“You’ll be my arms, and I’ll be your eyes”

Hi Folks:

If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s well worth watching. We first read about it in an article in the Huffington Post. In China two specially-enabled men, lifelong friends, are changing their world – one tree at a time. When he was three Jia Wenqi lost his arms from a burn resulting from touching a power line. Jia Haixia was born with sight in only one eye, but he was blinded in an industrial accident in 2000. After losing his sight he became despondent. Both men were concerned by the environmental degradation in their area and so they teamed up to start planting trees. With no budget they used only hand tools and planted branches cut from existing trees. In their first year they planted 800 trees; 2 survived. They’ve now planted more than 10,000 trees and hope to cover a mountain.

They deserve our applause, and our support. How can you make your world a little better?

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. A classic tale, also well worth reading, is ‘The Man Who Planted Trees’ by Jean Giono. Originally written in French, it’s also available in English.

P.S. II, the sequel. A story we first heard about in 2012 is a man in India who has planted a forest by himself: The Man Who Made a Forest

The Why of Hugging

Hi Folks:

In our last ‘Free Hugs’ post we detailed the process of making our new ‘Free Hugs’ posters. Below we have the lovely Marcia modeling one of them for us.

New Posters in Action!

New Posters in Action!

We’ve been offering free hugs to locals and visitors (and other species) for seven years now, and (without question 🙂 ) the one question we get asked more than any other is, “Why are you doing this?Continue Reading →

Eating Our Way Through Victoria – Breakfast Out

Hi Folks:

In Marcia’s family the favourite meal to eat-out has always been breakfast. On the road? Get up early, take on a few miles (or kilometres), then pull over and have a hearty meal.

Victoria is blessed with many fine restaurants that are open for breakfast, and today we thought we’d profile two of them. We only write about restaurants we like because if we’d had a bad experience somewhere it may have been the chef’s day off, the server was having a bad day or something else, but a good meal, shared, is something to treasure.

Without further ado… 🙂

Continue Reading →

New Posters: For the Love of Hugs

Hi Folks:

Well, this being our 7th year of hugging Victorians (and anyone else who’s interested), we decided to update our FREE HUGS posters. The old ones have served us well, but they’re definitely showing their age. At the risk of overstating the obvious, all you need to make a poster is a pen or a marker and something flat enough to write on… but as the saying goes, “The Walk is Part of the Gift“. To that end, we wanted to put some effort into our new posters.

Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – May

Hi Folks:

One of the (many) wonderful things about living here on the ‘wet’ coast is that we have flowers every month of the year. Victoria is know as the ‘city of flowers’ after all. To that end, both of us selected flower images from the ones we made in May. Both images were made with our cell phones, and both were pushed around a bit in Lr. Continue Reading →