Summertime has perennially been the season of road trip vacations for me. When I was a young girl, this meant sitting sardined in the back of the station wagon with my brothers and sisters, all of us tormenting each other as soon as we became bored with playing license plate bingo and seeing who could… Read more »
Seven years ago, after she turned forty-five years old, my friend Kate, who is a special education assistant, decided that she was going to write and perform in a Fringe Festival play. Last week I was privileged to read the first draft, which she recently completed. The play is about her experiences growing up in… Read more »
A young acquaintance of mine says that her interactions with the rest of human society can be roughly split into three disproportionate categories. First of all, there are about ten per cent of the people she meets that she takes an instant liking to. These are “her kind of people”–individuals who share similar values, passions,… Read more »
I have lived in Vancouver for fifteen years now, and although I’m no jet-setter, I have spent enough time in other cities across the country to confirm that I would no longer consider moving to any other place in Canada. For me, that means no other place in the world can measure up to Vancouver…. Read more »
When the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon set sail in the eighteenth century to voyage across South America in search of the fabled fountain of youth, he was continuing one of humanity’s most ancient quests. Since prehistoric times, witches and sorcerers employed talismans and minerals and rendered potions from roots, herbs and flowers in the… Read more »
For those of you who believe, as I do, that many of our most troubling problems as a species can be traced back to our ceaseless busyness, our never-ending striving for new skills, experiences, knowledge and possessions, there is a political party out there that has some very interesting things to say. The credo of… Read more »
In keeping with my scattered, spring-fevered mind this week, here is a collection of odds and sods insights, with the general theme of enjoying the upcoming brilliant spring and summer weather: >> If you have the space to do it, try line-drying your clothes outdoors on sunny days. The natural sunlight will increase the intensity… Read more »
I have a firmly held belief that life is too short for fast food. It is too short, in fact, to bother with treating meals as simply a source of energy — something to be boiled in a bag for five minutes before rushing out of the door, or something ordered by speaking into an… Read more »
It seems to me that there’s considerable misunderstanding about what it means to be bored. In our fast-paced world, being bored is considered to be a very negative state, even an abnormal and unhealthy state. It’s supposedly a state that exists when our external environment isn’t stimulating enough to spark our interest and passion. Think… Read more »
A few weeks ago, just before the recent B.C. provincial election, I was at a dinner party and the discussion turned to the severe funding cutbacks that the current government has inflicted upon our educational system. As a result of these provincial cuts over the last four years, teachers have been laid off, class sizes… Read more »