Yorkvill Village Art Festival - Review

This past weekend, I had the chance to visit Yorkville Village Arts Festival. 

YVAF is an exhibition of contemporary arts done by OCAD university students and recent grads located in downtown Toronto’s Oval Square. The location itself features some of the most fashionable clothing and lifestyle brands.

I found the exhibition a small entertaining event that will run till Nov 9th and presents beautiful paintings, sculptures, textile and acrylic work. 

Below is a sneak peek to the event: 

Art by Lindsay Ferriss

(Quiet) games for 3 to 5 year olds

Cold season is fast approaching and I know there will be more than one occasion that we (parents) have to entertain! Our kids. 

This year, after our recent hospital experience when my son was admitted and not allowed to leave his room for almost a week, I think I’m a bit more prepared ;) and I thought maybe I can share some of our favorite quiet games and toys with you.

*If you want to know what happened to my son, read about it here.

In this post I am going to stick to Puzzles only because you can do so much with them:

• Not only solve them but you can use them instead of plush toys and do a little pretend play: take those farm animals to the stable, dinosaurs for a battle, give them some food, make them jump in muddy puddle then wash them, turn the lights off so they sleep when they don’t want to!, or keep them awake when they are too tired!
• Try using the puzzles pieces as puppets : come up with a story and then put a puppet show. Or you move the pieces to tell your story to your child, or he can be the one who acts and you tell the story (or reverse!).
• Teach them something new about the animals/objects; 

Doctors are humans too! They make mistakes, can be inexperinced or unethical...get a second and/or third opinion.

Rant Alert!!! this post is to share with you how inexperienced and unethical some doctors and nurses can be and how big of a risk we take if we only take the advice of doctors without listening to that inner voice that we all have. 

It all started last Thursday with a mild tummy trouble, then fever accompanied with diarrhea on Friday. Things got worse when vomiting was added to the equation on Saturday night. On Sunday morning, things were out of control; we couldn’t lower my son's temperature, despite he had lots of Advil & Tylenol in his system so we rushed to Mackenzie Health Hospital’s emergency.

After about 4-5 hours of waiting, doctor Shelton visited my son. He just asked a few questions and concluded that we should wait for few days then if he is not any better, we can go to see our family doctor and that it’s just a virus nothing to worry about.

So we left the hospital but when we got home, the fever went back rocket high to 39.5 even though he was almost maxed on the dosage of Advil AND Tylenol. We wrapped him in a cold wet blanket and went back to Mackenzie Health’s emergency. We told the nurses that we were there half an hour ago and that we insist on seeing the doctor again because of the high fever and that my son was very pale with blue lips, shivering and feeling very weak.

First they asked us to stay in the line again to "Get a number and create another chart!!"....after they

Thinking about false memory

I have recently been thinking a lot about thinking.

The thing is, last Friday when I was leaving work, I kept reminding myself to take my laptop with me, since I had to work remote the Monday after. Then comes Monday morning, I open my bag and there it was – nothing!

I panicked....

I had this vivid memory of me putting the laptop in my bag before heading out of work, so, I searched the entire home inch by inch:  in the fridge, under the beds, in the closets, in the bathroom... (well, I have a little one, so things might end up in places that you wouldn’t have imagined, and not always by him!). When I found nothing except forgotten toys, I was pretty sure that my bag was nicked without me noticing...Meanwhile my husband kept asking me to call a colleague to take a look at my desk to see if it is there or not. Finally I did it, only to prove him wrong…and u can guess what happened. Right? My colleague said it was there, sitting on my desk!!!  

Has this ever happened to you?

This whole embarrassing event got me thinking: then why I had that false memory? Is there something wrong with my brain? How can a memory be false, when it appears so vivid and detailed?  What other memories do I have from my life that might be false?!! (This one is actually frightening, so I try not to think of it much!) Is there a way to improve my memory and to detect or eliminate false memories?

It got me so fascinated that I am now taking the online course of “The Science of Everyday Thinking” thrue edx.org hoping to know more about our brain and thinking abilities. I am going to share some of the interesting things that I learn along with an artistic twist. Hoping you can enjoy it too.

XO

Supplies for Watercolor painting

This is a watercolor sketch of some of the tools and supplies i use for my watercolor paintings.

The palette shown above is an old plastic palette filled with tube paints from different brands of watercolor; Van Gogh, Reeves and Cotman paints. When using this palette, I mix my paints with water on a few white dinner plates which are dedicated for this purpose.

Colors in this palette are :

• Cadmium Yellow
• Camium Lemon
• Yellow Ochre
• Golden
• Indian Red
• Cadmium Red
• Red Ochre
• English Red
• Carmine
• Madder Lake red light
• Raw Sienna
• Ultramarine
• Blue
• Cobalt Blue

Free Facebook Covers

Instruction to download:

1. click on an image that you like
2. It will open a new window
3. "right click" on the image in the new window
4. choose " save image as ..." 
5. click on the folder that you want to save the image in 
6. click "save" button
7. Please don't forget to mention my blog and this page when using the images :) 
8. Check this page frequently and my blog for updates.

Have fun...

Drawing and sketching - Journal Page

It's been a while that i wanted to give these markers a try. I have seen lots of amazing works using them and wanted to try them my self.

I did this sketch during a lunch breaks. I'm glad i made my lunch time productive.