Pool of Shame

So the other day I finally decided to get some exercise. Think mortality. Consider the shape-shifting of menopause. Suspect the hump beginning to form on the back of my neck from trying to figure out how Twitter works at a desk set-up that's ergonomically criminal. Desperation does funny things to a gal.

For me, preparing to get into a pool requires just a little less prep than a Rolling Stones concert.  It requires shaving every part of my body that might not be covered by fabric, and that, in polite company, shouldn't actually have hair and let's face it, always does.

It requires rummaging through, finding, and then holding up by two fingers with a pained look of confusion on my face, the bathing suit that's been in the bottom of my dresser wondering what in God's name made me think that THAT bathing suit made sense. Ever. It makes even less sense now. It's damn near fluorescent. Perfect for Halloween actually and when I'm in it, rather pumpkin-shaped.

I work part-time at an employment centre in a town of 10,000 people. The only thing worse to do for money in a small town (if you prefer anonymity like I do) would be to be a shrink. I've realized that I really MUST get over being seen by every single person who has ever passed through our office looking for work or I can just hole up, order in, duck and cover. I've tried that. It's hellishly boring. Being seen in a bathing suit is the ultimate "get over it" test. Well, next to being naked.

I get to the Rainbow Road Pool.   I peer inside. Nobody I know is there. Thank you mother of Mary. Well, nobody except the former Olympic swim coach whom I met earlier yesterday who needs to talk to me about something. Is there no mercy? Not now!!!

When it's time for the class to start, I put on one of those foam belts that helps you float (or not drown) since it's a deep water class.  It helps me float so well I feel like I might just begin to levitate over the water the way the good year blimp floats over major sporting event. Note to self: Might not need the flotation device. How about a body fat test instead?

Apparently, my flotation device also doubles as a homing device that works better than a cruise missile. It's target, however, is any body bobbing next to mine. I'm like a big pale white rubber duckie bobbing and teetering and uncontrollably bouncing towards any other wet body near me. Trying not to collide with another means my legs must kick so hard under the water, I begin to picture one of those  old fashioned egg beaters making cupcake icing.

If that isn't bad enough, when I turn my attention to the rest of the class, I'm even a little more horrified.
I'm not sure what it is about these classes but regardless of where you are in the Western Hemisphere or what the instructor on the deck of the pool is doing, it has little resemblence whatsoever to what is happening in the pool. She's got one of those microphones that's attached to a plastic head band and I think, if you're air traffic control, we're in trouble. Remember that Kelly dearest? Kerrisdale. Circa 1996. Aquafit laugh-a-thon.

These women take their aquafit exercising seriously. Well, some of them. The others act as if they're not even in a class or in a bathing suit or in a pool. They're in a coffee shop. They're catching up on their children's  teenage dramas, other people's pet traumas and the obituaries in last week's Gulf Islands' Driftwood. We're not in Tim Hortons Ladies. Hellloooooo! That comes later. Except, there isn't a single franchise of anything here and we do indeed love it like that. (Actually that's a lie, I didn't know that Canadian Tire owned Marks WorkWearhouse).

And, that was that. I did it. I've done it twice now. And I'm gonna do it again. Anyone care to join me?

I'm too busy for my Success

 Cowboys are busy too.

In the last two weeks I had some work that involved talking to five small businesses in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland to write about a specific aspect of their businesses. You can find out a lot about a business by talking to the person in charge of it and mostly what you find out about is their ATTITUDE.

Just from talking to one person, I could tell whether I would ever talk to them or I would, on the sole basis of how they were on the phone, forgettabout'em;. All of them were either owners or managers.

One of the businesses has been doing business at the same location on South Granville for 27 years. It's run by a woman. I'm sure she's busy. She has had lots of publicity. At this point she could be like, ya, whatever, I don't need to talk to you because I don't need any more publicity. Everyone who lives in Vancouver knows about me. Instead, she took the time to talk to me and made sure everything was explained properly. She followed up quickly. When it was over she thanked me and told me that she was excited that her company would be receiving notice on the web site where it would be. She invited me to introduce myself the next time I was in Vancouver. Total professionalism.

Contrast that to someone who was "too busy","couldn't really talk, you've got me at a bad time but didn't have the ability to just come right out and say "No, I'm sorry, I can't do this right now, please get back to me at some other time in a month or so." That would have been fine. Just say No and stick to it. I could have moved on. I wouldn't have wasted my time, the time, he apparently thinks is completely valueless compared to his.

Instead, he rushed through everything, and as a result, what I ended up writing, he wasn't happy with but he didn't get back to me for more than a week. Didn't respond to e-mails. When he finally did get back to me he just kept saying, I'm too busy, I can't get to this, there's a lot of inaccuracies. No shit, I thought. You barely could talk to me without saying, busy, busy busy instead of focusing on the details.

I refrained from saying to him. You agreed to do this. I am depending on making money from this. If you couldn't follow through you should have said NO, I can't do it!

It was just a really good lesson. First of all, saying you're too busy, and continuing to say that and doing a lousy job on something is not how you want to be doing business. Saying you're too busy, in a world where everyone is too busy, is just lame. It makes you sound like you have a fragile ego that somehow needs the world to know that you're so important because you're too busy or that you are completely unable to set boundaries for yourself.

Now, I'm not saying that there aren't people who are over the top busy. But, you know what? I'm guessing, based on what I've witnessed, that those people are rarely the ones that use "busy" as an excuse.  They know how to manage a workload, set priorities, establish clear boundaries and quietly manage to negotiate changes if they aren't able to meet a deadline.

Someone I follow on Twitter said what I've been thinking for a few days since that interaction. Her Tweet said,  "I declare a moratorium on the word busy. Everyone's busy, we get it. Busy is default status. Let us know if it changes."  Her name is Holly MacDonald and her blog is Spark + Co.


Think about that the next time the knee-jerk, "I'm too busy," is about to come out of your mouth and make you look less than you are.

and PS: In case you think everyone on Salt Spring is just sittin' around. It's not true. It's true for those you see sitting around day in and day out staring out the windows at coffee shops but in general, it's so far from the truth.

Not a Green Thumb? Aim for a Green Tongue!

 

A few links:

Recipes

Salt Spring Seeds

Seed Savers Exchange

Agchat

Organic Consumers Association

 
I've been deliciously devouring the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, A Year of Food Life, by author Barbara Kingsolver perhaps most well known for The Poisonwood Bible. Her eldest daughter Camille Kingsolver ads in her observations with research back-up contributed by her husband Steven L. Hopp.

She wrote the book in 2007 detailing her family's move from Tuscon, Arizona to her husband's small farm in the Southern Appalachians. It's full of interesting and alarming facts about food sourcing and their decision to grow everything they eat, to find it locally, to align their food choices with the growing season.

It's the American version of The 100 Mile Diet but with more research behind the politics of food sourcing and convincing enough to smack an unconscious mouth into forming a small hesitant question mark before popping in the next bit of artificial sweetened, trans-fatted, square food morsel.

Now, just in case you're a slow learner, I'm not an "early adopter" (do ya think?) and it's quite ridiculous to admit this considering where I now live but coming from the city, I'm used to sleepwalking into a grocery store and practically sleepeating what I've hunted and gathered from the place. That's a slight exaggeration of course. I did shop at Capers which, in hindsight, is a halloween costume of organic lies.  But, I've never eaten an organic piece of meat because I always get this picture of a gentleman farmer chasing something all over the poperty, getting it in a headlock, wrestling it to the ground and just doing an allround messy job of the finale. Crazy I know.

I've never grown anything. Not even a single pot plant. When I buy garden plants, they're already started. Seeds? Huh? Do they still make those? You may not know that humans, in our illustrious history, have eaten 80,000 plant species. Now we eat about eight with even that number heading in a reduced direction to genetically modified corn, soy and canola and who knows, perhaps just a single pill a day by 2040.

I've lived here on Salt Spring for two years now and I'm surrounded by locally grown food whether it be available at farm stalls, at the Saturday and Tuesday Farmer's Market in the Park, at the various farms that open their gates to hungry locals, the gardens growing behind restaurants (Harbour House and Hastings House come initially to mind), in neighbour's backyards, on apple trees, the mushrooms and fungi growing wild beside forested trails, rosehips and blackberries.

I'm at the market almost every Saturday as a result of selling my photographs and only recently have I become a little adamant about eating the locally grown greens, vegetables, fruits that are bulging out of the booths of the farmers who live here.

So, here's my goal and a challenge for you in case you're slow like me.  Try and pay attention to where the food you're buying comes from, how far away that is, whether it's possible to buy locally grown and to eat "in season".

Maybe if I do that, I'll be more motivated to open a cookbook, have someone for dinner,  find recipes that befit the bounty all around. Baby steps. Everything in moderation. What's for breakfast?

Have you changed something about the way you purchase food or what you eat in the last couple of years?