Is there such a thing as empathy burnout? If so, that is what I am feeling. All my get-up-and-go got up and went. For the last couple of months, I have received one piece of bad news after another. People I know and love have died, are dying, cannot get the surgery they need, or […]
How do you plan for the next decade or two of your life when you are 72? I want to make the best use of my time, energy, health, and money with the awareness that all of those things will decline. The two people in my life whose advice I value the most, my sons, […]
For some time now, years actually, I have failed to recover my pleasure in drawing and painting. I have all the gear, but I am not using any of it. My spare room houses brushes for oil painting, watercolour, and acrylics. It has blank canvases of various sizes, sketch pads, watercolour paper blocks, and palette […]
This morning, somewhere between sleeping and being awake, I was trying to remember Dolly Parton’s name. I could see her in my mind’s eye, but I couldn’t recall her name. I knew the shape of her first name and that it had two syllables and that it probably ended in “y”, but I couldn’t remember […]
This week my eldest son said he had been harassed by someone in the street. He was happily walking along, minding his own business, when a man started taunting him. He asked if my son was sick, if he wasn’t feeling well. He wanted to know what his problem was, and why he was wearing […]
In one corner of my living room is an easel holding a blank canvas. It has been there for a couple of weeks. I keep meaning to get out my paints and brushes to actually create something on it, but my lack of imagination holds me back. I have no idea what I want to […]
Today I was delighted to hear from the doll collector who now has my old doll, Nurse Nan. I had written about the doll in a previous blog post and explained how I came to donate her to a local doll collectors’ club. After she had been picked up from my home, Nurse Nan was […]
It has been quite a year, hasn’t it? We have all adjusted to new truths, new living situations, and new restrictions. As I look back on my year, and as I try to stay hopeful, I want to review what has changed in my life and how my life has changed me. I do this […]
After a suitable interlude, I have resumed my memorabilia winnowing. A few months ago I sorted through and discarded about nine boxes of miscellaneous documents. Most recently, I abandoned an attempt to sort out “The Box” and my eldest son relieved me of it in its entirety. You might have thought this would have cured […]
It’s gone. That box that I have talked out in a couple of blog posts (here and here) and that I have been packing around for fifteen years, is finally gone. I opened it up, looked superficially at the contents, and decided there was too much to sort through. Inside the box were three big […]
Question: What is the relationship between this kettle and this box? The answer: a dream. Remembering a Dream I rarely dream. In fact, when I had a dream a several weeks ago, it was a momentous occasion for me. It was the first time I had remembered a dream in many, many months. Maybe years, […]
I don’t dream. I can go for months or years, even, without being aware that I have dreamed. Once in a while I might be startled awake while dreaming, but after I have gone back to sleep I don’t remember the dream. I haven’t woken up in the morning remembering a dream for years, until […]
A couple of weeks ago I reconnected with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I had stopped using them in early 2018 and 2019 and restarting those connections has kept me away from this blog. It has also kept me from reading other, favourite, WordPress blogs and I apologize to those bloggers for my absence. I probably […]
Everyone agrees that the Covid-19 problem is awful, and almost everyone thinks that their politicians are doing a terrible job of managing it. A friend on Facebook recently described the situation in Alberta as being “a dumpster fire” and she isn’t wrong. Comparatively, though, the dumpster fire is bigger in a lot of other places. […]
The process for finding and meeting a psychologist isn’t hard, but when you are depressed it seems like a pathway strewn with obstacles. At each roadblock, it is easy to just give up. Having overcome some of those setbacks, I would strongly encourage anyone who is feeling unusually despondent to stick with it. With the […]
This morning I had a really good clear-out. Now, a bag of trash and two bags of recyclables are waiting for the garbage trucks. In addition, I just took to the thrift store two boxes full of miscellany, a bag of clothes, a recycling bin full of pots and pans, and a George Foreman grill. […]
At 2:30 AM last night. I was having a bad night because I had insomnia, so, when my next door neighbour’s motion-sensor light came on right outside my bedroom window, I noticed. In fact, I noticed enough to get out of bed and look out of the window. I didn’t see anything, so I went […]
The first pecking order I became aware of was in housing. My family lived in a semi-detached house (known as a duplex in north America). At some point I began to realize that I went to school with some people who lived in detached houses, some who lived in council houses (social housing), and some […]
For a few years I have tried growing shrubs and bulbs in our front yard, but have had very limited success. The soil quality is not good because it is mostly clay. In addition, there are bugs that are determined to kill almost anything that starts to look as if it might grow to bloom. […]
Snowbird of Paradise 