a peek inside the fishbowl

Oh my pretties.

Why is so hard to love ourselves sometimes? Why is it so much easier to find fault and hate ourselves? Is it because it’s easier to think: I HATE MY JIGGLY BITS as opposed to I ACCEPT THE WAY I AM, JIGGLY BITS AND ALL. Why not do something for ourselves, out of love, to help make us healthy and strong (and as a happy by-product, decrease the severity of the aforementioned jiggly bits)? Wouldn’t life be so much better that way?

I am happy to tell you that the Elation Centre (a Fishbowl patron) is hosting a Love Your Body Workshop on Friday February 11, 2011 … just in time for Valentine’s Day. Love love love. And it’s just for you, to help encourage healthy changes via LOVE AVENUE and not Hatred or Self-Loathing Street. That’s a nasty old street. Don’t go there.

You can read up on the workshop here, but allow me to highlight a few things:

• There will be chocolate!
• You don’t need to be a yoga expert to attend. Heck, you don’t even need to be fit or flexible! All you need to do is bring some comfy clothes and a willingness to learn something new with a great group of likeminded women in a very non-intimidating environment. I have met Donna and Sylvie in person and they are both very real, very friendly and knowledgeable, very open and very very nice.
• I will add that yoga is pretty awesome. Have you tried it before? It is deeply relaxing and it’s the kind of skill that you can take anywhere, forever, once you learn. :)

I will be attending this workshop because I AM AN URBAN GODDESS. (Ha.)

Elation is giving away one spot at the Love Your Body Yoga Workshop to one lucky (Ottawa-area!) woman.

The deets:

• The class is on Friday, February 11 at 6:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. Please make sure you’re able to attend before you enter!
• You should live in the Ottawa area, or know someone who does, because the (one) winner will have to find their way to the Elation studio. (They’re located at Suite 201, 360 Kirkwood Avenue North across the street from the Real Canadian Superstore in Westboro.)
• For your entry to qualify you must tell me – using the comments below – what you love about yourself. This is a must!
• One entry per person please! We want lots of people to have the opportunity to win.
• I will do a random draw of all qualifying entries using Random.org at noon EST on Wednesday February 2, 2011. Please make sure you leave a valid email address, because you can’t win if I can’t reach you.

Sound good? Thank you to Elation Centre for hosting such a fantastic giveaway!

Soooo. Who wants to join me for yoga and chocolate? :)

Please inquire about our services!

There’s always someone willing to help with those dreadful, hard-to-reach itchy spots here at Scratch a Scritch Dog Spa! And that’s a promise!

We value all of our customers! We do however ask that clients please refrain from licking the couch after  their treatments. Thank you.

When it’s minus twenty outside, like today, I become a little bit more concerned about our feathered friends.

Our backyard is a haven for a number of different bird species. I’m happy about this, because we are a bird-admiring kind of family. We love watching them flit around the yard, swooping and skimming the air between the cedar hedges, the maple trees and the lilacs.

They’re lovely little creatures, with their own little personalities, and I know this to be true because of the few we’ve gotten to know over the past few years. (Remember BB?)

The trick to attracting outdoor birds to your yard this time of year is to make sure you have places for them to hide (trees, bushes etc) as well as food for them to eat, especially in the fall and winter when food is generally pretty scarce.

Right now we’re getting lots of cardinals, chickadees, and various finches.  

Back in the fall we had to upgrade our tired old bird feeder. We used to have the kind of setup illustrated here in the Canadian Tire catalogue, squirrel baffle and all, but it had weathered a few too many storms and eventually just disintegrated.

So we replaced it with this one (I added the squirrel image, obviously):

I LOVE THIS FEEDER. And no, CanTire is not paying me to say this.

1. a) It holds an awful lot of seed. We’ve had it up since November and we’ve had to fill it exactly twice.
2. b) I really like the barn-red colour. The birds don’t seem to mind it either.
3. c) So far it has been squirrel-proof. The perch is the kind that closes a door over the food if the creature sitting upon it is of a certain weight, so the heavier birds and animals can’t get at the food. Sorry pigeons! This buffet is CLOSED. FOREVER.

You’ll not that I wrote “SO FAR” the feeder has proven itself to be squirrel-proof. I am fairly certain squirrels understand complex physics and have developed their own space-time theories. There is a staff of crack engineers working madly night and day to crack the code of this feeder. There are squirrel-sized flow charts and computers hidden in their leafy nests, I just know it. It’s only just a matter of time before they figure out how to beam inside the feeder or something like that. But so far so good.

1. d) We also haven’t been visited by those flying seed hogs, the Starlings and Grackles. They have a history of using our old feeder like a trough, using their birdy heads like veritable shovels in order to spill piles of seeds overboard out onto the ground. (Personally I think they were being paid off by the squirrels.) Our new feeder prevents this from happening, as the birds are forced to take one seed at a time.

The new feeder is pictured in the CanTire catalogue here. You should read the reviews because they’re actually kind of amusing. Squirrels breaking in the windows! And working out advanced acrobatic routines! Snobby birds who refuse to eat at the feeder!  Wow. Some people get really riled up by this stuff, don’t they?