Sam

B.C. Woman Organizes Care Packages To Fight The Northern Food Crisis

Nobody should have to pay $28 for a head of lettuce anywhere — let alone in Canada.

That’s the belief that drives Jennifer Gwilliam, who spends her days organizing food care packages for people she’s never met. But she’s not even sending aid to a Third World country; she’s sending it to Canada’s remote north.

The high prices of groceries in Nunavut, for example —$47 for a box of laundry detergent or $105 for a case of water— have drawn increasing outcry from Canadians over the last few years.

"It was just shocking to see the prices they were paying for a head of cabbage or a flat of water," Gwilliam told The Huffington Post B.C. "I was just appalled. It’s hard enough to make ends meet down here, let alone with those sort of prices. So I wanted to do something."

After doing some digging, Gwilliam came across the Facebook group Feeding My Family, designed to raise awareness about the northern crisis and advocate for change. But she wanted to turn outrage into action, so she started her own Facebook group, Helping Our Northern Neighbours, last summer.

Gwilliam’s group matches people who want to donate packages of food and other necessities with those in the north who need it most.

People can either donate one box once, or choose to sponsor a family, meaning they regularly send care packages. There are no restrictions on what people can give, although many cater their boxes to the family they’ve been matched with.

[…]

There are over 400 names on Gwilliam’s list of people seeking assistance; just under half have received help in some way so far. She said many of donors (from across Canada) are living paycheque to paycheque themselves, but that doesn’t stop them from giving back. And everyone seems truly grateful for the help.

Candy Ivalutanar, who lives in Repulse Bay, Nunavut with her husband and two daughters under 10, said she cried the first time she received a care package.

"I told my husband, ‘I thought I wasn’t going to get anything. I thought nobody would want to ever help us.’ It touched me so much," Ivalutanar told HuffPost B.C. She frequently tells her sponsor, who has sent a few boxes already, that she loves her.

"I love her for helping me so much," she said. "Even if it’s just a little, I don’t care — that’s a lot for me."

Flawless human beings → Jesse Williams

Macro bee portraits by Sam Droege.

Used to distinguish and catalog the thousands of bee species in North America.

three years after i was born

"The archetype of the witch is long overdue for celebration. Daughters, mothers, queens, virgins, wives, et al. derive meaning from their relation to another person. Witches, on the other hand, have power on their own terms. They have agency. They create. They praise. They commune with nature/ Spirit/God/dess/Choose-your-own-semantics, freely, and free of any mediator. But most importantly: they make things happen. The best definition of magic I’ve been able to come up with is “symbolic action with intent" — “action" being the operative word. Witches are midwives to metamorphosis. They are magical women, and they, quite literally, change the world."

Fried Egg Jellyfish Are Kind of Adorable – & That’s No Yolk.

There are two species that hold the whimsical title of “Fried Egg Jellyfish”: Phacellophora camtschatica and Cotylorhiza tuberculata though the two are quite different from each other in all aspects beside appearance.

Phacellophora camtschatica is a huge jelly that prefers colder waters. It’s bell can reach up to 2 ft across and its dozens of tentacles reach over 20 ft long! If you don’t think this floating egg creature looks very menacing, you’d be right. It has a very weak sting and many small crustaceans take advantage of the jelly by riding on its bell (breakfast to go…?) while snatching up extra food.