Saturday 29 August 2009

trailrider

ok...check this out. it could really happen.
Nicole (another house family volunteer) and I (and mike) have suggested and hope to run the 10km trail run of the Canuck Place Adventure Challenge with Luke. Why the challenge? Luke is young kid who spends his time in a pretty skookum wheelchair. The wheelchair, although pretty hefty and solid, is not built for the rocks, boulders, creeks and bridges that the trail offers.
go here: www.bcmos.org
and check out the trailrider. A chair that was the brainchild of former Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan and friends.

Now we just need to make it happen!

Monday 24 August 2009

something is brewing for the race....

..so Leanne says, "Malcolm can you PLEASE help us on Friday for the Trailrider session at Jericho?!?!"

little did she know what thoughts might run through my brain (and similar thoughts through Nicole's brain) as we wheelbarrowed around jericho park and along the beach (past topless woman I might add) that day.

I look to Nicole at the end of our little walk about and say, "are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

fast forward 3 weeks later and Nicole goes for a run on the course and reports that it is (with some help) something that we can do....with somebody light!
I have been toying with the idea of somebody doing the kayak with me...but nothing ever came to fruition.

"hello Mrs Galvani. My name is Malcolm Chrystal. I am a volunteer at Canuck Place. We met at the Adventure Challenge last year....."

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have an epic sherpa event happening on the run in this year's adventure challenge!

Gill...are you able to help Nicole, Luke and I set up a visit with BCMOS sometime before the race so we can see how the chair and luke fit together?

I am away (selling seashells to hawaiians) until the 7th.

Yea!
Go team go!
malcolm

Thursday 20 August 2009

$20 to Canuck Place from Lip Balm Sales

ok....it is not $1000's, but I am proud to donate $20 to Canuck Place for some sales of our Organic Island Shell Lip Balm. Five dollars from peer volunteer extaordinaire Joan and $15 from the Jericho Oceanman event a couple of weeks ago.

Friday 14 August 2009

A week after...

I am still recovering a little from friday night! Actually I am recovering from a week of camping...the last night complete with 18 hours of full on RAIN. Packing up early in the morning in full rain storm at 0700.

Back to Friday. Great night all 'round. Dinner was awesome. Right off the bat after dinner I was targeted by a couple of brothers who were looking for a bit of rough action. I was their man!

Martin was in for Santos and he brought his wife in so she could help sign with one of the girls in the house. She has a vocabulary of over a 1000 words and it is awesome that Liz was in to hang out with her. Joan and Holl-y (or is that Holl-y?) were in and we were all ready for the night.

The brothers: a couple of rambunctious boys (one in Grage 8 and the other in Grade 12) that I will call J1 and J2, wanted to wrestle. Problem was wrestling in their minds is the WWF variety. All good and fun to watch on TV...but not the best for everyday folk. I set my mind to teach them how to wrestle the good old fashion amateur/collegiate style! We had tons of fun and J1 the elder was the eventual winner for the night! I think I broke my nose. It still hurts. J2, in some stupendous escape rolled up over my chest and face...smashing the cartilage. OW!

We wrestled for about 75 minutes! Inside for a break. After a little bit Holl-y (or -i) came down with the rest of the crew who wanted to go outside again. Out we go and just hung for a while until we started a game of hide and seek.

J2 eventually had the accident I was warning of him all night.

J2 laughs. Like K-Don laughs...full belly laughs that are exhausting and hard on your bladder. I kept warning him, "you are going to pee your pants if you keep laughing like that!".
J2 and I were hiding in the garden in a little cement nook. He is under the table...laughing (not good hiding strategy as that was how we were found in the bushes by his brother. All of a sudden somebody (not me) lets one rip and it reverberates against the concrete. Guess what? THAT IS FUNNY! J2 laughs even more....and then he squeals, "I peed my pants!!!!", which causes us to lose it completely! (it wasn't a gamestopper...just a little bit!)

Words of wisdom for the night:
When possible everybody should laugh so hard that you pee your pants. SOmetimes there is a good reason for everything!

Saturday 1 August 2009

Pokemon...

Hi, it's Joan!

Last night was pretty quiet. All the kids were pretty tired from all the sailing and fun at Jericho beach for the Summer in the City event! Malcolm was there helping out - too bad I couldn't go because I had lab volunteering!

Anyways, so there was me, Holly, Tony, and an on-call peer Sumeda. Kids in the house included Kelly, Mitch, Trent, Bradley, Reg, and baby Kate.

After dinner, Kelly went right to bed as she was exhausted from the long and exciting day.

Bradley kept on playing Pokemon Platinum on his Nintendo DS. This was when Holly and I launched into a nerdy nostalgic conversation about the oldest pokemon games on the old game boy colour we used to play. We talked about how Pikachu was useless wherease Squirtle was clearly superior...how Metapod was so annoying because all it could do was "harden"...oh it was delightful! But hey, we're not too old to play these games...I got a new DS lite recently, and I've been playing Pokemon Platinum on it too...=)

Afterwards, most of us went upstairs to the school room, except for Sumedha, who spent her night downstairs with baby Kate. Kate is soooo cute! She's only 11 months old, but she's pretty big, and her arms are so chubby. I was quite envious of Sumedha for getting to cuddle her.

For us in the school room, Trent and Mitch spent the night playing PS3 and watching videos on the computer, Bradley played computer games, and Tony brought Reg to the Snoezelen room and the piano to have some musical entertainment. While watching some Ghost Hunters with Trent, I was also catching up on some Harry Potter...

then it came to bath time! Trent and Mitch both had to take a bath...but neither of them wanted to go first. In the end, Trent got to go after Mitch because he won the polite contest (Mitch was getting quite angry and started being a bit rude).

And...that was it! Malcolm, I can't wait to see the lip balm samples!

BCMOS and the TrailRider

http://www.bcmos.org/index.php

yesterday we had the opportunity to go bushwhacking with some kids from the house with a very cool stroller/wheelchair/all terrain vehicle. it is called the TrailRider.
BCMOS is a group that makes the outsdoors accessible to people stuck in chairs.
They offer opportunities to go in gliders and work with these guys: DSA
They are the Disabled Sailing Association of BC. The kids got to go out in specialised Martin 16 sailboats.
Former Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan (himself chair bound) appears to be the driving force/inspiration behind both of these organisations.

Nicole (who did the Challenge last year) and I had a thought: Could we haul a kid on our run portion of the challenge? hhmmmmmmmm!!!!

The Blog

My name is Malcolm and I was a volunteer at Canuck Place Children's Hospice in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada for nearly seven years. Now I support them by raising money by participating in the Canuck Place Adventure Challenges!


I said hospice. Not really a word that you associate with children but there you go. We will tell you about the house as this blog progresses with the hope that you will learn, and as you learn we hope that you will share. The purpose of the Adventure Challenge is to raise money for AND awareness about Canuck Place.

The name of each kid at the house you read about has been changed.

September 14th and 15th are the dates for the next Adventure Challenges.

You can sponsor me for the race here: Adventure Challenge
Maybe you should do the race?

Names:

Just a quick note about the names of the kids in the house that you will read about: they are made up!