Tag Archives: Childhood Stories

July 6, 2022 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Have You Met Anyone Famous? Who?

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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 black squiggly autograph

The Internet says this is supposed to be an autograph.

I’ve never met anyone who is universally famous like Beyoncé or President Obama, so my answer to this question depends on your definition of the term fame and which social circles we may or may not have in common. Here are a few people who are famous in some subcultures that I’ve been in the same room with.

Curtis Hinds

Those of you who have followed my site for a while might remember that I was a preacher’s kid growing up. Curtis was (and still is) well known as a travelling pastor and speaker in certain Protestant circles. I knew him as a family friend who would occasionally come to visit us in the Midwestern portion of the United States or take us out to dinner when we travelled up to Ontario.

He was (and I’m sure still is) a friendly man who always had amusing new stories to share about his travels.

 

Robert J. Sawyer

Robert is one of Canada’s most famous science fiction authors. I’ve blogged about several of his books here like “Calculating God” and the Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy in previous posts.

He sometimes pops up at various literary events and festivals in Toronto. I’ve met him once so far. He was a kind and welcoming man to everyone around him that day, so do say hello if you also enjoy his work and see him around at a bookish event someday.

 

Devon Soltendieck

This one might take a little bit of explaining. Much Music is a tv channel that is like Canada’s version of MTV. Devon was a Much Music host in the 2000s. In the mid-2000s, I was riding the subway when I saw someone who looked really familiar to me. I couldn’t stop staring at him as I tried to figure out why he was so familiar.

“Okay, so how are we related?” I silently asked myself. I had occasionally run into distant cousins and other relatives whom I recognized but whose names did not immediately come to mind when I lived in the United States. Due to this, I assumed it was another case of me seeing a third cousin or something and needing some time to realize we shared recent ancestors.

It was only after I’d arrived back home and turned on the TV that I realized I’d probably seen a famous person instead.

He was facing away from me on the subway, so I hope he didn’t notice me staring at him. I would have politely ignored him if I realized we didn’t actually need to play the “how are we related” game after all. Ha!

 

Person photographing her white dog. That is the sum total of my celebrity experiences. I tend to avoid celebrity culture and take an alternate route if I see paparazzi clogging up a sidewalk here in Toronto, but I hope everyone who is into that sort of stuff has plenty of opportunities to rub elbows with celebrities if they so desire to.

I’m ending this post with a stock photo of someone photographing her dog because the thought of domesticated animals being famous makes me giggle. (Although there are some famous furry friends out there, too).

 

19 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as , , , , ,

March 22, 2022 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Books With an Adjective In the Title


Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

The following words are written on a green background: adjectives, verbs, prepositions, nouns, tenses, activate, study, adverbs, learning grammar. Here’s a quick and humorous story about adjectives before I dive into this week’s prompt.

When I was in elementary school, our teacher had us write poems that needed to have a specific number of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and other parts of speech in certain portions of the poem.

I was a little unsure about what made an adjective different from the other parts of speech, so I opened a nearby dictionary and selected words based in large part on what the dictionary said about which part of speech each one belonged to.

This is probably not exactly what my teacher was hoping we’d do, but I finished the project and technically followed all of the rules for it.

1. The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo

2. The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

3. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Edward Albee

4. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

5. The Case of the Perfect Maid – a Miss Marple Short Story by Agatha Christie

6. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

7. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho

9. The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

10. The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi

74 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as ,

March 2, 2022 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Tell Us Something About a Pet

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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.

I do not have a photo of the actual fish I’m going to discuss, so a stock photo must suffice.

A fish swimming in a blue sea. This happened in late spring or summer when I was a child. My family lived in a house whose backyard sloped down into the shore of a lake back then.

I was walking by the water when I noticed a fish swimming oddly close to the shore and to the surface of the water.

While I didn’t see any visible injuries on it, the poor little fish looked like it needed help. It wasn’t swimming as quickly and confidently as fish normally do. It looked wobbly and uncertain.

I built a little pen of rocks around it to protect it from any larger creatures that might hurt it. The pen was not terribly big, just tall enough to give it a safe spot in the water to rest.

Then I went to the house to see if one of my parents could help him or her.

When I returned, the fish was gone.

It’s impossible to know for sure what happened to it, but I choose to believe that moment of rest somehow helped and that it had a long and happy life after that afternoon.

I did not know it long enough to pick a name, but I bonded enough with it during the brief time we knew each other for me to remember it all of these years later.

It was a nice little fish, and I did everything I could to help it.

14 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as , ,

December 8, 2021 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: What I Thought of Santa as a Kid

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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.

As I’ve mentioned here before, my parents were pastors when I was a child. Many of our Christmas traditions revolved around the religious aspects of that holiday and the various parties, services, charitable fundraisers, and other events we held at church. It was always a busy season for us!

A black santa claus putting a wrapped presnt in his big, red bagMy family decorated a tree and exchanged a few thoughtful presents each year, but Santa himself was not part of our version of Christmas. My only experiences with him were through seasonal television programs and some traditional works of literature like T’Was The Night Before Christmas.

We didn’t own a TV at all for a while when I was in the prime age group for believing in him, and I was also homeschooled for several years there. Due to these factors, I didn’t know that some other families were so focused on Santa during Christmas until I was older and began spending more time around kids whose families had other traditions.

Sometimes my grandmother would bend the rules a little and give us a few extra presents from Santa or one of the friendly animals on their farm because of how much she loves Christmas.

We always knew they were really from her and Grandpa, of course, so my parents weren’t too fussed about whose name was on the “from” line. My parents taught us to be respectful of other people’s traditions and household rules.

The various legends about Santa amused me, especially when it came to learning about the historical Saint Nicholas and how myths about him and his magical helpers have evolved over time. That made little Lydia wonder if other magical creatures like the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny were also loosely based on real people or events.

When I started attending public school, I vaguely remember classmates talking about what race and ethnicity Santa should be. As far as I was concerned, he could be from any racial or ethnic group.

Appearances don’t matter because Santa was a metaphor for kindness and generosity in my family. We all perform the role of Santa when we notice what others need and quietly work to help them in whatever ways we can throughout the year.

12 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as , , , ,

November 30, 2021 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Bookish Memories

Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

I don’t know if I’ll be able to come up with a full ten answers for this week’s prompt, but I do have some fun bookish memories to share with you all.

 


Bookish Memory #1: Falling asleep while waiting for my dad to come home from a late night at work. I always wanted him to tell me stories about his childhood again. He had a marvellous way of turning his childhood into something just as exciting as any novel! I especially loved his story about accidentally setting his bed on fire when he was pretending to be big and powerful like Superman. He threw one lit match on it and then tried to blow it out just like Superman would do. (The fire was soon put out, and he never tried anything like that again. It was truly an innocent mistake). Sometimes I’d quietly retell his stories to myself as I waited to see ifPerson holding an annotated paperback book open. The book has a sticky note in it that says remember. he’d be home soon!

Bookish Memory #2: My mother reading the first few Little House on the Prairie books to me. I took over reading them as soon as my reading skills were strong enough because I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next and she needed to look after my younger siblings.

Bookish Memory #3: Being so bored in church that I read portions of the Bible that weren’t being discussed during that week’s sermon. I was a preacher’s kid, so I had plenty of opportunities to “read ahead” so to speak.

Bookish Memory #4: Occasionally getting away with reading secular books during long church services. Shh, don’t tell my parents. 😉

Bookish Memory #5: Discovering a fairy tale my aunt had started writing but not finished when she was a little girl. So far as I can recall, it was about a princess and a magic necklace.  I added a few more scenes to it and then tucked it away where I found it. Maybe someday another little girl in our family will find it in that cupboard and finish it!

Bookish Memory #6: Being excited to start high school and later on college because of the wonderful new school libraries I was about to gain access to! I remember staring into the dark windows of those still-empty libraries just before the school year began and wishing they’d open early for me. I would have promised to leave everything exactly how I’d found if I could only browse the shelves for an hour and take note of which books I’d hope to check out first.

Bookish Memory #7: Memorizing the summer hours of our local public library and timing my walks there so I could arrive first thing in the morning or later in the evening depending on my work schedule. I knew exactly how long that walk took and was often the first (or last) patron of the day.  Let’s just say that July and August are quite hot and humid in the Midwestern portion of the United States. You do not want to be walking around in the full heat of the day for too long. Sunburns and heat strokes can happen terribly quickly if you’re not careful.

Bookish Memory #8: Attending the annual book sale and book/art festival in support of that same local library. I’d often find a few secondhand books that piqued my interest after I’d bought a slice or pie or some other treat.  We lived in a small, sleepy town, so events like this were a big deal for everyone who loved the local library!

 

65 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops, Personal Life

Tagged as , ,

June 9, 2021 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: The Best Gift I Ever Received

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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 black gift box with a gold bow on it. The best gift I’ve ever received was learning how to have a wonderful time while spending little to no money.

When I was a kid, my parents taught us to enjoy hikes, camping, picnics, storytelling (courtesy of library books or amusing tales from my parents’ childhoods), and swimming in local bodies of water among many other activities.

This was a tradition they continued even once their financial situation improved and we could technically afford the occasional visit to a movie theatre or amusement park.

Yes, there were times when I was a preteen and teenager that I envied the flashier outings and presents some of my classmates talked about after summer vacation. I don’t intend to portray myself as a saintly kid or anything like that, but the funny thing about growing up is how much your perspective can change over time.

I entered adulthood with a vivid imagination and a long list of hobbies and interests that I can enjoy regardless of how much money is or isn’t left over after all of the bills are paid.

Even when I do go on something closer to a traditional vacation, I’m happiest when I enjoy it by swimming in the hotel pool or wandering around town and pretending I’m a local. You never know what cool parks, monuments, or hole-in-the-wall diners you’ll find if you go with the flow, walk past the tourist traps, and see what hidden gems are a few blocks or miles away.

10 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as ,

February 8, 2021 · 1:00 am

How I Changed My Mind About Weightlifting

As I mentioned last week, weightlifting wasn’t something that I immediately liked when I first tried it.

This week I’ll dig into the reasons why that was so and how I tweaked them so that I could finally enjoy this form of exercise.

No Training, Limited Equipment

Man struggling to open pickle jar

I’m sharing this stock photo because it made me grin.

The high school I attended was small and rural. It had a tiny weight room for student athletes and the occasional gym students to use.

Our mandatory gym classes for ninth and tenth graders were my first introduction to this form of exercise.

The problem was, our gym teacher gave us no training on how to use the equipment in that room. It was also cramped, hot, and crowded there. We generally spent twice as much time waiting in line for the next machine as we did actually exercising.

The first college I attended had nothing but two stationary bikes in their fitness room. The second college I attended had a large room dedicated to weightlifting, but once again our instructor didn’t teach us how to use the equipment safely or pick an appropriate workout for a complete beginner.

I was mildly interested in weight training by this point, but I was scared of accidentally hurting myself. This was the U.S. we’re talking about, and my family considered ourselves lucky to have reached a solid lower middle class existence after my mom graduated from college and found a decent job when I was in my early teens. That is to say, there was little to no extra money lying around for unexpected medical bills if I accidentally hurt myself.

Sensory Overload

Closeup of someone opening their eye wide and feeling overwhelmedMy limited experiences with gyms as an adult were of loud, hot, bright, crowded places.

The combination of those four things can be quite overstimulating to me, especially when I’m trying to concentrate or learn something new.

Kudos to everyone who is energized by all of that stimulation, but I’m not wired that way.

I’ve since visited one high-end gym that was a much more understated place to work out. There was no background music I could remember and the other people there were all working out quietly with plenty of extra machines, weights, and air conditioning to go around.

While it’s currently out of my budget, I am willing to revisit that topic if I ever have so much money that paying those high fees every month feels worth it.

 

Baby Steps

Man and dog standing on a step as the dog contemplates walking down it.So here I was as an adult who wanted to build muscle but had no idea where to start or how to do it safely.

My first baby step into weightlifting was a cardio fitness routine called Dorm Room Workout that included a a few minutes of weight training in the middle and at the end of their routine. If I could still find it anywhere online, I’d link to it here!

A family member had previously given me a set of five-pound hand weights I’d tried using once or twice, but I’d loaned them out to another relative by this point.

What I did have on hand were some soup cans, so that’s what I used for those portions of the Dorm Room Workout. They were light enough that I could copy the instructors moves precisely and didn’t have to worry about hurting myself.

I started to gain a little more confidence in my physical abilities.

Slow and Steady

A rack filled with small dumbbells

At this point, I started watching other videos of instructors doing weightlifting routines.

My other relative had returned the five-pound weights at this point, so I had something a bit more challenging to work with.

Once I’d seen the videos a few times and knew what to expect with them, I tried actually exercising to them. Yes, the trusty soup cans were trotted out first, but I eventually moved onto actual weights once I felt stronger and more confident in my abilities.

The nice thing about many weightlifting videos these days is that they include modifications. I couldn’t do a full pushup when I began, so I did them against the wall or, when I was stronger, on the floor while leaning on my knees. There were some weightlifting moves I wasn’t strong enough to do yet either.

Was my form perfect? No, but because the stakes were so low I adjusted it a bit each time and did my best not to move up to heavier weights or harder types of pushups until I was sure I was ready.

I no doubt could have proceeded much faster than I did, but I’m a cautious soul who would rather move slowly than suffer a painful injury that requires surgery or months of physical therapy to fix. To this day, I always try the modifications in new workout videos of any sort, but especially the weightlifting ones, before jumping straight into the more challenging versions of them.

8 Comments

Filed under Fitness

Tagged as ,

January 27, 2021 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: A TV Show That Influenced My Life

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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.

I wasn’t sure which book or film to pick for this week’s prompt, so I’ll be answering it with one of the first TV shows I ever remember watching that has stuck with me well into adulthood: Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

The Mister Rogers Neighborhood workmark.

Sesame Street appealed to me as a small child, too, but I preferred the calmness of Mr. Rogers. What a soothing, gentle man he was.

He had a marvellous way of making topics even grownups struggle with sometimes easier to understand and taking the fear out of experiences that sometimes frighten small children like moving to a new house or visiting a doctor.

His show modelled so many important things for his viewers: kindness, respect, inclusion, tolerance, curiosity, the pursuit of knowledge, and the importance of letting your imagination roam free sometimes.

I think all of us who watched his show when we were little were very lucky, indeed. I’m glad reruns of it are still reaching today’s youngsters.

26 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as ,

January 21, 2021 · 1:00 am

Vintage Science Fiction Month: My First Taste of Vintage SciFi

Vintage SciFi Month was created by Little Red Reviewer and is moderated by Red Star Reviews. Any science fiction film, short story, play, or book released before 1979 is eligible for this celebration of classic science fiction. 

Let’s take a walk down memory lane today.

My family didn’t have cable* for most of my childhood, and there were a few years there when we didn’t own a TV either.

Photo of Burgess Meredith from The Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough at Last".Many of the shows we watched were old enough to have sold rerun rights to public TV or to channels that could be tuned into if you had a good antenna. This means that my first taste of vintage science fiction might have been a little out of the ordinary for the average kid my age.

I had no idea what The Twilight Zone was when I began watching Time Enough at Last.

All I knew was that I totally understood where Henry Bemis was coming from as he was distracted from reading over and over again as he went through his day.

There’s nothing like being in the middle of a good book only to have to stop and put it down when someone asks you a question, it’s time to eat, or you have some other urgent business to take care of.

Sometimes I’d grab my book, load up on snacks, and go hide underneath a piano or behind the couch so I could finish at least one more chapter without interruption. Bemis tried similar tactics, including taking his lunch hour in the vault at the bank where he worked so he could finally read in peace.

The trouble was, he picked that particular reading spot on the same day something terrible was about to happen to his city that would leave him the sole survivor.

Yes, you’ll have to watch it for yourselves to see what that tragedy was and why he survived.

What I remembered being most fascinated by was his reaction to leaving the vault and discovering his entire world had changed forever. I would have been frightened and yet he seemed oddly relieved. He finally had all of the time he could ever want to read!

If you haven’t seen this episode yet, do give it a shot. The ending was as clever as it was thought provoking. While I do see some plot holes in it that I didn’t notice as a kid, I still enjoyed the process of seeing how Henry reacted to a day in which literally nothing went the way he thought it would.

*We didn’t have Internet access either, but I grew up at a time when that was still common for non-wealthy people who didn’t work in the tech industry.

If you remember what your first taste of vintage science fiction was, tell me about it in the comment section below!

16 Comments

Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as , , ,

January 20, 2021 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Something I Collected as a Child

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

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.

I have one predictable and one unexpected answer for this week’s prompt.

The predictable answer: books. I had several relatives who would send new books to me as Christmas and birthday presents. Between those gifts and the libraries I visited, I was always lucky enough to have something good to read.

cupped hands holding soil and earthworms

This isn’t me, but you get the idea.

The unexpected answer: earthworms.

Yes, I’ll explain this one.

After my two pet hamsters lived out full, happy lives and went to hamster heaven, my mother repurposed their old glass cage into a container to grow a few plants. She placed it in my bedroom.

I was about nine or ten at this point and wondered how my plants would fare if they didn’t have any earthworms to aerate and enrich their soil.

This thought bubbled to the front of my mind again the next time I went outside after a storm and saw earthworms lying on the sidewalk. Worried they might drown, I picked a few up, brought them home, and put them into the soil where they’d be safe from predators, careless humans, or future thunderstorms.

This was something I continued to do every so often without thinking to tell my parents about my private collection of rescued earthworms.

When I was eleven, my family moved a few thousand miles away to a new home. One of the last things we did before we moved was dump out the soil and plants from that container into the backyard.

My perplexed (and maybe slightly horrified) mother saw dozens of earthworms wiggling their way free as we emptied out the soil. She asked why there were so many of them, so I told her. Mom was too stunned to reply at first.

I didn’t get in trouble, but she did gently tell me not to rescue any more earthworms in the future. Apparently, they can fare quite well for themselves if you leave them to their own devices.

I’d like to think I amused my parents! If nothing else, they had ample proof they’d raised a compassionate child.

34 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as ,