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Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair
I have a lot of hair. Not just length, but thickness – the number of hair follicles on my head must be on the very high end of normal. Now I know that this is a good thing, especially as I age, but sometimes it comes with challenges. Once upon a time, my hair was pretty straight. Through much of my youth, I wore a typical young girl long hairstyle and it had just a gentle wave in the back. There were a couple of disasterous short hair cuts, but even through young adulthood and motherhood, I have preferred it… Read more…
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Rating retirement year one: not quite as planned
I still can’t believe I’ve been retired a whole year. The last day of July, last year, was my last day in the office. And while I really enjoyed my job and usually felt I was making a difference, I haven’t missed it for a single second. I knew it was time to make a change and if I hadn’t been in a position to retire, it would have meant looking for something new. On a trip to the UK that included Canterbury Cathedral. So this blog post should be about all the things I’ve accomplished in these past twelve… Read more…
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How much change can one person take?!
They say when you retire that you shouldn’t make big life decisions. You know, ride it out a while and see where things settle. Yeah, that wasn’t what I did. In January 2025, I announced at work that I would retire at the end of July. It was not a secret that I was planning to go soon and my boss asked for lots of time so there’d be a good period of overlap with my successor (that’s another story!). So that started the countdown clock. In May, I got engaged to the handsome ginger-haired man I’d been seeing. His… Read more…
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Standing up for Silver Sisters
Like most of the nation, I couldn’t help but be shocked and saddened when the now former CTV News Anchor Lisa LaFlamme showed up on Twitter this week to talk about how she’d been unceremoniously sacked from her job and then asked to keep quiet about it for several months. As the days wore on, and opinions were spouted and columns were penned, it started to become clear that sexism and ageism were likely at play here, and when it was admitted that her natural hair colour might have been part o the decision making process, women (and men) around the country… Read more…
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Masks and (peri)menopause don’t mix
We’re getting closer to putting 2020 behind us. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as my mother might say. Life everyone else, I’m sick and tired of COVID-19. It has ruined plans, taken people from us, delayed travel, interrupted educations and disrupted the economy. Depending on where we live, it may have locked us in our houses, and wherever we live, it’s made us hoard toilet paper, hand sanitizer and wipes. We started baking bread, leaving flour and yeast I even heard that popcorn was in short supply as we hunkered down to see if we could watch all of Netflix. Really early on, before we… Read more…
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Silver linings
Forty-something days into self-isolation and the hair jokes are running rampant. Beards, mustaches, hair needing a cut, bad haircuts that have been undertaken and roots – the dreaded roots that have bottled blondes worried about becoming brunettes and brunettes worried about lighter colours growing in. My own locks are long enough that a month or two without a trim isn’t noticeable – and I was fortunate enough to have gone to my trusty hairdresser just before the world changed. So the most noticeable change for me is the silver halo I’m now beginning to sport. In my case though, the… Read more…
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Changing with the times
Yesterday, as I was driving home, I saw my first flock of starlings this fall. They were dancing across the sky, magically swooping and twirling as one single unit. I’ve always been astounded at how birds do that. I know that geese, flying in formation, take turns as leader, but a flock of birds doesn’t seem to have the same, as they morph into different shapes, and double back again and again, never leaving a single member behind. When I saw this, I was coming home from a choral rehearsal, and the similarities between the birds acting as one, and… Read more…
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Are you happy
I’m reading a book called The Happiness Curve. It posits that our 30s and 40s are the most unhappy decades of our lives – where stress lives and where things bottom out, so to speak – and that in our 50s, we regain a great deal of balance and happiness. I think there’s some truth to that, at least in my somewhat privileged Canadian experience. I have a circle of friends who are either approaching or are just past that magic half-century mark and we’re all seeing a bright shiny future coming closer and closer. We’ve been heard humming Pharrell Williams’ iconic song. Many of… Read more…
