Author Archives: lydias

About lydias

I'm a sci-fi writer who loves lifting weights and hates eating Brussels sprouts.
December 15, 2016 · 1:00 am

Stuff I Miss About Celebrating Christmas

I stopped celebrating Christmas a long time ago for reasons that are hard to condense into a single blog post, but there are still some things that I appreciate about this holiday.

With the twenty-fifth of December rapidly approaching, I thought it would be fun to talk about my favorite parts of this time of year in today’s blog post.

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The Feasts

I love food like mashed potatoes with gravy, pumpkin pie, and devilled eggs. My mom would make all of this stuff alongside a lot of other delicious things for the big holidays.

We usually ate simple, one-pot meals throughout the rest of the year, so it was fun to sit down to something fancier at Christmas.

There are also plenty of snacks and treats that are only available for a short time during the year.

For example, my dad would buy the same kinds of German cookies and hard candies that his mother used to buy for him when he was growing up.

I’ve continued that tradition as an adult. It makes me feel connected to my grandmother even though we didn’t share many years together on this planet.

The Lights and Decorations

This is a dark, dreary time of year for the northern hemisphere. Ontario gets about 9 hours of daylight per day in December, but other places further north that get far fewer hours of sunshine than that. There are even towns where the sun doesn’t rise at all for weeks or months at a time.

(I don’t know about you, but I could never live in one of them!)

christmas-treeChristmas trees and holiday decorations in general make me smile because of this. It feels good to see so much extra light indoors.

Even the cheesy ones can be fun. There is definitely something to be said for putting in the effort to cheer up a public place regardless of what form it takes.

The candles, lightbulbs, and other festive baubles remind me that this season never lasts forever.

We will have warm, sunny days again even though it sometimes feels like the cold will never end.

The Time with Loved Ones

One of the few things I dislike about living in Toronto is that it means I live far away from my extended family.

I’m lucky to have good relationships with my parents, siblings, and other close relatives. We pack in as many visits as everyone’s budgets and workplaces allow, but I always wish we could spend more time together.

penguinsThe holidays remind me of how far away we live from each other.

When we’re apart during them, it’s nice to have a call to see how everyone is doing.

If we were penguins, it would look a little something like this. While the adults catch up on grown-up stuff, the little ones always manage to wiggle into the middle of the action to see what’s going on.

I’m amused by every single minute of it.

These are the things I carried with me once I stopped celebrating Christmas and started jokingly referring to the special meals I made as Festivus dinner instead. I wouldn’t give up any of these things I enjoy for anything in the entire world.

Regardless of what you’re celebrating or will be celebrating soon, I hope your days will be filled with light, love, and plenty of heavenly things to eat.

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December 12, 2016 · 1:00 am

Exercise Gear Shouldn’t Be Gendered

pinkToday I wanted to talk about something that annoys me a little bit every time I go shopping for new exercise equipment.

In every store I’ve browsed in so far, there’s been a pastel section for women and a black or grey section somewhere else for men.

I haven’t noticed a huge difference in quality between the two sections, although the equipment that’s being marketed to women is smaller and lighter than it is in the “regular” section.

The next time I need to move on to a bigger set of weights, I’m going to be paying closer attention to price. I think I remember it being about the same in both areas, but I’ll be curious to see if I’m right about that.

It bothers me, though, that something that everyone should be doing to improve their health is being broken down this way.

Gender Is Irrelevant 

While I understand the urge to develop unique marketing strategies for different slices of the population, this is such an inefficient and unhelpful way to do it.

Weight, mats, exercise bands, and other pieces of equipment have nothing at all to do with your gender. I’ve known all kinds of people who need something lightweight or smaller than average for many different reasons.

Like me, some of them might be petite. Others could be fitness beginners, recovering from an injury, or living with a disability that requires certain accommodations when they exercise.

All of these groups can be marketed to without assuming that everyone in them is a woman or that everyone who doesn’t need them is a man. It’s weird to me, then, to see people divided up this way for reasons that don’t mthursday-blogs-2ake any sense.

This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more as I’m starting to move into the sections of the fitness department that aren’t marketing themselves to women.

It’s incredibly strange to ignore half of your customer base that way.
No, I don’t care what colour my weights are or if a store offers matching accessories to go along with them.

The Bottom Line

All I want is solid, dependable equipment whose advertisements don’t divide people by gender. There are so many more interesting ways to design and market a product.

Maybe they could replace the pictures of men and women on their products with athletic dogs everywhere instead?

It would make just as much sense as dividing it up by gender. This kind of strategy would also be a hundred percent more cute than what we’re currently working with.

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December 10, 2016 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: December 10, 2016

saturday-blogsHere is this week’s list of rants, short stories, healthy living advice, and other stuff from my favourite corners of the web.

Uncontainable. I was hooked on this story before I finished reading the first sentence in it.

 

Running Protects Your Brain For The Long Haul. It’s not just running, either. Physical fitness in general helps to prevent your brain from shrinking as you age. How interesting.

Do Not Touch Baby’s Face via  Honest_Father. This entire post horrified me. I have no doubt that some people do all of those things, though.

The Last Unknown Man. What a fascinating tale. I can’t say much about it without giving away spoilers, but I never would have guessed that it was still possible for people to completely disappear from the public record at this point in history.

Is It Going to Rain? The only purpose of this site is to tell you if it’s going to rain in your city over the next couple of days. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

From Here Come the Holiday Wars Again via ReenieDiva:

It’s that time of year again. The snow falls gently, beautiful twinkling lights decorate trees and homes……and everyone seems to have an opinion and a list of rules on how everyone else should celebrate ‘the’ holiday. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m quite over this.

From A Compassionate Take on Why Misery Loves Company via ChristyBarongan:

In self-compassion speak, this is called common humanity. It’s one of the things that comforts us in the midst of our pain in suffering. To know that getting your heart broken is an inevitable part of experiencing love. It sucks for everyone.

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December 8, 2016 · 1:00 am

What Shows Are You Looking Forward To?

We are quickly sliding into the winter season here in Toronto, and that means a lot of time spent watching TV for my family.

My excitement levels are quickly rising for them, so today I wanted to talk about some of my favourite shows.

Glitch

I gushed over this show on my old site last month:

Glitch is an Australian sci-fi show about a small-town cop named James Hayes who is trying to figure out why six people have risen from the dead in the local cemetery. None of the dead remembers their previous identities, and all of them have come back in perfect health.

The link to my blog post is spoiler-free for anyone who hasn’t tried this show yet, but the link to the Wikipedia article about it discusses all of the episodes in a lot of detail.

My desire to know what is going on with these characters has only grown stronger in the last month or so since I finished the season one finale.

I can’t count how many times I’ve asked my spouse for theories about what is happening with this community. He had a fascinating theory about part of the mystery, but I think I’ll wait to share it until season 2 is released. I have a funny feeling that he is right.

He’s amazing at figuring out where show writers are going with certain clues, so I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the first season.

fuller-houseFuller House

Raise your hand if you were fan of Full House in the 1990s!

What I liked the most about the first season of Fuller House was that it embraced its cheesy origins. There were definitely a few scenes in season one whose syrupy sweetness made me cringe a little, but sometimes fluff is a good thing.

It’s nice to watch something lighthearted that doesn’t require you to think about the difficult things in life. A lot of the other programs I watch are serious and dark, so I appreciate the break I get from this one.

I will say that the creators did excellent job at bringing these characters to the twenty-first century, though, and I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone gets up to in season two.

star_trek_discovery_logo-svgStar Trek: Discovery

Anyone who follows me here or elsewhere online has no doubt figured out by now how much I like the Star Trek universe.

It’s been a long time since we had a new Star Trek series, so I’m excited to see what will stay the same as well as how it’s been adapted to fit a 2017 audience. There were certain things that were done in the original series that weren’t repeated later on because of how society changed between the 1960s and later eras.

For example, none of the other captains were quite as, er, popular with the ladies they met on various planets as Kirk was back in the 1960s. I’ve joked about how many kids he probably fathered during his career with Starfleet, although I’ll leave it up to the hardcore Trekkies to come up with actual figures there. Ha!

On a more serious note, every captain has seemed to have a quiet and mysterious streak to their personality. That’s something I really hope will be continued in Discovery as it makes getting to know the person in charge a little more challenging than it would otherwise be.

I was disappointed to learn that Discovery has been pushed back to a May 2017 release date, but I have been keeping an eye on this fan site for new developments. Hopefully we’ll know something more about it soon.

Fair warning: the guy who runs it shares all of the new information he uncovers even if it wanders into mild spoiler territory. I don’t mind reading them in this case, but I know that some of my followers don’t feel the same way.

call_the_midwife_titlecardCall the Midwife

I originally started watching this British drama because I’d read all of the memoirs it was based on and couldn’t wait to see how certain stories would be translated to the small screen.

Jennifer Worth, the main character of the first few seasons as we’ll as the author of the books, saw a lot of terribly sad things during the years she worked in the East End of London. It was a time in modern history when birth control was basically non-existent, healthcare was only just beginning to become available to everyone, and many different kinds of people were forced to hide huge secrets in order to survive.

Later seasons start telling fictional stories instead of true ones, but that hasn’t dampened my enthusiasm for this series at all. The nuns and midwives have such interesting lives that I’d watch them even if people stop having so many babies in the East End.

I’ll be talking about all of these shows on Twitter in 2016 and 2017. I hope to hear from you over there if you’re a fan of any of them!

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December 5, 2016 · 1:00 am

A Day in the Life of a Non-Enterprise Star Trek Captain

monday-blogs-1The other day my husband wondered out loud what it would be like to run any ship in the Federation other than the Enterprise.

Let’s think this through.

Your ship would quietly begin to catalogue two galaxies that had started to run into each other while Captain Kirk discovered yet another earth-like planet that shared the same wildlife, history, topography, language, and culture as our planet.

When Captain Archer’s crew suddenly became extremely ill from a mysterious disease that humans have no immunity to, you’d be trying to figure out how to spread out what was often fairly limited shore leave among your crew members in the most equitable way possible.

The most exciting part of your day would be figuring out what kind of protein the cook was serving that day. While the food was always excellent, sometimes you couldn’t tell if you were eating chicken, tofu, or something else entirely.

Their stories would make you shake your head when you met crew members from this ship at Starfleet Academy reunions or other celebrations. Sometimes you wondered if they were exaggerating when they talked about the things they’d seen out there. The known universe is a mostly empty place. You’ve known captains who spent years between one anomaly and the next one.

None of the other ships in the entire fleet run into gods, time loops, or the Borg even 5% as much as the Enterprise crew somehow manages to. The whole thing is incredibly bizarre. What is it about that specific ship that draws such strange circumstances to them?

With that being said, people who transferred from the Enterprise to other places sometimes talk about missing the monday-blogs-3adrenaline rush of a crisis. Mapping new parts of space is important, but it’s quite rare to run into any hostile, or even sentient, species. Mostly you’d find the occasion planet that had developed simple forms of life. The exobiologists always found them exciting, but they generally looked quite similar to Earth amoebas or slugs to anyone else who happened to take a look at the petri dish or aquarium.

Of course, no other ship had such high death rates, either. It was both a blessing and a curse to be assigned to that crew. A lot of people wrote out their wills and settled their affairs beforehand in case they were part of the unlucky percentage who didn’t survive their stay. Their excitement at being assigned to such a prestigious ship was always dulled by the threat that this transfer could also be the thing that lead to their death.
Yes, between 80 and 95% of the people who served on the original Enterprise survived over the longterm depending which role they held there. In a time when people almost always lived to a ripe, old age, though, these statistics were alarming. You would probably get through a few years on the Enterprise without any permanent injuries before being transferred elsewhere in the fleet, but the chances of losing at least one of the friends you made while working there ranged from possible to fairly high.

Is it possible to feel jealously and relief at the same time?

You ask yourself these questions every time a new position becomes available on the Enterprise and your transfer request for it is turned down.

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December 3, 2016 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: December 3, 2016

saturday-blogsHere is this week’s list of comic strips, quotes, and other links to my favourite corners of the web.

Broccoli Is Bad For You. This is one of those things that I can’t tell you anything about in advance. Go read it for yourself! The humorous potato picture on the left reminded me of the tone of this piece in a good way.

Probably a Canadian. I couldn’t stop chuckling at this.

Small Annoyances at the Grocery Store via GretaCribbs. Who else has had something like this happen to them?

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: A Critical Analysis via LoriLSchafer. What a perfect way to start gearing up for Christmas.

The Mutual Admiration Society via MichaelTMiyoshi. This is such a smart idea.

Coughs and Sneezes. I had no idea that vintage public health announcements could be so snarky. This was cringe-worthy at times, but so are sneezing and coughing fits when people don’t cover their mouth. Luckily, I don’t see this happen very often these days. Most people are pretty polite about it.

One final thought:

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. ― Oscar Wilde

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December 1, 2016 · 1:00 am

When Exercise Is a Bad Idea

injured-toy-bear

One of the hardest things for me to deal with when it comes to my exercise routine is to step away from it when I’m sick or injured.

Why is that, you ask?

Well, I don’t want to lose the gains in muscle mass or endurance that I’ve worked so hard for. Logically speaking, I know that a few days or even a week or two off isn’t going to make that much of a difference for anyone’s fitness.

It still isn’t fun to be stuck on the sidelines, though.

What Workouts Do

Sitting still all day makes me feel jumpy. I’m not used to all of those hours of sticking to the same few positions. Normally I use stuff like weightlifting or dance videos on Youtube to burn off that extra energy, but there are times when that simply isn’t possible.

All of this quiet gives my thoughts too many chances to get jumbled up as well, and that’s a problem.

My favourite thing about exercise is how effective it is at clearing my head. Not only does it brush away worries, it gives both your mind and your body a chance to set a goal and achieve it in a short amount of time.

Whether the goal was to lift a specific amount of weight or take a brisk walk for half an hour, that sense of accomplishment is delicious. There aren’t many other areas in life where this can happen so quickly.

Rest Is Needed

With that being said, rest is an extremely important part of the healing process. How much rest time is needed depends on what kind of problem you’re having, of course.

When I had a lung infection a few years ago, I slept a full eight hours each night and still needed long naps in the afternoon in order to have enough energy to stay awake in the morning and evening.

(Note to self: don’t get that sick again anytime soon!)

Even the most gentle exercise was out of the question for me then until the antibiotics started working and I stopped coughing so much. Not every injury or illness is like this, of course, which brings me to the meat of this post.

The Walking Solution

Walking is by far my favourite way to stay at least minimally active when I’m healing as long as it’s not anything as draining as that lung infection. What I like most about walking is that it’s low-impact, doesn’t require any special equipment, and can be customized to what your body can actually handle as its healing.

A quiet stroll counts even if it doesn’t make you break a sweat or raise your heart rate much at all. Staying or getting back into the swing of things is a completely acceptable and worthwhile goal. There will be plenty of time later on to actually try something challenging again.

Even a leisurely walk helps me to clear my mind. Toronto is a such a large city that there’s almost always someone or something interesting to see as you stroll. Figuring out funny or interesting backstories for them is a wonderful distraction along with the gentle exercise.

I’ve also found that symptoms ranging from mild pain to nasal congestion become a little less bothersome after a walk. While I don’t know if this is psychosomatic or if there’s something about getting up and moving around that actually helps people feel better, it’s nice to have the edge taken off of certain symptoms for a while.

I hope that this idea works for you, too, the next time you’re too unwell to finish your normal workout.

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November 28, 2016 · 1:00 am

Why You Should Be Following the Mystery of Tom Thomson’s Death

Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson was a famous Canadian painter who died nearly a century ago. His landscapes influenced the Group of Seven. Had he lived longer, there’s no doubt in my mind that he would have become an official member and they would have been called the Group of Eight instead.

If you haven’t heard of this artist or the kinds of paintings he and his friends became famous for, the links above will tell you all about them.

For the past few years, he has been tweeting through the last eight months of his life. His tweets are heavily researched and include references to his diary entries, conversations that others remembered having with him, and many other sources.

What I want to talk about right now, though, is why you should be following Tom Thomson on Twitter. He also has a blog, although he is much more active on the former. His tweets about his final months are beginning again today, so now is the perfect time to get to know Tom and his art.

Tom’s paintings are beautiful in an understated way. My favourite one from him is included below, although there is something I like about every piece of art I’ve seen from him so far. They remind me of what it feels like to stand outside on a freezing January morning, or a breezy May afternoon, or a hot and muggy August evening and feel everything that nature has in store for me on that particular day. The weather can’t always be tied up into neat packages, and neither can Tom’s work.

There are many things we know about the ordinary fabric of this artist’s daily life. His tweets discuss everything from what he ate for specific meals to how he liked to spend his free time to what sketches he was working on in the last few weeks and months before he died. More than once I was impressed last year by his descriptions of the small details of his life. One day, for example, he mentioned eating boiled potatoes and stew. I barely remember what I ate for dinner last week, so have those details of someone’s life from a hundred years ago is surprising and fascinating.

In the last nine months or so that I’ve spent getting to know him online, Tom has been kind, funny, and personable. There are times when he seems unsure of himself or when he doesn’t know what he should do next. Yet he still picks himself up the next day and tries again. These are the tweets I’ve come to appreciate from him the most because of how much they reveal about his personality and character. He’s the Monday Blogs Painting Picturetype of person I’d invite out to dinner if we were living in the same century.

Exactly how he died is a matter of debate. We know he was alone at Canoe Lake and that his empty canoe surfaced days before anyone found his body in the water.

Did he have some kind of medical emergency that lead to him falling into the lake and drowning? Did his canoe accidentally tip over or bump into something submerged in the water, leaving him to drown before he could be saved? Did he stumble across someone who was doing something illegal and who didn’t want any witnesses of their crime? Did someone else murder him for another reason?

There are so many different possibilities, and he’ll tell you about all of them as the date of his death grows closer.

I have my own theory about what probably happened to him, but I’ll keep the details of that to myself until we get closer to the end of his saga. The urge to write short, speculative stories about his fate is growing stronger. I don’t know if I’ll give into it, but it is something I’ve been thinking about doing as he gears up to once again chronicle the end of his life.

Which theory you end up believing will be up to you, but I hope you’ll start following Tom and learn a few things about him and Canadian history along the way over the next eight months. I’ve been finding a lot of writing inspiration in his tweets. Who knows? Maybe you will as well!

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November 26, 2016 · 1:00 am

Suggestion Saturday: November 26, 2016

Pumpkin_PieHappy Thanksgiving weekend to my American readers! I hope you all get to eat your favourite holiday foods this weekend.

Here is this week’s list of poems, comic strips, reviews, and other stuff from my favourite corners of the web.

Broken World, A Poem for My Daughter via nzstelter. The final stanza was my favourite one.

How to Tell if the Weather Is Going to be a Really Big Deal. This is something to keep in mind as winter approaches.

Small Cities in the US – Vermilion, Ohio via tayonthemove. This post is a review of a small town that the blogger recently passed through. I’ve never been to Vermilion as far as I can recall, so it was fun to see what this community is like.

Netflix and Ch-Ch-Chilly. Most of the towns I grew up in were nowhere near this small or isolated, but I was still reminded of my childhood a little. The Internet introduced a whole new world to me. I was so happy to have a wider social circle once my parents bought a family computer and signed up for it.

How Pokémon Go Can Improve Your Travels via AngeMichelle021. What an interesting idea.
From The Interloper

My in-laws are white and mostly Midwestern, so the pumpkin pie I baked is considered standard, as is the apple, though my mother-in-law will later say that my use of brown sugar instead of white makes it taste “like mincemeat.” To them, my sweet potato pie is the interloper, a bright-orange-colored alien to be ogled and commented upon and perhaps eaten, but not right away.

What have you been reading?

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November 24, 2016 · 1:00 am

An End and a Beginning

This is the final post of On the Other Hand. The last six years have been wonderful, but it’s time for me to move on to a new website and a different approach to blogging.

Effective today, I will be blogging at lydiaschoch.com. There’s a post there explaining why I made the move and what you can expect to see from me next.

I hope to see all of you over there!

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