After the neighbourhood started locking up their garbage in the spring, we hadn’t seen any signs of our resident bears until about a month ago. All of the ripening fruit around here was beckoning the bears with their fruity siren songs. Three weeks ago, my mother-in-law was sending me text after text, updating me on […]
Archives for 2024
Don’t You Get Me Wrong
September 23, 2024 by 45 Comments
I was just finishing preparing dinner the other night when I heard a very familiar guitar riff. I left what I was doing to run to the living room, which sounds dramatic, but it’s literally five steps away. Rewinding twenty-seven years or so, I was modestly famous among my friends in grad school for my […]
Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Cheap Trick Edition
September 19, 2024 by 52 Comments
It’s sunset season! I know what you’re going to say: sunsets occur on the daily. This is true – sunrise, sunset – but since I retire so early I don’t generally see sunsets from May to August. Sunrises, I see those every day. But sunsets? No. I really do believe that The Best Things In […]
Series-us
September 16, 2024 by 67 Comments
Just like everyone else in the reading world, I have strong preferences when it comes to certain genres and subjects. I gravitate towards those genres naturally, although I really do try to branch out every now and then to broaden my mind and my horizons. Recently Suzanne (HI SUZANNE) wrote about twenty ideas for lists […]
Nature, Nurture, Nerd
September 9, 2024 by 45 Comments
I am very accustomed to drawing a lot of attention on my daily walk, because I am accompanied by a living embodiment of a gigantic cartoon dog whose facial expression is exactly this for the duration: Every day people pass me and actually laugh at him, in a good-natured, look at that silly dog kind […]
Long and Winding Road
September 2, 2024 by 72 Comments
I was walking with a friend downtown toward my favourite bookstore when I recognized a woman passing us. Isn’t it funny that when you see a person out of context, it can take a moment to place them? Usually for me it’s someone I see from the dog park or the walking path; the person […]
Nicole’s Favourite Things: The Zucapocalypse Edition
August 29, 2024 by 58 Comments
August was a bit of a wild ride for me: I took an epic road trip to a family reunion, my husband and older son were gone for three weeks, the garden went completely rogue, my pretend sister came for a visit, I spent lots of one-on-one time with my younger son, and, just recently, […]
