While Michael Dunahee hasn’t been in my consciousness for the past fifteen years, I certainly remembered his name when his story resurfaced in the media recently. In 1991, four-year-old Michael disappeared from a school playground in Victoria, BC. Despite over 11,000 tips, his disappearance remains an unsolved case. A $100,000 reward has been announced by… Read more »
My baby girl Hilary works as a Special Events Coordinator with the Stollery Children’s Hospital Foundation in Edmonton. Over the course of the year, she takes the lead role in orchestrating several major fundraising events, the most recent being the Radiothon. Four radio stations from the Corus Entertainment group (i.e., CISN 103.9, COOL 880, 630… Read more »
My flight to Salt Lake City was not my first one since 9/11. I knew what to expect. Allow 2 to 2 ½ hours time for check-in and customs on international flights. Have a passport to make the security checks go easier. Don’t pack your handgun, heroin or nail file. No ignorant remarks about explosives… Read more »
Dr. Peter Hanson’s 1987 bestseller entitled The Joy of Stress was perhaps the first jargon-free work outlining the ramifications of stress. He believed stress could be fantastic or fatal. This supports the work done years prior by Canadian researcher Dr. Hans Selye. Stress is unavoidable, unless you’re dead. Harnessing the magic and potential of good… Read more »
When it was disclosed that a young bookkeeper had (allegedly) bilked Salvation Army of more than one million dollars, I didn’t call to cancel the donation debited from my bank account each month. I don’t think the illegal actions of one individual take away from the good work the organization as a whole is doing…. Read more »
I thought making a list of important women would be a great way to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8th. The list would surely have included mothers, mentors and role models. I also planned to name names … to share my own list of women of influence, strength, compassion–Oprah, Mother Theresa, women no one… Read more »
Regular readers of this space will remember I along with my husband did some brutal, pressured home renovations in December. By way of reminder I stripped a wallpaper border, TSP’d the walls, applied a tinted primer, then painted 3, or was it 4, coats of deep red on my office walls. I also ripped up… Read more »
Like for every writer before or after me, writing is a solitary pursuit. Writers write for all kinds of reasons. In her book, entitled “The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life” author Julia Cameron insists, We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It… Read more »
Lost in the retail waves of red Valentine’s Day merchandise is the fact that Random Acts of Kindness Week will be soon upon us. I tried unsuccessfully to research this topic on the Internet. Like so many Internet searches for information, there were dead ends (“this page cannot be displayed” messages) and just downright misleading… Read more »
In a follow-up to a recent column by the same name, here are some more snippets from the Edmonton Journal and the National Post. I spotted these crazy, inane, sad items during a marathon read of about ten newspapers that piled up in my absence. Here it goes. In a January 4th story in the… Read more »