Wish List: Flash Disc Portable Light Modifier

Part of being lazy with my blog over the last year or two has included being lazy with my photography. I’ve been relying an awful lot on my iPhone to take photos. It’s convenient and always handy, and I don’t have to download or do much, if any, post production. I can just upload my…

For the love of potatoes

Earlier this year I learned that I won — yes won — a week-long trip to Ireland for four people through a draw offered by Tourism Ireland at the Canada Blooms garden show. Crazy, right? People actually win these things! My Mom had already been working on trying to organize a family trip for next…

Under the sea

Time for a little tropical colour. We had a lovely visit with my brother and his family this past weekend. It was our first time having house guests here at the new place and the first time they got to see our new house. While it was not a PA day for our local school…

Rural life

So our move hasn’t gone quite according to plan. We did move one big load of our belongings to the new house on December 7, but the house wasn’t ready for us to live in it yet, so we piled our stuff in the rooms that were finished and turned right around and came back….

Force of nature

This morning I bring you a post from the cottage, where we’re cozied up by the fire enjoying the forces of nature around us. We arrived on Friday night after driving through steady, sticky snowfall, and Saturday turned out to be a sloshy warm day, perfect for building snowmen and forts out of the relatively…

Happy autumn!

I’ve been a bit absent from my blog again lately. I really don’t have any single excuse but rather a critical accumulation of more minor demands on my time that leave me completely exhausted and drained at the end of each day. I’ve been working at recovering from some tendonitis in my ankle so that…

A furry new paddling companion

I padded this past weekend with a couple extra days since it was my birthday and all, and we took off to the woods on a fairly last minute camping trip. Our friend Mike, who lives in San Diego, was going to be in town and as one of our elite camping/paddling pals, suggested we…

Bucket List Trip to Norway, Part 6

My last post on Norway, I swear! But this one is perhaps full of the most spectacular scenery of all. It was also probably one of my most frustrated times on our trip. If you’ve ever seen any marketing literature, videos or books about Norway, this site is featured prominently. It’s a jaw dropping cliff…

Bucket List Trip to Norway, Part 5

After Oslo we finally hooked up with my long-time friend Guro and her husband Preben and beautiful kids, Helene and Kyrre. This was my first time meeting the kids, and it had been nine years since I’d seen Guro and Preben, when they visited me in Canada. We took the train to Tønsberg from just…

Bucket List Trip to Norway, Part 4

The next stop for us in Norway was Oslo. We’d been warned by other travellers that the prices in Oslo were astronomical, which we thought was curious, since we already felt that the rest of Norway was insanely pricey. I mean, how much worse could it get? And really, it was no different than the…