This past weekend I read Lynn Martel’s new book, Stories of Ice, and really enjoyed the focus on glaciers of western Canada and the adventure, commerce, and creativity they inspired. There was one section on people who study glaciers, and many of my former colleagues were featured. They are studying glacier change, glacier runoff, microbes on glaciers, and more – all things I used to study and read about when I was still an academic.…

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I wrote last week that I would do something interesting to report back on this week, and I’m sad to say I haven’t actually done anything differently since last week. It’s probably just as well, as we’ve seen a persistent increase in COVID cases here in BC (1000 new cases over the weekend), and the Provincial Health Officer, Dr. Bonnie Henry, has warned people that we have to go back to how we behaved in…

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Every week I write a Wednesday blog, and every week (recently) I struggle with what to write about. Not the garden (again) or mental health (again). Not the dogs (again) or writing (again). Not drought (again) or wildfires (again). I realized that one of the reasons I’m having a hard time coming up with blog ideas is because I’m not doing enough things to talk about. It’s what Julia Cameron talks about in The Artist’s…

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Every week I write a Wednesday blog, and every week (recently) I struggle with what to write about. Not the garden (again) or mental health (again). Not the dogs (again) or writing (again). Not drought (again) or wildfires (again). I realized that one of the reasons I’m having a hard time coming up with blog ideas is because I’m not doing enough things to talk about. It’s what Julia Cameron talks about in The Artist’s…

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Lately I have been thinking about my book proposal again, which is a good sign to me that I’m perhaps lifting a little bit out of the depression that’s been holding me down for over a year now. I saw a notification for a course taught by Allison K. Williams entitled: “Nail Your Memoir Structure by Thinking Like a Novelist.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the course itself. But it sparked some ideas in my mind…

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This blog started as a strictly science blog. The longer I’ve been out of academia, however, the farther I feel from science, which means I write about other topics, too: books, writing, mental health, women in science, and gardening, to name a few. I write about what interests me, and a lot of it is related to content I come across on the web. But I don’t just get random online information. I try to…

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I’m part of several online writing groups, and in one of them the moderator checks in daily with a neat picture and the question: how did your writing life go today? This particular moderator, let’s call her Kathy, posted these daily check-ins for quite a while until she had a relapse of a chronic illness and couldn’t do it anymore. An example of one of the check-in photos (by Ken Chandler). I had been responding…

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Yesterday a friend shared this beautiful piece of music. It’s a quintet for cello by Samuel Barber, entitled “Adagio for Strings.” In this version, it’s played by 278 cellists from 29 countries via Zoom. In the last movement, each player shares an image in memory of someone they’ve lost. This is timely given the installation art on the lawn facing the White House, where COVID survivors have set up over 20,000 empty chairs to represent…

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This week we celebrated our 18th anniversary and the birthday of our first flat-coated retriever, Jasper, who died in 2011. We also remembered the early passing of my sister-in-law, Theresa, back in 2006. These kinds of events are a time to think about everything that’s happened since then, and whether things are going as planned for the future. We got married at Hilda Glacier, a small glacier in the Canadian Rockies, just at the northern…

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This past weekend I set up our Trillium 4500 trailer in the back yard for a two-night camping adventure. Since we have 2.5 acres, the “back yard” is relatively big, and there is a nice private spot to set up the trailer without being seen from the house or by the neighbours. I had originally planned to go camping at our local campground, but wasn’t sure I wanted to share a campsite – especially a…

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