This post originally appeared on Simcoe.com on July 27, 2018.
Cowboy’s Sports Coupe, Sporty to his friends, had become a bit of landmark to commuters along Mapleview Drive.
He’d lived 25 of his 34 years across from the Cedar Links Golf Centre.
“Secretariat was 19. The most famous horse in the world, with the best of everything,” Krista Hutchinson, Sporty’s owner, said. “He (Sporty) lived to 34, which is almost unheard of.”
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Raven Kanatakta tunes one of his guitars in his home studio in Barrie, Ont. Kanatakta does vocals and plays guitar in the Juno Award winning band, Digging Roots, currently on tour. The band will play a hometown show on February 28, 2018. Jan. 24, 2018.
Raven Kanatakta, singer and guitarist of the Juno Award-winning band Digging Roots, can write music anywhere.
“We go where the music calls us,” Kanatakta said. “You never know where you’re going to end up.”
The six-piece roots rock outfit is back in their home studio in Barrie following a festival in Australia.
Digging Roots has played shows all over the world.
“We ended up in northern Norway. Twice,” Kanatakta said. “Once when the sun didn’t go down, and another time when there was no sun at all.”
The band is playing a number of shows in Canada, including a Feb. 28 event at the Georgian Theatre in Barrie, but has plans to head back to Australia.
“Because it was colonized by the British, a lot of the same colonial history exists there,” said Shoshona Kish, Digging Roots’ singer. “I think there’s a really interesting conversation and connection with Indigenous people from Australia.
“We share some of the struggles and triumphs,” Kish said. “The exchange of that art seems really important.”
The home studio is filled with guitars, amps, drums, mics, keyboards, and, in the middle of it all, the master control, a Logic-equipped computer.
Kanatakta said they’ve got Logic, one type of digital audio workshop, in the home studio and Pro Tools at their main studio, but he can write music using Garageband on his phone.
“Raven’s always doing that,” said Kish. “He’s either got a guitar in his hand, or he’s at his desk, or he’s got his phone in his hand. You’ve got to grab those moments of creativity when they’re there.”
While they’re no strangers to high-tech music production gear, many of their songs use traditional methods.
“One of the ways we used to make music back in the day, some of the chants come from dreams, but others come from song lines,” Kish said. “You would trace the horizon and that would inform the melodic rise and fall of the song.”
On the walls of the studio are huge photographs of Jasper and Lake Louise.
“Many of our songs actually belong to a specific place,” Kish said, adding that they have thousands of these landscapes, both natural and urban settings.
“It’s a traditional Anishinaabe way of making music,” Kish said.
While they’ve lived in Barrie for the past 18 years, which is traditional Anishanaabe territory, Kish is from the Batachawana First Nation near Sault Ste. Marie and Kanatakta’s roots are at the Kahnawake First Nation near Montreal.
“The last time we played Barrie was four years ago,” Kish said. “We’re excited to do a hometown show.”
Fans can expect to hear a few new songs, but the band is still working on producing their latest album.
For the uninitiated, Digging Roots is roots based and blues-infused.
“We’re inspired by music for change. Some of the really revolutionary artists have been our primary influences,” Kish said. “It’s music with a message.”
The band’s Feb. 28 show at the Five Points Theatre also features Dione Taylor and the Backsliderz.
Tickets are available at 1 Dunlop Street West or online at barrie.ca/TheatreTickets.
Digging Roots from Bryan Myers on Vimeo.
Meghan Muise, co-owner of Ripe Juicery in Barrie, Ont. donates all the pulp from her fresh, locally-made juices (between 3-5 pounds of produce goes into each bottle) to Wishing Well Animal Sanctuary in Bradford, and Rounds Ranch in Elmvale. December 4, 2017.
This article originally appeared on Simcoe.com on December 8, 2017.
A downtown Barrie juice bar has beaten waste management to a pulp.
Or more accurately, to the pulp.
Twice a week, volunteers deliver pulp from Ripe Juicery to Wishing Well Animal Sanctuary in Bradford, to feed 74 hungry rescued farm animals.
“Technically, we’re a zero waste company,” said Meghan Muise, co-owner of Ripe Juicery. “We bring in only raw ingredients and make our stuff from there. We don’t bring in anything packaged.”
The juice bar even handpresses their own nut milks.
All of the store’s disposable packaging is made from recycled corn, wood or paper.
Working with just raw ingredients, Muise said, they were producing a more organic waste than most downtown businesses. Each bottle of juice comes from three to five pounds of fresh produce.
“It’s perfect pulp. It’s top-of-the-line produce,” said Muise. “It’s immaculate.”
“From the day I realized we couldn’t really recycle our pulp with the city, I thought, there has to be a better way,” said Muise. “We would have had to throw out a lot of it, and we don’t like garbage.”
Meghan Muise, co-owner of Ripe Juicery in Barrie, Ont. donates all the pulp from her fresh, locally-made juices (between 3-5 pounds of produce goes into each bottle) to Wishing Well Animal Sanctuary in Bradford, and Rounds Ranch in Elmvale. December 4, 2017.
Twice a week, volunteers deliver pulp to Wishing Well Animal Sanctuary in Bradford, and once a week, they deliver to Rounds Ranch in Elmvale.
But, pulp isn’t the only thing the juicery is diverting from the landfill.
“Our bottles are all recycled. We’ve brought in 20,000 glass bottles, maybe even more,” said Muise. Customers who return their bottle to the store get 50 cents back per clean bottle.
“We wanted a product that was super sustainable and eco-friendly,” said Muise.
Before opening Ripe two-and-a-half years ago, Muise worked at the Royal Victoria Hospital in addictions and mental health. Her business partner, Lindsay Haley, taught private yoga.
Muise said the pair saw an opportunity to do something unique in the city and the business took off.
Since opening, Ripe has three locations: two in Barrie and one in Muskoka that operates during the summer months. Each location offers a range of juices and smoothies from scratch and has recently added a full plant-based menu.
This story originally appeared on Simcoe.com on February 6, 2018.
Watching the UK’s longest-running soap opera, Coronation Street, saved a Barrie man’s life.
Scott Wray, 27, decided to give himself a self-examination following a Corrie storyline where one character, Robert Preston played by Tristan Gemmill, finds a lump on his testicle.
Preston discovers a lump, and is convinced by his girlfriend on the show to have it checked out. The lump is deemed malignant and Preston has to have it removed.
“In the end, he knuckled down and had it done,” Wray said. “It’s a very factual storyline.”
Wray, originally from Durham, England, said he checked now and then, but after following the Corrie drama, performed a more thorough examination.
“I checked around the back, which I don’t normally do. It was kind of hidden,” Wray said.
Wray said he found a 1.5 cm lump, about the size of a pea. Wray said there wasn’t any pain associated with finding the lump.
Wray visited the walk-in clinic, got a referral to a urologist, and quickly had an appointment at the RVH.
“I think I shocked the urologist,” Wray said. “I was so prepared for it because I’d seen [Preston’s] worries on the show. It felt like I’d already been through it.”
“It’s painful now, you’ve pretty much lost an organ,” Wray said, “but it’s fatal if you leave it.”
Wray said he was thankful that Coronation Street had raised awareness for testicular cancer.
“It’s not a big deal,” Wray said. “People get kind of worried about it.”
Wray, like fictional Corrie character, Preston, has had a testicle removed.
“My testosterone will drop temporarily, but then in the next couple of months the other one will do the job of two,” Wray said. “It reverts back to normal.”
Wray’s story has gotten a response in the UK from Coronation Street, his wife, Emily, tweeted about Wray’s procedure, and received a response from Tristan Gemmill. “I was actually speaking to him earlier,” Wray said. BBC Manchester ran the story and connected Wray and Gemmill by telephone.
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