After months in lockdown, my credit card was begging, gasping for air. So, when Nordstrom emailed me to announce they had reopened their Sherway Gardens store in Toronto’s west end after three months in COVID darkness, plans for my coming-out began. They missed me! What to wear? What time of day is best to go? Will their café be open for lunch? Will they be…
Big chemical and personal care companies are killing us slowly with their secrets
Last week I watched a horrifying two-hour documentary on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) television called “Toxic Beauty”. I stumbled on it while channel surfing and was stunned by the information imparted. A large portion of the program was dedicated to the coverup by Johnson & Johnson about the dangers of using their baby powder. A class-action suit initiated by thousands of women who developed ovarian cancer…
There’s nothing like a good murder mystery to help escape the real world
Several things appealed to me about reading The Tenant, a novel by Katrine Engberg. First of all, I’m a recent convert to the murder mystery genre and I love the escapism these books offer. And, one of the main characters has taken up writing in retirement. Also, the story is set in Copenhagen, a city I last visited as a twenty-year-old in 1967 when I…
Celebrating my forty-six seconds of fame in Maclean’s magazine
Maclean’s Magazine, Canada’s leading news magazine recently asked its readers to describe in one hundred words or less how they were coping with COVID-19 isolation. I composed a précis of my earlier blog posting Self-isolation and Quarantine Reveals My True Colours and sent it off. Then, to my great surprise and joy, they emailed to say my piece had been selected for publication and they…
Divide Me By Zero sounds like math and is in fact about a love triangle
The book review supplement in the Sunday edition of The New York Times can always be counted on for interesting reading recommendations that aren’t necessarily on the best-seller list. That’s how I found Divide Me By Zero, a novel by Russian-born Lara Vapnyar, who now lives in the United States. Although the book is categorized as fiction I couldn’t help think that the story was largely…
Are you getting as antsy about self-isolation as I am?
Few people enjoy alone-time as much as I do. I can spend an entire morning alone in my sunny little office working on my blog. I’ll have a quick lunch while I catch up on FaceBook and then retreat to a shady spot in the back yard for an afternoon of reading. After forty years in the corporate world with stressful deadlines timed right down…