Yesterday, I fell in love with a musical. It’s not the first time I’ve fallen in love with a musical, but it is the most recent. Before this, it was Hamilton, and that is still an absolute favorite. Today, though, my first love is Come From Away which I saw at the Golden Gate Theatre […]
I have been conned more than once, and each time I blamed myself. I kicked myself. I felt guilty. I found it very, very hard to talk about because it is embarrassing to have been conned. I know I’m not alone in this. Many of you have been conned, too. Whether you have been conned […]
When I was at the mall the other day, wandering about looking at blouses and sweaters, a woman standing nearby took a white embroidered top off the rack and we both looked at it. I said how pretty it was and she agreed. Then, she looked at me, paused, and said “You have beautiful skin!” […]
[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 […]
[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. […]
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 […]
The problem with “He said, she said” is that it isn’t fair. In our criminal justice system, we always have the presumption of innocence. That’s fine and good, but when there are no witnesses and there is no evidence, there can be no guilty verdict. Many people, mostly women, have been on the losing end […]
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, […]
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 myself in a very few minutes, 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 not getting out much. I have been […]
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 […]
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 (yes, he has played two Darcys), or […]
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 Melinda ends up spending the day with […]
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 […]
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 had already spent the morning at a […]
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 hour waiting to get a police information […]
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 horrific. I turned on my sister’s television […]
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 been a few instances where world leaders […]
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 some of the same stories repeatedly. That’s […]
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 even in the face of evidence that […]
