【推荐2】The Small Project Design (SPD) group is pleased to announce this year’s Small Project Design Knowledge Community Grant (拨款). The purpose of this grant is to provide financial support for small community projects working with architects. The small community projects are supposed to be under 5,000 square feet in size, or the budget is under $2,500,000, which struggle to find funds needed to hire professional design teams to solve design challenges.

The number of grants may vary based on funds available, quality of applications, and how we may distribute funds to make the biggest impact. This year we will be awarding up to three grants for up to $5,000 each.

Requirements:

• The grant funds may only be used to hire an architecture firm to assist with the design.

• The design team must include at least one member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).

Preference will be given to small projects with the potential for a big impact.

Application:

The architecture firm is the applicant although funds will be distributed to the community project. Submission must be made into a single PDF no larger than 10 MB and no more than eight total pages.

• 1-page outline of the full project budget: the design budget, the construction budget.

• A short description relating to the project—no longer than 1-page.

• Up to six pages of supporting documents：Include any relevant images of the project, site plan, site photographs, design concept sketches, or any additional graphics that can help describe the project and its benefit to the surrounding community, etc.

Submit your entry using this online form：https://form. jot form. com/220476728571159

Deadline: August 15, at 5 pm.

【推荐3】Looking for family-friendly places this summer? Ontario has got it all.

Check out this collection of family routes from across Ontario, From beaches and farms to big cities, planning your family trip just gets a boost of inspiration. Before packing up the car and the kids, make sure you book ahead, check for activity reservations and ensure that businesses are up and running.

Family Getaway in Toronto

Are your families planning a vacation? Toronto has attractions your kids won’t want to miss, from exciting sports and cultural and scientific wonders to treats and eats that everyone can enjoy. You can even visit the Aga Khan Museum for a window into the ancient world.

Fun Roadside Attractions in Algoma

Looking for best places to take the cutest photos of you and your family, look no further than this route. Algoma Country has its share of roadside attractions -- some famous, some odd, some you may not have even known about.

Family Adventures in Lennox & Addington

Turn off electronic devices and rediscover family-friendly fun in Lennox & Addington, from camping to hiking to farm visits and more.

Explore Ottawa with the Family

Grab your family bubble and experience Ottawa’s summer atmosphere with this 3-day tour. From the downtown core to the countryside, Canada’s capital is full of fun attractions for everyone, including tours and museums!

【推荐1】On a warm, golden day in early August, I sat by the lake in the area of Park Corner on Prince Edward Island, where Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the beloved 1908 children’s novel Anne of Green Gables, spent her childhood summers. Montgomery’s tale of the imaginative orphan Anne Shirley captured the minds of so many people that she and her red-headed heroine quickly became global literary miracles.

However, against the common belief, “people were never right in saying I was ‘Anne,’” Montgomery told in a 1921 letter. “But, in some respects, they will be right if they write me down as Emily.” She was referring to Emily of New Moon, a later novel, the first in a series about the difficulty of making it as a young female writer.

Emily, like Anne, is an orphan, but there the resemblance ends. In the adoptive family, Anne finds not only relatives, but companions who fall under the spell of her gift for seeing beauty and possibility in the world. For Emily, though, the story plays out differently. After her father dies, Emily is adopted by her dead mother’s family and finds herself at the mercy of her strict Aunt Elizabeth, who forbids her from reading or writing stories, trying to hold back Emily’s imagination (though in vain). Emily finds it “maddening that nobody could see that she had to write.” She is obsessed with words —their sound, their music and the magic of finding the right ones, which sparks a thrill of inspiration.

To some extent, Montgomery did base the Anne and Emily characters on herself. But while Anne was a charmed story, Emily was in many respects closer to the author, who was raised by her strict grandparent who allowed no space for the young Montgomery’s willful, imaginative personality.

For Montgomery, the road to reputation was far from easy. Now, a century after Emily’s release, I felt a surge of gratitude toward the author whose stories had defined my own childhood and inspired me to become a writer. She has not only carved those vivid characters on readers’ hearts. Her vision has shaped a future in which readers like me could dare to imagine and to write.

【推荐2】Do you find yourself checking social media sites as soon as you wake up? Do you answer e-mails on your phone while surfing the Web? Actually, we've lived a life in which we're all connected, all the time. Whether or not this is a good thing is the subject of Hamlet's BlackBerry, a non-fiction book by William Powers based on an essay he penned.

Early in the work, Powers questions the way we use devices, but certainly he doesn't criticize it. He does, however, recognize the downside of constantly being overstimulated—or what he calls the “problem of connectedness”. Among the things disturbed by the problem, Powers says, are the ways in which people are connected and deal with each other. “Constantly switching among people on social media platforms, texts and all the new ways of connecting all day, we never have a sustained connection.” His intention of writing Hamlet's BlackBerry is to help teach people how to connect more wisely. Powers looked to the past, where he found several precedents(先例)for both the current information age and the anxiety that has come with it.

One major figure Powers examines actually developed his own strategies for dealing with overstimulation. In William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Hamlet is informed his father is murdered by his uncle and too shocked by the news to think calmly, so he pulls out his “tables” from the pocket, an object Powers describes as a so rt of original electronic planner. In the Elizabethan age, tables were a kind of new device designed to help people bring order to their lives despite massive news. You could write notes during the day and wipe(擦掉) them away at night.

But how do we deal with the same problem? Powers has one suggestion that's child's play: just disconnect. His family, for example, takes an “Internet Rest Day” every weekend. “We don't have smart phones. Therefore we can't check our inboxes and do Web surfing that day. We really enter another zone and it's wonderful. Even when we're connected to the Internet again, we feel benefits of having been disconnected days before,” he says. “It's just about that simple word—balance.”