The weekly speedlink on Beyond the Rhetoric continues, starting with a recent post by Stacey Robinsmith on how you can beat the heat in Metro Vancouver. Prior to the recent forest fires in our area, Vancouver was hit with quite the heat wave. Cracking open a cold beverage is a good start, but you might want to pack up the family to enjoy the “free” air conditioning at your local IKEA or Costco too. Conveniently, both stores have cheap hot dogs too.
With the arrival of summer has come the return of the night markets in Richmond, but what about some outdoor foodie-ism in the Fraser Valley? Sahiba provides some of her highlights from the Surrey Night Market, now in its second year. While you can still get your bubble tea and tornado potatoes, Surrey’s take on the night market predictably comes with far more options in terms of East Indian food. The kulfi looks like a good way to beat the heat of the summer.
Part of the problem with so many children’s birthday parties is the abundance of gifts that the birthday child doesn’t even want. There has to be a better way and Buzz Bishop may have discovered it with the notion of 50/50 parties for charity. Attendees bring a small amount of cash ($5 to $10) in an envelope instead of a regular present. Half of the money goes towards a gift for the birthday kid and the other half goes to a charity of his or her choosing. It’s win-win-win all around!
Continuing on the subject of parenting, Pete Gilbert asked his Facebook buddies for some advice on how to encourage his kids to do their chores. He was looking for a suitable reward system for his children, aged 3, 5, and 8. One of the fellow dads said that they use a marble system in their household. Marbles are added to the child’s jar for doing good things and marbles are taken away for misbehaving. The marbles are then “cashed in” on a weekly basis for a reward, like extra screen time or a nice dessert.
And we close this week’s collection with a hypothetical question from fellow freelance writer James Chartrand. If you could take your existing business and start all over again, what would you do differently? For me, I wouldn’t have allowed myself to get side-tracked with projects and clients that weren’t related to writing at all; I took a couple of data entry type contracts early in my career that added nothing to my expertise or skill set. They didn’t pay well either and my time could have been far better spent.
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