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Gentlemen, the hours are counting down to the dreaded V-Day.
It’s not that we don’t love you, ladies.
We truly do. But we are men. We’re practical, unromantic. We are incapable of creating wondrous, exciting Valentine Day’s experiences every year, year after year.
In fact, we dread Valentine’s. No matter how you pretend otherwise, we know we are judged.
If he really loved me, he’d surprise me with a spa weekend at the Fairmont Banff Springs, or a week in Hawaii.
If he really loved me, he’d do more than buy a box of Turtles and cellophane-wrapped roses from the grocery store … which he does every year!
Gentlemen, I offer a low-cost (all things considered) solution.
Buy her top quality, hand-crafted chocolates.
Chocolates to drool over.
Chocolates so good that you stretch out the pleasure. Only one a week!
This past weekend, I earned major Valentine’s brownie points with Maria.
I booked a chocolate-making session at Peter Jo ...
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No, the sky is not falling.
Last August, Hicks on Biz reported a high-rise condo tower boom happening in the city, 27 high-rise proposals in design, permitting or construction stages, most of them over 20 stories, 10 of them north of 30 stories.
But in January, construction of the Glenora Skyline at Stony Plain and 142 Street came to a crashing halt. Of the four towers, only a few floors of poured concrete from the first had emerged.
Meanwhile, rumours have abounded of temporary stoppages in the construction of other downtown condo towers.
As for office towers, Edmonton commercial realtors were suggesting before Christmas that the city was ready for another office tower or two. Now, suddenly, a few analysts are proclaiming Edmonton to still be awash in office space!
Relax.
First of all, as a rule of thumb, only 25% to 40% of “proposed” condo towers actually ever get built, and those will be by highly experienced, reputable builders with good-quality financing.
There’s a ...
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The Chopped Leaf
Commerce Place, main floor
10102 Jasper Ave.
780 757 5323
www.choppedleaf.com
Food: 3.5 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 3 of 5 Suns
Service: 3.4 of 5 suns
Lunch for two, $16 to $24.
What a relief, to see a truly healthy, fast-food restaurant — offering mostly salads, with soups, brown rice bowls, quesadillas and salad rolls on the side — without making a big, hairy, self-righteous deal out of it!
The Chopped Leaf, on the main floor of the downtown Commerce Place, doesn’t make pompous claims about being organic, or vegetarian (it’s not), has no trace of a ‘healthier than thou’ attitude. It doesn’t make outlandish health claims … it just happens to serve excellent healthy food, traits all too rare on the deep-fry circuit.
Given its bounteous servings, the Chopped Leaf is reasonably cheap. Eleven to $12 gets you a full salad with a protein — i.e. a handful of chicken chunks, or shrimp or tuna. Eight bucks gives you the s ...
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I keep forgetting to mention - on the Hicks on Six blog - whenever Mack Male (Mastermaq) get together to record our weekly (more or less) podcast Mack & Cheese. It's a lively 15 to 20 minute chat about anything and everything Edmonton between the young pup - that's Mack - and the old dog - that's me, the Cheese in Mack and Cheese.
Of late we've talked about Mayor Don Iveson's promising abilities as a smooth political operator, about what the heck will happen to Northlands once the Oilers/Oil Kings depart from Rexall Place, about that on-going bugaboo of co-ordinated regional governance when there's 24 municipalities at the table.
It's reasonably enteraining!
The American states of Washington and Colorado will soon embark on a societal experiment of mega-proportions.
Legalized “recreational” marijuana will be for sale – available in state-licensed stores.
All governments are watching, given pot will likely be legalized across Europe and North America in the foreseeable future. California, the pundits say, will vote in favour of legalization by 2016. As California goes, so goes the USA.
This is not a column about the pros and cons of smoking pot.
It’s about the tax revenues from legalization; whether the added tax income is worth the hassle of legalization.
Washington and Colorado residents voted for legalization, in part, because advocates have promised new marijuana taxes will pour money into cash-starved state coffers.
If Canadian governments, including Alberta, toy with pot legalization, it’d be to tax the bejeezus out of it, as they do alcohol.
Right now, pot growing (primarily in B.C. it is claimed) is the la ...
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Farming is the Rodney Dangerfield of Alberta business.
Can’t get no respect!
Add up crops and livestock gross sales, and you’re at 3.6% of the provincial economy.
Toss in food-related manufacturing, it jumps to 7.9%, or 22 billion dollars.
But unless there’s a crisis as at XL Foods — one year ago — agriculture stays under the media radar.
Which, considering the ritual whipping of the oil/gas industry every day at high noon, might be a good thing.
Over the next 10 days, however, agriculture is spotlighted in the weakening late-autumn sun.
There’s the cattle-centric Farmfair International (Nov. 3 to 10) here at Northlands, the farm implement-focused Agri-Trade show in Red Deer Nov. 6 to 9, and, of course, that rural playground known as the Canadian Finals Rodeo at Rexall Place Nov. 6 to 10.
So welcome to the Hicks on Biz annual Agricultural Review.
Here’re the mega-trends happening out on the flat, fertile prairie. I’m much obliged to ag ...
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Just how much is food and dining out a part of our lives? Consider: Of the 240 packages in The Edmonton Sun/ATCO Christmas Charity Auction, running until 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 31, at least a third of them involve food.
Here’s the Weekly Dish’s food guide to hundreds of Edmonton restaurants who have donated to the Charity Auction. The number in brackets refers to the auction package number in the auction listings in today’s Sun print edition or at www.christmascharityauction.ca.
Steaks: Three of the city’s finest steakhouses – LUX (10), Ruth’s Chris (12) and Von’s (15) – are in the first 15 packages. LUX executive chef and Sun columnist Paul Shufelt is giving his guests cooking lessons, Ruth’s Chris is famous for its corn-fed steaks, Von’s kitchen is now supervised by extraordinarily creative chef Shane Chartrand. Don’t forget the Outback Steakhouse (107), hosting dinner with CHED’s Dan Tencer & Andrew Grose.
Fine dining: Thes ...
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(Update on this column: Two days after its publication, Don Iveson did win the mayoralty election in Edmonton, Alberta ...by a mile.)
What business wants from municipal politicians is so simple.
Create a business environment as good or better than other municipalities – physical, financial and regulatory. Be supportive, then get the heck out of the way.
Talk to any Edmonton business owner with skin in the game, and you’ll hear much the same.
Fix the potholes, roads and sidewalks; ensure top-notch core services; maintain law and order; enforce sensible regulations (i.e. environment, safety); help rather than hinder; keep taxes reasonable; create a city where employees want to live.
Then get out of the way! The less any of us have to do with bureaucrats, the better!
Business is most fearful of a city council or mayor so overly influenced by one interest group or ideology as to lose sight of the overall good.
Mistrust between socialist mayor Jan Reimer (1989 to 1995) and commer ...
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How fortunate we are, how lucky for our children, to live in Alberta.
This province is so full of human energy and expertise. It has jobs galore, collective technological ingenuity and unsurpassed quality of life. So many opportunities exist here that one hardly knows where to start.
How about in Red Deer?
Red Deer and central Alberta are a perfect illustration of just what we have.
Full employment, robust manufacturing, conventional oil and oilsand industry servicing, agriculture and food-processing, petro-chemical production: All turbo-charged with home-grown expertise and unsurpassed quality of life.
That expertise plus being smack-dab in the middle of populated Alberta with a first-rate transportation system has led to booming international exports.
Within Red Deer itself, some 70 companies export to 35 countries. A third of total sales from Red-Deer based companies is generated outside Alberta.
All this happens within beautiful countryside. Employees have a choice of a city, rural or rurban lifest ...
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(Part of a series of blog postings from Graham Hicks' two-day tour of PTI Group lodge-hotels in the Canadian oilsands)
How Edmonton's PTI Group - Canada's largest owner/operator of worker hotel-lodges in remote industrial areas, builds a content and efficient hospitality workforce.
Yes, it's about the money, which, in Northern Alberta, is pretty darned good.
But it's just as much about the company's egalitarian culture, its hiring practices, and simply the way it treats its employees within a unionized context.
Without any government prodding, PTI maintains an open preferential/priority hiring system.
At the top of the list, hiring local First Nations members. About 250 permanent employees hail from the Saddle Lake, Meadow Lake and Driftpile First Nation bands and from the Fort McKay Metis (or Wood Buffalo) group.
Second preference is hiring Albertans who reside locally.
Third is Alberta-based aboriginals.
Fourth is Albertans, period. I.E> Anybody with landed-immigrant status or C ...
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