An Albertan who spends winters in California.
Happy New Year! It amazes me to realize that I have been maintaining this blog for a decade. I would not have imagined that to be possible when I began it. The years 2010-2019 have been full of new experiences, accidents, and opportunities. I have moved from Red […]
On a car journey on Interstate 80 in California over the holiday, some family members and I saw something unusual on the horizon on our right-hand side. We were all wondering what we were looking at. Some of us thought it was snow on mountains behind foothills; others […]
Every year, when I come to San Jose, I am delighted to see flowers. It amuses my sister to see me taking pictures of what seem to her to be unexceptional blooms, but when you come from a snowscape, greenery and blossoms are a lovely contrast. Today I […]
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka the Mormon church, has a nest egg of one hundred billion US dollars. Yes, $100,000,000,000. Leaving aside for now the fact that this money is all in a tax-exempt investment fund, this huge amount of money is just sitting […]
Every year the Monterey State Historic Park Association arranges for an evening of access to several adobe buildings in the city. Some of them are not normally open to the public, so it was quite a treat to be able to visit them with my niece last Friday. […]
This weekend I took an Amtrak train from San Jose to Salinas and enjoyed a very comfortable journey. When I arrived at San Jose Diridon station I had time to wait and take in the lovely architectural details. It was built in the Italian Renaissance Revival style and […]
Here are some new and some new-to-me murals seen this week on South 1st Street in San Jose. I always appreciate the colorful creativity of the artists’ work and am often surprised by the imagery. When I was here last winter the site at 791 South 1st Street […]
There is a song by Jerome Kern and B.G. DeSilva that admonishes us to always look for the silver lining. Quite by chance today, I found it. I also found Santa Claus on an apartment balcony. But nothing surprised me more than finding out that Captain America lives […]
You have probably seen that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was caught on a hot mic gossiping and giggling with some other world leaders about President Donald Trump. Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but none of that actually happened. The incident you saw was edited from […]
I’ve been feeling a bit stressed lately because some dirty rotten scoundrels are trying to steal my savings and I don’t know how to stop them. I know why they are doing it, though. They borrowed some money they didn’t have and gave it to their friends. The […]
I’m the kind of person that enjoys true crime re-enactments so it should come as no surprise that I am also enjoying the US impeachment hearings. I’m lapping it up. I can have that channel on while I’m pottering about the house, doing crafts, reading, or replying to […]
On Saturday I was flying from Edmonton to San Jose via Seattle. The first flight was without incident aside from some turbulence. When I arrived in Seattle I had plenty of time to catch my second flight which my boarding pass told me was at gate N18. I had […]
In Canada, there has been a bit of a hullabaloo about poppies. Not real poppies; the fake kind that people wear for Remembrance Day. One of our hockey commentators made remarks insisting that immigrants have a duty to buy poppies and there has been a huge blowback in […]
This afternoon, on Remembrance Day, I went for a walk to get some fresh air. We had a heavy snowfall two nights ago and I didn’t get out at all yesterday so I was feeling a bit of cabin fever. I had my camera with me and took […]
As regular readers may have guessed, I have a soft spot for red brick buildings. I suspect that is partly because they are rarely built these days, and partly because they remind me of the English neighbourhood I grew up in. Whatever the reason, I like the way […]
Quite by chance in our wanderings today, Jamie and I came across the historic McKay Avenue School. The building is currently being used as the Edmonton Public Schools Archive and Museum. It is a lovely building with some interesting features and we were drawn to it from the […]
Borden Park in Edmonton is one of my favourite places to go for a walk, and I have posted pictures of it here previously. (October Afternoon, Autumn, Sunday Morning) One of the things I like about it is that is home to lots of sculptures. It reminds me […]
Borden Park is one of Edmonton’s best-kept secrets. When we moved here in 2014 I would walk to this park but since then I have had a couple of bad falls and I can no longer walk that far, so today I drove there. Even so, I had […]
In Alberta our bottles and cans can be returned for a refund, so every once in a while we take them to the nearest bottle depot. There are four people in our household contributing to a collection of empties. We put them in blue bags and line them […]
For everyone who has heard “It’s your age,” this article is for you. I have reached the age when this diagnosis has been applied to whatever thing I might be grumbling about. I must explain, though, that this conclusion has not come from my doctor. She is very […]
I am a snowbird who travels south for the winter. When I get there I have a bird of paradise plant on my patio.
