Diane the Wild Wanderer
It's a small world. Live large.
Hiatus
Today's the last day to bid on items in the TV, eh? charity auction in support of Kids Help Phone, a free, anonymous and confidential phone and on-line professional counselling service for youth. The auction of television memorabilia and experiences ends today at 6 pm...
Shop til you drop? Is dropping … good?
'Tis the season we're asked incessantly "are you done your Christmas shopping yet?" My unintentionally sanctimonious answer is I'm not doing Christmas shopping this year. I'm somewhat opting out of a holiday I've never particularly loved and love less now, but I'm...
You posts your vacations and you takes your chance
When I was in grade seven, seven people died in Chicago from taking Tylenol that had been laced with potassium cyanide somewhere along the distribution chain. My not-well-loved social studies teacher used the incident as the starting point of a discussion about our...
Everything’s better with robots
"I'd never get a tattoo. There's nothing I'd want on my body forever -- I'd change my mind after a week. Plus, I don't like pain." I've said that at least a few times in my life, and it was absolutely true. Until it wasn't. Yes, I got a tattoo today. I didn't exactly...
Beyond a poppy
When I was growing up, I believed Remembrance Day was about the World Wars, about remembering history so as not to repeat it. Vietnam was the recent past, and Korea was in there somewhere. But school focused on the "big ones," and many of us had grandparents who...
Coffee, TV or Me
Two unrelated features in the news have been swirling around in my brain like, say, a cup of hot coffee. That somehow entered my brain. Never mind. 1. The New York Times is running a fascinating series looking back at stories in the news and how they were reported --...
Yoga for the klutzy skeptic
One of the items on my not-a-bucket-list (which I've since realized everyone else on the Internet calls a life list, but that seems a little too on-the-nose) was finding a place to practice yoga that didn't "namaste or Lululemon me to eyerolling death." I seem to have...
Dreaming big and little with Airbnb
My favourite was the treehouse on Whidbey Island. Not just a tiny house in a tree, it had a giant tree growing through the middle of its one octagon-ish room, a bachelor apartment in the sky. My wish list on Airbnb is full of unusual micro dwellings, partly for the...
Iceland: The hills are alive with the sound of … hidden people
"It's not that we believe in ghosts; it's that we know they're there." So said our Icelandic guide Hlíf after we visited Höfði, the site of the Reykjavík summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that marked the beginning of the end of the cold war, and which...