Family fun for Halloween in Orlando: SeaWorld Spooktacular Halloween #SeaWorldSpooktacular

Disclosure: Our family was fortunate enough to be invited to the SeaWorld media day so we could say about our experience.

 

Last year was the first time to experience Halloween Spooktacular of SeaWorld Orlando and was really a lot of fun and we were very happy to return this year to review all the new additions.  Have you ever been?

 

Every weekend in October, SeaWorld is going to have a Halloween Spooktacular. There are plenty of activities that can keep your children occupied throughout the day. Halloween Spooktacular is an underwater "fantasea" made for the whole family. Meet pumpkin fish, the sea fairies and adorable creatures. Scattered throughout the Park are several stations of trick or treatment that will be spread over 2 million that tasty Halloween treats. Each season of trick-or-treat offers an assortment of macabre candy including Tootsie Roll, beans jelly Jelly Belly, Airheads and other favorite sweets.

 

One of our favourite places in the Park is Party Zone of Penelope. In the Bayside area enjoy a dynamic underwater environment that comes to life every day with a DJ live, a wide variety of crafts to choose from, countless bubbles floating on top of the head and colourful fish pumpkin slipping around interactive!

 

Our favorite activity was the cookie making station where kids can decorate their own cookie.

Do you wanted to be a rock star, a movie star or any Star? Well, at SeaWorld Orlando, a special family can become the Super Starfish of the day during Halloween Spooktacular, every weekend in October. Superstar of the day program gives children and families treatment star throughout the day with amazing prizes!

Superstar of the day families will enjoy:

Quick queue pass to skip the lines on his favorite day dining attractionsAll passes for delicious meals throughout your party decoration session cookie dayComplimentary Penelope ZoneReserved seats in our photo merchandise incredible showsComplimentary anywhere in the Park always remember your Spooktacular day

 

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'Hellgoing' piles on life's uncertainties and allows characters to crawl through

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Congratulations to Lynn Coady for being shortlisted for the Giller Prize for this collection of short stories.

The short stories in Lynn Coady’s new collection Hellgoing scratch beneath the surface of everyday life, revealing the inner lives of characters who find themselves at odds with the social roles they inhabit. This struggle between public appearance and private life is everywhere in Hellgoing.

Among the uncomfortable people who populate these stories are an ambivalent nun, a high-functioning alcoholic, a conflicted landlord and an ageing ukulele player.

Hellgoing is Coady’s sixth book of fiction and second collection of stories. In this new volume, she maintains her status as one of the leading lights of Canadian fiction, a position she claimed with the publication of her brilliant first novel Strange Heaven in 1998 and further solidified with her latest, The Antagonist, which was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize.

Coady, originally from Cape Breton, now lives in Edmonton, and these stories reflect her westward move. One of them follows a pregnant Cape Breton teenager’s awkward friendship with one of her teachers, while several others examine the difficulties of life in boomtown Alberta and New Age British Columbia. 

In Hellgoing, Coady celebrates everyday people who can strike a tentative balance between true inner weirdness and an outward appearance of normalcy.

In "An Otherworld," Erin finds herself so uneasy with the pristine Caribbean setting where her wedding is being held that she starts secretly throwing herself down the stairs in order to cope. In "Take This and Eat It," a nun on hospital duty recognizes her waning interest in her vocation when faced with an anorexic teen who cites religious zeal as an excuse to stop eating.

While trying to counsel the sickly teen, the sister rebuffs her fanaticism and advises her not to read the Bible, bluntly stating, "That’s what the Protestants do and look at them." After years of service, the sister can no longer be bothered with upholding a strict moral code, or even feign much interest in the lives of others.

In "Clear Skies," a reluctant young writer’s attempts to appear professional to the students in her workshop are unwittingly undone by poor personal hygiene.

As a champion of the awkward, Coady takes great joy in deflating individuals who are certain and self-assured. For instance, in "The Natural Elements," a friendly landlord’s delusions of benevolence evaporate when, in the middle of a boom economy, he is unable to get a repairman to fix his tenant’s furnace in deepest winter. He wonders, "What is the good of all this money, if it made no one responsible to anyone else?” even as he begins avoiding his tenant’s phone calls.

"Body Condom" mocks the narrator Kim’s oversexed younger boyfriend Hart, a self-satisfied spiritual seeker whose "therapy-language" makes him intrinsically ridiculous even if his desire to "choose light over dark" and "wellness over addiction" might be noble.

Most of the characters that populate the stories of Hellgoing are navigating a world in which they are deeply uncomfortable. And yet despite this, a kind of uneasy balance is visible in most of their lives.

While some might forget to shower for a few days, make poor choices in romantic partners or blow up at their employer in a misdirected response to the stress of family illness, Coady always underlines their toughness, insisting that most have been through much worse.

Each protagonist of these nine stories has gone through the crucible of life and decided to keep going, swimming against the tide. Hellgoing’s portrayal of imperfect characters struggling with daily life and (mostly) managing to keep up appearances is funny, appealing and resonant.

Jeff Miller is the author of the short story collection Ghost Pine: All Stories True. He lives and drinks coffee in Little Italy. 

This review originally appeared in Cult#MTL and is reprinted with permission.

It's not just Ontario's youth on minimum wage

Many people's image of a minimum wage worker is a teenager, perhaps at a fast food restaurant, earning some money to buy the latest smart phone. And a teenager flipping burgers is an accurate part of the picture: in 2011, almost 60 percent of minimum wage workers in Ontario were between 15 and 24 years of age.

Some of them are likely earning pocket money for extras; others are likely making crucial contributions to their family's incomes and survival. But, we also need to look at the rest of the picture: minimum wage is not just a youth issue.

A rising share of the Ontario workforce is working for minimum wage. Between 2003 and 2011, the share of employees working for minimum wage has more than doubled from 4.3 to 9 per cent. Minimum wage work is not distributed equally across all Ontarians: women, racialized workers and recent immigrants are more likely to be working for minimum wage.

In 2011, the share of racialized employees at minimum wage is 40 per cent higher than for the total population -- 13.2 as compared to 9 per cent. Fully 19.1 per cent of recent immigrants are working at minimum wage, more than twice that of all employees.

Young workers are much more likely to be working for minimum wage than those who are over 25. But almost 40 per cent of employees working for minimum wage, 183,000 Ontarians, were 25 years of age and over in 2011. The share of adult employees at minimum wage more than doubled between 2003 and 2011. However, the pace of increase was even faster for racialized adult employees and adult employees who are immigrants.

When we look at the distribution of low wage workers we see that twice as many employees in Ontario are making between $10.25 and $14.25 an hour -- almost a million Ontarians. We see the shifting age distribution of low-wage employees when you move above minimum wage.

While 40 per cent of minimum wage employees are 25 years of age and over, that number increases when you include those making up to $14.25 -- up to 61 per cent. The Ontario government is looking to an advisory panel for advice on setting the minimum wage. It is important that the panel keep these adult workers front and centre when they are considering their advice to the Minister of Labour. As should the province as they develop the next poverty reduction strategy.

An increase in the minimum wage will raise the floor for all Ontario employees. This increase will have a positive impact on those working for minimum wage and other low wage workers. It could also transfer income from shareholders to employees. The combined impact would reduce income inequality. In a time when governments feel that their budgets are constrained, this is a policy approach to address and reduce income inequality that is crucial and timely.

Read the report from the Wellesley Institute here.