In the first season of Glee, I found that Will (aka Mr. Shuester) shared many of my feelings of lingering doubt … Why did I never chase my dreams? What might have happened had I actually auditioned all those years ago?
Now, let me tell you, I did not relish the thought of being like Mr. Shuester. Quite the contrary. He [...]
Archive for the ‘Observations’ Category
April 20th, 2010
Confessions of a Former Gleek (part 2)
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April 16th, 2010
Recipe for a Wonderful Evening
1. Call up a good, true friend that you haven’t seen lately because the mundate elements in life keep stealing all your time.
2. With only one day’s notice, ask that she join you for an evening out.
3. As you step into the car pulled up at your driveway, you can already feel that the mad rush to get dinner and homework [...]
April 14th, 2010
Confessions of a Former Gleek (part 1)
I get an uncomfortable mix of emotions when I watch certain things. A ballet performance. A theatrical play. And the hit television series Glee.
I imagine other former gleeks take pleasure in watching these things. But me? It teases out raw, bittersweet feelings…
[please click to read more]
April 3rd, 2010
Personal style: Sacrificed at the altar of family
Most of the folks in our circle started out strong.
We wouldn’t sacrifice our personal style just because we were starting a family. Hell no! Just because we’d be parents didn’t mean we’d have to give up our sense of “cool.”
But, one by one, we’ve all slipped into family-dom. Some jumped in whole-heartedly, while others — like my husband and I [...]
March 29th, 2010
Sharing stories
There’s been a great deal of interesting and intelligent debate — as well as some yelling, screaming and posturing of course — about woman and blogs as of late. In one situation, some “mommy” bloggers were put under the academic microscope, while in others, the mainstream media snickered at mothers and their interest in blogging and, strangely, pronounced that women didn’t blog, only men.
People I know [...]
March 23rd, 2010
I’m still thinking about hyper-parenting
Hyper-parenting. You might remember that a little while back, I wrote a post sparked by the CBC documentary Hyper Parents and Coddled Kids. And I’m still thinking about it.
The whole concept of hyper-parenting is never really far from my mind, actually. It’s something that I consciously, actively want to avoid doing to my children. And yet, it seems we live [...]
March 7th, 2010
The Winter Resolution series: Bush party! (shhhh … pass it on)
When I was a teenager, every so often word would spread that a “bush party” was going to take place on the weekend. Unlike the “house party” which took place at some poor unsuspecting parent’s home while they were away, a “bush party” involved no house, just a location in the woods somewhere.
The two types of parties still shared some [...]
March 6th, 2010
Extra! Extra! Read all about it …
Good morning! If you don’t normally buy an Ottawa Citizen newspaper, pick one up today to support not only your local paper but this caffeine-needy writer!
In today’s Travel Section, I have two articles for your morning coffee:
#1: What a woman wants: how hotels can cater better to women business travellers and a list of hotels going all out to do [...]
March 5th, 2010
Destructive cycles (+ ticket giveaway to blood.claat, a play @ Ottawa’s GCTC)
She’s a 15 year-old kid in a school uniform. And she’s just given birth to a baby conceived through violence. That is her story. But it’s also the story of her mother. And her grandmother before that.
This is a cycle that’s fairly common in Jamaica, according to a 2006 Unicef report:
Approximately 20% of births are given by adolescents. In other [...]
March 3rd, 2010
Excuse me, but you’re stepping on my Canadian pride
An open letter to Canada’s Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney:
I don’t ever remember a time when I did not feel proud to be a Canadian. It’s similar in fierceness to the pride I’ve always felt for my family. It runs right to the core.
I drink my Double-double’s at Timmys, I buy my backpack from MEC and I bite my [...]
March 3rd, 2010
Maybe a puppy wasn’t such a bad idea, after all?
Last year, we lost Riley. Riley was our family dog. The puppy my husband and I adopted the summer we moved into our first home together. We had Riley for five years before any children came along. And in total, we had Riley in our lives for a decade. For anyone who’s had a pet, you know what kind of [...]
February 17th, 2010
Olympic dreaming? Not a chance.
In a world where parents are increasingly beginning to question the benefits of overscheduling their children in organized activities, the Olympics reaches right into a parent’s heart and makes you want to fire up that mini-van and start signing cheques. Almost. {read more}
February 13th, 2010
That was kinda sucky, wasn’t it?
I hate to say it, for fear of sounding unpatriotic, but Canada’s opening ceremonies for the Olympics was kinda, well, sucky. Starting with the snowboarder entry that was cheesy and far too long. In fact, most of it just seemed like it went on too long for its own good.
So much so that when K.D. Lang launched into crooning her melancholy lyrics:
Your faith was [...]
February 5th, 2010
Hyper Parents & Coddled Kids
Did you catch this CBC documentary yesterday?
I got a heads-up from Ann Douglas’ blog at parentcentral.ca that it was coming and I was intrigued. In her review, Douglas concludes that this “hyper-parenting” phenomenon is largely a thing of the past:
The documentary is worth watching, if only as a reminder of where we’ve been and how far we’ve come in rejecting the [...]
February 1st, 2010
Life As A Human has launched!
So, today is the big day! Life As A Human, the Canadian-based e-zine I was telling you about in my last post has now launched.
I really had no idea how it was all going to come together or who the other writers were — it was a bit of a leap of faith to sign-on as a contributor. As you [...]
