Lydia Schoch

Here is this week’s list of blog posts and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web. I can definitely tell that a lot of people are taking blogging breaks over the summer. It’s been a little more challenging for me to find good material to share with everyone recently, although I definitely enjoy  sifting through all of my sources.

Resilience Is Futile: How Well-Meaning Nonprofits Perpetuate Poverty I’m not surprised by this at all.

It’s 104 Degrees Outside. 10 Reasons Why That’s a Good Thing. Last weekend Toronto felt like it was 104 degrees outside when you factored in our extremely high humidity. I found this post while googling something related to this topic and thought my readers would enjoy it.

Blind, Orphaned Red Fox Kit at Buttonwood Park Zoo. It’s been a long time since I shared a cute animal video with my readers. This one made me want a pet red fox. They’re so playful and cute.

They All Scream For Ice Cream…In Hell via Austin_Hodgens. This was great.

From The Myth of the Ethical Shopper:

First, we wanted them to ban all the terrible things we read about in magazines. No more child labor, choked ventilation, abusive bosses, confiscated passports. Companies should apply U.S. working conditions or, at the minimum, follow local laws where they operated. Second, we wanted them to send inspectors to see if those commitments were being met.

And most companies did these things. That was the easy part. The hard part, it turned out, is that these structures aren’t designed to make factories take better care of their workers. They’re designed to make factories look like they are.

What have you been reading? How do your reading habits change from one season to the next?

I’ve often wondered what happens to checked luggage.

It probably isn’t treated quite the same way that this robot treats the bags it is inspecting, but I still had a good chuckle over the idea. This was definitely worth the two minutes of my time to watch it.

Readers, do you have any plans for summer travel? What do you think happens to your checked luggage once its out of your sight?

© Nevit Dilmen.

This past weekend was an absolute scorcher here in Toronto. With the humidity it felt like 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) yesterday and 38 C (100 F) on Saturday.

If you’ve never felt those kind of temperatures before, imagine walking into an oven as it is preheating. The air is so hot, muggy, and thick that it almost feels like you’re trying to breathe with a wet napkin over your mouth and nose. Every single breath you take is soggy and sweaty.

Our air conditioner has been running 24 hours a day which almost never needs to happen. Normally it works so well that I get too cold with it on all the time, although this weekend it struggled to keep up with the heat and humidity that Mother Nature has been throwing at us.

We’ve been eating a lot of popsicles, ice cream bars, salads, fresh fruit, and other meals that don’t require heating up the kitchen too much. The blinds are closed. We’ve put off all unnecessary errands and excursions until a later date. It’s just too hot to walk around outdoors unless you absolutely need to do so.

Of course, I can’t complain too much. I know people who have muddled through this heat wave without any air conditioning at all! The very thought of that makes me shudder.

I will be so glad when the temperatures fall to a reasonable 30 C (86 F), 90% humidity and all.

For those of who you are also in the middle of the Dog Days of summer, how are you staying cool?

For my readers in Australia and New Zealand, how would you feel about sending us a taste of that winter weather? 🙂

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

Before I share the links, don’t forget to go download your free copy of A Dark Corner of My Soul if you haven’t done so already. This book will remain free until July 25.

The Doctors Whose Patients Are Already Dead. This sounds like such an interesting line of work.

What It Really Means to Eat a Big Mac at the Arctic Circle. I lived in several small towns growing up, but none of them were this small or isolated.

Grateful for Our New Faucet…and Water via HMJonesWrites. The weather has been hot and humid here in Toronto this past week or two. Reading this post reminded me of just how grateful I am to have air conditioning. It would be a truly miserable summer without it! What are you grateful for?

On Giving, Boundaries, and Mutual Respect. What a fascinating post. This is a NSFW link, but it is really good.

From The Dark (in)Side:

Light is not synonymous with good. Fear, anger, hatred, and suffering have their place. Suppression of those things tips the balance away from seeking solace in the shadows, from seeking wisdom in the depths.

I highly recommend checking out this video.

What have you been reading?

I have something exciting to share with my readers today.

My friend, Michel Weatherall, recently published a book of poetry.  As you can see from the cover, he asked me to write the forward for it. I was thrilled to help him out with it!

What I like the most about this book was how dreamlike the poems were. Nightmares can change suddenly when you’re in the middle of one. A new hiding spot suddenly becomes dangerous. An escape hatch magically appears just when you think the monster is going to catch.  This collection handles those shifts expertly.

The most interesting part about it, though, was when Michel described how he came up with his ideas for certain poems. I really enjoy hearing how other creative people find inspiration. It really can and does show up everywhere.

From July 18 until July 25, this book will be free on Amazon and Kindle.

Anyone who enjoys dark poetry should check it out.

Happy reading!

Photo credit: Qwertyxp2000.

This blog was inundated with spam over the weekend.

I’ve finally cleared out everything that shouldn’t have been posted here.

I think I managed to get rid of everything that offered to make certain parts of the human body larger or show people how to to make $701.49 in their spare time without accidentally including anything legitimate in the deletion process.

If I have made any of your comments disappear by mistake, let me know.

The Pan American Games have just begun here in Toronto. Our city has been preparing for them for quite a while now.

All of the subway trains I’ve ridden in recently have either included posters about the games or friendly reminders to those of us who live in the city about how busy public transit is projected to be for the next several weeks. Some of the ads have asked us to work from home or travel during off-peak hours when possible.

So I started off July with the expectation that my city would be insanely busy until the middle of August. As in, I was planning to walk everywhere I could and to cut down on trips that would have required public transit during the busiest parts of the day. I was also planning to gently dissuade any friends or relatives who were hoping to visit this month because I assumed the hotels would be sold out and a lot of the tourist destinations would be even busier than they normally are in the summer.

My life is structured in a way that I can generally make these adjustments. A lot of other people’s lives aren’t.

What has surprised me the most about the Pan-Am games is that none of this has come true so far. The subway is not more crowded than normal. I’ve only seen a handful of people wearing lanyards that identify them in some way with this competition. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say this was a perfectly ordinary July. If anything, it’s actually a little quieter in my city than I’d normally expect for this time of year. There definitely aren’t a noticeable number of tourists here which is bizarre.

If any of this changes, I’ll let you know over the next month. It’s going to be fascinating to see how it all pans out.

Readers, are you interested in the Pan-Am games? If any of you are planning to attend them, what have you thought so far?

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

Can I Start Saying “Crap”? via pinkmenotmom. This was too funny.

Fifty Shades of Yellow. One of the weirdest things I’ve read online in years was this article. I can’t imagine being that obsessed with the life of someone you’ve never even met.

The Post-Ownership Society. We really need to fix this.

Highway Survivor via jdubqca. There’s no way I can discuss this poem without giving away spoilers. Go read it and then we can talk about the final stanza.

#DeadRaccoonTO honoured by Toronto with Sidewalk Vigil. Those of you who are on Twitter might have heard of this already. What I like about this article is that it finally tells us what happened to #DeadRacoonTO. Closure is nice!

What have you been reading?

As most of you already know, I’ve been recovering from an injury for a little over a week now. It’s the kind of injury that makes it painful to type, so once again this will be a short post.

When I saw my doctor, I felt just like the character in the XKCD comic above. (You should be able to click on it to enlarge the picture. If that doesn’t work, click here).  It’s so difficult to explain what’s going on with your  body when you can imagine far more painful and horrifying things that could happen to it. The 10-point pain scale probably works much better for patients who don’t have a runaway imagination. Ha!

What I ended up doing along with my pain scale rating was describing how the injury was affecting me. At one point it was so uncomfortable that I was having a hard time eating or sleeping.

The good news is that I’m doing much better! The pain is 95% gone, although there is still some stiffness that makes it uncomfortable to type for a long period of time. I’ve been doing a set of doctor-recommended exercises to get my full range of motion back.

I hope to be fully back to my old self in time for my next post here. Thank you all for all of your kind thoughts and messages this past week.

Last week I developed an injury that makes it painful for me to spend a great deal of time on my laptop. It’s healing, but I still need to rest it as much as possible.

Instead of a regular post, then, I’ll be sharing an optical illusion with you that I found on this blog.

Stare at the dot on the girl’s nose for 15 seconds. Be sure not to look at anything else during that time. Then look at the blank page on the right and tell me what you see.

(Don’t worry – it’s nothing scary!)

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