Category Archives: Blog Hops

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Autumn is a beautiful season in Ontario. You can spend hours outdoors without worrying about sunburns or frostbite, so most of my answers will reflect the benefits of taking advantage of such mild weather.

The Word on the Street Festival. This is an annual Toronto festival about literature that features local and well as international authors and publishing houses. It covers every genre and age group you can imagine, and everyone is welcomed. Of course, it was virtual this year due to Covid-19, but the food there was amazing in the past. They had cuisine from many different cultures, and the portions were so generous at many stalls you could easily buy one meal and split it with another adult if you wanted to.

Photography. I’ve mentioned my interest in this hobby in previous Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge posts. Autumn is the perfect time of year to play around with this, especially when I’m photographing the marvellous autumn landscape.

Stocking Up on Treats. Every store that sells food will have some candy that’s dairy-free, but it’s always fun to visit specialty shops and, before this pandemic happened, various food fairs/festivals to stock up on fancy vegan chocolate and other hard-to-find treats that are safe for my milk allergy before winter hits. (I get the winter blues, so having small things like this to look forward every X number of weeks helps my mental health).

Nature Walks. Autumn is my last hurrah for long nature walks until spring, so I spend as much time as I can outdoors before (this part of) the world freezes and everything is coated in ice and snow.

Nuit Blanche. This is an outdoor, overnight, free art show in Toronto that features the work of (mostly) local artists. You can find everything there: robotics, concerts, dances, interactive art displays, live theatre, light shows, and so much more. One year the city was even “attacked” by zombies. (Nobody was actually harmed. My spouse and I saw dozens of folks dressed as zombies who were roaming around and groaning dramatically every so often). I’m officially inviting all of you to come check it out online on between 7 pm on October 3 and 7 am on October 4 if you enjoy this sort of stuff. The programming is wildly different every year, so I can’t even begin to guess what they’ll have this time!

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My answer for this week is going to be short and sweet.

When I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy many years ago, I kept a dictionary open right next to it. There were so many new vocabulary words included in it that I kept having to stop reading to find out on what Earth the characters were talking about.

To be fair, I was in middle school when I read this series. Some of those words might be more familiar to me if I were to come across them again as an adult. But the memory of looking up words regularly during these hours of reading is a strong one for me.

If you’ve read this series, did you have the same experience?

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Wow, I came up with a lot of answers this week.

I love discussing:

History. The most interesting parts of it are the ones that chronicle how ordinary people live and how medical care has evolved and improved over the centuries in my opinion.

Art. If you want to talk about the possible meanings for a piece, I’ll happily jump into that conversation.

Ghost Stories. Whether they’re fictional or based on the personal accounts of real people, I find all of this stuff fascinating.

Fitness. I enjoy hearing about types of exercise folks do or don’t like and why. For example, I’ve never been able to get into jogging, but I love yoga, dancing, and weightlifting.

Astronomy. My favourite subjects here generally revolve around space exploration, the possibility of sending people to Mars, and the discoveries of new planets.

Food. Cooking, meal planning, the latest scientific understandings of good nutrition, and even the history of various foods/dishes all catch my attention.

Archeology. Learning how different groups of people lived hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of years ago is always interesting to me. We’re such an adaptable species in general.

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I’m an adventurous reader who bounces around among all of the genres. While there are certain genres I visit regularly and others I only visit occasionally, it takes a lot to turn me off from a story entirely.

This is the fairly small list of topics that I refuse to read about.

Glorifying Prejudice. That is to say, I strictly avoid anything that makes it seem honourable to hate or discriminate against  others because they’re not like you in some way. Why not encourage inclusion and acceptance instead?

Preachiness. This is a universal nope from me no matter the subject matter or whether I happen to agree with the author.  If someone wrote a book that tried to browbeat its readers into believing that purple is the best colour in the universe, I’d stop reading before finishing the first page despite my deep love of that colour.

Hopelessness. I used to be a huge fan of stories like The Walking Dead or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. While I do still enjoy some horror in small doses, everything I read and watch needs to have a hopeful message included in it these days.

Dead Pets. There are far too many books out there that kill off beloved pets at the climax of the plot. I’ve had my fill of this trope until the end of time itself. Let Fido live!

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Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

This question is a little subjective since foods that are common in one culture may be unheard of in another, but it’s still a fun topic to discuss!

If you also grew up in a family of fishers and hunters or in a rural area, some of the meat on list might seem pretty ordinary.

The rest of them I’ve tried on vacations or by picking up random pieces of produce at the grocery store and wondering if I’d like them!

The strangest foods I’ve eaten include:

• Turtle
• Venison
• Elk
• Oxtail
• Chicken hearts and livers
• Frog
• Gooseberries
• Lychee
• Dragon fruit
• Pomegranate

I was not a big fan of the lychee, frog, or pomegranates, but I enjoyed the rest of them.

But by far the strangest thing I’ve ever eaten is grass. When I was a child, I couldn’t figure out why cows ate grass but humans didn’t eat it. It seemed to me that a calorie was a calorie no matter where it came from. I loved lettuce, so I assumed grass would taste just as good.

Spoiler alert: it wasn’t tasty. There was very little flavour to it at all, but the stringy texture of it convinced me that while cows might like grass, this human does not. 😉