Virtual tour Friday aimed at helping public understand Alzheimer's, dementia

Anyone who hasn't had first-hand experience with Alzheimer's disease or dementia might not realize its brutal impact on patients and caregivers alike. On Friday, however, anyone interested in gaining a greater understanding is invited to take part in a sensitivity training session offered by the cloudnine Agency in Idaho Falls and the Esplin & Packer Eldercare Law Firm in Blackfoot.

The session will feature the internationally known Virtual Dementia Tour®, a scientifically proven method of building a greater understanding of dementia through the use of sensory tools and instruction.

Reservations for the tour are suggested, as space is limited. The tour takes approximately 25 minutes. Contact Jodi Davis, Esplin & Packer Law at 785-5600 or Julia Barr with The cloudnine Agency at 552-0399, to reserve your spot, or email: jodidavisecc@hotmail.com or julia@idahocloudnine.com.

The session and tours will take place at Liberty Square Luxury Senior Apartments, 2475 South Ammon Road, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The Virtual Dementia Tour® is an immersion simulation of dementia created to teach people about the physical and mental challenges facing those living with it. For caregivers, it helps them provide better care by offering hope and providing tips and tools necessary to create an environment that supports the needs of those with the disease.

More than 500,000 people from elder care communities, corporations, caregivers, first responders, healthcare providers, municipal employees and nonprofit organizations in 14 countries have experienced the tour. Of those, 94 percent said they felt it was crucial and necessary to undergo the training in order to provide good care to those with dementia.

To learn more about the Alzheimer's Association, visit this link: https://thelongestday.alz.org/.

Natural Grocers schedules Nov. 12 opening for Idaho Falls store

The old Andrew Well Drilling building on 17th Street is gone, and the ground is being prepared for a 15,000-square-foot Natural Grocers store.

Dirt is finally being moved on the site where Andrew Well Drilling used to be, to make room for Natural Grocers, a 58-year-old chain based in Colorado. The 15,000-square-foot store is slated to open Nov. 12, said Nancy Flynn, spokeswoman for the company.

In addition to the store, the developer, Leadership Circle, LLC, of Montrose, Colo., is seeking eventually to build a restaurant and a retail store on the 4.42 acres, but the only definite plans at the moment are for the grocery. The 4,816 square-foot-restaurant pad and 11,250-square-foot retail pad are listed with Randy Waters of Sperry Van Ness High Desert.

Natural Grocers has 68 stores in 12 states, with six more scheduled to open this year. In 2011 it opened stores in Boise and Missoula, and most recently it opened a store in Helena, in December.

"We really cater to specialty diets, gluten-free, non GMO (genetically modified organisms)," Flynn said. Because of their small footprint (a Whole Foods store, by contrast, is typically twice the size) and their emphasis on personal communication and education rather than advertising, they are able to keep their costs down. "We feel like we're the label-readers in the market," Flynn said.

When it opens, the store will employ around 25 people. All the produce they sell is USDA-certified organic, and Flynn said they buy local produce "every chance we get.

Here is a link to its Web site: http://www.naturalgrocers.com/, and there is a link on the site for anyone who has organic crops to sell.

Movie Review: Man of Steel

It's a bird ... it's a plane ... no, it's Superman, updated for the new millenium!

We seem to have hit a lull with the construction news that gets BizMojo Idaho readers excited, so let's go to the movies.

"Man of Steel" doesn't bring a whole lot  new to the Superman story, but that would be pretty tough to do. Although it had its shortcomings (more on this later), I found it to be an excellent movie for Fathers Day and especially good for adoptive parents and children.

The story, first laid out in 1937 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, is all here. With their home planet, Krypton, due to explode any day (the result of reckless energy extraction, hint, hint), baby Kal-El's parents, Jor-El (Russell Crowe) and Lara (Ayelet Zurer), put him in a space capsule and shoot him to Earth. He is found in cornfield near Smallville, Kan., by Jonathan and Martha Kent, who raise him as their own. Because of the Sun's radiation, young Clark Kent has extraordinary abilities that he must keep under wraps. Too bad every school bus he rides on seems to plunge off a bridge, leaving it up to him to save the day.

This part of the tale is done in flashback, with Kevin Costner and Diane Lane as Jonathan and Martha. Clark is played by the suitably handsome Henry Cavill, an English actor best known for his work on Showtime's "The Tudors." He has a nice way of underplaying the role, suggesting Tom Welling and the TV show "Smallville" more than Christopher Reeve.

Any Superman movie had better have a good Lois Lane, and in "Man of Steel" the honors go to Amy Adams ("Enchanted," "The Master") who plays the Daily Planet reportrix with the requisite pluck and grit. Unlike the Superman we grew up with, Lois traces the Man of Steel back to his roots and puts the pieces together. No pair of horn-rimmed glasses is going to fool her. This is a Superman for the 21st century.

Clark/Kal-El spends a lot of time adjusting to Earth, working odd jobs (fishing trawler, dishwasher, etc.) and keeping a low profile. His senses are heightened and the X-ray vision is a bit of a freakout for him in elementary school.

During all this time, a gang of imprisoned Kryptonians led by General Zod (Michael Shannon) has been freed by Krypton's destruction. They set out to find a new planet to colonize, and after 35 years of hunting they find Earth, whose defenses are far to feeble to thwart them.

This is a job for Superman!

The last third of "Man of Steel" is taken up with explosions and destruction, flying tanker trucks, missiles, jets, etc., all of a piece with what we saw in "The Avengers," "Iron Man 3," the "Transformers" movies, and you-tell-me-what-else. Smallville gets trashed first, then it's on to Metropolis, where the level of destruction is truly gargantuan.

I suppose this is the sort of action audiences expect, and I know someone is going to say to me, "I just go to the movies to be entertained." Fair enough. I'm not expecting "The Seventh Seal" when I go to a movie like this. If tickets sales are good there won't be any reason to stop making movies like this, no matter how boring and redundant these scenes of cataclysm may be getting to be.

Spoiler alert: Kal-El/Clark/Superman defeats Zod and his minions. Most are sent back to their intergalactic Gitmo, but the general meets a more earthly end.

The movie wraps up with Clark taking a job as a stringer for the Daily Planet. Considering the Kryptonian state of the newspaper industry I think he might want to rethink his career choice, but what do I know? Also, what's the deal with the Daily Planet building being all shiny looking when Metropolis had been destroyed only a short time before? Is FEMA that good in the DC Comics universe? Or did they get "super" help?

For all my caveats, I can say without shame that I enjoyed "Man of Steel." As summer flicks go it was as good as "Iron Man 3." Expect a sequel in two or three years. I'm guessing the baddie will be Lex Luthor. Any ideas who should play him?

MAN OF STEEL -- Directed by Zach Snyder. Starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Russell Crowe, Kevin Costner, Diane Lane. Rated PG-13. Grade: B

Idaho Falls Power posts Twitter, Facebook notices on tree-trimming, paving work

Let's hand it to our friends at Idaho Falls Power -- they are actually posting information on Facebook and Twitter that might be useful to people. I don't know if you're going to be in the neighborhoods mentioned, but knowledge is power, right? So here's the scoop:

Tree-trimming crews are out across Idaho Falls today - in the 600 block of Neptune, the 400 block of Bellin and three blocks on Starlight. Idaho Falls Power line crews are out, too, on Hartert, Holmes, Northgate Mile and Elmore.

Work also began on the parking lot at Idaho Falls Power headquarters on Capital Avenue. Crews will be resurfacing half of the lot this year and the other half in 2014.

You might want to consider liking them (Facebook) or following them (Twitter). Who knows, next time there's a power outage in your neighborhood, you might get the news faster than anyone.

Female guitar makers of WWII the focus of talk Wednesday at Museum of Idaho

Female workers at the Gibson factory in Kalamazoo, Mich., during World War II

I'm probably going to be posting a lot about the exhibit at the Museum of Idaho GUITAR: The Instrument that Rocked the World, which opened last Friday.

This Wednesday at 7, the first guest speaker is John Thomas, author of "Kalamazoo Gals: A Story of Extraordinary Woman and the Gibson 'Banner' Guitars of WII."

While history had it that Gibson shut down production at its Kalamazoo, Mich., factory during World War II, Thomas was intrigued by a photo of seventy women sitting in four rows in front of the factory in the mid-1940s. He set out to find at least one of the women in the photograph and ended up finding a dozen. Despite denials that endured into the 1990s, Gibson employed a nearly all female workforce to build thousands of wartime guitars and marked each with a small, golden "banner" pronouncing that "Only a Gibson is Good Enough." The banner appeared on the guitars at the moment those women entered the factory in January 1942 (coincidentally, the big hit on the pop charts then was Glenn Miller's "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.") The banner disappeared at the end of 1945 when the war ended, the soldiers returned, and most of the Kalamazoo Gals ceded their guitar making jobs back to their male predecessors.

Thomas' talk will be in the Maeck Family Foundation Education Center (in the same parking lot of the museum.)

Tickets are $5 and can be purchased in advance from the front desk or at the door. For more information, call 208-522-1400, ext. 3012