If you’re looking for something to do with the kids one Sunday, why not head to the Vancouver Art Gallery for their supersunday event, which is held on the third Sunday of each month.

Artists, staff and volunteers help kids to discover that there’s more to art than just drawing and painting.  The event covers writing, dance and even video creation, opening kids’ eyes to forms of art they may never have considered before.

The last event featured snippets from each of the exhibits currently on display at the gallery.

Truth Beauty covers photography from 1845 – 1945, and allowed you to pose for a family portrait.

The Kutlug Ataman: Paradise and Kuba exhibit encouraged families to go on camera and explain what they love about where they live.  The videos may be shown at future supersunday events.  Kids could also make their own TV, and put the photograph that they had taken at the gallery on to it.  What kid doesn’t want to be on TV, after all?

The Tree: From the Sublime to the Social looks at the impact that trees have on people and how the forest can be used to awe and inspire us.  Sketching of trees was encouraged, and they were also apparently giving potted trees away that you could replant, but although we found the indoor growing room, we couldn’t find anyone who was actually handing the trees out.  There was also a dance workshop and a story writing workshop on trees that we unfortunately get time to attend.

The Emily Carr and the Group of Seven exhibit encouraged families to paint their own winter landscape, and to learn about some of the most famous painters in Canadian history.

The price was a little steep ($15 apiece for parents) although children under 12 are free, and they do ask for a small donation to help cover the costs of the materials. 

While the event runs from noon to 5pm, which should give you enough time to see everything, chances are your kids will just tire out before seeing it all.

All in all, though, it was a great experience, and a nice change from just another weekend trip to the mall.

The threat was received on February 27th, and the college is working with investigators to deal with the threat. 

Specific details regarding the nature of the threat itself have not been divulged, but the campus is to be closed from 11pm tonight until 7am on Saturday, March 1st, at which time the campus will re-open.

All classes, events and services scheduled for tomorrow have been cancelled, and all staff and students are requested to stay away from the campus.

More information will be available at the website (http://www.douglascollege.ca) or by calling 604.527.5452

It doesn’t matter, who’s fault it is – just contain the damn spill and start the cleanup.  You can both sue each other into oblivion AFTER you get the oil off the ground, and out of the water, and people back into their homes. 

Although I do have to do a little finger pointing myself.  WHY did it take, if the reports are to believed, so long for the spill containment to begin?  Certainly the ShellBurn Refinery would have known almost immediately that something was wrong when the amount of product coming into their facility dropped so dramatically.  And I know that they have spill containment procedures and product onsite (I used to work in the liquid handling equipment industry, primarily dealing with the oil companies.  This included the sale of spill containment material).  Why couldn’t they have gotten what was needed to the spill site considering how close they were? 

Of course they’re not obligated to do any such thing, but when an environmental disaster such as this occurs, shouldn’t you just do what’s right first, and worry about it later?

Anyway, I’ll get off the soapbox now, and repeat what I said earlier – it doesn’t matter who’s fault it is.  Just do something about it.

Maple Ridge is probably best known for producing three world class athletes in three different sports: Cam Neely (hockey), Larry Walker (baseball) and the late Greg Moore (auto racing), who incidentally is “officially” from Pitt Meadows, rather than Maple Ridge.

It was officially incorporated in 1874, making it the 6th municipality in the province (only New West, Victoria, Langley, Lake Cowichan and Chilliwack are older), with about 50 families living on 33,000 acres.  Today, those same 33,000 acres house about 75,000 people.

While Maple Ridge does have a number of cultural events, like the Caribbean Street Festival (this weekend, no less!) and the Jazz & Blues Festival, and the Maple Ridge Fair (next weekend) it’s also had it’s share of local personalities, most notably Dave Alexander, who’s junk pile on the Lougheed Highway became legendary; and Linda Meyer (the topless jogger/cyclist).

A temporary farmer’s market opens up every Saturday right in the middle of downtown, in Memorial Peace Park, which also happens to be a rather large public wi-fi hotspot.

While it may not be the hippest place in the Lower Mainland, a good portion of the Lower Mainland heads through Maple Ridge every summer to head to Alouette Lake up in Golden Ears Park.

So it’s got that going for it. Besides, what other burb in the Lower Mainland has a blog dedicated to photos of it, like the image above of the Maple Ridge Horse, used by permission from the Maple Ridge Daily Photo blog.

Richard Pitt, who founded wimsey.com, Canada’s first commercial ISP, opened the door of his home last week to an RCMP officer and the head of Pitt Meadows’ bylaw enforcement department.  Evidently BC Hydro had alerted them to the fact that the home was drawing above average amounts of power, and might be a grow-op.

Pitt was told that inspectors would be back in 24 hours to inspect the home looking for signs of a grow-op.  When he offered to show them the PCs in the home that were drawing the excessive power, the police refused.  Upon returning the next day, they were apparently satisfied that there was no illegal activity in the home.

All of this begs a couple of questions (in my mind, at least):

1. Why didn’t someone just check with the city to see if this was actually a legitimate business?
2. If they really thought it was a grow-op, why would they give someone 24 hours to at least make an attempt to sanitize the site? 

Pitt summarizes the whole experience on his blog.

So for those of you who might run a small data center from your home, maybe let Hydro know, so that you don’t get flagged as well, eh?

CITR will be doing live broadcasts from the Agrodome, and the games from Capilano will be webcast, although they appear to be having some problems with it as this is being written.

Ticket prices aren’t mentioned on the girls’ site, but for games at the Agrodome, prices range from $8 during the week to $15 for reserved seats on Saturday night.

Even though my school (Port Coquitlam, now Terry Fox Ravens – Provincial Champions, 1993 & 1994) haven’t qualified for either tournament this year, I always seem to be drawn to following the results. 

If you’re a fan of high school sports, and basketball in particular, these are definitely the events to check out.

But if something like this comes out, I’ll promote the hell out of it, because I think that it would be an excellent resource.

When you live way out in the suburbs and decide at the last moment to take a trip into Vancouver to do something specific, like go up to the observation deck at Harbour Center, it might be a good idea to check and make sure that it’s actually open first.  While the Top of Vancouver restaurant might be open, we didn’t really feel like dropping a hundred bucks on dinner just for the view.  So we’ll be going back in March when the observation deck reopens.

So after driving all that way, we decided to hop on the SeaBus and head over to Lonsdale Quay.  Yeah, it was late at night, and everything was closed, but this was about dealing with cabin fever, and just getting out and doing something.  It didn’t matter what.

After that it was time to start the long drive home, but even then it wasn’t just along the Barnet Highway, but down Broadway instead. 

Yeah, it’s hardly the most exciting night we’ve ever had, but it was great to just get out for awhile.  And it wasn’t the standard, “Let’s drive down to English Bay” type of situation.

All of this will be available at northernvoice.podcastspot.com. Combined with what I’m sure will be a fair bit of Flickr traffic, this should help to provide as much coverage as you can get without actually being there.