Living

Rev. Judith Hardcastle confers her blessings on Barkley, a Great Pyrenees collie cross. Hardcastle will carry out a pet blessing service this Sunday, 4 p.m. at St. Andrews United Church on St. Georges Avenue in North Vancouver.

On Thanksgiving you will likely find yourself around a table covered with all kinds of great foods. If you’re fortunate there will be friends and family members joining you for the feast.

Katie, Andrew and Will Loutit hang onto a salmon sculpture at Heywood Park. The trio celebrated Rivers Day in the City of North Vancouver, which included a creek-to-creek walk from Mackay Creek to Heywood Park.

Collingwood’s new headmaster Rob Lake is the subject of 800 Rubik’s Cubes manipulated by the students and assembled into a hip and square likeness.

If you’re ever asked to bring a dessert to a potluck dinner, a sheet cake is a good idea. They’re really simple to make, easy to transport, and can feed about two dozen people.

I liked the old Café Ça Va. I found its ambience appealing, a sophisticated but comfortable mix of traditional brasserie and contemporary urban esthetics.

Set your cameras to stunning. Shutterbugs hoping to create a photographic memory of B.C.’s insects, invertebrates, amphibians and other animals have two days to submit their pictures to the SPCA’s eighth-annual wildlife photo contest.

I’ve always wanted to create a floral arrangement for Thanksgiving using a beautiful white pumpkin.

Amy Butler’s Blossom, by Amy Blossom, Chronicle Books, 420 pages, $40. Amy Butler’s blog Blossom is published biannually as a magazine and for the first time is presented in book format as a collection of the first two issues.

George Janousek shows off the banana palms growing in his North Vancouver backyard. The huge plants currently feature three banana bunches. This season marked the most trees Janousek had as well as the tallest.