Blocked
I don’t normally do this. I may hold forth about access and barriers to accessibility, but I don’t normally take on specific individuals or businesses in my neighborhood (except for Buskerfest because they deserve it). However, one of the big grocery stores in my neighborhood has recently done their best to demonstrate that they don’t…
Fall Migration
The monarchs left yesterday. I’ve been trying to pretend it isn’t happening. The cold that came on the Labour Day weekend, temps dropping from hot to cool between Friday and Saturday and staying around can no longer be said to be an aberration, just a fresh interlude between heatwaves. My feet have been cool for…
Ironies
This was the plan: on Saturday, September 11, a small church in Florida (very ironically called the Dove World Outreach Center) would commemorate the tragedy of 9/11 by burning copies of the Qur’an. Despite this church only having 50 members, the issue took over the media, as such a hateful act naturally should, people from…
Rheumatoid Arthritis, Pregnancy & Parenthood
Not having wee ones of my own, I had no idea. I received information about a new book dealing with pregnancy when you have RA and it looked like something we should review for MyRACentral. I interviewed the author – a lovely woman named Suzie from Perth, Australia – and found out that there is…
Epiphanies
It all started last Thursday morning as I was making my way to the grocery store after having kicked in 30 minutes on work. I’m making a mental list of what I’m going to do after I’ve been shopping, actually keeping it fairly reasonable, trying to take it easy on my shoulder. As I get…
Words to Live By
My friend Dawn came by for our end-of-summer lunch with her daughter Lana and Lana’s friend Autumn, both about 8 years old. Overheard when they’re meeting Lucy (who was ecstatic about the kids): Autumn: cat tongues are so funny. Lana: I never wipe off kitty kisses. Autumn: you shouldn’t wipe off any kisses. Lana: maybe…
Annual Shamelessness/Contest
This week has kicked my arse. There was a lot of work, there was forgetting of moving slowly and subsequent consequences, there were various disability related expenses hemorrhaging, much delay of certain administrative things that really shouldn’t be delayed, Buskerfest has started and although I’m sure I could get a good rant going on minimal…
Hard Conversations: When RA Affects Your Work
The shoulder has ripples and I talk about work, at work… “‘Can you work at all?’ I was in the middle of my two weeks off to heal, hadn’t shown any signs of healing yet and was talking to a friend about how I felt, sharing my worries about what it meant for afterwards. For…
Book Review: Endurance
In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 28 set off on the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition on the ship Endurance, intending to cross the continent of Antarctica via the pole. They reached the Weddell Sea and their ship became encased in pack ice and over the duration of the Antarctic winter, slowly crushed. At…
Leadership
What makes a leader? There’s passion and determination and the ability to inspire similar passion in others. A belief in doing what’s right and the willingness to do that, even though it isn’t popular – the recent healthcare debate in the US is one example. I saw another example somewhere within the past week about…
Bridging the Distance
It is both a memory and a defining moment, overlapping and coexisting and still, a decade and a half later, it is as clear in my mind as the day it happened. I was working for a municipal government, part of the team that implemented Ontario’s dearly departed Employment Equity Act. This was a brilliant…
What If
It’s been hard to ignore, but I’ve done my best, mentally erasing the implications of the two marks just below my left knee, the tiny ends of the suture waving back at me with a decidedly insouciant air. They’re right there, couldn’t be more in the my field of vision if they tried and every…