Non-Vax Kids are Healthier?

Do you vaccinate?
Do you follow the schedule like a good citizen?
Did you know the schedule is different from province to province?
Did you know that you don't have to follow that program?

Many of us refuse vaccinations.  Many of my friends have refused to vaccinate their children and babies because we've read evidence to make us worry.

I have a friend in her 20's who has never had a vaccination and she is the picture of health.

There is mad evidence now that Vaccines damage our biology and a German researcher did the work.

Would you like to read about that?

Ok, but only on one condition:  you treat this info like it's a hot potato.

HERE IT IS ~ read, understand, and now share.


Last week I read a blog post by a mother who's child was suffering from Pertussis which is the whooping cough.  She said that as she typed, she kept her sweet boy in full view as he played and coughed and then played some more.  She didn't vaccinate him for Pertussis.  Do you know why?
Because her sweet boy was not her first sweet boy.  She and her loving husband buried their first born the year before.  He died in his sleep the very night he was given his DtaP vaccine.

As that mother worries as mothers do, sitting up night after night with her wee boy struggling to breath beside her, she doesn't wonder if she made the wrong decision about the vaccinations.
At least, she assures herself, this child is still breathing.


If vaccines were about OUR HEALTH, they wouldn't be such a profitable industry that no one is allowed to question.

Question it .... please.

A Clear Path to Democracy

Well THAT was inspiring!!

I had my first volunteer meeting with my local Liberal Member of Parliament.

There I sat with about 25 fellow Kingstonians listening to a Queen's Law student in her early 30's who has been thru 30 or 40 elections in her life.

Holy moly .... inspire much?

Other than a few young peeps on the phones, I was the
youngest in the volunteer pack.

We'll be canvassing our areas of the city on Monday
encouraging our Liberal neighbors to vote.

As our speaker so eloquently said (and yes it brought tears to my sappy eyes) ...

we want to make the clearest path to democracy.

And ... by doing this, I am now a part of the super awesome victory party where I'll sit around with fellow Liberals and await the election results.

This is my first time taking part in an election, and it's a monumental one to say the least. If I could feel more patriotic, I'm not sure how.

Thank you to MP Mark Gerretsen and his team for making this Canadian feel connected once again.
Now .... let's get things done eh?

Do you want to vote, but can't get a ride?

We have volunteers to drive you there. There's no reason to not fill out that ballot. You might as well .... it's there waiting for you!

#ygk
#kingston
#canadavotes

'Tis the Season for Theft

I watched a tv show yesterday called "Storage Wars".  It's a canadian show about people who buy the contents of storage units after the owners default on the rent.  So often during the show, the potential buyers would look into that cluttered unit hoping it contained something valuable.

I see a correlation here, as I'm sure there are many individuals and groups out there who drive down the road and upon seeing a greenhouse, wonder the very same thing:

"Is there something valuable growing in there?  And how do I get my hands on that?"

Because I speak so openly about Cannabis, people like to tell me their "big fish" stories.  I know that 'gardening pride' feeling, as my one hot pepper plant yielded more than thirty peppers this year!

People tell me about their past grows, their current grows, and the grows they just happen to find. "Find" being the operative word here.  I giggled and growled inside a few months ago while a friend's husband boasted to me that he's really good at finding other people's outdoor crops.  'What do you mean you're good at 'finding' people's crops?' I wanted to ask.  Were they lost?  Were you part of a search party?

Nope.  He means he's good at thieving other peoples' medicine. What often amazes me, is that these very same people would never risk  stealing from a store or a bank.  Oh no.  But they'd steal months and months of work and worry from their neighbor and their fellow citizen.  Those plants didn't fall down from the sky you dick!  They didn't root themselves, water themselves just so you can come and cut them down like a thief in the night!  They were likely planted for a very good reason!  Whether that reason is illness or strife matters not.  Some people kill deer to fill their freezers with meat;  others grow plants to fill their medicine cabinets with medicine!  Would you steal a deer carcass from your neighbor's back yard?

There's a societal lesson here.  We're supposed to be a team!  We're supposed to have each other's backs. I get that times are tough.  But I also get that what goes around comes around.  Karma is real.  I'll even admit that in the past, I may not have felt this way.  I too have dreamed of finding a flowering goddess with red hairs galore. Would that not be a destiny of perfect timing?  If I ever had, I may have justified it with that cop-out: "if we don't take them someone else will".

Many of these thieves will appease any small sense of guilt by telling themselves that whomever owns the plants, should have been smarter.  Or maybe they're simply too busy doing the math in their shitty little heads to even consider why the person ever planted those ladies.

I know a guy right now who has some plants somewhere out there. He's growing them to make brownies for his terminally ill brother. Would you take his plants if you happened upon them?

I know a woman in Oregon who legally grows Cannabis bushes in her back yard to keep Leukemia away from her daughter.  Are those plants a lesson to be stolen and bragged about?

I know people who coddled sprouts to plants to bushes all spring and summer only to have them stolen. That's how many were going to pay their rent,  buy their food, live their lives, cure their ills.

Now what?

Many many years ago, this guy from my hometown bragged to me about he and his buddies finding a crop on the mountain. They went up at night, bags and snippers and shovels in hand.  He said the plants were THIS BIG!!  So big that they had to use a chainsaw to cut them down.  What a dick.  He said that they went home, dried some colas out in the oven, and smoked a few big doobies.  They all had the worst headaches of their lives that night. At the time, I wondered why that was and I often remember that story when trying outdoor.  Ain't nobody got time for a headache! But now I know exactly why the dicks got a headache that lasted all weekend long.

Karma baby.

Autumn is the glorious season of harvest.  Every gardener looks forward to this time of year.  One final push, and then the chance to reap the rewards of your hard work and gardening skill.  As the hairs on the flowers darken from white to yellow to orange to red, the chances of your Cannabis plants being stolen rise significantly. Hide your love away.  Hide your crop away.  Don't tell a soul.  Sad I know, but until the world pulls it's head out of it's ass and finally legalizes personal cultivation, we must hide from thieves.

I'm proud to be a part of a movement of faceless humans who want to have each others' backs.  The majority of us try to live with a one love mentality where we will help one another even if it's just through fb.  We feel the love.  We push the love forward, outward, to anyone who will receive it.  So to steal someone else's Cannabis is simply against our motto.

Happy Harvest to all of the gardening geniuses I know, and of course all of those I don't yet know. Kudos on your hard work. Know that I have your back.  And if you're out on a lovely autumn walk, and come along some ripe and ready Cannabis plants; admire, sniff if you wish, but walk away.  Turn the other cheek.  And never tell a soul what you saw or where you saw it.

Walking the Bar Tending Tightrope

Last night at work, six bottles of Labatt Blue showed up in the liquor licensed establishment wherein I work and I didn't sell them.  My smart serve secures that liquor license.  I've been stewin' about it ever since.  It took several doobs last night to get my mind to shut down.  Yet every time I start to write about it today, I lose the spark about two sentences in.  So I decided to go light on the wordage in this one and show you my night using pics from one of my favourite television series Deadwood.

I really felt uneasy last night.  Uneasy as walking a tight rope.  And yet that's what it is sometimes ... this dual role of being sweet and polite so you get a tip, but being responsible and law-abiding so you don't get sued by the customer or the bar owner.

I  started the shift like this:

Then very quickly became this:

And my anger escalated it to this:

and this:

What they saw though, was this:

What I was visualizing was this:

As a bartender, it's a fine line between this:

And this:

So I've decided that the next time some little weenies decide they wanna screw with my smart serve and the liquor license under which I work, I'm simply going to take their booze and do this ... right in front of them:

And allow my friend Karma to do the rest :)

The Investigation of Freedom of Speech in Canada

re-blogged from thecouchactivist.com

I recently blogged on my new site about "Harperman", the little diddy that a

gaggle of proud Canadians put together to show their disgust for Stephen Harper.

You can read it here :)

Calling For a Referendum To Aid All Veterans

I have a friend who is a veteran.  He fought in the Bosnian War.  Usually, the war itself doesn't phase me.  I mean, which war that is.  There are so many, and in my opinion, none of them warranted.  But this one is different.

I was in high school during this one, and my friend Jane had a boyfriend who was right in the midst of it. I remember she called him once and in the background she could hear bombs dropping.  Now, you must remember that my life and Jane's life revolved around teenage stuff;  her friend's life revolved around survival.

For those inside of wars that's all it's about.  Day by day by day just trying to survive.  And we believe in our western comforts that when that war is over, so is the sentiment of mere survival.  But that's not the case at all is it?  We now know that the war lives on.

The war lives in moments of daydreaming, it lives in the sounds of fireworks.  War comes alive at night in some dreams.  And it stays alive in the scar tissues of the perpetually aching wounds that do heal over .. on the surface.  Prostheses are fitted and when that pant leg goes back down, we believe that life goes on.  We believe that a pension and some flair removes that survival sentiment.  We believe that pride and the societal gratitude for their service fills their heart with comfort.  Out to pasture go our veterans, free to live the rest of their days in peace.  If only that were the case.

School children playing can sound like shrieks of fear.  People rushing, tires screeching can sound like the memory of an attack.  And squares on the calendar that mean so little to you and I, can represent annual reminders of moments of terror.

From time to time my friend the veteran shares with me.  I know not when it comes, the words shared when I least expect them.  But I always lean in, always stop what I'm doing and concentrate on this fragmented testament from a hero who remains to this day, blameless in all of this.  He tells me this time of year is bad because it was September when they came home.  Odd isn't that?  That the date they came home is one that sticks in their grey matter the way a poisonous tick clings to its host. Why do you think that is?  That question comes from another fragmented piece of this puzzle.  My friend speaks of the many ways in which he and his regiment were and still are disrespected by the military. But how they were treated when they came home is for me a mystery, I dare not burden him with my need for clarification.  My role isn't to get the details right.  My role here is only to listen, to apologize, and to offer invisible support or perhaps a doobie when I have one.

I guess now I feel like taking on a role of advocate for him.  I'd like to hug him but I fear that would be too much.  Instead, I just try to support him.  I don't really know how.  I only know to keep the conversation light until he is ready.  I don't dare ask questions.  I don't even clarify details because he doesn't deserve to have to set the scene for any of us.

The platoon, the regiment, the squad or the group ... it has its mindset, it has its orders, it has its own mantra even.  By its own design it is a supportive network of men and women that form a bond over time they say.  That bond no doubt aids in that survival instinct.  But in the moments now, as each of them tries to audit the memories that keep bubbling up, they realize that they are alone.  The support of the squad isn't there anymore.  That web, though invisible was made of the strongest silk.  But is it now gone?  Has it dissipated into thin air?  It feels that way when each year they have to beg and grovel--or so it feels--for their pensions.  Veterans who lost limbs have to prove their limbs haven't grown back in order to get what we all say they deserve.  We all wear our yellow pins don't we?  If pins were dollars maybe we'd have enough funds to give our men and women of the military what they need.

My heart is heavy at the moment for a man I never knew.  Another veteran.  Another soldier from my friend's regiment.  He says now there's only two of them left.  I think he feels the pressure of that to be honest. And in turn, I feel the pressure of worry for this friend of mine.  Last week he received a phone call from a distraught widow.  Her life, shattered.  Her husband, gone fishing but never to return.  How this conversation and many after it went, haunts my friend though he knows he did the right thing.

You see, this widow believes the web still exists.  She like so many of us believe the bullshit Hollywood nonsense that show soldiers selflessly comforting the wives of their deceased brothers, as though they themselves aren't also on the verge.  Hollywood shows strength and valor and unwavering pride.  Is this what veterans feel?  I'm not so sure.  My friend was asked to go down East and bury this fellow soldier from his regiment. And when he hesitated she demanded it of him.  At the moment he told me this, I was so torn between angst for him and angst for that widow.  I wanted to protect him, but I wanted to comfort her.  Her words cut into him, I saw this.  But what did those words do to her as they left her lips?  Did they tear through leaving a mark?  Did she know as they were piercing the skin that she was wrong to say them?  Grief can be the sharpest weapon we have.

My friend told her that he couldn't do it.  Money and transportation aside, he literally could not do it. I fear that at the moment, his own scars of ptsd are held together with white knuckles.  I see it in him some days, the war sits right beneath the surface.  Those are the days that he doesn't share with me. Those are the days that he busies himself with anything that will take his attention away from the ongoing battle in his head.  His decision to put himself first undoubtedly weighs on him too.

As a child, there was this one guy in our small town that went off to the military.  His name was Pat. Pat is older than I am, but we shared a bottle of zambuca once at an outdoor family reunion many years ago.  Alcohol can be like grease on a tire when it comes to words and sharing memories or traumas. While we sat staring at the fire, our faces burning but loving it still, Pat shared with me some of what he saw.  He shared some of what he did.  He shared with me the feelings, the smells, the noises.  I think the noises were the worst and as we sat there, I could tell that he was still in that war. Whichever one it was.  Can Pat ever be free of that survival sentiment?  Can my friend ever be free of his memories? Can any of our veterans for whom we fly flags and wear pins and feel respect, really forget what they went through?  And do we have any right to ask them to do it?

I'm learning that the answer to that question is no.  And that leads me to another question about war and why we keep doing it.  I wonder how parents can push their kids to be in that world, when they know they won't be supported after the duty is done.  You know that right?

This issue is worldwide I think.  If your country has a military, you're in this too.  Your opinion of this is important.  And how you use that opinion could be life shattering or life saving for millions of soldiers of varying ranks, ages, experiences, and disorders.  The citizens of Canada make the rules. Election #42 is going to illustrate this.  So while we're there, choosing a leader, I say we demand what we all know is right.  Instead of building up the military with tanks and artillery and F35's, we need to make sure ALL of the veterans and people who took part in defending our freedoms are supported fully.  Put the military spending where it should have always been!  Otherwise, what's the point of wearing those little yellow pins?

Ask any veteran if those pins help him or her sleep at night.

Thank you to all who have served.

Don't Fear the Tear!

Lemme tell ya ... I'ma changin' peeps.

I never used to cry ... cold was a word my mum used more than a few times when I pushed a hug or a kiss away as a child.

But as each year passes, I get warmer.

Now, depending on the day, time of month, or phase of the moon, I bleed emotions out of my eyes.

I hold them back instinctively ... that's what ya do.

We're taught that tears do no good but make you look weak, puffy, and blotchy.

But as each year passes, I lose that instinct.

Holding them back does nothing but ensure they come tomorrow, or next hour, or when another effin' Apple commercial hits a chord ! ‪#‎fuapple‬

So I adapt. Buy bigger tissues. I use tissues twice the size of my noggin these days.
I might bring back the hanky!!

I've even started lettin' them flow in front of my hunni.
All he says is, "aw ... my sweetie's so sensitive".

Even when I get hopeful of future successes, the emotion comes out all salty n' soggy n' wet.

Screw tradition, screw social norms, and screw hiding your tears.

If I can bring back the hanky, I can make puffy & blotchy beautiful too.