Just write. See what happens.

Dear Ontario Teachers

Posted on December 12th, 2012

Dear colleagues, I know I haven’t written about what you’re going through in a long time, not since the post that unexpectedly deflowered my blog three months ago. I want you to know that it’s not because I’m ignoring what’s going on; I think about it every day. (Well – and I did have that [...]

How Far to Bend the Gender

Posted on December 5th, 2012

As a girl born between two sisters, I was, in childhood, emphatically girly. I loved unicorns, ballet, pink things, dolls, My Little Ponies. The tendencies of our elder brother didn’t hold much sway with us back then – he was outnumbered – and he seemed happy enough to make his Lego projects and wooden models [...]

BANG Book Review: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

Posted on November 10th, 2012

I admit, I’ve been remiss. I haven’t been keeping you all up-to-date with the GGG book club’s choices for… um… approximately a year. Whoops. I know you have all been tearing out your hair and wailing (internally): But Dilovely, the books! Forget the rest of this drivel… the BOOKS! I promise I will rectify the [...]

National Holidays and Life’s Trajectory

Posted on July 1st, 2012

Happy Canada Day, Canadians! And happy strawberry season, to everyone who can get ‘em locally. (The smell of the warm strawberry field yesterday evening, when we went picking, was delectable. You can’t beat strawberries that were picked minutes ago, just a few blocks away.) While I’m at it, happy early Independence Day, Americans! I don’t [...]

Snapshots from Homecoming Weekend, a.k.a. “Glad to be Old”

Posted on September 25th, 2011

It’s Homecoming weekend. No wonder there were so many students all garbed-out at the same time: boys with warpaint on their faces, girls with gaudy t-shirts offsetting their way-too-short shorts. There’s a big house party on a busy street. The music can be heard blocks away. A gaggle of students crowds the front porch, surrounded [...]

BANG Book Review: The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

Posted on March 23rd, 2011

Here’s a book that makes me feel lucky. It puts into perspective the easiness of my life. I live in Canada, in a time when cultural diversity is considered a virtue. I’m white and middle-class and educated. I’m female, but I have a union-protected job in a female-dominated field… and now that I think about [...]

Stalling Techniques

Posted on January 31st, 2011

Folks, I’m sorry I haven’t blogged in a while. I’ve been feeling overpowered by life: among other things, reading The Hunger Games and finding that it consumed my brain to the extent that I was afraid to start the next book for fear of falling off the planet, AND now, report cards. I’m rather behind on [...]

School Snippets #2

Posted on September 23rd, 2010

OOOPS. Just found out that one of my Grade 2 students, whom I thought was a girl, is actually a boy. And I’m wondering why I’m such a dummy, why I was so sure he was a girl. I mean, on the first day, I actually thought to myself, Wow, what a strange name for [...]

One Year Old

Posted on June 8th, 2010

Dear Everett, Today you are one year old! At this time last year, we were still waiting for you to arrive, because you weren’t born until 9:23 p.m…. but you were worth the wait – and you were worth all the hard work I had to do. We fell in love with you the moment [...]

BANG Book Review – A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Posted on March 25th, 2010

Our latest GGG book club pick, A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, was pretty much a unanimous “not recommended”. Overall, the gals were disappointed. Before getting into that, I will say that although I didn’t love the book, I did enjoy it. I did not find it boring or hard to get through, [...]