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 waving signs or chanting to build walls […]
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 using the expression “A pain in the […]
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 and the right link in order to […]
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 coming for a short stay. Can they […]
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 friends’ and family’s photos, updates, travels, celebrations, […]
Yesterday, Sunday, I was setting out at 8:30 in the morning to go to my sister’s house. She has recently had a back injury and I was going to help her to get ready so that she, her husband, and I could go to visit family in Monterey. As I stepped out of the door […]
For the last couple of years, I have mostly kept my comments on Facebook to my day-to-day activities and reactions to the events in the lives of the people I care about. I love seeing their family photos, weddings, vacations, weather concerns, and pets. My thoughts about politics have been channelled into Twitter and sometimes […]
Over the holiday I inadvertently upset my sister. It was a misunderstanding, but I hurt her feelings. When I realized what I had done I felt awful. In fact, I lost sleep over it and made a point of going to her house the next day to apologize. Today, though, I realize I really didn’t […]
My last two blog posts have talked about how I have managed money over the years and I realize now that I have been a little too smug about it. I really shouldn’t be so self-satisfied because I have actually made some really dumb financial choices as well as some good ones. The first dumb […]
Originally posted on Snowbird of Paradise:
I walk the line between wanting to live in the USA, close to my family there, and feeling horrified by repeated mass murders. My US family members are all lovely, peaceful, law-abiding folks who are outraged at gun violence. Every time. They don’t keep guns under their beds or…
We tend to think of mental health as an all-or-nothing kind of thing. You either have it or you don’t. Lately I’ve been thinking that there are so many contributing factors to mental health that it is surprising that most of us have most of them most of the time. I also wonder if any […]
Who do you think you are? Are you whatever is in your mind? Are you who you see in the mirror? Are you whatever other people think of your appearance? Jamie (MustBeTuesday) recently posted a video on body positivity that taught me a valuable lesson. He explained that we tend to think of the “self” […]
Austerity kills, and do you know who it kills? Poor people. New immigrants. The elderly. People with addictions. Young artists. Unemployed people. The disabled and infirm. Single parents. I don’t care what political landscape you inhabit, you only have to look around to realize that some of us are suffering. We are suffering so much […]
My Facebook and Twitter feeds this week have included the thoughts of many people who have been openly debating the likelihood that they will not vacation in the United States for the next four years. In addition, some of my former academic colleagues in Canada are rethinking their plans to attend conferences here. Most of […]
Today I realized that some people view the people who joined the Women’s March as whiners and misandrists. They think we are sore losers, or people who didn’t vote and now regret it. They think we hate men. They don’t understand what has got us all so upset. This may be an answer for them. When […]
It is starting to worry me that I find myself dismissing as sadly misguided the perceptions of people on the other side of the political spectrum from me. I look down on their choices of news source as clearly being inferior to my own. Then I realize that they are doing the same thing to me. […]
We can’t put all the blame on Facebook and Google for fake news stories when we are the ones who share them without a second thought. As the news media grope around for someone to blame for the outcome of the US election, they have included social media in their accusatory gaze. Facebook and Google […]
I have been happily chugging along thinking all is well until yesterday when I realized that one of my younger son’s Facebook posts had not shown up on my news feed. I only discovered it because a mutual friend had commented on the post, and that did show up. So, I started to wonder what was […]
A week ago I would have guessed that the Walloons were characters in a Dr. Seuss story. I would have been so wrong. They are, in fact, French-speaking Belgians. The only reason I know that is because this week they have shown that they have the power to block a trade deal between the European […]
How it works This how seasonal affective disorder works. It keeps you in the house, makes you regret every bad decision you ever made, bashes you over the head with your personal shortcomings, and then teases you with all the things you could have done but didn’t. Here I sit in my little apartment, […]
Snowbird of Paradise 