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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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…
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
Imagine you have gone to a foreign country for a visit and you are enthralled by the clothes, the customs, the food, the culture. You find it delightful to experience even briefly the unusual and unexpected. You visit national monuments and attend cultural events, and you smile at […]
My memory has never been good, but now it is frequently awful. One of my most valuable techniques for overcoming the problem is to always put things away after I’ve used them. This is especially important for things like screwdrivers, scissors, tax files, and Tupperware lids. If things […]
I understand why Britain chose to divorce itself from the European Union. It was a marriage fraught with irritations, and in order to end the annoyances Britain decided to walk away. It was a tough decision and it could have gone either way, but they walked. I feel […]
From the moment a child is born, we want to reassure ourselves that our baby fits into our perceptions of what is considered normal. Normal numbers of fingers and toes, normal weight, normal health, and normal gender. The problem with that is that we have very narrow perceptions of […]
The Promise Regular readers of this blog will remember that I promised to provide an update on my social experiment: living for five months in California without a car. At the end of December, I flew from Alberta to spend the winter in San Jose, and I had […]
Several years ago I met someone online whose empathy helped me with the daily tribulations that accompanied my husband’s illness and, ultimately, his death. I appreciated his friendship and looked forward to exchanging emails with him. Unfortunately, it turned out that his empathy was not without self-interest. Little […]
I am a snowbird who travels south for the winter. When I get there I have a bird of paradise plant on my patio.
