar story to what's happening in Vancouver.

https://savethepariscafe.com

Itty Bitty Book Review: "Educated"

"Educated" by Tara Westover

This is quite an amazing memoir and you can hardly believe it's true but it's been pretty checked out. She was born in 1986 in Idado to parents who were extreme Mormon fundamentalists and survivalists and believing government, schools, doctors were all things to be avoided. She wasn't really even home schooled particularly but she managed to get a BA in history from Brigham Young University, a PhD in history from Trinity College Cambridge and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University.

But probably her biggest challenge was getting away from the negative influence of members of her family and to find her real self...to be "educated". She is still in contact with some of them. It's a complex story that you really have to read yourself. It doesn't fit into an "itty bitty book review"

She has talked to just about everyone who is anyone. Just a couple of links that are brief:

5 min talk with Ellen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is635n6RNR0

3 min talk with Bill Gates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Y6Udf_Nzo

This bit of humour from the Life on Gabriola FB page

I hesitated a bit to post this as making fun of people doesn'tt seem quite the right thing to do at this time but most of us have been "dazed and confused" as travellers at some point in our lives so we can relate to it. I've included some scenes of Gabriola...other people's although I do have lots of print photos although not of our honeymoon staying at my parents' place. Well, I guess since we were poor students we didn't think we could afford the film and processing. It was a bit of a luxury at the time.

THESE ARE ACTUAL COMPLAINTS RECEIVED BY "THOMAS COOK VACATIONS" FROM DISSATISFIED CUSTOMERS:

1. "On my holiday to Goa in India, I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food."

2. "They should not allow topless sunbathing on the beach. It was very distracting for my husband who just wanted to relax."

3. "We went on holiday to Spain and had a problem with the taxi drivers as they were all Spanish."

4. "We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our own swimsuits and towels. We assumed it would be included in the price."

5. "The beach was too sandy. We had to clean everything when we returned to our room."

There were some sandy beaches on Gabriola but mostly sandstone.

6. "We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as white but it was more yellow."

7. "It's lazy of the local shopkeepers in Puerto Vallartato close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during 'siesta' time -- this should be banned."

8. "No-one told us there would be fish in the water. The children were scared."

9. "Although the brochure said that there was a fully equipped kitchen, there was no egg-slicer in the drawers."

10. "I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local convenience store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."

11. "The roads were uneven and bumpy, so we could not read the local guide book during the bus ride to the resort. Because of this, we were unaware of many things that would have made our holiday more fun."

12. "It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England. It took the Americans only three hours to get home. This seems unfair."

13. "I compared the size of our one-bedroom suite to our friends' three-bedroom and ours was significantly smaller."

14. "The brochure stated: 'No hairdressers at the resort.' We're trainee hairdressers and we think they knew and made us wait longer for service."

15. "When we were in Spain, there were too many Spanish people there. The receptionist spoke Spanish, the food was Spanish. No one told us that there would be so many foreigners."

16. "We had to line up outside to catch the boat and there was no air-conditioning."

17. "It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel."

18. "I was bitten by a mosquito. The brochure did not mention mosquitoes."

19. "My fiancée and I requested twin-beds when we booked, but instead we were placed in a room with a king bed. We now hold you responsible and want to be re-reimbursed for the fact that I became pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked."

Some Vancouver bookstores are making deliveries...good on them!

 If you can’t get to the bookstore, the bookstore can come to you. That’s the reminder from some independent book sellers in Vancouver as concerns about COVID-19 ramp up and residents are increasingly staying home to protect their health and the health of others.

Chris Brayshaw, owner of Pulpfiction Books, which has outlets on Main Street, West Broadway and Commercial Drive, said his three stores will remain open for regular hours for the foreseeable future, but he took to social media this week to remind clients of services the store has provided for years. 

His staff have been, and will continue to, take orders by phone, via email and on social media through platforms such as Twitter. Orders are mailed at cost, but are free for ones over $50. Pulpfiction can also hand-deliver anywhere from Pemberton to Hope, a service that’s free for orders over $50.

“It’s kind of business as usual, but I thought it was probably a good idea to reiterate that because a lot of people seem to be off work or off school or are at home looking after kids, and [might be thinking], ‘Oh my god, it's hard. I'm trapped in my house, in my apartment, and I can't go out and pick stuff up,’” Brayshaw said.

Full article here:

https://www.vancouverisawesome.com/events-and-entertainment/coronavirus-vancouver-bookstores-delivery-2164192?fbclid=IwAR2jvvf3aYHBcuy6GYNsMC7X9LZwgWkfh7cSOJAWgbEFqHWqpxRqgce7jKo

Itty Bitty Book Review: "Where the Crawdads Sing"

"Where the Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

This was a Brock House Book Club pick for July but my Palm Springs bookclub was raving about it all last year so I thought I would read it since I was looking for a good book. It is quite wonderful and beautifully written. You really get the feel for the North Carolina swamps and all the wonderful wildlife that only the "Swamp Girl" knows so much about and can paint it too. She spent one day in school as she was "white trash" and laughed at but educated herself and published famous books on the wildlife there.  She ended up alone at a very young age and survived by her wits.

This is fiction but I'm now reading "Educated" by Tara Westover and this is a true story of a young woman who overcame many obstacles and accomplished many things. This was the Brock House book for March but Brock House has closed so we won't be meeting.

Good on these folks!

 A friend recently joked that FB was created to share cute cat videos and photos and there's a certain amount of truth in that but there are other ways to use FB and I'm quite interested in this group in Vancouver that began with a couple of friends wanting to help people.

It's called Covid 19 Coming Together (Vancouver)

The idea is to bring together people who need things and people who can help get them. It's almost gone viral in just a couple of days.

PLEASE SEE ANNOUNCEMENTS FOR HOW TO USE THIS GROUP AND COMMUNITY GUIDELINES AND EXPECTATIONS. COVID-19 is creating unprecedented interruptions to our day-to-day lives and poses a threat to many of our community members. We, as members of society, have a choice as to how we navigate our way forward. We can choose fear and division and toilet paper hoarding. OR we can choose to connect to share resources, support each other, show solidarity for healthcare workers and the vulnerable, build community, and amplify social movements fighting for critical access to healthcare, housing, and workers’ rights. We choose the latter. Practicing physical separation does not need to mean being isolated from each other. This is a group created by community members for all of us in the Greater Vancouver area to come together, connect, and support each other in this critical time. Let’s show up for each other in a big way, Vancouver!

This was posted Mar. 14:

Group update, call out for help, and reminder of group guidelines:

WOW! On behalf of the organizing team, we are blown away by the level of response to this group. We came together spontaneously yesterday after seeing the need to create a platform such as this, launched at 1am with no promo other than adding friends, and it has been snowballing ever since. YOU, the people of Vancouver and the surrounding area, have been keeping our hearts bursting ever since!

A couple of things the Admin team wanted to highlight:

1. We are accessible to folks who don't have Facebook! We encourage people to post on behalf on others, and also offer ourselves to post for Seniors and others who don't have Facebook. Please get the word out to just email us at covid19comingtogether@gmail.com

We recognize that this is still not accessible to people who don't have regular internet access, and are expanding our capacity to do more safe outreach.

If you're looking for something to do...

This looks like a pretty amazing resource...openculture.com

Use your time in isolation to learn everything you've always wanted to.

http://www.openculture.com/2020/03/use-your-time-in-isolation-to-learn-everything-youve-always-wanted-to.html?fbclid=IwAR3wEpxi2sjdLhA3X6GuUuA3vBrex5WOw6k_xiV1jVwV5us6zK2pEqSCCsI

Yes....very true. We have a lot in our own backyard in B.C.

Cartoon by Adrian Raeside

A walk on Spanish Banks yesterday

A bit chilly but wonderfully sunny and so much snow on the mountains. These photos don't show it as much but we got a wonderful view of the mountains and snow on our drive down.

I don't think Jim and I need to panic buy this item...got this covered.

Update

Jim just received this notice from one of the people organizing the conference at the University of Toulon.

"Following President Macron's directives, the university has informed us this afternoon that we will not be able to hold the Huxley Symposium here in April."

Well, not surprising after listening to Macron yesterday. On the positive side, Jim has enjoyed working on his keynote and found lots of new stuff. It will be published in the Aldous Huxley Annual. That won't be published until next year so he has lots of time to even add more new stuff he keeps finding....

I'm really glad we decided many months ago to leave our memories of France as they were and not try to do a last farewell trip.

And I'm glad to be in Canada and not Palm Springs at the moment. They had an incredible rainstorm yesterday. Worse than St. Valentine's Day last year. More rain fell since the previous record in 1908. Nicki mentioned that so many things have shut down including the social activities at the place where they're staying and weather not looking that great for the next while. Now, this is really unusual for Palm Springs in March.

Benjamin's photo. At one point on FB, he posted "Our homes are going to wash down the hill!)

Lot's of roads closed due to flooding. I wonder what the final damage will be. They haven't fixed everything from the St. Valentine's Day storm last year.

Doesn't look like the Huxley Symposium at the Universisty of Toulon will be going ahead

Yesterday evening we listened to some of Macron's (President of France) speech in French and then picked up this in English. And our local B.C. top doctor, Bonnie Henry, is advising against all non-essential travel to Europe and the United States. If you do travel,  a 14 day self quarantine is advised on return.

"French president, Emmanuel Macron, announced in a televised speech on Thursday the shutdown of schools, universities and colleges across the country starting on March 16 for an undetermined amount of time.

Macron also called coronavirus the “biggest health crisis that France has known in a century.” While Macron did not use the word “quarantine” in his speech, he also asked that individuals limit traveling and to work from home as much as possible. Those over 70 were also advised to stay home.

The president said, however, that the municipal elections set for this weekend should be maintained and did not address the current ban on gatherings for more than 1,000 people, which is valid until April 15. It seems likely, particularly in light of the school shutdown, that the ban will tighten up and extend beyond mid-April."

A bit windy yesterday but lovely sun and sunset yesterday

Viwed from our recliners in our little nook, of course.

What's to say in this crazy old world...

Well, some cancellations of major speakers in the Huxley Symposium in France in April. I think it proabably will be cancelled by the University of Toulon or the government of France. It's pretty scary  having borders closing down when you can't get in or out.

"When Will There Be Good News"...a  great novel by Kate Atkinson and maybe there will be some good news in the world  soon...who knows?

Still, wonderful memories of the south of France and they will never be taken away.

Palm Springs is affected...

Riverside County has declared a state of emergency....the county of Palm Springs.

Palm Springs cancelled the huge BNP Paribas Tennis Tournament and even the Rancho Mirage Library is now closed for two weeks. All related to concerns over the virus.

"BNP Paribas Open to be cancelled for 2020. INDIAN WELLS, CA, USA -- Due to health concerns, the 2020 BNP Paribas Open will not take place. The tournament announced on Sunday on social media that the year's first Premier Mandatory event will be cancelled after a coronavirus (COVID-19) case was detected locally."

This seems to be some positive  local news:

UBC researchers get federal funding to help with global COVID-19 response

Yue Qian could only look on, feeling helpless, as COVID-19 ravaged her home city of Wuhan—the epicentre of an outbreak that has killed more than 3,000 people and infected more than 90,000 globally.

“When the quarantine was first issued, I was so worried,” says Qian, an assistant professor in the UBC department of sociology. “I was desperately trying to connect with my family in Wuhan to make sure they were OK. Watching from afar has been really hard.”

Today, Qian was announced as one of the UBC researchers—along with Dr. Richard Lester, Dr. Srinivas Murthy, Natalie Prystajecky and Dr. Mel Krajden—who are the principal investigators of teams collectively receiving more than $2.8 million in grants from the federal government to study COVID-19. The funding is focused on accelerating the development, testing, and implementation of measures to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak.

UBC sociologist Yue Qian, who is originally from Wuhan, is studying the human experiences and mental health consequences of quarantine. Credit: Paul Joseph/University of British Columbia

What a great idea for a garden

I'm not sure where you'd get old bricks these days but love the thought of these in a garden. There were lots of old bricks on Gabriola Island from the "old brickyard".  Our fireplace and our patio there was made of "reject' bricks. Now, that was recycling. Almost everyone on the island got these rejects and did similar things.

Itty Bitty Book Review: "The Temptation of Forgiveness" by Donna Leon

Donna Leon mysteries are always great for escape and bringing back memories of Venice. I think almost everyone who visits Venice needs to come home and read a novel taking place there just to recapture that amazing experience.  This is the one someone suggested to me...not a great book but fulfilled its purpose.

Poor old Venice with the high tides and floods last year and now the Coronavirus. I might haveto escape with another Donna Leon.

"Venice in the time of coronavirus, though, is a shell of itself, with empty piazzas, shuttered basilicas and gondoliers idling their days away."

internet Archive...talk about free library cards and you don't have to go to NYC....

Jim has been using this a lot in his current research. What an amazing resource for everyone, not just academics. You take out the book or whatever for two weeks just like a library and you can't download them (except for books publishied before 1923).  But Jim has found his scanning software on his phone and iPad can capture an image and then put it into PDF. That's been really useful for him.

About the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.

We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 20+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 625+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages.

As our web archive grew, so did our commitment to providing digital versions of other published works. Today our archive contains: 

• 330 billion web pages
• 20 million books and texts
• 4.5 million audio recordings (including 180,000 live concerts)
• 4 million videos (including 1.6 million Television News programs)
• 3 million images
• 200,000 software programs

Anyone with a free account can upload media to the Internet Archive. We work with thousands of partners globally to save copies of their work into special collections. 

Because we are a library, we pay special attention to books. Not everyone has access to a public or academic library with a good collection, so to provide universal access we need to provide digital versions of books. We began a program to digitize books in 2005 and today we scan 1,000 books per day in 28 locations around the world. Books published prior to 1923 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through our Open Library site. Some of our digitized books are only available to the print disabled.

Like the Internet, television is also an ephemeral medium. We began archiving television programs in late 2000, and our first public TV project was an archive of TV news surrounding the events of September 11, 2001. In 2009 we began to make selected U.S. television news broadcasts searchable by captions in our TV News Archive. This service allows researchers and the public to use television as a citable and sharable reference.

And lots more.