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Sunday 4th April 2010

The weather here is still wonderful. I'm enjoying the sun so much.

Yesterday I did a bit of weeding - Do you have one of the tools like mine?... You push the gripping spikes down with your foot, then pull the weed out and smack the knob on the top to eject the weed into a bin. It's particularly good for dandelion-type roots. I still had to do quite a bit of bending though, because I was not outing that type of weed. I don't know where this weed came from .. it's a darned nuisance, seems to have suddenly spread over all the garden. No use trying to get a landscape service to do this job ... They generally can't tell a weed from a plant.

This reminds me ... I just received an advert from a garden service which has a "new way to prevent lawn weeds". This is a fungus which attacks broad-leaved weeds! Hello!! Can you just imagine that it also attacks all broad leaf plants at the same time? Can you just imagine that it is a living organism which can breed and go on spreading and killing? I have enough problems with fungus in my garden let alone spreading a new one. Just because it has been developed by a University doesn't mean that it can't go viral.

I feel bad about not going to church on Sundays. I used to go regularly until one old crony got up and starting spouting about "the faithful wife". I've probably complained about this before, so I won't get started!

Last night we had a bit of rain and a very strong wind came with the cold front going through. This is the beginning of the tornado season and I keep an eye out for trouble with the powerful winds.

Yesterday, when I was weeding, my new neighbour came to greet me.

I noticed they didn't know about Guelph's particular garbage sorting arrangements, so photocopied a page and put it in their mail box with my introduction. It's such a nuisance when the men don't pick up the rubbish.

What with the divorce and all the problems with this house I still remember that when I looked out and saw the mess in my driveway I just sat down and cried. Oh well, that's about sixteen years ago now and just puts me in a position to save other people such grief. I also told her about the home invasion and warned her about the thieving that has gone on locally. So, they're up to speed on all that!

There are still the laws on when to water the garden etc. I think I will photocopy that page too. No point in their being fined for watering on the wrong day.

Hope your town is not so finicky about everything. Probably is though.

Saturday 3rd April 2010

I heard from an old school friend, who lives on the Isle of Wight. She telephoned me on her mobile. She said that calls via the mobile are free on the weekend. I wonder how that works. I thought that she may be using SKYPE, but she didn't know what that was. Eventually I learned that she has been using tiscali. The prices seem reasonable and worth looking into.

The weather over here is spectacular ... 26C yesterday. A bit too hot for me, so I was in the basement until later. It's amazing to think that next week it could be snowing again. So unpredictable in the spring.

Had a lovely day out with Maxey Travel on Wednesday. Toronto - Mississauga Mall for lunch. Talked myself out of spending hundreds of dollars on an outfit I will hardly wear.

Then we went to the King Tutankhamen exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Magnificent. So glad the Maxey people were going there. I hate driving to Toronto.

Toronto has changed such a lot over just the past 8 or 10 years. Even more recently than that. Just a mass of tightly packed condominiums nearly 70 stories high. It makes me feel claustrophobic just to drive among them. The hordes of various ethnic groups of people charging around makes driving or even walking hazardous. I was coughing and sneezing much of the time because of the filthy air. Oh well, just about everywhere is overpopulated nowadays. On the way there and back our tour guide was telling jokes from the internet.. There were a lot from Red Skelton which I hadn't remembered.

A pilot study which taught seniors to play World of Warcraft found that spending at least 14 hours (in two weeks) playing the game improved the results of tests that measured thinking speed, memory, executive function (what you use when you plan and organize) and spatial ability. The more they played, the better they became - both at the game and at these mental skills.

This isn't the first study to find that video games keep minds young. The improvements make sense: Keeping your brain mentally stimulated prevents memory loss, especially if you use parts of your brain that you normally don't use. But video games aren't all you need (that goes for children, too). Physical activity staves off brain drains like Alzheimer's disease by boosting cerebral blood flow and stimulating the growth of grey matter.

It's never too late to start; even people with mild memory loss saw improvements six months after adding just 20 extra minutes of activity to their lives.

... For myself - I still can't name 25 animals in 2 minutes! . Can you ? (or should that be 30 animals in 5 minutes - I can't remember which!

Visit a site for many photographs of North American Birds and animals.

Rhona Raskin Home Page at http://www.rhona.com.