A poundkeeper's story
Jun 17, 2013 / 5:00 am
One day I get a call from an elderly lady about a little dog on the loose. We went - there was this tiny little Shihtzu, scared to death. We couldn't get near her. Don went one way, I went another way until we got her cornered. This little girl had teeth flashing in every direction,...
Word-smartaleckiness
May 20, 2013 / 5:00 am
My daughter, Heather, likes to torment me by sprinkling the following two terms throughout email messages: ‘forsure’ and ‘nevermind’ When I reply to the emails, I carefully put a space between...
Minds untucked
May 6, 2013 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed So, I belong to a secret group on Facebook. The group is set to secret because it is filled with extremely inappropriate, offensive, rude, insulting, outlandish, awful, godawful and bloody godawful posts about anything and everything...
I swear
Apr 22, 2013 / 5:00 am
It’s sad but it’s true: I sometimes swear like a trooper, or maybe it’s more like a sailor. In fact, I could make a sailor blush with the colourful words I use, and sometimes do make a sailor blush (Jim being an ex-sailor). And worse, I enjoy the hell out of it....
Online lunacy
Apr 8, 2013 / 5:00 am
I tend to think I’m crazy, but have come to realize that I have serious competition in that department. The Internet is chock-full of absolutely crazy people, along with equally crazy trends, notions, habits, ideas, scams, spams, and all the rest of it. The inhabitants of the...
Mouldering bookmarks
Mar 25, 2013 / 6:00 am
Today’s column is about organization, specifically organization of your browser. Not to show off, but my browser bookmark organization is second to none, the Folders of My Life all sit in a prettily-labelled alphabetic column, as you can see in image 1. It’s almost...
When I grow up
Mar 11, 2013 / 5:00 am
When I was a kid, I sometimes wondered what I’d end up doing when I grew up. The decades passed, and each decade brought the same question back to mind, except somewhere along the way ‘growing up’ became ‘growing old’, because that’s where I’m...
It's boosterism, baby
Feb 25, 2013 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed Keepin' it real. You’ll have to excuse the wet spots all over this column, they are from the tears I’ve shed since learning the painful news today. Please keep calm while I break it to you: BC is no longer the...
Sound of music
Feb 11, 2013 / 5:00 am
Sound of music, sound of talking, sound of cards shuffling, sound of silence; these are a few of the sounds in our house these days. The missing sound? The drone of television. This new scene started about six months ago when we were on holidays for three weeks,...
Afloat
Jan 28, 2013 / 5:00 am
Life has certain moments that you know you’ll remember forever. You’re usually wrong, because unless you were smart enough to take a photo, you mostly do forget. You can swear that you will never forget a good moment, but you sometimes do. You can swear that you will...
Survivalist of the fittest
Jan 14, 2013 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed Who goes there? On Facebook, as users know, there are ‘sponsored ads’ on the right side of the page. These ads are based on what Facebook has decided is of interest to you. Mostly I get travel ads, cycling ads and...
Best friends
Dec 31, 2012 / 5:00 am
Cathy Atchison, who lived across the lane from me, was my best friend through elementary school. She was one grade behind me, so when I started junior high, it created a strange sort of separation. We were still friends, though, and still lived across the lane from each...
Pet dead trout
Dec 17, 2012 / 5:00 am
Most kids enjoy having a little buddy for cuddles and chats. Some kids have stuffed animals, some have an imaginary friend, some have dolls, some have a pet dog or cat. Then there’s Andrew, my six-year-old grandson. He has a pet dead fish, one he adopted from the grocery store...
Daily dose of Ducoing
Dec 3, 2012 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed Kevin gears up. There are a fair number of crazy-minded people lurking in my family, but none so crazy as the one in Seattle, with his decidedly skewed view of things, or as he would say, ‘stuff ‘n’...
Warning! Weather ahead!
Nov 19, 2012 / 6:00 am
Few remember this, but it used to be that weather was only available in basic flavours, and weather announcers were pretty much stuck with those flavours. The weather report went something like this: “Rain today. Don’t forget your umbrella!” or “Sunny, with...
No dog!
Nov 5, 2012 / 5:00 am
After our Border Collie, Angus, died in July, the one thing we knew for certain, for absolutely certain, was that we would never get another pet. We did not want to go through such pet-end-of-life sadness again. Besides, we wanted to travel. And we wanted to be able to go cycling...
My life as a penguin
Oct 22, 2012 / 5:00 am
My life has been crazy lately. I’ve been doing major renovations on my home, but sometimes I run out of money to do the work, so I need to earn more. That’s when I have to go out and serve smoothies at the local cafe, or prepare pizza at the pizza joint, or go fishing up at the...
A dog's secret weapon
Oct 8, 2012 / 5:00 am
I was thinking about dogs the other day, thinking about what it is that I love so much about the creatures. I’ve always had a pretty clear-cut idea about the specific traits I like. I like big rather than small, almond-shaped eyes, spots (I really love spots), narrow snout,...
Life of a carafe
Sep 24, 2012 / 5:00 am
Today a star was born. A little glass carafe just moved out of its box and into service. It has waited a long time for this moment. We’ve been using the French press coffee ‘system’ for decades, long before it became fashionable. In the earlier...
'Good old days'?
Sep 10, 2012 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed Every so often someone will send me one of those chain emails touting why the old days were so much better than now. I guess they see the word ‘old’ and assume that I’ll relate. Wrong. I had a great time in those...
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