Canadians’ basic decency won yesterday, with the decisive defeat of Stephen Harper’s politics of fear and hate. Thank goodness! Now, however, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals will have to hold to their…
The election is on Monday, and it looks from here like a minority Liberal (red) government. The NDP (orange) stands to lose much of what it gained in the Orange…
The leaves are beginning to turn colour here, and the sky is the brilliant blue that always makes me think of my mother quoting Helen Hunt Jackson’s poem about “October’s…
Here’s a photo of the Roman road at Conimbriga in central Portugal. It’s only one of the many roads I’m thinking about now, as I go back to the preliminary…
Pleased to say that I’ve just signed a contract with the University of Regina Press to publish my next non-fiction book Road through Time, probably in Spring 2017. It’s about…
Just because it’s another nice weekend…
In my other life I lead book discussion groups in Montreal-area libraries, and, knowing that a federal election was coming up, I put Terry Fallis’s The Best Laid Plans on…
I’ve always loved these sun-loving flowers. Cosmos are the stars of many gardens around here at this point in the cycle of the seasons. I suspect they won’t be so…
An Anyone who’s read Charlotte’s Web or gone walking early on a September morning knows that spiders are especially busy this time of year. This web was glowing in the…
The last long weekend of the summer, and the weather is wonderful here. No rain in sight, but I did find this rainbow when out walking this morning. The runners…
This week Jeanne started kindergarten–hard to believe that she’s now five. Like millions of children in North America, she’s said good by to summer, and gone skippingly into a new…
Last year a photo of African migrants holding cell phones up in Djibouti won the World Press Photo prize. The men were trying to pick up a good signal in…
August is a month of many pleasures, not the least being the arrival in markets of real tomatoes. Most of the years I don’t buy them because they don’t taste…
Not that I’m going to make fun of the environmental concerns of these folks who are shown powering up their two electric cars, but I mean, don’t low gas-guzzlers and…
We may end up with more pears this year than the squirrels can eat! Last year we had perhaps a half dozen but this year there are lots. I’ve started…
This is from a photo I took of a clementine back in 2011, just after the amazing sweep of Quebec by the New Democratic Party. Election night was amazing–nobody believed…
Don’t get me wrong: there have been times in my life when I just loved political campaigns. Hard to explain, but the kind of rush a political junkie gets after…
There’s been a lot in the news this week about the discovery of a planet that might be hospitable to life as we know it. The scientists have amused themselves,…
Didn’t have my camera with me the other night, but Thom, his mother, Grandpa and I made an after-supper visit to a local artisanal ice cream place. It was a…
The gate on the north side of Mount Royal Cemetery are just about finished. The stonework was completed before the snow fell last winter, but it’s been some time for…
