Hi everyone! This post is especially for those of you following us in the Quinte region. This Sunday, the team over at JB Printing is holding a very special event to raise money and awareness for Sarcoma, as part of the International Sarcoma Awareness Week.

What’s a Step & Fetch? We’ll let Tamara, from JB explain:

This Sunday July 25th, we are hosting a Sarcoma STEP & FETCH Cancer awareness event at JB Printing!

The walk starts at Quinte West City Hall at 1 pm, weaves throughout Trenton and then ends at JB Printing. Participants collect Sarcoma Fact Cards along the way, once back at JB Printing, the fact cards turn into tickets for chances to win some FANTASTIC door prizes!

Please come out for this ALL ages, Rain or shine event! There will be great food, awesome prizes and a delicious bake sale! If you can’t make it to the walk, come out for the BBQ & Bake sale! The Whystle Dawgs Band will be performing too! Hope to see you there!

Call or email me for details; 613-394-3245, [email protected]

Thanks!!
Tamara (from JB Printing)

Registration is FREE, and it’s open to all ages. It sounds like a blast! Make sure to check it out, support a good cause, and have a tonne of fun along the way.

I have a personal blog this week. In light of recent family events, I would like to focus on good heart health. While sometimes you do all that you can to promote a healthy lifestyle, like exercising, eating right and being positive…life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect it. This post is for my dad.

It is important at any age to promote healthy living. I recently picked up a copy of Alive magazine at my local Good Health Mart and I really enjoyed reading the articles. I actually read the entire magazine from cover to cover, which is rare for me. It is very informative, while being a light read. This month the magazine is dedicated to women and the many natural health and wellness solutions available for increased well-being. I especially enjoyed the article on the health benefits of the ten most popular fruits of the season. If you are unable to find a copy of this magazine, visit www.alive.com to view the articles online or to sign up for their newsletter.

An invaluable source for good heart health is the Heart and Stroke foundation They have interactive and easy to use Action Plans online to help you reach your goals. As the website states, with these e-tools you will be able to set and achieve goals to manage your blood pressure or achieve a healthy weight and keep track of important details such as medications and appointments. The first step is to take the assessment in order to be directed to the plan that’s right for you. The assessment is based on well-researched science. It’s free, confidential and takes about 10 minutes to complete.

I have started to follow Tosca Reno’s Eat Clean Diet as a way of promoting good heart health, along with going to my spinning/bosu class every week, and I feel great. I recommend her book – the Eat Clean Diet Recharged! to anyone who would like to embrace a cleaner healthier body.

It’s a nice sunny day today with blue skies. The wind is picking up now – it’s a perfect day for a sail.

Other heart healthy links:

• Toscareno.com
• CHFA.ca
• goodhealthmart.com
• hpechu.on.ca

—Kathy

I saw something beautiful last night. Yes, it was ‘The Decision’ on TSN (ESPN). No, I am not an avid basketball fan who is joining the Miami fan bandwagon. If anything, I am a little disappointed to see another Raptor star leave Toronto (Stoudamire, McGrady, Carter and now Bosh). Sorry, not the right blog for this… back to marketing.

Over the last couple days, the media has been drooling over where arguably one of the best NBA players of all time, Lebron James, will be playing next year.  After seven years in Cleveland without a championship, Lebron felt it might be time to move on.

What do you get when you put ‘The most sought-after free agent of all time’, ‘6 NBA teams that would do anything to get him’, ‘a huge mass of intrigued fans’ and ‘media boosting his ego from every angle’?

The ability to create an event (or spectacle) that benefits a great cause!

All the proceeds from this televised event, where Lebron James announced he would be joining the Miami Heat, went to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. We saw ads from:

Hotels.ca, Redbull, Nestea, Moores, McDonalds, Degree, Shell, ABC (World cup coverage), Vitamin Water, Bing, TSN (the OPEN coverage), Red Lobster, OH! Henry, Sapporo, Mercedes-Benz, University of Phoenix, Nissan Versa, Lenscrafters & Malibu Rum

Along with the five scholarships from the University of Phoenix, I am interested to hear how much money will be raised from the event/six city tour.

I think it is amazing that people were quickly able to turn this media frenzy into something that can tangibly help people. I know a lot of sports fans think this was a joke and many people could have guessed he was going to Miami to join Wade and Bosh. They criticized him for this just being an ego-driven televised special to boost his ego, but it wasn’t.

Sure, he could have just done a press conference and been done with it. The build up that gathered over 150,000 Twitter followers in 7 hours was critical to making this a success that companies were dying to be a part of.

Brilliant is all I can say.

What are your thoughts?

I’m sure most of us have coffee on a regular basis. I didn’t drink coffee before I got to college, although I really loved the smell of it. I had tried tea (orange pekoe) before and I hated the taste and smell of it for years. It wasn’t until half-way through college that I decided to open my mind (and palette) a little and try tea in a proper sense. This will be my handy introduction to tea, and hopefully some of you might make a similar journey to absolutely loving tea as much as I do.

What is tea, and here can I find it?

Tea is the leaf of the tea tree. Often herbal tisanes are mislabelled ‘tea’, but only the leaves of the tea tree are properly called ‘tea’. The different types of tea (green, white, black, yellow) come from the different processes for picking, drying, and curing the leaves. Because of this every type of tea has slightly different ideal temperatures and steeping times. The best place to find great tasting loose-leaf tea are actually international importers and asian or middle-eastern grocery stores. You can get large amounts of good quality tea from international stores because their customers need tea, but refuse to pay too much for it because they know the price of the tea at its origin. If you buy tea from a store that caters to North Americans they will charge what they can get away with because they assume you’re ignorant of its true price.

Which is better, bagged tea or loose-leaf tea?

If you’re a coffee drinker I would explain it like this: which is better, buying pre-ground coffee and having that in a bag until you use it – or grinding your own beans fresh before making each pot of coffee? Loose leaf tea tends to be cheaper than the ‘convenience’ of bags, it is almost always far more flavourful, and allows you to ration or blend your different leaves to custom tailor your cup of tea (where bags are a pre-determined size, and short of tearing multiple bags open and mixing them, you are stuck with the kind you purchased.)

What’s a good tea to start out with if I’m a coffee drinker?

Typically tea will have less caffeine than coffee so if you’re replacing coffee with tea I would recommend you go for a black tea because they have the most caffeine. Typically with black teas it’s permissible to add dairy or sugar, but if you’re a coffee drinker (even if you add cream and sugar to your coffee) you should have no need for adding anything to your tea. Adding dairy or sugar to green teas or other asian-styled teas is considered in very bad taste and will make more experienced tea drinkers cringe. The beauty in tea is in the subtle nuances of the flavour which dairy and sugar will completely overpower and obscure. It would be like taking an intricately carved sclupture and layering it with multiple coats of thick paint and then pretending like you appreciated the artistry of the piece. Your goal with tea is to take it unaltered, and with time eventually be able to pick out the flavours. Some long-time tea drinkers can pinpoint not just a region where the tea was grown, but some also to which altitude the plants where grown at.

How can I decaffeinate tea?

While tea has 40-80mg of caffeine, and coffee has 80-120mg, tea is much more simple to decaffeinate. 80% of the caffeine is released in the first 30 seconds of brewing. Take a dish and place the leaves in the dish, then cover them with the hot water. Mix the leaves gently with the water, and after 30 seconds strain the leaves. Now most of the caffeine is gone. Brew your tea as normal and enjoy a cup of decaffeinated goodness!

How can I make supercaffeinated tea?

If 80% of the caffeine is released in the first 30 seconds of brewing, how can we make supercaffeinated tea? During the process to decaffeinate tea we are soaking leaves and discarding the runoff caffeine and keeping and using the leaves. This time repeat the procedure, and instead of discarding the 30-second wash, lets collect that in a mug. Suppose you repeat the process 6 times you should have enough liquid for a mug of tea, but inside you’ve got 80% of the caffeine from 6 bags, instead of 100% of the caffeine from one bag. Use this trick with caution and silent reverence when you need a good kick but don’t want a coffee or an energy drink.

Where can I learn more about the types of tea?

Next week I’ll explain a bit more about the main types of tea, and which tea we drink most often here at Engine – if you have any questions about tea ask below and I’ll answer your questions in Getting Started with Tea: Part II

Until next week, take care and try a type of tea you haven’t had before and let me know how it turns out!

—Tom

This week is Health and Fitness Week in the city of Belleville, Quinte West, and Prince Edward County. A nice lead in to this week was the Health & Fitness Expo held at the Wally Dever arena this past weekend. The nice weather did not stop people from attending the show, which was great to see! Local area businesses, government, and service groups were on hand offering invaluable information on how we all can live a more healthy and active lifestyle. Some of Engine’s clients had booths in the show. They presented lots of information on how you and your family can stay healthy and fit. Please visit their websites for further information.

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