With apologies to our American friends who apprently can’t access Ari Farce material for copyright reasons.
Continue readingAuthor: Mary Soderstrom
Recreating Eden: Why There’s Not Much of a Post Today
Little Jeanne is coming over to play today, the day before her first birthday. Got to wash the kitchen floor because her way of getting around is scooting on her bum (unless, that is, you hold her hands so she can walk.)
Funny, I feel worse about …
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Why There’s Not Much of a Post Today
Little Jeanne is coming over to play today, the day before her first birthday. Got to watch the kitchen floor because her way of getting around is scooting on her bum (unless, that is, you hold her hands so she can walk.)
Funny, I feel worse about ha…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Jack Would Approve: Radio Nederlands Series on Protest Songs
One of the brief uncomfortable moments at Monday night’s vigil at the foot of Mount Royal in memory of Jack Layton was the interminable version of “This Land Is Your Land” by a group of well-intentioned Anglophone musicians. The song’s a good one, but…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Save Sept. 19 for an Interesting Evening of Reading and Love
Last winter in the depth of our despair the Quebec Writers’ Federation asked me if I’d like to be one of two writers to present a favourite novel that has been translated into the other official language as part of the Festival international de litt
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Jack’s Reach…
Just a note–I got more hits on my blog yesterday than I ever had, all with search terms like “Jack Layton House.” (Most went to a posting from shortly after the election about Rick Mercer’s item visit to Jack and Olivia chez eux along with a photo of …
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Saying Good Bye: Jack’s Last Letter and a Link toward a Page of Condolence
Here are a couple of links that may be useful to people saddened by the loss of Jack Layton.
The official condolence page in English
Et en français
And here’s the last letter he wrote:
August 20, 2011 Toronto, Ontario Dear Friends, Tens of thousan…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Our Jack of Hearts Is Gone…
The country and the world will have tougher going now that Jack Layton has left us.
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Saturday Photo: Flowers, Native and Otherwise
This is the season for Brown-eyed Susans, Rudbeckia or whatever you want to call this fantastic golden flower. They are native North American perennials and given some sunshine will bloom for several weeks at the end of the summer. A great flower whi…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: The Basement Is Clean! Or How to Have 35 Years of Construction Scraps Recycled.
Of course, one of the things about moving back into a “restored” house is the sharp contrast what was left over makes with the clean walls etc. Lee now has his basement workshop back, but as he organized and rearranged, the six sheets of 3/8 inch Gy…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: For the Record: The Gazette Says Now to Making the Armed Forces "Royal"
The Montreal English language daily The Gazette fell all over itself welcoming William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge a few weeks ago, so you might think it would also be wowed by the idea of reintroducing “royal” into the names of Canada’…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Thursday in the Park with Jeanne and More Than Thirty Years of Subsidized Day Care in Quebec
Today Jeanne is spending the day with us, the first time she’s passed a whole day away from her parents some place not her own home. It’s momentous in a way, but she will be a year old in a week so she’s quite ready for the experience, as are Grandma …
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Further to Warren Buffet: The Gini Coefficient, a Measure of Income Inequality
When talking about taxing the rich and the effects of inequality, it’s useful to look at a country’s Gini coefficient. That is a measure of household income inequality where 0 would be complete equality and is based on the distribution of household in…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Royal Canadian Air Farce, Or Harper Really Doesn’t have the Interests of the Country at Heart
A Nanos poll reported in The Globe and Mail says that Stephen Harper’s decision to add the designation “Royal” to the names of Canada’s Air Force and Navy would boost the fortunes of the Bloc Québécois and Quebec nationalism. That, of course, is a m…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Life Goes on Department: The Ducks Did It Again This Summer
As I said earlier, I’ve been catching up on my usual walks now that we’re back in the house. Last year I was delighted to find that ducks had raised a couple of families of ducklings in Parc Pratt, and I wondered if they’d been successful this year.
…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Why Warren Biuffet’s Advice Is Good for the Rich Too.
On Sunday friend and neighbor Adrienne Jones handed on this link to a Salon.com article on why it is in the interest of the rich to be taxed more. Basically, the idea is that in societies where inequality is high, the rich don’t have it proportionalll…
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Observation for Today, a Day of Finishing up Odds and Ends
Despite 35 years of metric in Canada, construction is all in the old inches and feet mode, while temperature, speed and some kind of food are metric. What accounts for the difference?
Continue readingRecreating Eden: Saturday PHoto: The Beauties of Mount Royal and the Cemetery
The gates to Mount Royal cemetery don’t look like this now. About a year and a half ago fissures were found in the mortar holding the big stone blocks–put in place in the 1860s–together. Since then there have been various steps at correcting the pr…
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