Month: September 2025

What’s for lunch?

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I started making bag lunches for my brother and I when I was in junior high. For three of my four university years, I lived off campus and carried a bag lunch almost every day. Then, throughout our teaching career, I made bag lunches for my husband, our children, and I. That’s over 40 years and thousands of sandwiches!

When we retired, I was excited that I’d never have to make bag lunches again, but then came the dilemma that I still live with 18 years later. What should I make for lunch today? In retrospect, making sandwiches every day was easier than having to decide what to feed us for lunch every single day for the rest of our lives!

When my parents were in their later years, they ate the same simple lunch almost every day. It consisted of Laughing Cow cheese and fresh buns from the bakery down the street from their apartment. How boring, I thought, but now I understand! While I don’t think hubby would go for that, he’d probably be happy with mac and cheese or eggs and toast every day. Me, not so much!

I decided to ask ChatGPT for ideas. If you’re not familiar with ChatGPT, it’s a free and easy to use artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, a tool that can do everything from recommending a book for you to read to helping you plan a trip. In a matter of seconds, it gave me several possibilities. Some include ingredients that I won’t find in my small town grocery store, but others are very doable. I had to laugh though when I saw that the final item on the list was peanut butter and banana sandwiches, something that often appeared in those bag lunches!

The photo was also generated by ChatGPT.

Now it’s your turn. I’d love to hear some simple, nutritious lunch ideas! What are your favourite things to make for lunch?

Beaver watching at Miquelon Lake Provincial Park

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Earlier this week, we spent three days camping at Miquelon Lake Provincial Park. We hiked a little over 9 km (5.6 miles) one day and about half of that the following day, but by far the most fun we had was an hour spent watching a family of beavers hard at work. We came upon them quite by accident while enjoying an evening stroll alongside the Grebe Pond and stayed until my camera battery died! Of the many photos that I took, this one is my favourite.

The North American beaver, officially Canada’s national animal, is this continent’s largest rodent. The saying “busy as a beaver” is very apt. As we watched, the industrious critters constantly crossed the path in front of us on a well-worn trail from the water’s edge to the hillside above us. There we could hear them using their long orange incisors to busily cut branches from the trees that they felled before dragging them down to the shoreline.

Look at the size of the load that this one was hauling!

We’ve encountered a beaver in the water several times when we’ve been kayaking. If we get too close for comfort, it slaps its tail on the water with a thunderous splash and dives beneath the surface. At first, these ones were clearly surprised to see us watching them from just a few feet away, but they didn’t seem too bothered by our quiet presence. The young ones were the most cautious, first sitting still in the edge of the brush and peeking out before quickly scooting across in front of us.

With its big, webbed hind feet and its rudder-like tail, it’s no wonder that the beaver is such a good swimmer. Not only did they drag the branches down to the water’s edge, but then they swam across the pond with them to add them to their lodges on the other side.

We had thought that this would be our last camping adventure of the year, but we had such a good time that we’re thinking of trying to squeeze in one more. As I mentioned in my last post, I’m never quite ready to let go of summer!

How can it be fall already?

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Do you remember when you were a kid and summer seemed to go on forever? Me too, but now it seems to fly by in a flash. I have a love/hate relationship with fall. I love the crisp autumn air and the changing colours, but fall means winter is just around the corner and I’m never ready for that!

I try to hold onto summer for as long as I can, but the signs are all around me. Days are getting shorter and leaves are beginning to change colour. Teachers and students are back in school and soon our regular fall/winter activities will be in full swing again. Still, I have a hard time accepting the changing season. Reality definitely hit this morning though. When I first looked out it was -1ºC (30.2ºF) and there was frost on the roofs across the street! Frost in the first week of September!

For me, summer seemed to go by faster than ever this year. Perhaps that’s because with all the traveling we did to far flung places like Armenia, Germany, and Alaska, we didn’t spend as much time doing the things we usually do during the summer months. We did manage to fit in a fair amount of golf and we hope to do more of that in the few weeks before the course closes, but we’ve only spent 11 nights in our trailer, less than half our usual 25 or more. We are planning to get out for one more short trip, but after that it will be time for hubby to winterize the trailer. We’ve only had the kayak on the water four times, so I sure hope we can do that again too.

As a retired teacher, the beginning of September always feels like the start of a new year to me. As such, it’s a good time to set some goals or make some “new years” resolutions. Sharing them with you will make me more accountable and help me actually accomplish them, so thank you for that!

When I think about this summer’s golf and kayaking season, one thing that stood out to me was the fact that over the past few years, I’ve lost strength in my shoulders and upper arms. No surprise, as I used to lift weights all winter. Doing that is more than I can handle now, but I need to do something, so I’ve decided to add some work with dumbbells to the morning exercises that are already an established part of my year round routine. This website has some good information and exercises for seniors, so I’m going to do a set of the 5 upper body weight training exercises every morning Monday to Friday.

It’s been ages since I last published a Fashion Friday post, so that’s also something that I plan to resume doing on a semi regular basis. I haven’t shopped for clothes in quite awhile, but I have been paying attention to what’s on trend for fall and here are a few things that I’ve been noticing…

  • chocolate brown, lots of chocolate brown
  • off-white and neutral tones
  • blazers with jeans
  • bulky, oversized sweaters
  • capes
  • dark wash jeans in almost any style, but not torn or distressed
  • suede boots, shoes and handbags
  • loafers and mary janes
  • statement belts
  • statement necklaces
  • scarves, both silk and knit

While lots of these are very wearable and make me want to rush out and start shopping, my first step will be my semi annual closet changeover (but not until after that last camping trip!) At that point, I’ll take a close look at what I already have, then figure out what, if anything, I actually need. Then I might look for a few pieces that fit with my existing wardrobe and that I’m likely to wear for more than one season, pieces that fit my style adjectives… classy, comfortable, casual, confident, and authentic.

What about you? Are you happy or sad that summer is over? Do you have any goals or plans for the new season? Will you be wearing any of this season’s trends?

Book of the month – August 2025

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The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir

Roma Ligocka

The book opens with an elderly Jewish woman sitting in the elegant dining room of a posh hotel on the French Riviera. Suddenly and quite seamlessly it transitions to the dark Ghetto of Kraków, Poland during World War II and I was hooked!

Roma Ligocka was born to Jewish parents in Poland in November 1938, less than a year before the beginning of World War II. Told through the eyes of a child, the story of her early years living in the Jewish Ghetto of Kraków is a harrowing account of uniformed men in shiny black boots with snarling dogs, people being shot indiscriminately, her mother’s tears, and from her hiding place under a table, seeing her own grandmother seized by SS officers. After her father is arrested and taken to Auschwitz, Roma and her mother, with their hair dyed blonde and carrying falsified documents, escape the Ghetto and are taken in by a non-Jewish family who pass them off as visiting cousins. Sometime later, when her father escapes the concentration camp and is reunited with his family, she fails to recognize the haggard spectre that he has become.

Roma is just short of her seventh birthday when the war comes to an end, but her life continues to be marked by severe hardship. Within two years her father dies and the communists take control of Poland.

As her adult life unfolds, we see the results of the trauma that she endured as a child. Although she studied art and costume design at the prestigious Academy of the Arts and became a successful costume and set designer, she continued to confront her frightful memories and her adult life is characterized by anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse and the inability to maintain lasting relationships.

Finally, at the age of 55, on March 2, 1994, Roma reluctantly attended the première of Steven Spielberg’s epic movie “Schindler’s List” in Kraków. The Academy Award-winning movie was shot entirely in black and white except for the image of a little girl in a red coat. Seeing something of herself in that little girl, Roma, who had had a bright red coat of her own as a wee child, finally felt inspired and strong enough to tell the story of her own experiences.

Interestingly, although I suspected it early on, until late in the book, Ligocka doesn’t reveal the fact that her cousin, Roman, with whom she had a close relationship, was none other than the famous director, producer, writer and actor, Roman Polanski.