Author Archives: lydias

This is a fantastic explanation of why poetry matters.

I always seem to run low on blog post ideas this time of year.

Is there anything you’d me to write about? I’m open to any and all ideas!

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Graveyard Shift via prnancarrow. Everything I want to say about this post will give away spoilers. Sometimes stories work better if you go into them without any clue what they might be about, and I think this is one of them.

Be More Like Dandelion. Dandelions have always been my favourite flower. This is why.

The Face of Evil via CGAyling. I’m sharing this with the knowledge that it might offend some of my readers, but I’m willing to take that risk.

Litany for My Mother’s Body. This is quite the story.

Spilled Milk: Dads and Bras via davidbadash. Hilarious! I wonder how these dads would have handled a daughter like me who couldn’t care less about these things?

From The Great American Chain Gang:

Compensation varies from state to state and facility to facility, but the median wage in state and federal prisons is 20 and 31 cents an hour, respectively.

Because inmate workers are not considered “employees” under the law, they have none of the protections that word implies.

A Guide to Being Born is the most inventive short story collection I’ve read in 2014.

It’s difficult to discuss the plots of any of these tales without giving away spoilers, but I was impressed by every single one of them. If I had to choose a favourite, it would be “Safe Passage.” In it a group of elderly women mysteriously find themselves travelling on a massive ship. None of them can remember how they got there and no one has any clue where they’re going.

I figured out what was (probably) going on pretty quickly, but I still loved the process of sifting through all of their theories. This story, like all of the ones in this collection, has complex characters that I really enjoyed getting to know.

What have you been reading?

I’m in the middle of sprucing up this blog.

Suggestion Saturday will be published on time tomorrow as usual, but please excuse any temporarily unavailable pages or other possible tomfoolery over the next few days.

You never know what will happen when you play around with the back end of your blog.

( This also wouldn’t be a proper site maintenance update post without at least one bunny. You’re welcome. 😉 )

Photo by Agustín Ruiz from Mendoza, Argentina.

I’ll admit it – I’m not that good at keeping in touch.

Losing track of what friends and relatives are up to these days isn’t something I do on purpose. It’s always nice to hear about the new babies, spouses, jobs, and creative projects in their lives, not to mention the more mundane stuff like forwarding a funny video to  so-and-so because I think he or she will like it.

But life happens. A week becomes a month, a month becomes a year. There are so many other things to accomplish in a day that sustaining these relationships gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list. Before you know it, it’s been far too long since you sent your last email, text, or postcard (for the rare relative who can’t be found anywhere online).

One of my goals for this summer is to get better at reaching out to people I haven’t spoken to in a while. It only takes a few minutes to write an email or send a card, but it will be fun to hear what’s new in everyone’s lives. I’ll be updating my readers on this experiment over the next few months.

For those of you who are better at keeping in touch than I am, how do you make it part of your routine? Everyone else, I’d love to hear about your results if you choose to join me!

Can you name every country in the world in 12 minutes?

My brother sent this game to me a few days ago, and I was surprised by how addictive it is.

The first time I was only able to think of 40 of the 196 countries on earth. It was an embarrassingly low score, but I am slowly improving as I play the game over and over again.

What is your score?

My parents moved several times while I was growing up. We were the only grandchildren on mom’s side of the family for many years, and I can only imagine how much our grandparents, aunts, and uncles missed us every time we moved away.

Photo by KevMAC.

One of the best things they did to keep in touch with us was to send little boxes full of stuff. Candy. Clippings from the Sunday comics. Books. Letters. Once they even included a tape of my grandfather telling stories about his childhood. Half of our excitement was rooted in getting mail addressed to us specifically. It made me feel very grown up and important!

They stopped doing it once we moved back to Ohio when I was 11, but I dreamed about those deliveries for years to come.

I’ve been working on my own care package of Canadian sweets recently. There are a lot of candy brands up here that I’ve never seen in the U.S., and I thought it was about time to share a few of them with my grandparents and extended family.  The best part of it is finding something special that I know they’d never pick out for themselves but that I suspect they might like. Some people are easier to figure out than others. Solving that riddle is surprisingly fun though!

What do you add to the care packages you send out? What the best care package you’ve ever received?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

You Can Learn A Lot About America From Each State’s Internet Search History. Ok, this is hilarious. I’d love to know what the most common search terms are for each province in Canada.

Not All Pastor’s Kids Are Christian. Sorry. via JamietheVWM.  There is a very short list of Christian blogs I still really enjoy reading. Jamie’s blog is one of them for many reasons, and I was reminded of nearly all of them with this post.

Love Is a Terrible Reason to Get Married via LarryCheetos. The title stays it all.

Adult Children. A brilliant answer to a repetitive question.

From I Can Show You 99 Kinds of Crazy. None Are Due to Mental Illness via TruthisHers:

One of the reasons the word crazy is tops on my offensive mental health terms is because when its definition is researched we find it closely linked with the word insane, which is commonly defined as marked by foolishness and folly. Foolishness! Witless, stupid, brainless, mindless, unintelligent, harebrained—all words that imply a faulty character and flawed intellect.

From So I Married an Astrophysicist: Dispelling Myths About Scientists:

I don’t see “scientists” as guys in white coats with taped glasses and pocket protectors.  I don’t think of them as “Dr. Jekyll” types trying to attain immortality by creating something never before achieved.  I don’t see them as pawns of any particular political agenda or as money-hungry individuals who will make wild claims in order to get the next grant.  I definitely don’t see them as people who are willing to engage in and promote a vast conspiracy for the purpose of controlling the public.

I Can Hear You Whisper chronicles the journey of a family whose third child is born with serious hearing loss. What makes it even more fascinating, though, is everything Lydia Denworth has discovered about the science and sociology of deafness.

The handful of people living with disabilities that I knew growing up were either paraplegic or amputees. Our community was small and most of its members were able-bodied and (fairly) young. Things are quite different here in Toronto, but I still loving stumbling across books that describe what other people’s lives are like. There are a lot of questions that are impolite to ask unless you know someone very, very well. (Even then, I wouldn’t bring up certain topics. It’s much better to quietly wonder about something than to accidentally hit a sore spot!)

This book is so well-written that it feels like a conversation between old friends. I really enjoyed learning about what this author’s life has been like, and I suspect my readers might as well.

What have you been reading?

Photo by Adria Richards.

For anyone who hasn’t heard the news yet, Maya Angelou died yesterday.

No, I’m not sad today. It’s a little odd to grieve over someone you don’t know, but hearing about her death did make me think of my first encounter with her writing. It’s funny how reading someone’s books can make it feel like you know them in certain ways.

I was pretty young when I first read I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Some of the things she talks about in that book flew over my head the first time I read it, but each time I returned to it I understood a little more.

The rest of her autobiographies didn’t capture my attention the way the first one did. I suspect that I was too young to grasp everything she had to say.

She was an incredible writer, though. Many stories can be read silently, but hers work better if they’re read aloud. You have to feel every syllable to understand what she’s saying and why she chose certain words.

I’m looking forward to returning to her books as an adult reader. There is a tentative plan bubbling in the back of my mind to blog my way through them, but I’ll have to see what I pick up this time around.

Is anyone interested in following along? Where should I begin?

I’ve really gotten into a musical rut. Most of the artists I listen to are from the 90s and 00s, and I tend to go back to them over and over again.

I’m purposefully not mentioning which artists or styles of music I like so I don’t sway your recommendations.  Some people only like one genre of music, but I’m not one of them.

What have you been listening to?