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. […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
[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 […]
[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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
I had a bad fall while on vacation in California and needed the help of my family to fly back to Canada. I broke my wrist and fractured my pelvis, and have written about it in this blog (here, here, here, and here). My experience in negotiating all the […]
If you are watching the news and thinking we should keep out immigrants, please have a chat with your friends and neighbours. Most, if not all of them, are or were immigrants, or they have ancestors who were immigrants. Immigrants are us. When I see crowds of people […]
It has been a long, painful, journey both literally and figuratively since I had a bad fall while in California. It has also caused me to rethink a few things; the fragility of my health, the risks of wintering in the USA, and the wisdom of never again […]
The process of disconnecting from Facebook started out easily enough. I put up a post to tell my friends and family that I was planning to deactivate my account and two days later, that’s what I did. It took me a few minutes to find the right page […]
Imagine that you are going to be away for a long period of time, and so you ask your good neighbour to take care of the house for you. He says “Of course! No worries. I’ll be happy to.” Then he says, “By the way, we’ve got guests […]
I am so spitting mad right now I can’t think straight. How could Facebook not know that Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica were messing with our minds through its website? And why isn’t someone under arrest for this already? I have loved Facebook. I have loved seeing my […]
I am a snowbird who travels south for the winter. When I get there I have a bird of paradise plant on my patio.
