Wednesday, January 28, 2015

This Week's Favourite Things! January 19th - January 25th 2015

1.  The show that Ben Caplan and the Casual Smokers put on at the Marquee last Wednesday.  Wow.  It was awesome; especially loved the scream-along audience participation segment, very cathartic.  The Marquee is looking pretty awesome too, with the Seahorse Tavern having relocated into its basement.

2.  Nova Scotian Crystal.  Established in 1996,  this is North America’s only hand-cut, mouth-blown crystal maker, making some of the finest crystal available in the world!  Now here's a feel-good story of a business that got saved from closure by a private investor coming forth to buy it such that it could continue to run without government money or similar assistance.  From what I heard the business was bought by someone retired from the banking industry.  Three cheers for people that have realized they can take responsibility to use their wealth to help their own community, rather than shoveling it into foreign investments or what have you.  Better yet that in this case it is promoting a beautiful craft, and a landmark on the Halifax waterfront, hopefully for many years to come.   Apparently the raw materials for crystal are only made in 2 places in the world. Cool.

3.  The Turbine Fashion boutique in the Historic Properties.  Speaking of local investing, Turbine is owned by Canadian designer Lisa Drader-Murphy and mainly features her designs as well as some really wonderful hats made by her manager/hat making expert who formerly had a very popular successful hat shop on Granville Island in Vancouver before coming home to Halifax.  The shop is unique in that all the clothes in Lisa's lines are made locally by a small staff, and with that in mind the prices seem quite reasonable.  Plus I believe they have another shop at the Sunnyside Mall in Bedford.  Between Turbine and Nova Scotia Crystal I got to thinking that Halifax, as desolate as it seemed on a January weekday, could be on the cutting edge of a move towards a locally-based economy which would be so resilient to, and maybe even buoyed by all the global craziness going on with respect to things like oil prices and interest rates.  A cheerful thought anyhow, reminding me of this video. I've posted it before but I'm not sure if it's been a favourite thing yet:

4.  Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein.

5.  Still digging that Infinite Waters guy and watched a tonne more videos.  Here's a favourite, How to Stop and Spot Mental and Emotional Manipulators.  Wish I'd seen this years ago, but better late than never!   This is a favourite too:  Seven Signs of a Spiritual Awakening.  I like the bit about being all about "promoting what we love instead of attacking what we hate" much more conducive to stress-free living.

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