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Tl; dr: Greetings Island is the best e-greeting-card site.  * * * * I love greeting cards -- birthdays, anniversaries, thank yous, "glad you're my friend". I used to love spending time choosing unusual and relevant cards for family and friends. No Hallmark drivel, and no holidays that are meaningless to me -- but lots and lots of birthdays and thinking-of-yous.  I also used to send winter-season cards to a lot  of people. My partner and I would carefully choose what card would represent us that year, and every year the list got longer and longer... At some point our list was out of control, and card-sending became a huge chore. Time to cut back! Or maybe to end the practice? When we moved to Canada, and I discovered that  Papyrus  products, my card of choice, were outrageously expensive here. On a month when I had a lot of birthdays on my calendar, the price of cards alone, without postage, could easily top $30! Of course the practice of sending cards is enviro...

"I find it really difficult to ask for help." I've heard many people say this. I don't know if I ever said this myself, but as a teen and then young adult, I definitely tried never to ask for help, and seldom would allow myself to accept any. When I needed help of any kind -- physical, financial, emotional -- I would feel uncomfortable and deeply indebted, for relatively small actions. In New York City, where, like millions of New Yorkers, I didn't own a car, if someone gave me a ride home, I would thank them profusely. Years later, living in Mississauga, I offered people rides home all the time, and realized it was not that big a deal. The same goes for being asked to stay for dinner, or being offered a cup of tea or a glass of wine in someone's home. A simple act of friendship or kindness, especially from someone I didn't know very well, seemed like Such A Big Deal. This is certainly one area where our world makes it more difficult for men. Asking for he...

As a child, I was taught to use a knife and fork like this: fork in left hand, securing what you want to cut, knife in right hand, cutting. Put knife down, transfer fork from left hand to right hand, put food in mouth. Repeat. My mother drilled this into me and my siblings. My family was not overly big on table manners, but taking that extra moment to put the knife down, and transfer the fork before putting food in your mouth, was considered a critical lesson. I recently overheard two people -- Canadians -- talking about this. One of them said, in mock horror, "Do you transfer ?" And the other replied in an are-you-crazy voice, "No, I do not transfer!" I thought, did my mother teach me wrong? Have I been using some crude, impolite technique to eat my food -- all my life? I heard this conversation a while ago, and finally remembered to look it up online. To my astonishment, the fork-transferring method of eating is considered American, and the non-transfer method is ...

When I was growing up, my grandparents and other older relatives used an expression, "Use it in good health," or a variant, "Wear it in good health".  This was said when you bought something that you were very excited about, or received a wonderful gift, or made a major purchase. If you brought home a new coat that you loved, and tried it on to show her, along with "It's beautiful," or "It looks great on you," my mother would say, "Wear it in good health."  Another variant is, "You should wear it in good health." The you should  part is a wish or a prayer, similar to the more formal (and religious-sounding)  may you . It expresses a desire. In "wear it in good health," the you should  or may you  is understood.  Tangent: there is also a sarcastic version of you should . "Maybe the Democrats will grow spines and vote against this war." "You should live so long." This is roughly equivalent to he...

This is the other shopping story. The one in which I don't come out looking like a rational adult. I don't care much about clothes, shoes, bags. I don't buy expensive cosmetics or skin-care products. As long as I have what I need, I'm good. It's easy to watch my spending about any of those. But. There's always a but, right? I love home things. Towels, linens, dinnerware. Rugs. Shelves. Lamps. Organizers. (I could go on.) And I love home-decorating. When buying clothes, I hold my nose and get it over with. But don't let me in Bed Bath and Beyond or Ikea without adult supervision. Despite this, I still try very hard to not buy gratuitously. I won't say I never  buy home things that we don't technically need. But once I've got our "needs" covered, I try to leave it there. (Scare quotes around needs, acknowledging that these are not true needs, but needs of privilege.) Does it seem like I'm avoiding something? Not getting to the point? ...

I recently read these somewhat old, but still relevant, letters to the New York Times Book Review. Cost of the Crash To the Editor: In his review of “Crashed,” by Adam Tooze (Aug. 12) , Fareed Zakaria asserts that “the rescue worked better than almost anyone imagined.” He notes there was no “double-dip recession” and growth returned “slowly but surely.” But this misses what was the major criticism of the “rescue.” It merely hit the re-set button — keeping the big banks solvent. Meanwhile, the stimulus did little to put people back to work. It was not the double-dip recession that critics feared but a long sluggish recovery that failed to affect the majority of the people. For example, it took six years (2009-15) for the unemployment rate to return to the pre-recession number. The share of income received by the top 1 percent had been 23 percent before the recession. After falling to 18 percent in 2010 it jumped back to 22 percent by 2015. Meanwhile, as late as 2015, the bottom 99 perc...

We used to eat President's Choice Blue Menu granola. The vanilla-almond flavour was crunchy, delicious, and reasonably healthy. My favourite way to eat it was with plain Greek yogurt and fruit, but it was very good with milk or rice milk as well. Then... it changed. It was no longer crunchy. It was no longer tasty. With a little liquid added, it tasted like soggy cardboard, or what I imagine soggy cardboard would taste like if it were a breakfast cereal. Thanks a lot, Loblaws. Allan, who does our food shopping, went on the hunt for a cereal that would satisfy all the requirements: whole grain, crunchy, tasty, not overly sweet, and reasonably healthy. Plus I prefer clusters to flakes. It would also be good if the cereal didn't cost $10.00 a box. This is how I discovered Jordan's Morning Crisp granola, and it has made me very happy. Morning Crisp is crunchy. Morning Crisp is delicious. Morning Crisp comes in a variety of yummy flavours: Wild About Berries, Simply Strawberry, ...

I recently realized that I enjoy a lot of TV shows that are themed around a workplace. There are the comedies, like The Office and Brooklyn 9-9, and my favourite sitcoms of past generations, such as Barney Miller and Mary Tyler Moore, and a whole bunch of sitcoms I don't watch, such as Cheers. But there are also dramas like Bones, and Suits, and older shows like ER and several others from that era. You can see why the workplace is ripe for use as a setting. It allows writers to bring a very diverse group of characters, with widely disparate backgrounds, strengths, and expectations, into a situation where they must work together, for better or worse. The diversity and the need to work together is believable, if often not truly realistic. But inevitably, as the show continues, the workplace becomes a surrogate family. In both Bones and Suits, many characters have no other family, or have only a small scrap of family left, or are estranged from whatever family they have. Each backstor...

The ancient technology I grew up with, including the colour. We still have a bit of antiquated technology called a home phone. We use a VoIP phone -- have done so since 2002 -- which is why I say "home phone" rather than "landline". Our home phone is not a landline. I've blogged about VoIP in the past: it's reliable, very inexpensive, and easier to use than Skype.* I also like the flat-rate monthly fee that includes all the bells and whistles. The only catch is that if your internet connection or power goes down, you have no phone, so it's best to have a cell phone as a backup. Then we graduated to this. The other relevant fact here is that Allan doesn't use a cell phone. He's had a cell phone at various times, and he hated them, and doesn't want to be bothered. (I actually have several friends who don't use mobile devices.) And now this. But they suck. This means that if I'm not home and there is a power failure or internet failure,...

We miss Tala a lot. Of course. Need it even be said. Somehow I have gone from abject grief to poignant acceptance quicker than I expected. I have no idea why this is. With each dog we have said goodbye to, eventually I get to a place where, thinking of them, I feel sad but at peace -- fortunate to have had their love, assured that we did everything we could for them, and a kind of happy-sadness at their memories. My heart still aches for Tala, but somehow I'm at peace with it. Everyone is asking about Diego. He is doing really well. He seemed "off" for a couple of days -- he seemed to be waiting for Tala to come home. For all we know, he still is. But he has quickly adapted to a new routine, and seems almost like his usual happy self. I miss the howling, and the rough-housing. I wonder if Diego misses it, too. I'm grateful that I was home for almost a full week before we suddenly had to say goodbye to Tala. If I had been out of the house at work and union meetings, ...

What did people do before Fitbit? Without their adorable little bracelets, how did they get enough exercise? Never mind that, how did they manage to live?? All those lonely, barren years, decade upon decade, people running, swimming, cycling, lifting, walking -- without a Fitbit. Can you imagine? It breaks my heart just thinking about it. Pre-Fitbit, I often didn't know if people were exercising at all! Imagine! I might be speaking to someone who was getting enough exercise, and I wouldn't even know it! Unless the subject came up, I wouldn't know how many steps they had walked that day! What a scary thought.

Tala has cancer. As it happened with Cody , we found a lump. First I was sure it was a cyst, then I was hoping it was a cyst, now I'm just hoping it's not an iceberg.  There's a big ugly tumoury thing sticking out, but this type of sarcoma is known to have internal tentacles. We're having x-rays done today to see if the cancer has spread to any organs, then - we hope - surgery as soon as possible. Cody's cancer turned out to be highly operable and likely not metastasized, and we were thrilled to celebrate  one more Cody Day . But it did turn out to be her final year. Tala Day is in late January. Will she be with us in January 2017?  The answer to that, of course, is we don't know.  And the answer to that is we never know. We don't know about Tala and we never know about any of us. I feel that we never know  every day. I'm not trying to be maudlin or melodramatic; it's just a fact. I feel my own mortality, and that of everyone I love, every single da...

We need to get rugs or carpet runners for Tala; she's slipping on the wood floors when she and Diego play. But with one heavy shedder and one heavy drooler, we're not too keen on buying nice rugs. While looking for something else at Ikea, we found a rug they were promoting: $17! They're not bad looking, either. I put the rug down, Tala immediately ran down the hall, retrieved her squishy bone toy from my office, ran back, and settled in for a chew. She saw that rug and she knew exactly what she wanted. For $17 each, we can cover a good portion of the floor with these babies, and make Tala very happy.

In September, I blogged about watching "Bewitched" on Netflix as my "comedy before sleep" show. I'm still watching it, sometimes taking as many as three nights to get through one episode, so potent is this sleep aid. I want to share two random observations based on Bewitched. People on TV have whiter teeth now. I always notice teeth and smiles, and it was immediately apparent that the teeth of every actor on Bewitched is dull and off-white, compared to the gleaming white teeth seen on TV shows today. This is obviously down to tooth-whitening technology. But it must mean that everyone on TV now is having their teeth whitened, that tooth-whitening has become one more appearance enhancer that is expected of actors and aspiring actors - one more way that TV does not reflect reality. The difference is quite striking. No one with the kind of teeth I see on Bewitched would be allowed on TV today, except as guests on a Jerry Springer-esque show. The other observation i...

Central Library at National Autonomous University of Mexico, Mexico City While I wait impatiently to post some exciting news, please enjoy these photos of amazing libraries all over the world . I've seen six on this list: New York Public Library, Butler Library at Columbia University, Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library at University of Toronto, Trinity College in Dublin, Central Library at University of Mexico (from the outside only), and Los Angeles Central Library. Library photos from BuzzFeed.

I'm reading  Dark Age Ahead , Jane Jacobs' 2004 strong caution to North American society. I'll blog about the book in general at a later date, but wanted to share some thoughts that keep coming up as I'm reading. This is the first time I'm reading Jacobs since living in a suburb, the kind of area Jacobs reviled, rather than living in a dense urban environment, the kind she revered. And now, when I read Jacobs' shorthand descriptions of suburbs, I wonder if she truly understood them. Two of the charges levelled against suburbs - and if you've read Jacobs or anyone influenced by her, you've encountered these repeatedly - are (1) no one knows their neighbours, and (2) you have to drive everywhere. The former refers to the absence of shared community spaces. Jacobs often wrote that we must encounter each other face-to-face in order to build tolerance and a sense of community. The latter criticism is often expressed as, "You have to drive [x] distance ju...

Every year I seem to break the holiest commandment of the holiday season: I'm not busy. I always hear how "everyone is so busy this time of year" and "this is such a crazy time of year, you can't get anything done," but that never reflects my experience. We don't travel to see family, we have no extra social events, and we don't do Christmas shopping. Many years ago, we used to send a huge pile of winter-holiday cards, but we've gone digital with that, and we don't do it every year. So Christmas is an extra day off, and here in the Commonwealth, we have Boxing Day, too. Two days off with nothing to do and no obligations. A strange scheduling glitch at the library gave me four days off in a row, which I am thoroughly enjoying. I'm reading, doing things around the house, and we're taking that final move-in step that never got done: hanging pictures. And one more thing! Here's something else I'm doing with my un-Christmas winter...

We've moved! We're renting a much larger, newer, and more comfortable house in central Mississauga. We've lost the huge backyard of our old rental home, but the backyard here is still a decent size, the largest of any house we saw that we'd want to live in. (The choices were huge backyards with old, un-maintained, falling-apart houses, beautiful new townhouses with either no backyard or a tiny square of cement, or this place!) We have more space - way more space - in this house on two floors than we had in the old place on three floors. And after two major floods, we're pretty happy not to have a basement! The basement of the current house is a separate apartment, and those tenants do not share the yard. One of the big differences in this house is that our landlord and his family used to live here, so everything is new and well-maintained. It is by far the nicest place either of us have ever lived in. It will be a while until we're all set up, but I've deci...

After a week of looking at houses for rent, we found something we love and put down a deposit. My dread of moving has been mostly replaced with a mixture of resignation and excitement, as this will be a definite upgrade in our standard of living. Life is full of the unexpected. We're very fortunate in many ways - it could be way worse - and I don't want to lose that perspective. This experience continues to be educational! In addition to the rental scams I saw on Craigslist , the basement disaster and our impending move have provided a refresher course (as if I needed one!) in knowing your rights and asserting them. Know what you're entitled to Last week, I emailed our insurance agent with a question, and was told that our claim would be disallowed - none of our losses covered - because we are not covered for flood. I was horrified. Sick to my stomach. What about our sewer backup rider? Our damage was from sewer backup, and we bought an extra rider expressly for that. The ...

My friend Impudent Strumpet writes a series of posts that dispute the oft-repeated notion "money can't buy happiness". ( Here's an example. ) I find this idea very thought-provoking. I've definitely subscribed to the idea that money doesn't equal happiness - that making the acquisition of riches a primary life goal does not lead to a happy life. Imp Strump's posts led me to think more clearly about this axiom and see what kinds of truths it might or might not hold. If money doesn't buy happiness, try living without any For people who live in poverty, money undoubtedly could buy a great deal of happiness. The stresses of poverty are endless, and few of us would deny that being able to afford adequate food, housing, fuel, health care, and other basic necessities would make many people who lack those things very happy indeed. That is why universal health insurance and a more just, rational economic system would solve more problems for more people than t...