Cooks and Rides and Climate Change……and many other things -

Well, we made it through another holiday season and we can now reward ourselves by sitting down with our tea or coffee, putting our feet up, and preparing ourselves for the adventures to come. As always I am strongly urging all those wonderful people who put up bright and cheerful decorations and lights to leave them up for all of January – why would we turn off the bright lights in the darkest month?” Light up January” should be a new Canadian tradition! We have had our western New Year’s celebrations with friends and family and can now look forward to the Chinese New Year, which falls on February 7th this year. In that calendar this is the Year of the Rat.  In our western culture this is generally not seen as a positive symbol, but we may be wrong about that. The Rat is the first of the twelve Chinese zodiac symbols so it represents new beginnings. It promises to be an exciting year, full of new beginnings in work, study and relationships; a year for gamblers to be a bit more cautious but a year for new ideas to pop up everywhere.  Rat people are said to be leaders, pioneers and conquerors. They often have high energy and never stop moving or thinking. William Shakespeare and Mozart were both born in the year of the Rat, so it is looking better and better. If there are grandchildren to entertain, or even if there aren’t, renting the movie ‘Ratatouille’ would be a perfect way to celebrate the start of this year. This lovely family film stars a rat as chef – if you are a fan of the seemingly endless number of kitchen/cooking shows on TV, our young chef is more Jamie Oliver than Gordon Ramsey.   As the writers’ strike seems set to go on for some months yet, it is clear that more and more of these so called ‘reality’ shows will be popping up on our TV screens as producers try desperately to fill in those hours of TV time. Expect to see ‘The Youngest Chef” and ‘The Tallest Chef’ and “The Chocolate Chef’ any day now! Anyway, it is amazing what can be learned from some of these cooking divas. For example, I now know (in theory) how to prepare squid for cooking – a skill I will never, ever use, but best to be prepared. I have enjoyed watching competing cooks preparing meals for the British army using tent kitchens and in- ground ovens, and then cooking lunch for 800 on an aircraft carrier – good, clean fun until they ran into rough seas. They have really ingenious ways of making sure that the soup doesn’t wind up on the floor (deck).   For the tough guys in the audience who sneer at wimpy men in tall white hats, I refer you to Gordon Ramsey and his ‘kitchen nightmares’. This is not a show for children as it comes with a very strong ‘language warning’ – Gordon may cook like an angel but he does have a somewhat limited vocabulary!   Moving from a warm kitchen to the cold, cruel world, our own experts are predicting a federal election so we know it won’t all be smooth sailing. While political problems around the world may make us grateful to live in Canada, we are facing challenges of our own. Global warming continues to speed up in spite of all the brave words and the latest predictions are that the Northwest Passage will be ice-free within the next 7 years, not the 22 years talked about a few months ago. It seems NASA ‘misinterpreted’ its polar data – well, we all know how unreliable government computers can be! This raises real and immediate problems for the people of the north in terms of their culture eroding, their communities needing to relocate, their traditional ecology disappearing as birds and animals are threatened with extinction – problems faced by other northern countries like Finland, Sweden and Iceland. However, the governments of those countries are acknowledging the challenge while our own government had the unwelcome distinction of winning the ‘fossil’ award at the recent international environmental conference in Bali. Not our finest hour!   It seems clear that our country will need us in the year ahead – so let’s begin the new year by getting off the couch, turning away from all those cooking shows (or some of them, anyway) and getting into shape for the work to come. Buy those walking poles – you only feel silly for the first few minutes, then you feel great! Blow the cobwebs off the treadmill, sign up for those Tai Chi classes, take up Line Dancing or Ballroom as tastes dictate – and let’s all ‘Boom and Zoom’ into the new year, determined to face whatever 2008 has to offer. Busy people are healthy and healthy people are happy, so let’s do our part. Experts say we are supposed to challenge our brains daily, and surprise them with novelty on a regular basis, to keep those little gray cells ticking over. Well, our travel writer had great fun on a relatively short ‘zip-line’ ride in Cancun. I see a new one has now been built in BC, connecting Whistler Mt. with Blackcomb Mt. A ‘zip-line’ tour that takes 2.5 hours to complete and is made up of 5 different runs, the longest being 1,100 ft long! Now that should be enough challenge and novelty to carry anyone through the rest of the year!   Whatever resolutions you make for the year to come, and whatever challenges you set yourself, may the year ahead be filled with health, laughter and friends.   “Happy New Year” from all of us at Seniors CHOICE.

 

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