Category: Vancouver

Vancouver Yogathon, Four Days To Go

Kristi

Just four more days until the Camp Moomba Yogathon and Blissfest I am participating in at Thunderbird Stadium. I decided to re-post something about this because my original entry may have been missed a few weeks ago when the RSS feed wasn’t working.

The yogathon means a 108 minute long session of yoga for the thousands of people who participate. The funds raised through the event go towards sending children whose lives have been affected by HIV/AIDS to Camp Moomba, to give them a chance at a normal summer of fun. This will be my third time participating, and it’s something I look forward to taking part in every summer if I can. Last year we did the yogathon in heavy rain, which was not something I was expecting to enjoy as much as I did.

If you can please help me reach my fundraising goal. At the moment I am 76.67% of the way there (according to gifttool).

Camp Moomba Yogathon & Blissfest
July 12, 2008
UBC Thunderbird Stadium

Camp Moomba Yogathon & Blissfest

Lotus mudra

In seventeen days I will be participating in the Camp Moomba Yogathon & Blissfest at UBC. The yogathon is a yearly event to raise money for children whose lives have been impacted by HIV/AIDS, and where participants do a whopping 108 minutes of yoga.

The much needed funds raised from this event will help send a child to summer camp for an experience of a lifetime. You can help change a life of a child…

This will be my third time participating in the yogathon, and I am really looking forward to the challenge. Last year it rained the whole time, but it only added to the fantastic experience of doing yoga with a few thousand people.

Please help me reach my fundraising goal.

Camp Moomba Yogathon & Blissfest
July 12, 2008
UBC Thunderbird Stadium

Poppies

Rachael Ashe: Poppies

I walked part of the way to work yesterday morning, and on the way I stopped to photograph some of the poppies in the community gardens along sixth Avenue between Maple and Burrard. I think this area is one of my favorite places in Vancouver during the summer. The people who care for the gardens do such a wonderful job, and I’m glad these are in a public area for me to appreciate.

Big Sister. Little Sister.

Big Sisters of BC Lower Mainland is looking for more people to take part in their mentorship program in 2008. I became involved with the organization last year, and thought I’d share my experiences.

With the dedication of our wonderful volunteers, we are currently providing 315 girls with the support of a caring mentor– thank you! But for 2008, Big Sisters of BC Lower Mainland is on a mission! We know that there are many more young girls who need a mentor in their lives, so we want to serve even more girls in 2008! In order to accomplish this, we need more women to volunteer with us AND more families and community workers to know about our programs so they can refer girls to us who could benefit from having a mentor.

In the spring of 2007 I was looking around for volunteer work and I decided to give Big Sisters a try. It was something I’d been considering for awhile, especially after hearing about it from a friend who’d been matched with a Big Brother (the boy version of Big Sisters) as a young boy and his good experiences within their relationship. I didn’t know much about the program at the time, other than it involved volunteering my time and working closely with a young girl I would be paired up with.

My first step was to attend one of the many Info Sessions Big Sisters hold regularly around the Lower Mainland, to learn more about the program and it’s requirements. Once I decided I was definitely interested I filled out an application package, attended an orientation session with other hopeful candidates, and then a one-on-one screening interview with a Big Sister councelor. It was a couple of months before Big Sisters got back to me about a potential match with a teenaged girl named Lauren. They put a lot of care and attention into finding just the right combination of people because they want the relationship to last.

In the beginning it felt very odd and awkward, to both Lauren and I, to hang out because essentially ours is an arranged relationship even though we are both willingly involved. It has taken time to get to know one another and become comfortable talking about ourselves, but it’s totally worth it. It was also tricky between both our schedules to come up with a regular day and time to get together, but seeing each other the same day every week has been key in helping the relationship grow. My “Little Sister” is a wonderful beautiful person, full of life and intelligence, is lots of fun to be around, and shares my love of photography.I feel lucky to know Lauren and she would not have come into my life any other way.

If you are interested in becoming a Big Sister yourself, please call Call 604.873.4525 ext. 300 or email info(at)bigsisters(dot)bc(dot)ca. Information about qualifications can be found here.

A kind of optical delusion of consciousness.

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Alex Fraser bridge
I just started reading “The places that scare you: A guide to fearlessness in difficult times”, written by Pema Chodron, and found this wonderful quote from Albert Einstein:

A human being is part of the whole called by us “the universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty,

~ Albert Einstein

Lucky room for rent

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Lucky room for rent

Taken in the neighbourhood of Strathcona, Vancouver, with an Olympus XA and cross-processed Ektachrome 100VS. I haven’t done any xpro in months, so I was happy to have such satisfying results on my first roll of the spring/summer season.

The weather is fantastic today. I went for a long walk along the seawall at lunch, and stopped in a park to play on the swings. What a great afternoon!

The NV wrap up

The sky appears to speed on by
The above photo was taken in Gastown, Vancouver, with a Vivitar Ultra Wide and Slim toy camera.

I’m really glad Zak invited me to work with Foo Associates at Northern Voice this past weekend. I don’t think I would’ve attended otherwise because my experience last year didn’t leave me “wanting more”. I would’ve missed out on a lot if I hadn’t been there.

I felt last year was great socially, and interesting because I was “thrown” last minute onto a panel, but lacking in the kind of content I’d actually paid for. This year was still very social, but because of my role as “Foo Associates representative”, brought me into contact with many new and interesting people instead of just chatting with friends. I was definately more interested in this year’s speakers, and made a point of not opening my laptop and (mostly not) shooting my camera during sessions to divert my attention. An open laptop in the audience usually seems to mean surfing/chatting/photo editing is going on, and I didn’t want to fall into it this year like so many others I observed.

Zak and I led a morning session on the first day called “Photo-Blogosphere-Meatspace-Mashup.”
The idea was to document different information related to blogging, such as the year people started blogging, number of blogs kept, and so on. We threw out some ideas, as did the audience, and then found a spot to create human graphs using the twenty or so participants. The results were fun, and though we hoped to explore this further during the conference, weather and space issues were against us. It’s an idea I’d like to try again, if I can figure out a good way to bring together interested bloggers.

I never did get further on the second day with my diptych series of conference attendees and their equipment, as mentioned in my previous blog entry. But again, I definately want to explore this further, now that I have a better idea of what works well and how best to shoot it.

All in all Northern Voice was a great source of inspiration, knowledge and social interaction.