Personal Reminiscences – Page 25

The Smallest Helper

2013-10-12 2013-11-11 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

While I was pondering the nature of flour in my cogitations about bread machines (I’m still debating which model, by the way – suggestions welcome, but local stores have few options), I turned my grey matter to the business of yeast. Yeast is, of course, important in bread making because it makes bread rise. Why? You ask. Well, dear reader, the answer is simple but not pretty: farts. Yep. Yeast flatulence makes bread rise. Yeast out-gases carbon dioxide after it eats. The gas gets trapped in the gooey dough and, since it can’t escape, the dough expands. Food writer Linda Stradley ……… click below for more ↓

Something so basic, yet so different stands between us

2013-10-12 2013-11-11 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

You’d think it should be this easy: just take a bread machine, throw in all the ingredients listed in the recipe, push a button, wait, remove loaf and eat. Yum. Nah, of course not. Never is. And there are reasons for this, I’ve been learning. I have an old bread machine – must be 20 years old or near as dammit – and my results were always mixed, using the recipes in the manual. I constantly tinkered with them. The best loaves were qualified successes. I ate them, Susan balked. The worst were, well, inedible, even for a guy who ……… click below for more ↓

The Eyes Have It

2013-10-05 2013-10-05 Education & Learning / Personal Reminiscences / Psychology & Sociology / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

This summer my mother was diagnosed with macular degeneration. There is no cure. It is irreversible. It simply progresses. Science has some hope for future cures, and has some treatments to slow the progress, but a cure likely won’t come soon enough for her. At 93, one expects that the body will fail, that organs and parts won’t work as well, will lose efficiency, will fail. But this is particularly tough on her. It was clear during our visit today that this diagnosis troubles her. My parents were both voracious readers, and they passed along a love for books, reading ……… click below for more ↓

I Didn’t Know That…

2013-10-02 2013-10-02 Books & Reviews / Education & Learning / History & Biography / Personal Reminiscences / US PoliticsOne Comment

One of the great delights of learning is to be able to read or hear something new, something unknown, something that challenges the mind or your previously formed ideas and opinions. Something that fascinates and delights you. That “ah ha!” moment. Last week I stumbled across a website called History of England and I felt like that when I started to read through it. Better yet, I spent an hour downloading the 104 free podcasts of his history (plus the eight or so supplementary ones) to listen to while I walk my dogs.* The site is a blog created by ……… click below for more ↓

The (sometimes violent) urge to write

2013-10-01 2013-10-01 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Critical Thinking / Internet & Social Media / Literary pretensions / My Writing4 Comments

As of this writing, I will have published 253 posts since I began this blog at the ending week of December, 2011. Two hundred and fifty three posts in 21 months. Just over one post every two-and-a-half days, on average. Plus 30 or so still in draft mode. Another half-dozen scribbled in word processing notes or notebooks. And that doesn’t include the six years of blog posts – a list of 91 pages – on my previous blog site (still available in archive format, although some formatting issues have developed after some code updates). “Scribble, scribble, scribble,” as Prince William ……… click below for more ↓

Why Spelling Matters

2013-09-29 2013-09-29 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Language & Grammar / My Writing / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

Sometimes I despair when I surf through the social media. Technology has empowered everyone to be able to comment, to post their stories, to share their opinion. Yet it has not enabled their ability to compose a sentence, or to spell the words correctly. It has not made us better grammarians, better spellers. And in my despair, I’m not alone. Others take exception to the general dumbing down and its accelerating spread online. It’s not just the easily-confused homophones like they’re, their and there, board and bored, your and you’re. What’s heartbreaking about those mistakes is that the differences are ……… click below for more ↓

The Moral Compass

2013-09-23 2013-09-23 Atheism & Spirituality / Critical Thinking / Faith / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

I have a laminated card beside me, wallet-sized so it can be carried around easily. I made it at my shop a few years ago; just a simple, two-sided business card with some text. It’s part of my personal moral compass. We all benefit from some guidance, at times, something to remind us of the higher things. I look at it frequently through the day, as a reminder when I find myself in Dante’s dark wood. Every problem, every concern, every moment of doubt can be worked through using these basic principles, if you step outside the flow and think them ……… click below for more ↓

Swimming with Vivaldi

2013-09-20 2013-09-20 Arts / Culture / Personal Reminiscences / Uncategorized2 Comments

Today, for an hour, I swam with Vivaldi. Not the actual composer, of course. He died in 1741 at the age of 63. Would have made a mess of the pool to dig him up and toss him in. The “red priest,” as he was called (for his red hair), probably couldn’t even swim. Not a lot of people back then could. but he could write music, and play the violin beautifully. Almost 300 years later his music is still as powerful and moving as when he was alive.* Rather, as you guessed, I swam with his music, the Four ……… click below for more ↓

Of Type and Typography

2013-09-16 2013-09-16 Arts / My Writing / Science & Technology / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

Humans have remarkable ability that is shared by – as far as we know – no other animal. We can turn abstract images and symbols into meaning. Words are, of course, the prime example, as old as our history. We can turn a word like dog, tree, table or vacation into a broad and deep understanding of what that word means to us. Of course when I write “dog” and you read it, they’re not the same thing. I need to add qualifiers – adjectives, descriptions, anecdotes – for you to come close to appreciating my meaning. Even then, it’s ……… click below for more ↓

Reflecting on our successes this term

2013-09-08 2013-09-08 Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Personal Reminiscences / Provincial PoliticsOne Comment

With just over a year left to go in this term, I’d like to take a few minutes to consider all the accomplishments of this council over the past three years. They are not inconsiderable, and worth celebrating, I think you’ll agree. Most recent are the two new state-of-the-art recreational facilities; jewels in our community. Centennial Pool Aquatic Centre is now open, to the public’s delight and great excitement. If you haven’t seen it, stop by and look inside. Everyone who does is impressed. It certainly exceeded expectations. Bring your bathing suit and come for a swim. It proved to ……… click below for more ↓

Three Archy poems by Don Marquis

2013-09-07 2013-09-07 Arts / Books & Reviews / Humour & Satire / My Writing / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

pete the parrot and shakespeare i got acquainted with a parrot named pete recently who is an interesting bird pete says he used to belong to the fellow that ran the mermaid tavern in london then i said you must have known shakespeare know him said pete poor mutt i knew him well he called me pete and i called him bill but why do you say poor mutt well said pete bill was a disappointed man and was always boring his friends about what he might have been and done if he only had a fair break two or ……… click below for more ↓

Archy and Mehitabel

2013-08-27 2016-05-25 Books & Reviews / Humour & Satire / Language & Grammar / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading Now3 Comments

I can’t recall exactly how old I was when I first cracked open Don Marquis’s book, archy and mehitabel, sitting there among the other books in the basement, black spined, stiff, yellowing pages. That old book smell. Perhaps I was 11 or 12, but not much older, because we moved from that house in the summer after my 12th birthday. But I still remember it well.* The book was one of those oddities on our basement family bookshelf. I ignored it, at first, then looked at the pictures – cartoons by George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat . Long ……… click below for more ↓

Christmas Creep in August

2013-08-23 2013-08-23 Atheism & Spirituality / Canadian Politics / Critical Thinking / Humour & Satire / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

On August 22, we got the Sears “Christmas Wish” catalogue delivered to our home. It was a sunny, hot day that almost reached 30C. The sprinkler was watering the garden while we enjoyed a cold beer on the porch, sitting in shorts and T-shirts. The last thing I wanted on my mind was winter. But there it was, two pounds of wildly-inappropriate seasonal shopping choices, refusing to be ignored. As welcome as a fart in a crowded elevator. It seems every year “Christmas Creep” advances down the calendar, earlier and earlier. Last year I heard Xmas music in stores on ……… click below for more ↓

I’m Baaaaack….

2013-08-14 2013-08-16 Blog & Blogging / Personal Reminiscences2 Comments

After a few days waiting while the site transferred, I’m back, live and active. Boy do I have a lot to say that I’ve been holding in while the admin stuff was churning away… but I won’t say it all now… 😉 If you encounter an “internal server error” while reading my posts, refresh the page please – the port seems to have been imperfect and needs some tech tweaking to figure out why that’s happening. Sorry about that… I got an interesting call this week from Hostpapa’s CEO, Jamie Opalchuck, after I posted my piece about moving from Hostpapa ……… click below for more ↓