Back to village life

Just a few photos to remind myself in months to come what was so lovely about living in Dunmore:

There are loads of summer visitors in the village now and driving is quite a feat. Yep, parking on both sides of the road and up the hill!! Luckily our parking area in front of our house is tucked away so people don't park there casually. But when everyone is occupying a house, parking does get tight.

There was also a blessing of animals at St. Andrews COI in the village on Sunday afternoon. Mitzi and I went down and the female vicar blessed her that she would have a safe journey back to the U.S.A. Mitzi was less impressed by the blessing than by the treats that were available and by the other dogs. She really has got quite friendly.

I haven't been swimming. I don't actually like to swim that much anymore. I used to do Aqua Zumba and Aquacize but I have problems with tendonitis in my arms and shoulders so swimming isn't fun. And wading around the shallows in a bathing suit isn't that appealing to me either. But my cousin and a good friend are visiting in August so I may get in yet. One regret I have is that we haven't gone sailing. Looking at all those beautiful boats out on the water I would really like to go. Maybe, maybe....

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December in South Arica 1977, Part One

December in South Africa 1977, Part One I had never understood candlelight in quite this way before. Oh there had been candles on the table Christmases past back home in Canada. For atmosphere, for festivity. While the electric crystal chandelier above cast the “real” light on a table laden with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce.… But this, this was different. Here in the corrugated iron shack that my friends had referred to as “the cottage”—not any cottage that I had ever seen in my growing up in Quebec—with no other light either inside the cottage nor outside in the black night of the Transkei, I understood how candlelight could draw a world down into the narrowness of those around the light, as if nothing else in the world existed. I looked at the six faces around the table, illuminated in the candlelight, my own pulsing with sunburn. "Oh you’ll be grand," they’d told me down at the beach that day. "We’ll tell you when to get out of the sun." And toni...

January 2024 and blogging

I haven't posted on my blog for a long time. Partly that was due to not knowing what to write about and partly it was wondering if I wanted to put myself "out there" anymore. And in what way. I subscribe to a few blogs on Substack, which is a subscription-based blog. You can pay to have your own blog, you can pay for someone else's blog, and that means you get to write and post and get comments back from a whole lot of people. You can comment on other people's blogs--if you pay--or else you can just read the blog and not pay. Of course you might miss some of the "pay only" content--much like modern news media has teaser stuff but to read the whole article, you have to pay for a subscription. The Substack blogs cover all kinds of topics and there are a few "professional" writers--meaning they're journalists and writers who have published and been paid larger bucks than the $5 a month they get per subscription on Substack--but I think most ...

There's got to be a morning after

And today is the fourth "morning after", with each "night before" a little easier, a little more "make the best of it but take care of yourself." Before I move back to writing this memoir style blog--going to continue with the South Africa trip of 1977--I feel I would be shrinking if I didn't say something about how I feel about this week's US election. As of this writing, Saturday, Arizona still hasn’t finished its count—the GOP did a great job of preventing the mail-in vote for being counted early and messing up the ability to use the machines—so I still don’t know if we are going to be saddled with the odious Kari Lake or whether the House is going to be Republican too. Still, it’s becoming more “academic” than visceral for me, if you know what I mean. Necesitamos avanzar. Sera dificil, sabiendo que muchos, especialmente aqui donde vivo, creen en los planes de Trump y Vance. (I have been practicing Spanish in preparation for a 10-day December cr...

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