Lydia Schoch

Photo by Roger and Renate Rössing.

My old friend, Bruce, is having surgery today. He and his family are waiting to hear if some of his most recent health problems are caused by an incurable form of cancer or by something that could potentially be treated.

Everyone who knows him is waiting to hear what the doctors say as well.

I think it’s safe to say that most of us on this side of the globe are waiting for spring. We’re rapidly approaching the time of year when it feels as though winter will last for eternity.

There are other people I know who are waiting for things that only they have the right to discuss online. The list felt incomplete without mentioning this, but that’s all I’m going to say about it.

Overall, though, it feels like a lot of us are in standby mode. The clock is ticking, but it’s not yet time to stand up.

On a lighter note, I’m counting down the days until Waiting for Earl to Die and other stories is released. There are only two more to go.

What are you waiting for today?

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

Why I am Raising My Child to be a Feminist and Why I think You Should Too via danarel. Readers who have raised or who are raising kids, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this article. Did or are you consciously raising your kids to identify as [fill-in-the-blank]?

Bare Necessities via XplodingUnicorn. Ha!

If Only Once, If Only for a Little While. This is a tearjerker. I’ll leave it up to my readers to discover why.

In Transition to Independent Living, the “Dignity of Risk” for the Mentally Ill. I don’t actually think this is a good idea, but it was intriguing to see how a man living with a severe mental illness coped with his newfound independence.

Why I Blog About Mental Illness via ChristyBarongan.  A nice addendum to the link above.

From Ashes in My Pine Tree:

This morning my doorbell rang and I found an old woman on my porch who announced herself with the phrase “Good morning, I’m about to ask you the strangest question you’ll be asked all day.”

Just for the record, if you’re trying to spark my interest that intro is a pretty damn good way to do it.

She then proceeding to hold up a big ziploc baggie full of ashes and asked if I would mind if she laid her mother to rest in my front yard. Yes, you heard me right, she wanted to spread her dead mother’s ashes on my seldom mowed lawn.

I am a Bacha Posh: My Life as a Woman Living as a Man in Afghanistan was a heartbreaking read.

Sometimes girls living in Afghanistan assume a temporary male identity so they can work to support their families. Their hair is cut, their names and clothes are changed, and for a few years they are thought of as boys because girls in their culture have so little freedom.

The problem is that eventually they are forced into living with the same heavy restrictions that apply to all of the other women and girls. It’s incredibly difficult to transition from all of the freedom they experienced as children to having so many limitations placed upon them at puberty.

Some women fight back against it. This is the story of one woman who did just that. I think all of my readers will really enjoy it.

What have you been reading?

Source: Deutsche Fotothek.

I’m on a short Internet hiatus.

They say that if you tilt your screen at exactly the right angle, you might be able to see what these girls have spotted.

Let me know in the comment section what it is you think might be out there. I can sleep easily now that I know all of you have something to occupy your minds. 😛

As promised, here is the sneak peak of the cover for Waiting for Earl to Die and other stories.

The book will be out on January 28. I’ll share the purchase information next week!

When I first started this blog, I occasionally shared links to sites that I found entertaining. I stopped doing it because I eventually ran out of websites to recommend.

I’m busy with non Internet-related stuff this week, so I thought today would be the perfect time to revive this old series.

Incidental Comics. This is a hodgepodge of comic strips about all kinds of topics. Most of them are related to writing and books, but sometimes Grant Snider throws serious wild cards out there.

Ethics and Society. There aren’t many blogs out there about ethics that aren’t written from a religious point of view, but this is a great example of how to write such a thing.

The Beautiful Kind. A fascinating blog written by a sex worker. This isn’t for kids or for anyone who is easily offended.

Before Vaccines. People used to die from diseases we don’t think about anymore. Many more people suffered terribly – whether temporarily or permanently – from these diseases. I look forward to the day when there are no more updates needed for this particular site.

Smarter Every Day. This is for kids, adults, and everyone in-between. The content varies from day to day, but expect a lot of science experiments and short, humorous videos from this tumblr.

My Aunt the WAC. Some of you might remember how much I adored A Hundred Years Ago. The author of that blog is back with a new project that is describing the incredible life of her aunt who decided to join the Women’s Army Corp during World War II. Before joining the WAC, Marian Solomon was a middle-aged woman who had spent her entire life on a small, rural farm. What an amazing change that must have been in her life! The story is just getting started, so head on over and check it out.

1111 Comics. This comic strip is surprisingly hard to explain. Expect the unexpected with it. It doesn’t always make me laugh, but when it does I laugh very hard.

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

Spring… This is about the time of year that I begin daydreaming about how green Toronto will be in a few months. I really miss the sight of  flowers, grass, and trees every winter. If you feel the same way, maybe this gorgeous picture will help.

Things to Say to Yourself Instead of the Negative Stuff. I love this.

Sex-Positive? Or Sex-Sensitive?  Do I agree with this? Yes and no. So much depends on the context of not only what is said but of the relationships we have with the people who say them. It was a fascinating read, though, and this is one of my favourite sex blogs. This link is NSFW.

Ask a Skeptic: What About Ghost TV Shows? I’ve actually really enjoyed all of the updates in this column so far, but I thought this particular letter is a good place to start for anyone who isn’t already familiar with this thought-provoking site.

From When Told You Are Not Pretty:

Don’t forget how trees shake their last leaves in winter like they’re shedding skin from the old year. Shed pretty. Shed it now. Teach yourself to replace it with heart-wrenching, brilliant, clever, artistic, unique, understanding, fighting. Always living.

From The Life Lessons I Learned from Yoga:

Sometimes the things I don’t know overwhelm me. The books I haven’t read, the questions I don’t know the answers to, and the concepts I can’t wrap my brain around crash like waves and threaten to drag me out to sea. It’s so easy to stack them up and measure myself against the pile. But if knowledge is power, so is the knowledge that there’s always more to learn.

I’ll be back next week with another book recommendation. What have you been reading?

Photo by Felipe Micaroni Lalli.

I keep getting hits from people searching for phrases like:

how families are destroyed due to t.v., phones, and internet.

Who else remembers life before the Internet?

Long distance phone calls were extremely expensive. You only made them on very special occasions, and even then you didn’t talk for a long time.

Packages and letters took days to arrive, and sometimes longer than that if you sent them out over the holidays or your handwriting wasn’t legible enough. You also had to pay not only for the stamps but for the paper, postcards,  or greeting cards on which to write your messages as well. There was no such thing as jotting off a quick note.

It was extremely difficult to disprove urban legends. Another kid once terrified me with stories about how a friend of a friend conjured up Bloody Mary. I was old enough to be skeptical of it but still barely young enough to wonder if it might have actually happened once or twice in the past.

Facts were hard to come by. You had to physically go to the library to look up statistics, dates, names, or places unless you  were lucky enough to have a relatively modern set of encyclopedias in your home. I remember making lists of things I wondered about ahead of time in anticipation of having some of those questions answered at our next visit to the local library.

People were easy to misplace. If they changed their last name or moved away, you might never get in contact with them again.

It was quiet. Lonely. Boring. Tedious. Isolated.

I don’t miss that world at all. The one we have now is so much more connected. I can email my parents every single day of the week if I came up with a new question or story for them, and it wouldn’t cost any of us a single penny. I can send a funny joke to my nephew or coo over the newest baby in the extended family for the same price.

This is a good thing.

Technology doesn’t drive families apart. It keeps them together.

I wonder how long it will take the technophobes to realize that.

Photo by Ws47.

A funny thing happened to me over the holidays.

Some of the adult members of my family went on a hike. The trail was roughly a mile long and a little rocky. (Think something slightly rougher than the picture on the left, although we were not on Tuckerman Trail).

My parents and spouse dropped out about halfway through it. Youngest brother and I kept going.

He’s in fantastic shape. I’m in decent shape. It wasn’t hard as long as you paid attention to where you placed your feet when the rocks grew slippery.

The trail began to get a little tougher. I started to use my hands to steady myself. There was a steep drop-off on the left side of the trail, and I preferred not to see how far down it went.

The rocks were getting bigger. I was hot and thirsty.

Youngest brother looked up and pointed at the top of the mountain. It looks like the kind of trail that requires legitimate hiking boots and a big bottle of water.

“I think that’s where we’re headed!”

He sounded cheerful.

Why, oh why did he sound cheerful? I thought it was supposed to be a class 2 trail.

“Are you sure?”

“Kind of.”

“Um…I think I’m going to head back now.” He was okay finishing it alone, so that’s exactly what I did. After he finished it, he walked back and found me and our mom waiting for him.

“You almost made it to the end!”

“Wait, seriously?”

“Yeah, you were like 90% finished.” He actually went on and completed another short hike further up the mountain before walking back because this trail ended so quickly.

Well, shoot. If I had known that, I would have kept walking.

I wonder how often in life we all give up right before the tough stuff ends?

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

So You Want a Rationalist Girlfriend. This was so creative. I’d love to do something like this with statistics one of these days, I just need to think of a topic. (And convince my followers to fill out a survey. Ha!)

Why I Despise the Hipster Aesthetic. My feelings about this topic definitely aren’t as visceral as the ones the author describes, but I am irritated by people who thinks it’s fun to go “slumming.”

A Fleeting Glimpse via 4BethCarpenter. You all know how I like to harrumph my way through this time of year, but even I have to admit that this is a beautiful sight.

End of the Year 2014 Survey via K8Tilton. Kate Tilton is one of the many engaging authors I’ve met on Twitter. Right now she’s asking anyone who has ever visited her site to fill out a short, anonymous survey about your thoughts on what she can do to improve it. I’ve filled out the survey. Will you?

Reflections on Two Years of Marriage via juijonathan. Every January on Reddit there are a few posters who share all kinds of statistics about the frequency and type(s) of sex they had with their spouse over the last year. (Have no fear, relatives who lurk on this blog. I will never, ever share that kind of information here. 😉 ) This guy took that concept and stretched it a little further. Instead of talking about his sex life, he records all kinds of statistics and anecdotes about life with his wife so that their future – and currently completely hypothetical – child will know what mom and dad’s lives were like before he or she existed.

From The Prodigal Prince: Richard Roberts and the Decline of the Oral Roberts Dynasty:

Shortly after the wedding, Oral called Richard and Patti into his study, sat down in an armchair by the fire, and began to cry. Oral said he’d had a dream: If either of them backslid—the term for leading an unchristian life, especially one outside Oral’s domain—they’d be killed in a plane crash.

“It never occurred to us that maybe it wasn’t God who had spoken,” writes Patti, “but Oral trying to manipulate us to protect the ministry.”

Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole is  good example of one of my favourite types of nonfiction: stories about unusual medical conditions and how they affect the lives of the people who are diagnosed with them. One of the reasons why I enjoy this genre so much is that it reminds me of when I used to read my mother’s textbooks when she was in nursing school. They fascinated me even though I was too young to understand everything mom was learning from them.

This particular book is about neurological disorders. Sometimes a tumour can cause drastic changes in someone’s personality, although I’ll leave it up to my readers to discover whether the personalities of the patient in that section was changed for the better or for the worse. 😉

It’s difficult to say much more about it without giving away spoilers, but I’d heartily recommend it to anyone who is fascinated by how the mind works.

What have you been reading?

My next book, Waiting for Earl to Die and other stories, will be coming out on January 28.

I’ll share more details on the official publication date, but you will be able to purchase it through Kobo. The cover will be revealed in the very near future.

Today I thought I’d discuss how I originally came up with the ideas for a few of the stories in this anthology. I’ll also be sharing brief summaries of the tales in question.

The Genealogist

Maryanne’s adjustment to the afterlife has been surprisingly rocky. All she wanted was a period of quiet contemplation until her loved ones forget her and she’s freed to move on to an unknown future. Unfortunately the living aren’t cooperating, and their interference only seems to be growing worse over time. 

I’m related to several amateur genealogists who have uncovered many legends about our ancestors.

Every time I hear an unsavoury one, though, I wonder what that particular ancestor would say if he or she knew that people were still remembering certain facts about him or her a few hundred years later. It’s fascinating from a historical perspective, but it also makes me wonder what future genealogists will say about me.

The Cure

Life-threatening allergies used to be something you learned to live with. Jerome has seen how serious they can be, though, and is ready to do absolutely anything to blot his allergies out of existence. The question is, will it work?

Allergies are rampant in my immediate and extended family. Some of them are mild, while others are not. This tale is the result of me daydreaming about what it would be like to have a permanent cure for all of them.

Waiting for Earl to Die

Carl loves everything about his new neighbourhood except his deathly ill, cantankerous neighbour, Earl. They say that only the good die young. In this case, Carl can’t help but to agree with that rule. Now all he has to do is wait for nature to take its course. 

Old places can hold a lot of secrets. My parents moved into a beautiful, old house when I was teenager. It was built around the turn of the twentieth century and had a lot of charm if you overlooked how dark its rooms could be in wintertime.  I loosely based Earl’s home on the one I finished growing up in.

Everything else is entirely made up. I don’t wish death on anyone.