Welcome planting season by picking up some quality seedlings at the insanely popular New Westminster Horticultural Society Annual Plant Sale this Sunday, then follow with a garden-planning workshop on Thursday, courtesy of the New West Community Garden Society!

New Westminster parents of preschoolers and gradeschoolers who hoped to enroll their kids in programs of choice may need to adjust their plans, as School District 40 prepares to shuffle the locations of so-called ‘Programs of Choice’ – Early French Immersion and Montessori. It all comes into play in the fall of 2012, or when the new elementary and middle schools are ready.

The Gordian knot of exits, on-ramps and highways at Stewardson and 20th St. near the Queensborough Bridge is one of the gnarliest intersections in the Lower Mainland, let alone New Westminster. I live just blocks away and regularly end up in Burnaby when I mean to go to Queensborough, or vice versa.

I participated in a focus group this past Tuesday night to help improve the website for  New Westminster Parks, Culture, and Recreation and part of our “homework” prior to the evening was to troll around on the NWPCR website to get a better idea of what worked and what didn’t. It was while trolling around I discovered that the NWPCR department has put together a Spring Wellness Challenge to get us all up and at ‘em, dust off those wintery cobwebs, and get our collective butts moving. Here’s a little …

In search of a museum gallery that connects to the toddler, the parent, the teenager, the tourist, the old timer and the teacher all at once, New Westminster Museum & Archives curator Rob McCullough is hosting a May 4 visioning workshop at the museum.

I’ve spent the past three or four months deeply involved in the process of selling our townhouse and buying a house; a real house, with a yard, and a non-matching-with-your-neighbour-front-door and, importantly, no strata council. It’s been an extremely complex process complete with volatile mood swings and nail biting moments but all, as they say, has come out in the wash and sometime in July I will be saying goodbye to my beloved Brow of the Hill and jumping rather headfirst into a new neighbourhood I know only secondhand: Sapperton.

By now we’ve all heard the big news; Donald’s Market is coming to the River Market at the Quay. However if you’re like me (and everyone else I’ve spoken to except one person), your first reaction was, “What’s Donald’s Market?” I had to take a field trip to answer this question. So over the past two weekends I jumped on the Skytrain, shopping bags in hand, to visit each of the Donald’s locations. First up, Commercial & 8th Avenue.

Monday night council meetings are a thing to behold! They are open to the public and while many citizens do attend, the process of a council meeting, which can be long and tedious, is often just a bit to late, or early (or dull) to attend in person. Hey, the city gets that, and for several years the civic goings on of our wise and venerable Mayor & Council have been available on TV on the Shaw community channel. But what happens to those of us in our increasingly fragmented media landscape who do not have access to Shaw’s service?

Volunteering in New Westminster connects you to the community like nothing else. There’s no shortage of causes to choose from, but my organization of choice is the Royal City Farmers Market.

The HST has been getting a lot of press lately, mostly by those who are making political hay out of scaring misinformed people. Regardless of who said what when, the reality is the federal government will provide B.C. with transitional funding of $1.6 billion that is slated to protect vital health and education services.

The Bluebird Dairy corner store, long an icon at 8th Street and 4th Avenue, was unceremoniously demolished today. I feel a bit sad.  Long ago, as a young early 20s single woman-about-town, I used to rent the top floor of that big brown house next to the Bluebird. And I bought a huge amount of my groceries at the little corner store. I came to rely on the Bluebird. The staff became familiar faces.
On September 11, 2001, I was on my way to work, and stopped in at the Bluebird …

Residents of New Westminster who want to learn more about the Initiative to End the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), get involved, or just sign the petition will get their chance on Saturday April 17, between 10:00 AM and 12:00 noon at Canadian Autoworkers Union Hall at 326 12th Street.

This is a guest post from Pat Johnstone, President of the New Westminster Environmental Partners. NWEP is looking for new members, volunteers and community allies. In Pat’s words, here’s a summary about NWEP and what they do. If you’re interested in learning more, the next regular meeting of the New Westminster Environmental Partners will take place at New West Public Library at 7pm on Wednesday April 14th.

New Westminster can be a tough customer for a cyclist! There’s a reason they call it uptown. So how can the average rider find a comfortable route from downtown to uptown? Frequent rest stops for snacks and beverages at the local eateries, of course!

As gardeners across Metro Vancouver begin working in their gardens, there are some spring and summer visitors who are very interested in what they are doing. These visitors are the birds. Every summer, thousands of these little migrants fly up from the States and South America to breed in and around Vancouver. But as commercial and residential developments spring up in former bird habitat, some of these visitors will find it increasingly difficult to compete with invasive birds for the last remaining nest sites.

One of the strategies resulting from the Translink Regional Cycling Strategy Stakeholder Workshop Summary held April 6, 2009, was to “make bicycle-transit interaction convenient, seamless and intuitive.” Good strategy, but what is being done to realize it?

Riding with a dog can be fun and easy, providing you are confident with your riding skills, but there are unique challenges. For instance, how do you keep an excitable 60lb American Staffordshire Terrier from pulling you a) into traffic b) off your bike c) into a lamp post, or d) with him after the nearest squirrel?