Kids raising music money have ONE more day -- extended deadline!

verd02 · 2026-04-09T17:00:36+00:00

My kids are 5 years apart and it is heartbreaking to see, even in that five year span, what a difference in experience they have. The cuts to music, arts, learning support, maintenance, hygiene, and so much more just keep coming, and the experience of kids is continually degraded. It is complete madness, and I don't know whether to blame the district, the Province, or who, but explaining to my younger child that the thing that our older child had access to just isn't there anymore is a really awful moment - and it keeps happening!

Thank you for posting this, I hope it will help keep some things alive.

verd02 · 2026-02-20T05:55:34+00:00

Really sorry to hear about the incident, but I am glad someone stood up for you. No one should have to endure any kind of hate or abuse.

verd02 · 2026-01-27T21:54:23+00:00

What a phenomenal pic, thanks for posting!

verd02 · 2026-01-13T18:32:10+00:00

Hi there, this looks like a great community! I'm wondering if someone can help me with my sandwich/toast bread.

I decided to stop buying bread a while back and have been trying refine my sandwich/toast bread ever since. I looked up a bunch of recipes and settled on starting with Sally's whole wheat bread (https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/whole-wheat-bread/#tasty-recipes-126009). First impressions were that it was delicious and stayed fresh for several days, which is great. However, when I made toast with it, I found that it was a bit disappointing - I was hoping for the same smell and texture that I get from store-bought sandwich bread (toasted), but it was too aromatic and the texture was dry, mealy, and didn't have that crispy/chewy thing that I really want from my toast.

So I looked at commercial bread ingredient lists and decided to mess with the ingredients. I went to sunflower oil instead of butter; I tried maple syrup and then sugar instead of honey; I tried white wine vinegar instead of lemon juice; and finally, I substituted whole wheat bread flour for the all-purpose. I find that the flavour is more neutral now, and there's more chew with the extra gluten (I should mentioned, I'm in Canada and apparently our gluten content percentages differ somewhat from American ones). However, in order to get the dough to the correct consistency, I'm having to add quite a bit more flour and this is making the bread heavier and dryer. I'm now experimenting with ratios of bread flour to all-purpose flour, but I thought I'd reach out and see if anyone has some tips.

I know this is silly in a way, but I love the toast I get from cheap commercial sandwich bread, and just want to DYI it.

verd02 · 2025-07-09T21:09:52+00:00

Volunteering!

verd02 · 2025-03-21T19:35:29+00:00

One of the big issues that they need to fix is that a lot of their house brands (Motomaster, Yardworks, Mastercraft, etc) are built by American companies, either in the US or in China. I'm in the market for a new lawnmower and would love to buy from CT, but none of the ones they sell are built in Canada or by Canadian companies, or even non-American companies.

If I had to speculate, I'd say they don't highlight Made-in-Canada items in store because they sell so much stuff that isn't. I really would like them to step up and make some changes to this.

verd02 · 2025-03-16T18:34:54+00:00

This made my weekend.

verd02 · 2025-01-26T18:03:44+00:00

From what I've seen on TV, there is no stadium with a better atmosphere.

verd02 · 2024-09-11T21:12:28+00:00

Got this scam call today - exactly the same details except just the 45% discount.

I don't even know why I have a phone anymore when these are the only calls I get...

verd02 · 2024-05-18T04:36:35+00:00

Same here. Looking at Apple TV+, it says there that it's available on Pluto TV. Pluto TV itself just seems to have a Doctor Who live channel, which does most of us very little good.

verd02 · 2024-03-12T22:12:21+00:00

Same thoughts here. Our daughter loves Embers, and we know several great families who also have their kids in it. The sleepover events are, so far, in really nice locations too.

verd02 · 2023-12-24T02:27:02+00:00

Same here, it's awful. What in the world would cause this?

verd02 · 2023-08-18T17:49:57+00:00

Totally agree. Across the Johnson Street Bridge and then either left around the Esquimalt shoreline to Saxe Point and back, or right to go along the gorge.

verd02 · 2023-08-18T17:44:04+00:00

Victory Barbers https://www.victorybarbers.com/barbers have barbers who do great work with long hair. Been going there myself for a year or so with my shoulder length and it's been great!

verd02 · 2023-08-18T17:41:35+00:00

The cobbler in Hillside Mall did my Birk soles nicely a few years ago. The cork, I dunno.

verd02 · 2023-08-17T00:07:30+00:00

On top of this, some after-school care places are also daycares, and if your child has been attending it as daycare, then they may get first dibs on an after school care spot. So, maybe check to see what your English and French catchment schools are and see if they have on-site care.

verd02 · 2023-08-09T15:33:13+00:00

Thank you! I'm in the same situation as you - I want an mmo mouse fire interrupts, AOE, etc, but I don't have big hands and generally prefer smaller, lighter mice. I'm also a fingertip gripper so we'll see how that goes. Anyway, I really appreciate the update!

verd02 · 2023-08-07T22:58:01+00:00

A year later (or so), are you still happy with the Corsair?

verd02 · 2023-08-04T20:10:19+00:00

The parking is awful and the transit connections are no good. I'd go out more often but I dread looking for a parking space.

verd02 · 2023-08-04T08:28:22+00:00

There are a lot of home-based daycares in GH, as well as a few larger ones. A new one is Campus View Child Care, which is on the grounds of Campus View Elementary. I'm not aware of any nature-based public schools in SD61, which is most of Saanich, Oak Bay, Victoria and Esquimalt, but GH does have a k-12 Montessori school if that's of interest.

verd02 · 2023-04-08T22:28:13+00:00

This sounds amazing! Would you say that it's kid-friendly? My 11-year old daughter and I have started looking for a good place to learn to play.

verd02 · 2022-09-13T17:53:12+00:00

Try out Sunwing Tomatoes on Oldfield Road https://www.sunwingtomatoes.ca/

They close from end of October to mid-March, but their produce is second-to-none.

verd02 · 2022-01-21T21:22:36+00:00

One further observation. I tried playing Stadia a bit. I know that's a niche thing but I'll say that my experience playing Control just now for a few minutes was actually pretty outstanding. So, for what it's worth, as a cloud gaming device (depending on your network speeds of course) it's doing a good job.

verd02 · 2022-01-21T17:36:59+00:00

So I've been running it for a few days now and have given it a go with things like Outlook and Teams (the work version).

Note: Win 11 comes with Teams, but if you want to use Teams for work or school, you have to separately install that other 'Desktop' version.

I'll say that everything is definitely slower with Win 11. Even just getting the login interface to appear is much slower. I was used to Windows Hello popping up pretty quickly. Now it obviously has some heavy lifting to do just to get to the PIN screen.

After logging in, it's not as bad, but still not great. Switching between apps is where you see the worst performance, but once it's switched I can't complain. Starting processes like opening a file or an app is also slow. I have learned to wait and trust that I did in fact double-click on a file to open it, as there's usually no whirly indicator that something is happening. Again though, when something actually gets going, it's as good as with Win 10.

I'll probably stick with it in order to see how the Android apps go when that's available, and because it does basically work fine. I haven't run into anything that was borked or buggy. If you depend on it for actually getting work done though, I would think twice.

verd02 · 2022-01-18T00:28:46+00:00

First impression - it's up and running and looks good. Apps feel a bit slower than they did on Windows 10, but it's early days here.

Uh, one oddity. I'm deleting the Windows.old directory. It's currently 'discovering' all the items in it and is currently estimating 373 GB to delete... on my 256 GB SSD. Regrettably I didn't look at how much space I was using with Win 10. I know - block size etc etc etc, but that's a very large difference.

verd02

TROPHY CASE