Category Archives: Personal Life

November 29, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Like or Dislike True Crime? Why?

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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.

A drawing of a magnifying glass that has a dark yellow handle. The glass is magnifying three fingerprints that are on a white background. Content warning: domestic violence and murder. I am only including details that are 100% necessary in order to understand my feelings about this topic.

I dislike True Crime because of:

1) the way this genre can exploit the victims of violent crimes and re-traumatize their loved ones by sharing these stories without consent,

2) how some True Crime programs exaggerate or even make up details about certain cases to make them more interesting,

3) how some True Crime programs lionize murderers and abusers,

4) which victims are and are not discussed. That is to say, pretty, young, straight, white women are far more likely to be featured on them from what I’ve observed. It feels deeply wrong to me to overlook people from other races, sexual orientations, ages, sexes, etc. for these stories. The grief all of their families and friends feel is the same no matter what the victim looked like or how they identified.

Now to dig into a more personal reason why I avoid this genre.

Someone I attended high school with was murdered by her abusive ex (who was also a student at our school) in front of their small children a few years after graduation. He is still incarcerated so far as I know.  Their kids survived and are safe with relatives now.

What happened to my classmate and her family was horrible. I think of her story every time I overhear discussions about this genre. I’m sure it feels like a harmless hobby for many fans, but a lot of True Crime stuff can take on a sinister tone if you have personal experiences with the topic and see how uninformed and unkind some folks can be about the cycle of abuse and how dangerous it is when a victim tries to leave.

I cringe when I hear people talk about what they would have done differently in certain cases or how they thought someone should behave when faced with a homicidal ex. It makes me feel like they’re dissecting a book or tv show instead of talking about the tragic deaths of innocent people who could have easily been any one of us instead.

If you’re going to consume this genre, please speak respectfully about the victims and be careful about the assumptions you make about what you would or would not do in their shoes. You may know far more people who have been through something similar than you think. Kindness and compassion are key.

There’s so much important work that can be done to reduce suffering in these situations. I wish the True Crime community would focus much more of their energy on crime prevention, assistance for victims of abuse and their loved ones, and honouring the dead in whatever ways they have the time and/or money to do so.

Wouldn’t it be a relief to live in a world where the True Crime genre comes to an end because there are no new murders for them to talk about?

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November 8, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Something You Believed But Found Out Wasn’t True

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When I was seven, my parents moved our family a few thousand miles away from where we had previously been living. Since we were homeschooled at the time, my siblings and I didn’t have to say goodbye to classmates or teachers. We couldn’t bring all of our friends and relatives with us, though, so that was still an adjustment.

Cartoon image of a little girl who is holding a green umbrella and yellow satchel and wearing an orange raincoat. The wind is blowing against her so hard that her umbrella has been turned inside out!

Image credit: cromaconceptovisual

After we moved, I thought about my maternal grandmother a lot. In my WWBC karma post last month, I talked about how much everyone loves her.  She was (and still is) the quintessential grandma: gentle, kind, soothing, adores children, and will feed you warm, homemade chocolate chip cookies if you like them.

I was allowed to play or read as I pleased after our daily lessons were finished, so I had a generous amount of time to try to figure life out.

Sometimes when I missed my grandmother terribly and it was windy enough to carry sound* I’d stand on a local hill and yell loving messages to her.** I thought that maybe she could hear the faintest whisper of my words if I yelled loud enough and if the wind was blowing especially fast that day.

I imagined her bent over in her large, friendly garden harvesting corn or picking strawberries only to pause and wonder if she’d really heard her granddaughter yelling her name or if she was just imagining it. Perhaps she’d smile and blow me a kiss or yell back her own message, too.

It took another year or two for me to learn enough from my science textbooks to realize sound doesn’t work that way, but it was a comforting thought while it lasted.

*At that age I thought wind could somehow carry sounds long distances if you made your words strong and loud enough to last the entire journey. Don’t ask me how that was supposed to work!

** I apologize to any neighbours who may have been terribly confused by why a kid was loudly yelling “I love you, Grandma” and “I miss you, Grandma”  over and over again outside. Those messages were intended for her ears only.

(We moved back to her area several years later, so this tale has a happy ending).

 

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November 1, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Celebrity People Say I Look Like

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Ooh, this is a fun topic!

Can I assume that you all know who Shirley Temple, the beloved 1930s child star, is?

A photo of Shirley Temple when she was a little girl, maybe 6 years old. She’s grinning and wearing a blue dress with white lace trimming the collar and front portion of the dress. She has a cute little blue bow tied up around her curls, too.

For anyone who might not know her, this is what she looked like as a little girl.

This is what I looked like as a little girl:

A 1980s photo of two young siblings, ages about 4 and 2, who have been posed for a professional photo. The older girl child is me, Lydia. She has short, very curly brown hair and is wearing a light purple dress that has a large white collar with red trim on it. The little boy is my brother. He has short, straight, blond hair and is wearing a collared shirt that has a rainbow pattern.

(That sweet little boy next to me is one of my brothers. I’ll leave it up to him to identify himself further if he wishes to).

I have memories of older women stopping my mother in department stores to coo over my curls and tell us how much they thought I looked like Shirley Temple.

And, yeah, I can see the resemblance.

 

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October 31, 2023 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Things I Love About Halloween


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

Happy Halloween to everyone who celebrates it! This is my favourite holiday of the year, so I’m thrilled to see October 31 come around again on the calendar.

In previous years, I’ve blogged about My Favourite Halloween Treats, Halloween Picture Books, and Halloween Things I’ve Never Done  for Top Ten Tuesday’s Halloween Freebie post.

This time I’m going to talk about why I love this holiday so much, especially since I wasn’t allowed to celebrate it as a kid as I’ve mentioned before.

So what’s so fantastic about this holiday?

1. Presents Aren’t Needed

It’s a relief to celebrate without being expected to give or receive gifts. I have a lot of mixed feelings about that tradition.

Two white people are each holding up a sugar cookie that has been decorated for Halloween. One cookie is shaped like a ghost and the other one a skeleton. 2. Candy and Baked Goods

Halloween candy and baked goods are delicious. If I receive something I can’t eat for allergy reasons, there are a lot of other people who can eat it and who wouldn’t mind taking it home.

3. Free Expression

This is the only time of year when it’s socially acceptable for adults to dress in costumes (unless you’re going to a comic conference or something). I love having the freedom to be anyone I want for that night…even if, truth be told, most Halloween nights find me no longer dressing up at all.

4. You Can Eat Anything 

I enjoy cooking, but I do not like the pressure that can come on other holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas to follow a rigid menu and make all of the dishes the exact same way every time. There is no set menu for Halloween. You could eat pizza, samosas, Pad Thai, or a nice, big salad if you wish!

5. Halloween Music

Don’t tell anyone, but I start listening to Halloween playlists in September. I love jumping around from lighthearted kids’ songs to the season finale song of Supernatural to all sorts of other spooky music.

6. Autumn Is Gorgeous 

I love walking through crunchy leaves in the park and seeing the brilliant red, yellow, orange, and occasionally purple leaves still clinging to their trees or bushes.  Halloween is often pretty close to peak colour here in Toronto, so this is yet another reason why I love this holiday.

7. Ghost Stories 

Whether I’m going on a ghost tour, reading a ghost story, or watching a paranormal film, I think it’s interesting to explore the spirits’ motives for haunting a particular location.

A jack-o-lantern is sitting in a patch of glass. There is a candle inside of the lantern that is making it glow orange and yellow. It’s dark outside, so few other details can be seen other than the lush grass it is sitting on. 8. Carving Pumpkins

Am I good at it? Not really, but it’s still amusing. When else are you going to have permission to play with food? (Or potential food, rather).

9. Acknowledgement of Death

A friend of mine died in a car accident when we were in high school. One of the weirdest parts of that experience for me was how quickly people stopped talking about him. We were all grieving, and of course I respected everyone who found it too hard to discuss him or his accident. Halloween is a relief to me because it’s one time of year when more folks are willing to broach such topics and remember the dead.  Yes, there is pain in those moments…but over time there can also be so much joy to be found in retelling funny or touching stories about those who are no longer with us.

10. Fear Is Fun In Small Doses When You’re Not Really In Danger

Wow, that was a wordy sentence! But, yeah, I do see the value in feeling a little fear from a spooky movie or ghost story when you know that it is 100% fiction. This is such a different feeling than being afraid of something or someone who could actually harm you.

 

 

 

 

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October 18, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Favourite Scary Monster

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There are mild spoilers for The Last of Us and The Girl With All the Gifts in this post. 

Black silhoutte of a zombie in tattered clothing lurching forward with their hands outstretched as they look for new prey. Zombies are my favourite scary monster.

I know a few of my readers are grossed out by them, so I picked the least graphic stock image of one I could find and will not go into gory details in this post.

They deeply frighten and fascinate me because there are no mystical rules controlling where they’re allowed to go or what they’re allowed to do. Unlike the vast majority of other monsters, zombies are 100% unaffected by:

  •  Sunlight
  • Holy water
  • Wolfsbane or other herbs that can harm, say, a werewolf
  • Garlic, onions, or any other food
  • Whether or not you invited them into your home
  • Fire
  • Having a wooden stake thrust into any portion of their body
  • Silver bullets
  • Prayers of any sort
  • Excommunication by a priest, pastor, or other religious leader
  • Unfinished business from their previous lives
  • Any sort of disturbance of their gravesite
  • The presence or absence of a full moon
  • Where they died (unless they’re trapped there…for now)
  • If their soul has found peace after death
  • Any attempt to communicate with them, whether in person or through an Ouija board, psychic, etc.
  • Whether or not they have food, water, shelter, medical care, weather-appropriate clothing, oxygen, or sleep
  • How much sage you burned to cleanse your house and keep them away

A zombie will chase you until it gets distracted by someone else or it can no longer physically move due to being injured, stuck, etc. Unless you’ve destroyed their brains, they can wait as long as is necessary and under any circumstances before you can no longer outrun them or they meet their next victim.

That’s so scary to me that I only watch or read this sort of story in broad daylight. I love the tingly sensation of being scared silly occasionally, but I do not want to bring certain images into dreamland with me.

In some modern retellings of this monster like The Last of Us or M.R. James’ The Girl With All the Gifts, there can be people who are only partially affected by the zombification process. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers for those who aren’t familiar with those worlds, but having characters who have one foot in each camp adds all sorts of creative twists to how this sort of story usually goes.

I prefer zombie fiction that has realistic (ish) explanations for how these creatures were created and that focuses more on people fighting zombies and figuring how to survive than in humans fighting each other.

Zombies are scary enough in and of themselves if you ask me. It’s hard to defeat a foe who has so few weaknesses, after all.

It’s interesting to me to see how people react to this threat and how well they do or don’t work together once the plot speeds up and the living dead outnumber the living.

You can get a lot of memorable character development from those sorts of situations if you have the right storytellers and a decent storyline to work with. My favourite versions of these tales are the ones that gently poke fun at the silliest parts of the horror genre in a way that invites the audience to laugh along and agree that trope X was good in the past but is now overused, trope Y is as ridiculous now as it was back in the 7os, and trope Z is woefully underrated.

I find zombie fiction even more fun when I get to mix a little critique into discussions about them.

So that is why zombies are my favourite monster and why I enjoy this sort of storyline ever so often.

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October 11, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: The Most Creative Halloween Costume I’ve Worn

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So here’s the thing about being a preacher’s kid: it can give you a childhood that’s a little off the beaten path in certain ways.

My family didn’t celebrate the secular, mainstream version of Halloween until I was 11*, so I only had a few years of trick-or-treating and picking out a costume before I aged out of that tradition. I  was so thrilled to finally be able to dress up, get some candy, and say “Trick or Treat” that I didn’t worry about choosing creative costumes. One year I was a nurse, another one I was a mime, and I don’t remember what I decided to be that third year. I wasn’t allowed to pick anything scary or gross, and late October used to be a much colder time of year than it often is now, so I probably picked the warmest costume I could find.

*We went to Harvest Festivals instead which are a Christian alternative to Halloween for some denominations. They were an interesting mixture of the sort of cute Halloween or autumn party you might throw for a class of preschoolers and some scary skits about various religious topics like the spiritual dangers of trick-or-treating. I don’t believe we were allowed to dress up for them because that was considered sinful, but we did get candy, a few small toys, and to play fun games like bobbing for apples!

The most creative Halloween costume I’ve seen on someone else was made to look like a pink birthday cake. This person spent hours decorating cardboard to look like a cake, and I think they used pink and white tissue paper or something to give the appearance of light, fluffy frosting on the cake. It was a beautiful costume but apparently rather stiff and uncomfortable to wear.

One year I also saw about a half dozen people dressed as dominos (the game pieces, not the pizza place). I always wondered how they decided who would be which domino and where they got their costumes from.

a hazy pink photo of a ghost standing in a hallway that’s lit by a pink light. The viewer is looking at it from the perspective of a pitch black room where nothing else can be seen in the foreground. I’ve never gotten into dressing up for Halloween as an adult, but I know what I’d pick if I did.

A ghost.

Think about it: you get to stay warm, comfortable, and anonymous under your cozy bedsheet, gently frighten the locals without resorting to anything gory or offensive, and maybe even rattle some cool metal chains.

What’s not to like about that?

It’s a vastly underrated costume choice if you ask me. I haven’t seen anyone dressed up as a ghost in Toronto in years, and I think this deserves a strong comeback.

If I’m going to dress up, it’s going to be in something comfortable and practical even if it is Halloween.

Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

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September 27, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: How I Shake Off a Bad Mood

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A white iPhone is lying on a wooden floor. The screen of the iPhone is black except for a yellow face that has an angry expression on its face. The top of its head is pink and just beginning to turn red in anger. My assumption for this week’s prompt is that we’re talking about bad moods that have innocuous, non-medical causes and aren’t a sign of anything seriously wrong in life.

I’m usually a pretty upbeat person, but we all have grumpy days eventually. This is what I do to shake off those feelings.

1) Eat a snack. Low blood sugar can cause a bad mood for me.

2) Take a nap or go to bed early. I can get a little grouchy when I haven’t had enough sleep, too.

3) Read or watch something comedic. It’s hard to laugh and still feel out of sorts afterwards.

4) Take a long walk out in nature.

5) Spend time alone. I love people, but I also need to charge my introvert battery regularly.

6)  Mute the news for a while. The negative slant they bring to everything in order to get more clicks and views is sometimes too much for me.

7) Perform a random act of kindness.

8) Write a thank you note to anyone who has done something nice for me lately. It could be for a friend, relative, clerk at a local business, or anyone else who made my day better.

9) Dance or lift weights. Exercise is such a great mood booster.

A combination of these things usually works well for me if one of them doesn’t do the trick on their own.

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August 30, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: The Weirdest Thing I Loved as a Child

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A photograph of a very old graveyard. The gravestones are covered in moss and have most of their etchings either hidden by moss or worn away. The largest and nearest one has begun to bend over and looks like it might soon fall over entirely. Please note that this post includes references to child mortality and epidemics because little Lydia read tons of stories about (typically Victorian-era) children who caught all sorts of unpleasant illnesses. This will be a general overview, and I will not be going into detail about specific characters, individuals, or causes of death.

The weirdest thing I loved as a child was visiting the pre-1950 (ish?) sections of graveyards, figuring out how old the people there were when they died, and trying to guess what might have killed them and if they would have survived if they had access to modern medicine. I was most interested in the gravestones of those who died young because almost everyone I knew who died had done so at a ripe old age.

Why was I interested in this? Well, there were a few reasons for it:

1)  I’ve always thought cemeteries are beautiful and peaceful places to remember the dead. I liked seeing the pretty tombstones, reading names on them that maybe weren’t so commonly used these days, and pondering their creative epitaphs.

2) Getting sick made me anxious in small part because of how many classic novels I’d read about kids being disabled or killed by all sorts of diseases that can now be cured with medications like antibiotics or prevented entirely with vaccines. (See also: Beth March from Little Women, Helen Burns from Jane Eyre, and Mary Ingalls from the Little House books). It was always nice to go to the library later on, or maybe ask my mother who was training to become a nurse back then, and learn about how modern medicine has radically changed the world in this regard.

3) It made getting vaccinated slightly less horrible. I still hated needles, but at least I knew why vaccines were so important.

4)  I liked being scared, and it was frightening to read lists of names on a gravestone who died one right after the other and realize they were probably related and suffered from the same illness.

In conclusion, I have a bit of a gothic side. Don’t tell anyone. 😉

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August 23, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Three Fun Facts About Myself

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The numbers 1, 2, and 3 are beige coloured and lying on a red surface. Beneath each letter is a small lego: a white one underneath the number 1, a black one underneath the number 2, and a red one underneath the number 3. Once again, I’d like to have a crystal ball so I can see how you all answer this question! Will you be telling us a secret? Posting pictures? Sharing funny childhood stories? Or maybe something else entirely?

Here are three fun facts about me that I don’t think I’ve shared on my blog before:

1. I once stopped driving and pulled over to the side of a quiet, flat, country road to save a turtle that had been flipped over on its back. There were no other vehicles anywhere to be seen in either direction, so I was not putting myself in harm’s way by doing this. The turtle was a greenish-brown little creature that was about the size of a small dinner plate. It wasn’t at all heavy to pick up and probably weighed no more than 5 pounds. It didn’t look anything like a snapping turtle, but I’m not sure which type of turtle it was. I picked it up, brought it to the edge of the road, and made sure it was walking into the grass safely where it would live happily ever after before I drove off again.

2. I was born with an innocent heart murmur that wasn’t diagnosed until I was an adult. It’s called an innocent murmur because it doesn’t cause any health problems and doesn’t need to be treated. Some of you may have one, too! About 10% of adults and 30% of kids have them, so it’s a pretty common variation of normal. I only ever think of it when I meet a new doctor who pauses and listens again to my heart while examining me.

3. I  have always loved educational stuff. When I was a teenager, my family visited some family friends in a big city. There was a gorgeous, huge museum there I desperately wanted to see. Our hosts said museums were boring and wanted to show us a local mall instead. Mom took me aside and told me to be polite, so I smiled and said nothing more about it.

My only memory of that excursion is of patiently sitting in a food court with a neutral expression on my face as I silently felt the sting of disappointment and the grating texture of boredom that somehow seems worse when you’re a kid or teen.

On a positive note, I have visited that museum multiple times since then and always have a marvellous time examining their fossils, paintings, and artifacts in detail.

But I still don’t like going to the mall. Ha!

(This is in no way a judgement of people who love shopping or malls, by the way. May you enjoy those hobbies to your heart’s content. Our hosts and I simply had wildly different ideas about what is fun in life, and I doubt they realized what a rare treat visiting a museum was for rural people who didn’t have a lot of disposable income.

We had a mall in the town we lived in, but it was about a one-hour drive to the nearest small museum and  several hours to a full day of driving for the large ones. Due to the cost of gas, multiple meals, parking fees, highway tolls, and possibly renting a motel room or two for the night in addition to buying general admission tickets to a museum, we were only able to afford to do this about once every five to ten years when I was growing up. It was a huge deal whenever it happened, and it was one of the many reasons why I moved to an urban area as an adult).

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August 2, 2023 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A Job I Wouldn’t Be Good At

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A neon sign lit up against a black night sky in a city. You can see a skyscraper next to the sign. The words “Peninsula Night Club” are in neon blue on the sign. The word “liquor” is larger than all other words and in neon orange on the sign. The word “dancing” is on the bottom of the sign and in neon pink. If any of you secretly own a nightclub and are looking for people to work late hours and pressure your patrons into buying watered-down alcohol while the DJ blares eardrum-rattling music all night long, I am not a good candidate for the role for the following reasons:

1) I am a morning person who needs an early-ish bedtime and a stable sleep schedule in order to function properly and stave off ugly sleep-deprivation migraines,

2)  Migraines give me horrible noise sensitivity, so I would not be able to  remain in a noisy environment if I’m at any point in the migraine cycle.  I also really don’t want to suffer permanent hearing loss from dangerously noisy work,

3) Sales is not something I’m naturally good at,

4) When I worked roles that involved sales in the past, I only said truthful things to my customers and respected their boundaries if they didn’t want to upgrade to a more expensive model of whatever they were shopping for or add extra items to their order. I  never pressured them to buy anything they weren’t interested in and actually got in trouble sometimes for not selling stuff that my customers never wanted or needed in the first place,

5) I haven’t touched alcohol in years, wouldn’t know what to recommend other than telling everyone to go drink a strawberry margarita*, and would be perfectly honest every time someone asked if the drinks were watered down or otherwise deceptively advertised.

*Back when I did occasionally drink alcohol, it was at most two or three glasses of it per year, and strawberry margaritas were one of the handful of drinks that might entice me. I liked the fruit and the fruit juice in them a thousand times more than the alcohol, though, so now I just ask for a freshly-squeezed orange juice or something for rare celebratory moments instead.

So there it is. You now all know my weaknesses and what sort of job I’d be terrible at. Please make your hiring decisions accordingly. 😉

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