Research demonstrates that given names can cause lifelong personal issues. Some kids get by with easy names and others, such as myself, have spent our entire lives spelling our names. I grew up with the name Lilice (sounds like Denise) Lesinski (doesn’t rhyme with anything, but my dad with his Polish sense of humour, in…

Sometimes a meme is just what you need for an easy post. Did I say easy? When Blogland was busy with 100 Things a About Me lists, I could only manage 59. Now I need to come up with 7 or 8 things, depending on where the tag originated, that aren’t on that list? OK,…

We’ve all survived, hopefully all a little wiser. Three things I’ve learned this week: 1. You can’t beat the support you get in blogland. Thank you to all for your reassurance and good advice. My favourite explanation for teen boys’ behaviour is that testosterone is a neurotoxin and that their brains are swimming in it.…

My Mother’s Day started at 1:30 a.m. Take two boys, ages 16 and 17, uncharacteristically exceeding their curfew; add a twelve pack of beer. While you’re at it throw in some poor judgment, a little mischief, and a romp through the woods in rugged terrain after dark, and what do you get? An ambulance ride…

Just like a deep tissue massage, sometimes frogging just hurts so good. It seems I’m not alone. Donna has some lovely yarn that is destined to stay a center pull skein, Beth is turning pools of colours into a frog pond, and Blogless Marsha pulled out her hair swing sweater because some unreliable nasty knitter…

While at the Seattle Knitting Expo Blogless Marsha and I took a class on Tunisian Crochet. It’s done on what looks like a crochet hook on steroids – the length of a long knitting needle and the thickness of a size 10 needle (6mm) for sport weight yarn. For worsted weight, the hook must be…

Here’s our lion! This is the boy, who at age six, accompanied us to our high school’s production of Oliver. That night he confidently told us that he was going to be on that stage someday, and here he is. I am so thankful for this school-related positive experience for him, as academics haven’t been…

Not really. We’re eight years from retirement, one of us pensionless, the other with a teensy-weensy one due to the recent sale of the company for which he works. We moved to Canada 24 years ago, young and oblivious to important life implications, simply because it was pretty. It’s been a good life, but we…

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Eat, Pray, Love, there is sentence I’m dying to quote, but can’t locate it from memory. It’s about how our culture reinforces hard hard work all week and then the weekend comes and all we can manage is to sit around the house in a semi-comatose state. That about describes me,…

These past few days I’ve attempted to leave comments on all you Blogspot people’s sites to no avail. Is the problem fixed? Just know I’m thinking about you: Jayne, I can relate to the Glysomed tube in your knitting basket, especially knitting with seasilk. Marianne, I’m putting that Japanese Feather shawl that you pictured on…