Two years of Covid semi-isolation has been a mixed blessing. I have enjoyed feeling safe and secure but also felt myself become increasingly agoraphobic. The long Edmonton winters and icy sidewalks made it difficult to get out for walks, and my social life was reduced to visits with my immediate family and increasingly rare meetups […]
Category: Friends
Meme Morality
When I checked in with family and friends on Facebook Stories a few days ago, I saw a beautiful sunset in Hawaii, a message about racism at the border of Ukraine and Poland, and an image of a golf resort in England set to relaxing music. It struck me that these three messages encapsulated the […]
Who Wants to Know?
If you use Facebook at all, you will have seen some random questions occasionally. You have also, probably, answered a few of them. I once answered the question about how far I live from my birthplace, and the one about how many grandparents I can name. Mostly, though, I have resisted the temptation. These questions […]
Rethinking My Rethinking
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 […]
. . . and don’t come back!
Molly Jung-Fast, Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Beast, got it right when she wrote today “America Finally Breaks Up With Her Abusive Boyfriend.” As a Canadian watching from the sidelines for the past four years, I feel the analogy fits perfectly. When you watch a close friend or family member being constantly insulted or abused, you […]
Coincidence, Correlation, and Cause.
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 […]
More Than One America
When you watch Independence Day celebrations and hear the patriotic songs, it looks and sounds as though the people of the USA are all celebrating the same thing, doesn’t it? Today, I’m beginning to think that the perception is wrong both for the observer and the celebrant. Yes, Americans are independent of British rule, but […]
How Little Has Changed
I remember some of the names of my high school classmates. Sylvia Coulson, Jane Cripps, Janice Butler, Valerie Russell, Penny Lewis, Peter Blackwell, and many more. My memory gets worse every day, but today I remembered one person who changed my perceptions. Her name was Penny Haag and she joined my class when I was […]
Twitter: It’s A Love/Hate Thing.
I have been an avid user of Twitter for a couple of years. You might say I’ve been enamored or addicted. Today, though, I decided our love affair is over. It’s been good, Twitter, but you became abusive. Now I have chosen to leave. For a few months now I have been troubled by how […]
The Buttons of My Life
Today I did something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I took out and repurposed my button and pin collection from its hiding place in a corner of a drawer in my jewelry box. As regular readers already know, I tend to hold on to things for no good reason. Among the things […]
Cleaners, Cleaning Ladies, and the Biases of SEO
When I first started this blog in 2010, WordPress provided me with a perfect platform. I didn’t have the skills to create a website, and WordPress made it easy for me. I was able to upload text or to create text directly on the site and soon thereafter to incorporate photos, all without technical ability […]
Times Have Really Changed
I have a friend in her late thirties who has many friends in the same age group. They are single and looking for life partners but finding that the dating world is not as rewarding as they would like it to be. I have known my friend for several years, and in that time she […]
A Well-Travelled Gulliver
I recently reconnected with an old friend. We knew each other at college back in the early 1970s and I wrote a few blog posts about some memories I had of the ways in which she helped me through a difficult time. Subsequently, I wrote to tell her about the posts by finding an address […]
Doing a Google-inspired Happy Dance
I am SO happy! I just got an email from a friend I haven’t seen or heard from since the 1970s. We were students together at Bretton Hall College back in the day when we wore bell-bottomed jeans. Isn’t that marvelous? I have been doing the dance of joy in my kitchen. A little while […]
My E-cleansing Progress: Deleting Facebook and Instagram
In March 2018, I deactivated my Facebook account and I really haven’t missed it. Occasionally, when talking about something they had read or posted on there, family members have said: “Oh, I forgot you aren’t on Facebook anymore.” Otherwise, its absence from my life has been largely unnoticed. Yesterday, I was so disgusted by yet […]
Thank You, Nancy Miller (Part 3 of 3)
[The following is the third part of a story I began here and continued here.] In 1971, after I had left my marriage and moved in with a college friend, Nancy Miller, one of the things I had to resolve was that AR had taken off with the cheque book to our joint account and overspent it […]
Thank You, Nancy Miller (Part 2 of 3)
[This is a continuation of the story I began telling in a previous blog post.] After visiting with my family in the London area, I applied and was accepted into the college that had been recommended to me by my brother-in-law Jim. Consequently, AR and I moved again in 1971 so that I could attend. […]
Thank You, Nancy Miller (Part 1 of 3)
The other night, just as I was falling asleep, I found myself remembering the woman who came to my aid in 1971. I was standing at the side of a road with my suitcase and my mother’s sewing machine, waiting to be picked up by a friend from college. She had said “If you need […]
Let Me Walk You Out
After you have visited a friend and the evening is over, it’s a lovely friendly gesture if your host waves goodbye at the doorstep or walks you out to your car. It says “I know you have to go, but I hate to see you leave.” You drive away feeling loved. On the other hand, […]