Over the years I had made sporadic notes on my family tree, starting in my teens by taking down some information from my mother and from my godmother, May Ryan. This turned out to be a good but limited start on the family history. My mother told great stories about her childhood in Point St. Charles, but her stories rarely went back before her ( Read more... )

Bit of a slog. Not sure what I think, whether Maugham was edging toward an unreliable narrator story (we're told repeatedly that Philip Carey now thinks he's free - of religion, of class conventions, of love, etc., when we can see he isn't - presumably hence the title), or whether the distance you feel between Carey and real emotion was actually ( Read more... )

As readers of this occasional journal will know, I foster cats. I like cats ( Read more... )

In Quebec we have a thing called an RAC, a Reconnaissance des acquis et des compétences, which is a sort of paper diploma you can get for things like graphic design that you might have learned on the job over years. These are granted by vocational schools. You demonstrate you know your trade, you might brush up your lesser skills by taking a module ( Read more... )

William Sloane:
To Walk the Night (1937)
The Edge of Running Water (1939 ( Read more... )

I've been working on and off for years with my friend Sara, and for a lot of it she's been gradually assembling a film connected with her family history, so I've heard a fair bit about it ( Read more... )

I have a cousin who married a man from Ireland, and this man's brother, whom I've never met, is a genealogy buff living in Dublin. He's been delving back into where the Ryans came from - my mom's family, and also the family of my cousin, whose dad was my mom's older brother ( Read more... )

I had a black and white cat called Chairman Meow for two weeks. He was gentle and undemanding and liked climbing onto my shoulder. Someone saw his photo on Facebook and adopted him, so this morning, while I woke up with a black and white cat in the house, now I have a tabby I'm fostering after she was rescued in Park Ex by a friend of the Patrol's ( Read more... )

On pondering it I decided two cats was too much. The rescue group is sending me a cat called Chairman Meow next weekend. He's a black and white rescue, currently in another foster home. Not sure why the other foster folks want him to move along but I gather it's not that he's difficult; they may be planning to travel.

Apparently he wasn't named ( Read more... )

I'm sitting here with foster cat Sophie as I write. I first described her in a post from August, but this is the last night she will spend at my house. The woman who had Sophie before me has rearranged things so she can take her back; while this woman's wicked mother-in-law was away on a long trip she adopted Sophie, who'd been rescued by someone ( Read more... )