resistance to persistence

I watched Michael Moore’s SiCKO last night. Living in Canada, I’d never understood the whole pay for service bit. And The US Healthcare Insurance business was confusing as well. A few friends of mine moved to the States after University and I’d always thought that if you move to the US, you’re fine as long as you get health insurance. I’d previously contemplated moving to the US and figured as long as I worked with a large enough company, they’d arrange for health insurance as part of the work benefits package. After watching Sicko, it appears it’s not that easy. Health insurance doesn’t appear to always cover all of your bills, and if there’s a loophole to get out of paying it, you’re stuck with the bill yourself. I’m sure the movie showed select cases and it’s not as bad as Michael Moore portrays. But it’s likely close enough and that scares me.

The movie makes me appreciate the Canadian health care system much more now. It’s never been something I’ve ever had to think about. When we were on a recent cruise ship, I wasn’t feeling well and went to see the medical doctor. At the office, I was presented with a menu of charges. It was such a foreign concept to me. Talking to a doctor was $100. Some stitches was $150. A broken leg another few hundred. If you had a serious medical illness, you’d definitely be in for some huge bills.

What amazed me even more was learning about the British and French health care systems. They’re even better than Canada’s. If you have a baby in France, you can have a person show up at your house to do laundry, cook some meals and clean up for a few hours each week. Daycare is $1/hour. I know a lot of people that pay a good chunk of their salary for the first few years of daycare. France even has a 24-hour doctor service that does house calls for minor illness. Very impressive.

If you’re an American, leave some comments… Is the health system as bad as Michael Moore makes it seem? Would you want government paid health care for everyone if it cost you extra in taxes? And what the heck is a HMO? I hear that term all the time and we don’t have these in Canada.

Nasal Clensing Pot or Nose Bidet as I like to call it

My web traffic took a huge spike a couple weeks ago after my posting on the “nose bidet” or Neti Pot. A Canadian online health store, Aviva.ca, contacted me and since I’d been unable to find a neti pot at any of my local drug stores offered me one to try out. Great offer, and I wanted to try it, so I said sure. I’ve been using Sinus Rinse for the past few weeks, which uses a squeeze bottle technique, and wanted to try a true neti pot.

This week, I got my shipment from Aviva.ca. I had chosen one of their several models of Neti Pots. I was also suprised to receive a great deal more than just the Neti Pot. The box contained a shaker bottle commonly used for mixing powdered health drinks. I also received a bunch of health food supplements and informational product brochures.

The Neti pot itself it very nicely made - a solid ceramic pot, nice enough that you’d think it was something to put with your kitchen dishes. And as expected, the pot worked great. I used a slight saline rinse to wash my sinuses. Since it only uses the gravity flow of the water, it’s less pressure than the squeeze bottle products. A little bit of practise to adjust the angle of my head and the water poured straight through.

If you have sinus and allergy problems and find allergy medicine doesn’t work very well for you, you might want to give a Neti pot a try. And if you’re looking for a place to buy it, Aviva.ca has a selection of a few to choose from.

a large range of products sent to me by Aviva.ca

check out the old equipment in the background. not much has changed

i went to the hearing doctor’s on friday to get my hearing checked. the last few months i was concerned that my hearing was starting to fade. i thought i couldn’t hear people as well in conversations and i listen to an ipod about 2-3 hours a day. time to get checked.

first off, i met an audiologist and he took me into a soundproof room about the size of an elevator. it’s a good thing i’m not claustrophobic. i got some hearing earplugs installed and a little trigger control. with the earplugs installed and no sounds in the room all you can hear is youself breathing.

first, i had to squeeze the trigger when i heard a sound. the sounds got fainter and fainter and fainter….and fainter. i had to time my breathing to be between the faint sounds. next it was on to a sentence i had to hear and repeat. quieter and quieter. lastly some words i had to listen to and repeat. again, timing my breathing so i didn’t make noise during the words.

i felt pretty good about the test thinking i heard everything. but then i realized…i’d never even know if there was noise i didn’t hear. because i wouldn’t hear it. like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody heard it, i wouldn’t know a tree fell.

the results came in and i passed with flying colours. top tier hearing results. sadly, i didn’t get a blue ribbon or a certificate for my wall, “Blaine Kendall has achieved excellence in the field of hearing”.

spoiler alert: gross part ahead.
the doctor took a look in the ears. a bit of a wax ball that he pulled out. since i was a kid, i’ve always had wax buildups in my ears. and once when it was really bad, the nurse flushed my ears with a water solution and it was amazing. i’m a big fan of ear flushing. after it’s over, you feel like you can hear a pin drop.

the process works like this. if you have a bad buildup, you may need to get some baby oil in your ears for a day to soften it up. then the nurse takes a water syringe of warm water and squirts it slowly into your ear. the water sprays your eardrum, bouncing back and flushing out the wax, sometimes with very gross results. but your hearing will be amazing afterwards. don’t try this at home with a normal syringe…it can be dangerous and cause ear damage if you don’t know what you’re doing. best to let a medical professional do it for you. i’ve tried the murine ear kit as well for doing it at home.

there’s also ear candling as well. you place a cone candle in your ear, and the heat melts the wax in your ear and pulls it out. i haven’t tried this, but it apparently has some good results.

have you had your ears checked lately?

J and I got back on Monday from a 2 week vacation in Europe. We had an amazing time, met some great people and basked in scorching sunny weather every day. Here’s how it went…

May 10-12 Venice

Gondoliers over my shoulder. Too expensive.

Amazingly beautiful. A city on water. Streets, alleyways and bridges crossing tiny canal routes. It’s easy to get lost in the tiny streets, especially if you’re used to a grid street system. Thankfully, there’s always markers towards the major landmarks and you can navigate your way based on them. Our hotel, Lanterna di Marco Polo, was midway between the popular Rialto bridge and San Marco square. Room rates are expensive (~$200 CDN/night for a very tiny room in a 3 star hotel). Water taxis are a cheap way to get a good view of the city. Buy a ticket and get on the #1 line. It takes you around the major canal route and makes lots of stops. Just ride it for a while and see the sights. Much cheaper than taking a gondola which is about $100 for an hour ride.

San Marco square is a great place to people watch and relax. The square is full of pigeons and are actually a popular attraction. Vendors sell food and pigeons flock to you and sit on your hands and shoulders. Very funny to watch people freak out when then get 3 dozen birds surrounding them. My favorite attraction here was Doge’s Palace. Shop specialties are ceramic masks. We even saw Neil Patrick Harris (aka Doogie Howser) at the Peggy Guggenheim museum. For meals, we mostly ate pizza, spaghetti and lots of gelato and they were all amazing. Italian pasta is just sooo much better than when you get in North America.

For the following week we took a Royal Caribbean cruise around Italy and Greece. This was our second cruise together and looked forward to having a floating hotel with constant meals and pampering.

May 13 Split, Croatia

The pillar was falling so I spent some time holding it up.

We only spent an afternoon in Split. Unfortunately, it was a Sunday so there weren’t many shops open and most would only take their local currency instead of the Euro. The port looks very modern yet has an old historic area which is great to walk around in.

May 14 Corfu, Greece

I was exhilarated after a dip in the water.

We did a great excursion of a 4×4 tour of the island. A caravan of 16 jeeps took off from the harbour and headed to the mountains, up a series of steep switchbacks (27 of them I believe) to a mountaintop village for a tour and sampling local snacks, wine and ouzo. The tour continued on down the backside of the mountain to a great beach hotel and I took a refreshing dip in the salt water for a half hour. Another lunch of greek salad, mousakka, and lamb spaghetti. J drove the tricky technical way back up the mountain and did an amazing job doing so. A very fun way to see a lot of beautiful sights of the island. We also found out how they harvest the olives in that area. Mesh netting is laid under the trees and as the olives fall off the tree, they’re shaken across the netting down the bottom of the hill for collection. In some cases, they fire shotguns into the trees to shake some olives off the trees.

May 15 Katakolon Greece

The ancient competition field in Olympia

Katakolon is a sleepy port town, with shops that only open when cruise ships arrive. We took an excursion to Olympia to see the beginnings of the Olympics. A lot of great history of sport. Some ruins still exist, but most are toppled pillars. We also got to run around on the competition area of the original site of the Olympics.

May 16 Santorini, Greece

At the top of the hot volcano. Santorini is in the background.

Our excursion took us to the volcano, and a hike to the top. Still active, but the last eruption was in the late 1940’s. A hike to the top of the volcano, and we understood why they were handing out bottles of water - it is HOT. No open volcano pit, but just the heat absorbed by the dark lava. Next, our ship took us to a sheltered bay for a swim in warm volcano springs. We had to jump off the ship into the 10 degree water and swim to shore for the springs. The look on J’s face as she jumped in and immediately realized how cold it was will always stay in my mind. The swim to shore was longer than expected, but the salt water made it easy to float. The springs weren’t really ‘hot’, more like slightly warm. We also got an explanation of the tricky harbour waters in the area, and how a recent cruise ship in the area hit some of the underwater cliffs and eventually sunk[video].

What a view for lunch.

After the tour, we took the cablecar to the top of Santorini. If you’ve never seen Santorini, it’s definitely a spot that has to be visited. A village perched on the top of a sheer mountain cliff with amazing views of the surrounding sea and sunsets. Houses are tightly tucked into each other built into the side of the mountain and one person’s rooftop is the neighbour’s patio. J and I had lunch at a great restaurant with a patio overlooking all the ships docked below. There are 3 ways up and down to the village. 1) cable car like a ski lift 2) ride a donkey up the steps 3) walk up the steps yourself, avoiding the donkey doo. We opted for the very long lineups for the cable car which moved fairly fast. We heard horror stories from people who walked and complained it was very slippery and dirty. We even saw a couple who took the donkeys and the guy fell off and split open his head. I’d obviously recommend the cable car.

May 17 At Sea

Forced rest. The cruise had lots of activities planned to keep everyone busy. This was the only day of the vacation which wasn’t impeccible clear blue skies. A few clouds blocked the sun at times, but nothing much to complain about.

May 18 Naples, Italy

The ancient version of Abbey Road in Pompeii.

Lots to do from Naples, but Naples itself it mostly a busy industrial city with terrible traffic. The worst I’ve ever seen, even worse than Rome. Street lights don’t seem to be obeyed. As our tour guide explained, “red lights are simply an opinon”. We took an excursion to Pompeii. I’ve always wanted to see this and it didn’t disappoint. Pompeii is amazingly preserved huge city, even though only about 2/3rds of it has been excavated. You could easily spend a week in Pompeii exploring the whole city and not see it all. There are even examples of preserved bodies of people who eventually succumbed to the smoke and ashes from the volcanic eruption in 79 AD. A lot of the original pillars are still standing and the foundations of all the buildings are intact, but the upper floors of the buildings were toppled. Storefronts, bakeries, and even a brothel are there.

May 19-21 Rome

The cruise ended in Rome and we planned to stay a few days, but unfortunately not as long as we’d like. We packed as much into our 2 day Rome visit as possible. First stop, the Vatican.

In the middle of St. Peter’s Square with St. Peter’s Basilica in the background.

The Vatican was definitely the highlight of my trip, not for religious regions, but simply for the architectural and artistic elements. I’m a huge sucker for roman columns and St Peters square doesn’t disaapoint. Over 140 giant pillars surround the massive open gathering area. The sheer enormity is just so impressive. Next, St. Peter’s Basilica is the most amazing church I have ever seen and it is definitely one of my favorite places in the world. The artwork and sculptures are so beautiful that I was in awe. Around every corner, another huge marble sculpture and another amazing painting and ceiling. I could have stayed there for hours and I tried to. We also took a long climb up to the Cupola, the large dome for a very high look down into the church. Going up even further still, walking the disorienting slanted stairs up around the top of the cupola you appear at the very top of the church with a 360 degree view over the entire city.

That evening, we found a great neighbourhood restaurant and had some authentic bruschetta and spaghetti. “When in Rome”, right? We stuffed ourselves and couldn’t even touch the pizza that we had ordered. We took a walk to the Trevi fountain to see it lit up at night. Very romantic and impressive.

The Roman Colliseum. I’m not a Gladiator.

For our last day we started with the Colliseum. We paid $10 for a short tour that gave us a free ticket and bypassed all the very long lineups. That timesaving itself was worth it since we didn’t have much time. The tour explained a lot about the history of the Colliseum. On to the Palatino and the Roman Forum to see the ruins. The sun was cooking us and we fasttracked it through the ruins, hiding in shade where possible. Another great lunch of pizza and a visit to the Spanish Steps. This also brought us to the fashion and shopping district, what J had been looking forward to. She had shopping withdrawal and needed a fix. A tour around shops like Ferragamo, Louis Vuitton, Burberry, Hermes, Gucci, Prada, etc and some money spent and J was feeling normal again.

Another great pasta dinner and some more walking of the city finished out the day. We had to leave Europe, but we’ll be back again soon.

All photos by my wonderful wife, J.

i’m not that big. yet.

I’ve been very slim all my life and struggled to put on weight. In the past year, I’ve put on 30 lbs of muscle and finally figured out what I was doing wrong and wanted to share what I’ve learned with other “hard-gainers” out there looking to gain weight. I’m not a fitness pro and I’m not an expert in this subject, but below is what I’ve learned along the way and has been successful for me.

In February 2006, I joined a gym and hired a trainer. I made a commitment that for 1 year in my life, I was going to change my lifestyle and see an improvement in my life. This is what I’ve learned…

Have a Buddy

Without a doubt, I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I have if I didn’t have a commitment to go to the gym on a schedule. If you can find a friend who’s willing to go to the gym with you at the same time, it makes things a lot easier. It’s easy to talk yourself out of going to the gym. And once you’re there, it’s easy to talk yourself into quitting early. In my case, I hired a trainer. I wanted to get results as fast as possible and I wanted someone with the knowledge to get me there. Trainers aren’t cheap and it’s been a big financial commitment but it’s also been the difference between success and failure. Mostly everything I know now I’ve learned from my trainer.

Keep a Schedule

This goes along with having someone to go to the gym with. Have a time that you know is always your gym time. I know every morning when I wake up on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday that I’m going to the gym and I don’t have the voices in my head talking me out of it. Each of those days, I go at the same time, so it becomes my natural routine. This also makes organizing your eating schedule around your workout times easier. When you’re tired both physically and mentally, it’s very easy to just go home and crash on the couch. Resist the urge and go to the gym - you’ll feel very good after your workout.

Make a Plan and Goals

Write out what your goals are. For me, it was gaining a certain amount of weight. For some, it is lifting a certain amount, or losing a certain amount of weight. If you don’t have a goal, you won’t know what you’re working for. Physically write that goal out in your training book. The act of writing it out is a very powerful one. Once you have your goal, you need a plan to get there. Your plan should include your workout schedule, eating plan, etc. Once you reach your first goal, set a new goal and repeat the process. Track your progress. For me, it was weighing myself each week. I gained about 1.5lbs every 2 weeks and each time I stepped on that scale, I wrote the date and weight. Seeing progress happen was very exciting and also gave me some extra adrenaline and energy to finish my workout that day.

Change is Good

You’ll need to switch up your program every once and a while. If you do the same routine, the same workout every week for a year, you’ll be very bored and unexcited. You’ll also plateau in your progress. Change your workout every couple months to include different exercises and body parts.

Eat, Eat, Eat!

I learned early on that I wasn’t gaining weight because I wasn’t eating nearly enough, but I always thought I was. I tracked what I ate for a week and showed my trainer. He laughed. I was eating half of what I needed to put on weight. I always ate very healthy, but just never enough. And what I was eating, I was burning off each day with my active life.

Write down what you consume every day for a week. You’ll soon see it’s not very much. Now double that amount and you’ll start gaining weight, it’s that simple. It’s a hard goal to meet, but you need the energy to fuel your workouts and fuel the muscle building process. I use the word ‘fuel’ on purpose. When I increased my eating, I felt like a furnace. My body became a food processing machine, and my body temperature actually felt much warmer.

Doubling your food intake is not an easy thing to do. It’s expensive and time consuming. Start by increasing the quantity you eat at each meal. Going to the gym isn’t your only workout time. Meals will be workouts too. You’ll have to force yourself to eat more, just like you’ll force yourself to do more reps or lift more weight. Next, increase the number of meals you eat. For me, I would eat nearly every 2 hours. Here’s my schedule for an average workout day.

• 8am - breakfast
• 10:30am - eat a large snack
• 12:30 - lunch
• 3pm - eat a large snack
• 5pm - workout. sip 1 litre of gatorade through workout
• 6pm - 1litre gatorade and protein shake
• 8pm - dinner
• 11pm - protein/fruit shake

Tip: I put meeting reminders in my electronic calendar and cellphone for my snacktimes so I don’t miss my times to eat when I’m busy at work. It’s easy to delay eating a meal and forget about it altogether.

What you eat is still important. For “hard-gainers”, you don’t have to worry too much about fat, but don’t go overboard. A good burger can be somewhat healthy, but all that ketchup is fat. I could eat pretty much anything I wanted, but thankfully I enjoy eating healthy food. I never watched protein-fat-carb ratios, but I tried to limit the total grams of fat consumed each day to a certain amount. And carbs can be your best friend to someone who needs to gain weight. I love steak and baked potatoes, and thankfully that’s what I needed to eat.

Water Is Essential

Also, throughout the day, drink lots of water. Water keeps your muscles hydrated so you can use them when you need it, and a high protein diet needs more water than usual. Ensure you drink more than 2 liters of water per day.

Protein

Aim for 1gram of protein per pound of body weight. So if you’re 150lbs, consume approximately 150grams of protein per day. I try to get as much protein as I can naturally through food, but I use vanilla whey protein powder post-workout and in my shakes as a meal replacement.

Workout Fuel

2 very important parts of the workout are what you’re drinking during and immediately after. During your workout, continually sip a sports drink like Gatorade. You need a sports drink to stay fueled during your workouts. Water is not sufficient. Drinking nothing at all is even worse. After you’ve completed your workout, I think there is approximately a 30-minute window that is very crucial to getting protein into your system to supply your muscles to start rebuilding. A carbohydrate drink with a high glycemic index (such as Gatorade) slows that time period and allows you to get the protein to your muscles.

Every day when I go to the gym, I bring the following:

• 1litre Nalgene bottle
• 2 scoops of gatorade crystals
• 1 ziploc bag with 2 scoops of lemon-lime gatorade crystals and 2 scoops of vanilla whey protein(~25g protein).

I fill the Nalgene with 2 scoops of gatorade crystals and 1 litre of water and drink this during my workout between sets. It’s usually gone by the time my hour workout is completed. After my shower, I fill the nalgene with water again and pour in the gatorade/whey protein mixture. I find the lemon and vanilla mixture to be the best tasting combination. Mix well so no powder remains. Drink this over the next 20 minutes.

An hour before bed, I try to have another shake with some mass building whey protein. In a blender, I mix the following:

• 1 cup of frozen fruits (mixed berries, strawberries, etc)
• 100ml of yogurt
• 2 scoops of mass whey protein (~25g protein)
• 2 cups of orange juice

Some people might say use milk instead of juice for some extra natural protein, but i find the juice makes it all taste better and easier to drink. This is a good energy supply to your body to keep it fueled through the night as it’s repairing and building new muscle.

Workout Program

Best to consult with a trainer on this, or spend a lot of time trying to learn it on your own. There’s a reason why people go to school to be trainers - because they learn the right way to work out. You wouldn’t read a book to take out your appendix - you go to a doctor who has the knowledge. Likewise for a fitness professional. If you can’t afford to continue with a trainer, hire one to at least design a program for you to do on your own. Although, there is a big advantage of having a trainer there through your workout to spot you on the really heavy weights to lift a little off as you’re finishing your last couple reps. This will get you moving onto bigger weights faster. My trainer designs and adjusts my program to target areas that need to be worked on. And every couple months we switch the exercises around.
One part of my workout plan starting out was “No Cardio”. Since I was already very slim and had a very low body fat percentage, I didn’t do any cardio. Cardio wasn’t a priority for me as a goal and any cardio I did would simply burn more calories that I would have to replace again with even more food. Now I do a fast 5 minute treadmill session to get the heart going to enable fat to burn during my workout and supply energy to the muscles. As I get to my final physical weight, I’ll adjust my program to a balance of cardio and weight training.

Rest, Rest, Rest!

Getting enough rest is definitely important. You’ll feel wiped after a good workout and naps are a good way to get them in through the day. When you sleep is when your body gets to repair itself, so don’t feel guilty that you’re being lazy. Sleeping is one area I need to increase as I only get 7 hours which isn’t ideal if you want to get bigger.

One book I found very helpful and really explained a lot about eating is Power Eating by Susan Kleiner. I would highly recommend it. It really explained a lot about how foods work for your body, what you need to eat when and really made sense.

I hope this information helps some people out there and I’d love to hear some comments from you.

I hate to admit this, but i watched Oprah today. My wife was watching and Dr Oz was on. He always explains the embarrassing questions about the body from a doctor’s perspective. All your pooping, farting, gross questions get answered.

See that little gravy bowl kinda thing above? That’s called a Neti Pot. Also jokingly called a nose bidet. You fill it with some warm salt water solution and pour it into your nose. “WHAT!?” you say. I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t seen it demonstrated. You tilt your head at an angle, shove it up your nose and pour the water.

The water makes its way through your sinuses and out through the other nostril. I really want to try this when my allergies start acting up this spring. I always imagined something like this when I know I have pollen irritating my sinuses that I just can’t clear. This is the solution for the problem. It’s apparently safe enough to do on a daily basis. Look for them in drug stores and health food stores.

Read here to see how the practise works.

UPDATE: Aviva.ca, an online health retailer, sent me a great Neti pot to try out. Read all about it here.

It looks so much like a photograph, I can’t believe it’s actually a small model. I would never have the patience to do anything like this. Maybe when I was younger, but my MTV-generation training has bred me for instant gratification. Now, Now, Now.

Dutch artist Edwin Zwakman produces large-scale photographs by painstakingly reconstructing objects and landscapes from memory. The pylon pictured above is 50cm tall, made from approximately 400 pieces of copper soldered together, the cables are made from vinyl and cotton wool is used in background.

click image to view it larger

sneakerplay.com is having a shoe design contest using the NikeID website. I picked the colours and name as a tribute to my dad (a philly flyers fan), i love the colour orange and some colour elements from a favorite old pair of DC shoes I can’t find anymore. The winner of the contest gets 2 pairs of shoes bought for them - 1 to wear, 1 to display.

Below are my designs. Check them out and vote.
Check out my Team Designs!

i always resisted joining most of the social networks. friendster and orkut seemed silly to me - i had enough friends at the time and my friends wouldn’t join it anyways. myspace is just plain ugly. but i’ve been getting facebook email requests from friends. it also seemed like a worthwhile network to join since a lot of my photography and blogging contacts seemed to be on facebook and i wanted to make sure i wasn’t missing any more events. i signed up last week and i’ve been addicted. more interesting than email, and i’ve found friends i went to school with, worked with and even went to elementary school with. it’s amazing to stumble across people you lost contact with.

the interface is very clean and organized. very un-myspace. how anyone can look through myspace pages amazes me…so much visual diarrea. facebook just keeps me more connected to my friends. with email, it’s a hurdle to remember to send a friend an email. with facebook, their face appears randomly in your friends list to say “hey…what’s that friend been up to lately?”. you can leave quick notes and messages. update your status and people know what you’re up to, whether something as important as buying a home, or as unimportant as getting a coffee.

i think the real tipping point to joining, is due to the large number of non-tech friends who’ve joined. with myspace and other sites, it’s usually for the more tech crowd. i have friends in facebook that i know would never create a blog or join myspace. facebook is very friendly and easy to use. there are no hurdles to joining. fill in a couple fields, add some friends, fill out the rest as you please or don’t. a very relaxed webapp. the most amazing thing i found about facebook is how easy it is to add your friends. it can check your yahoo/hotmail/gmail addressbook and look for friends already on facebook or offer to send them an invite email. it found friends of mine right away. very cool.

so if you’re on facebook add me as a friend.

this week is very busy.
gym on tuesday and thursday nights.
prepping for a day of snowboarding this weekend. get the legs ready for the whistler trip.
work is crazy busy with new product releases happening.
i’ve got a bunch of photos to edit from previous weeks plus a photo shoot i did on the weekend.
and last night i was running all over the city.
first i met up with ian barr from hillandknowlton.com. Motorola is doing a phone seeding to some bloggers and I went to pickup my Motorola KRZR phone. very cool, very sleek, well designed - review to follow.
after that, i cabbed over the the AGO for the bloggers preview of the emily carr exhibition opening.
articles to come on both of those events soon.