Daybreak Alberta

As Canada's 3-on-3 national basketball teams get ready for Olympic qualifying for Tokyo 2020, and as Raptors fans still bask in the glow of the team capturing their first championship, one red-headed little girl is getting inspired to play along. That also means that the time couldn't be better for writer and sportscaster, Lisa Bowes, to release the latest in a series of books for kids starring Lucy. Lucy is an active young girl who loves to try new sports with her friends and in previous books, she has tried luge, speed-skating and hockey. Now, "Lucy Tries Basketball."

As we age, getting a good night's sleep can become increasingly difficult. Sleep Apnea increasingly gets diagnosed, especially for overweight men, and that usually means acquiring a CPAP machine to keep breathing airways open at night as you sleep. However, a University of Manitoba study looked at the quality of sleep for people who use their devices and it's suggesting that a deeper study needs to be made to ensure that CPAP machines not just keep airways open, but that a good night's sleep is also had. Dawson Reimer is the CEO of Cerebra, a Manitoba company that has developed new tech that could help. They are working with the University of Manitoba on mySleepStudy.com.

Back to school time for over five million students heading back to classes means the air will be filled with knowledge, but research has also revealed the air may also be filled with odors and many of them are not pleasant. You might think that the students lack of hygiene may be to blame but there's more to the story. To tell us more about the research behind the stink, Jason Tetro, an Edmonton microbiologist and author of The Germ Files, joined Russell.

Hello Jason!

The Edmonton Fringe Festival is presenting a show called "The Flying Detective," rooted in some of the history and adventure from Alberta's past. Two of the people on stage and off joined Russell to chat about the show. Director, Taylor Chadwick and actor, William Banfield.

The Edmonton Fringe Festival is presenting a show that brings together all those little moments of parenthood into a big picture of what it's like to be Middle-Raged. Former "22 Minutes" star, Geri Ryan, will be a familiar voice for CBC listeners and her acting partner onstage is Gary Pearson, a former writer for "This Hour Has 22 Minutes."

The Edmonton Fringe Festival hosts dozens of shows promising to make you laugh, cry, and even sing along. Writer and former radio producer, Katherine Koller returns to the Fringe this year with a show inspired by radio. Katherine first wrote for CBC drama in the early nineties with "Cowboy Boots and a Corsage" as her first piece was also adapted for the Edmonton Fringe. Three decades on, Katherine Koller is back writing and helping to stage a radio play called "Hope Soup."

Few would claim that a divorce was a stress-free experience and writer, Naomi K. Lewis, certainly wouldn't. While her marriage came apart, she came across a diary from her grandfather which traced his family's journey from Nazi Germany in 1942 through to Canada. However, as a secular Jew, it prompted for Naomi a lot of questions for herself, about where she's been, who she is, and what's next and so wrapped it all up in her new memoir, "Tiny Lights For Travellers."

Shirlee Smith Matheson has been writing for over 30 years, with more than 20 books to her name. One of those books in the 1989 non-fiction work about the building of Dam projects in British Columbia, starting with the Bennett dam in the 1960's, moving on to warn of calamity if work on the Site C dam in northern B.C. carried on. "This Was Our Valley" initially hit the shelves three decades ago and won the Alberta Culture Non-Fiction Book Award. During 2019, Shirlee Smith Matheson re-issued the book she co-wrote with north Peace historian, Earl K. Pollen, updating the story with new reports from the Site C project.

Summer has piqued and for those who like to hike, it's all access to breath-catching ridge walks and mountain meadows full of alpine wildflowers. If you're a dedicated hiker, you can probably relate but there's a chance that you would like to be more of a hiker than you actually are. Travel writer, Kim Gray (ToqueAndCanoe.com) didn't grow up doing a lot of hiking but she says that's changing.

It seems barely a year ago that Alberta singer and songwriter, Tobey Kai, was finally coming around to regaining what passed for a normal life. At the beginning of 2018, a skiing accident left her with a brain injury, facing months of rehabilitation. It derailed her life and her career. But now, as the Alberta summer blooms, her music blossoms again with the release of new tracks and a commitment to issue new music on a monthly basis. Tobey Kai has just issued a new video for a song called "Commandeer," and she dropped in to the Daybreak studio with Russell to play that track, chat about animals, and to start things off, they also listened to her recent single, "Running."