Tag Archive for 'holidays'

Taking your dog on holiday/vacation? Some things to consider…

Published by Tristan on January 11, 2008 in animals, asides, holidays and travel. 0 Comments

Diva as a puppyThis is a little late (meant to post before the holidays), but good nonetheless.

Almost every time my wife and I take our three rather large dogs (Diva’s pictured, as puppy, to the left) to a friend or family member’s house, I grapple with whether or not I really want to deal with them (the dogs, not the people.) They can be a lot of hassle and work, but in the end, they usually win. So I try to be as considerate as possible to our hosts, though it’s not always the easiest thing to do. This New York Times article has some entertaining stories and tips about taking your pets on vacation with you, especially on holidays to friends’ or relatives’ houses. And though I do refer to my dogs as members of my family, I hope I’m not nearly as extreme as some of the owners in the story. An excerpt: Continue reading ‘Taking your dog on holiday/vacation? Some things to consider…’

Waking up and going to work is stressful. What can you do about it?

Published by Tristan on December 27, 2007 in activism, asides and work. 0 Comments

Grogginess, grogginess, please go away. Grogginess, grogginess, please don’t come back another day.

After 5 days away from work, I had one heck of a time getting back into the swing of things this morning. Though my grogginess probably wouldn’t have been helped with the addition of grog, I felt like I could’ve used some to help me navigate the treacherous waters of work. Luckily, I came across this article called “7 ways to restart your day”, which will hopefully help me feel better about waking up early and slogging away every weekday.

Among the tips:

As soon as the alarm rings …
Spend your first 15 seconds awake planning something nice to do for yourself today.

Get up
The longer you lie there, the more you ruminate, the darker your outlook is likely to become, says Christine Padesky, Ph.D., coauthor of “Mind Over Mood.” So get vertical and make a cup of coffee, take a shower, feed the cat …

Drink …
Two glasses of water upon awakening, the time when our bodies are dehydrated, says Susan M. Kleiner, Ph.D., author of “The Good Mood Diet.” Dehydration causes fatigue, which affects your mood.

Move it
Just a few minutes of movement — a fast walk, for example — raises energy and reduces tension, says mood expert Robert Thayer, Ph.D., professor of psychology at California State University, Long Beach, and author of “Calm Energy.”

Investigate
When you’re dogged by anxiety or the dread you woke up with, try to pinpoint what’s causing it. If you can figure out why you’re upset, that’s halfway to feeling better.

Be kind and thankful
Do something nice for a stranger or friend and see if you don’t feel better about yourself. Also, jot down three things that you’re grateful for. It seems so simple, but counting your blessings just has a way of making you remember the sun is shining.

Laugh at yourself
Look at your own life and try to appreciate the absurdity of what doesn’t go exactly according to plan. Acknowledging how little control we actually have over what happens is sometimes a most freeing gift to yourself.

Hope this helps (you and me!)

Also, this blog has some good points about work and vacation. Additionally, timeday.org is a good place to check out and advocate for. Timeday.org is the website for Take Back Your Time, a major U.S./Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment. Sounds good to me!

What would Jesus buy? Probably nothing.

Published by Tristan on November 26, 2007 in asides, film and shopping. 1 Comment

Buy Nothing Day logoNot that I don’t want anything for Christmas, BUT…

Morgan Spurlock (”Supersize Me”) has a new film out, “What Would Jesus Buy?”, about Reverend Billy, a Vancouverite who preaches against consumerism on Buy Nothing Day. The antithesis to Black Friday, Buy Nothing Day has been popularized, if you will, by Adbusters. From this CNN story:

A review of “What Would Jesus Buy?” in “Christianity Today” questioned whether (Rev. Billy) Talen’s act, poking fun at both religion and consumerism, went too far.

“Yes, it’s condescending. Yes, it cheapens Christianity,” the magazine said, before concluding: “But the whole argument of the film is that our commodity culture has already cheapened Christianity.”

Something to think about.

Internet Explorer tried to hijack my Thanksgiving

Published by Tristan on November 24, 2007 in asides and technology. 0 Comments

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser has taught me that patience is a virtue I’m severely in need of. I spent much of my Thanksgiving break (probably almost a full workday) trying to figure out why the heck Internet Explorer was making the sidebar menu navigation on this site and List-en up! look like crap. I had no idea how horrific and unprofessional it all looked until I test-drove the sites on my mother-in-law’s computer, running IE 6.0. The sites looked wonderful (in my humble opinion) in the Firefox and Safari browsers that I’d been testing on, but for some still-unknown reason, IE piled every single part of the sidebar on top of itself like so many layers of two-week old digital lasagna, as if the navigation didn’t matter at all. (I guess it didn’t matter if no one was visiting the sites.) If you’re reading this, though, and hadn’t visited the sites until now, you won’t have a clue how bad it all looked, thankfully.

Anyway, after tweaking and testing nearly everything I could think of on the sites, I decided to reinstall the display theme (K2), and voila! Everything was in its right place. So now I can sit down for some leftover pie, without worrying that millions of strangers (or none) are laughing what used to be my pile of worthless sidebar doo-doo.

(Thanks to my wife and in-laws for tolerating both my absence from cooking duties and my obsession with fixing this wonderful CSS problem.)

Mission accomplished!