My mum was really great as a homemaker and as a post office clerk. I wish she was still here to take over from the woman at my local Canada Post office. She would have dealt with the needs of the young Vietnamese man ahead of me and […]
As in my previous blog post, I am rethinking my appearance which has devolved during nearly three months of being housebound. A bad fall has resulted in my spending most of my time lately in hospitals and at home in bed. I am now more mobile but still […]
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. […]
Colin Firth now has Italian citizenship! Isn’t that amazing? It comes as a shock to think of that charming, erudite, upper-crust, fellow with the plummy accent becoming an Italian. We all think of him as Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, or Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary […]
There is a Facebook post doing the rounds of the social networks that has come my way a few times now. It tells the story of a young woman, Melinda, who comes across an older woman, Mary, who is lost. It turns out that Mary has Alzheimer’s and […]
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 […]
When you go to a museum with old people, you don’t see artifacts, you see memories. I had the pleasure of visiting the Innisfail Historical Village yesterday in the company of a busload of people on a summer outing from the North Edmonton Seniors Association. We […]
On Wednesday, I was a lady-in-waiting. I’m not so well-connected as a royal lady-in-waiting, but I am right up there with the waiting skills. First, I spent almost two hours waiting at the car dealership for “just a quick fix” on my vehicle, and then I spent another […]
This is the story of how a bracelet goes missing and a hairdresser gives good advice. How It All Started The morning that I was due to leave London and return to Canada, a bomber in Manchester killed twenty-three people and injured one hundred and sixteen others. It was […]
It takes a special kind of perversity to use a handshake, the symbol of connection and cooperation, as a tool in establishing control. Pecking orders are about establishing dominance and social hierarchy. Chickens do it by pecking, and Donald Trump does it with bone-crushing over-long handshakes. There have […]
I’ve done a lot of looking back over the last couple of weeks. I have been visiting with some of the members of my UK family, and I realized that when you are around extended family, they tell stories of things that happened in the past. They tell […]
Given the number and significance of the lies being told by various politicians and their representatives, why do they still have loyal supporters? It must be a kind of sunk cost fallacy: having invested so much in a person or a party, the prior commitment justifies ongoing investment […]
If you see something, say something. Homeland Security has used this phrase to help combat terrorism, but it has value in other circumstances, too. They were the words going through my head when I saw a man yelling at a woman last week. I had just left the […]
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 […]
I’m developing a theory. My theory is that women, or most women anyway, aren’t much interested in joining armies. We prefer to join forces in more subtle ways. We join book clubs, Facebook, and meetup groups. It’s a kind of small-scale subterfuge. Increasingly, I live in a world […]
Talking About Giving Deciding how to contribute to charity has become really complicated. I used to just put a dollar or two into the cups of panhandlers in winter, buskers in summer, and the Salvation Army bell-ringers at Christmas-time. Then I joined a church whose members tithed, so […]
The day after the US election I had a terrible hangover and I hadn’t even been drinking. I had waited and waited for something, anything, to happen for a different outcome, but in the end all I got was a night with too little sleep. So it 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 […]
We can all get along. I know because I’ve seen us do it. On Saturday I took the bus downtown, as I do on most weekends. It’s about a thirty-minute ride and in that time I saw people of various ages, ethnicities, and abilities helping each other out. […]
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. […]
I am a snowbird who travels south for the winter. When I get there I have a bird of paradise plant on my patio.
