As you may know this was a big year for me, celebrating 50 years of marriage and turning 70. I feel very fortunate to have reached both of these milestones and so, if you’ll indulge me, I think a little navel gazing is in order. And rest assured dear reader that, if you recognized the first couple of titles here as the Dionne Warwick song from the 70s, my story does not involve “a guy with a pin to burst your bubble…” but rather is a happy, grateful one. When You Fall In Love (and are married 50 years) Firstly, you are not wrong if you calculated that I was…

My husband calls this the year of four. By way of explanation, I was born in 1954 and we were married in 1974, so with this being 2024, I am soon to be 70 and we have been married for 50 years. Both big milestones for sure and thus Grandma and Grandpa’s trip to Europe to celebrate! And what an experience it was; 20 days of action packed travel with time in Paris and London and a cruise of the British Isles. Having endured my fair share of peoples’ endless vacation photos and blow by blow descriptions of their daily activities while on vacation, I decided to take a more…

If you are over 40 you will recognize the title of this post as the 1970s slogan for McDonald’s restaurant. In the late 70s I was mom to two young children and we were regular visitors to McDonalds where the food, prices and atmosphere were focused on young families like ours. As the children got older we gravitated away from fast food restaurants and for many years have not really visited any of them until recently. This post is me fessing up to the fact that I succumbed to all the fast food marketing hype and fell off the healthy eating wagon hard. A Trip Down Memory Lane I am…

Once our children had families of their own, we established a rotation of sorts so that we could have our whole family together every other Christmas. This worked especially well when grandchildren were young and travelling the almost 1000 kilometres between our households was a big undertaking. We did this for several years and then COVID hit and extreme weather hit and airline cancellations hit and to make a long story short we have not been able to get together with our whole family at Christmas for a while. But not for lack of trying… *x#?&* COVID As everyone knows, on the first Christmas in the throes of dealing with…

Never in a million years did I see myself writing about cars and driving, but recent events have had this topic in the forefront of my mind. You see, we are now the proud owners of a new van, not so exciting in and of itself, but the journey to get there was like nothing I ever expected. The Fun Bus Back when our first grandchild arrived we thought purchasing a van might be a good idea so that we would have room for all the grandchildren we thought were sure to come. So we did just that and over the next several years more grandchildren did arrive. As time…

This is a story about a table, yes, a table- the one you see my grandchildren using for their chess game in the picture above. It is a beautiful solid wood table of the kind you don’t see much any more and that you certainly wouldn’t find at IKEA. It first belonged to our parents and after their passing now belongs to me. Before you start wondering what more one can say about a table, the real story here is about what that table represents and the memories that are attached to it. We Bought A House After many years with his company, dad received a promotion which involved a…

Haven’t we all at one time or another felt like our life was a three ring circus? Well, in our house we recently had a three ring circus of a different kind when raccoons decided to set up house in our attic. Yep, that’s right – literally raccoons in the attic, and figuratively too as we tried to figure out what to do. Spring Has Sprung One morning as I was sitting at my desk enjoying the sunshine, I heard a kind of a scratching on the roof and sounds that I thought might be baby birds. I quickly chalked it up to a bird nest on our roof. Kind…