My tribute to a generous and kind friend I made through Flickr and got to visit in 2015. I’m glad I shot so many photos!
Category: Writings
Articles, essays, stories, etc.
Birthday Gift to Myself
Birthdays aren’t usually a topic on my blog, but this year, the sun is out, the sky is blue, my life has been upended for over a year, and I’m musing over this What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found (and kept)? My reading. Yeah, I know “found (and kept)” denotes an object. But…
Natural Gas Furnace vs Electric Heat Pump: Which Costs Less?
Natural gas is dirt cheap in Canada. When I first began looking at the potential cost of switching to all electric for my heating, hot water, and stove, I found calculators only on US and UK sites and was shocked at their high natural gas and hydro rates. Everyone in Canada whines about gasoline prices,…
Are Windows Accessible?
Windows allow sunlight to come in and moments of standing, pondering the rain drumming the ground outside. Windows exist everywhere, and we accept the way designers have innovated them. But should we? I’m not talking about the science of keeping the indoors comfortable and the weather outside; I’m talking about how we open and close…
Summertime and the Carbon Dioxide Is High
Carbon dioxide. That gas of climate change — and vegetation exhalations at night. I walked into the room where my Aranet4 is sitting, a room I hadn’t been in for 12 hours and only for a few seconds all the previous day (Sunday) and my jaw dropped. 1132ppm carbon dioxide?? What the actual f—‽ This…
Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit That Lasts — A Review
I believe I first heard about Prolifiko, Bec Evans and Chris Smith’s company, on Twitter. I’ve been through a couple of incarnations of their methods to help writers write. When I first heard a few years ago about their free 7-day Writing Sprints, which ran the first week of the month, I signed up and…
I Launched Mind Explorer, A Substack Newsletter
Substack is where all the cool writers hang these days. But I’d resisted joining until Twitter started imploding, and I decided to find a way to get a Blue Sky invite quicker. I also thought maybe I could use Substack to make this website’s newsletter easier to manage. Nope. But it did give me a…
Improving My Community Through Fiction
How would you improve your community? Back in the 20-teens, the TTC (Toronto Transit Commission — Toronto’s public transit system) was enraging me so much, I wrote a satire, starring a naïve TTC fan who landed a job there, much to her delight! I set up a Twitter account for her and everything. I wrote…
So Many Things…
What’s something most people don’t understand? My post titles’ SEO these days are shit. I’m not following best practices for the Google crawler to find my posts and treat them preferentially in search results. Well, except for my last one — I used “top ten,” which is good for SEO. That’s why you see so…