Category Archives: Towntales

Stretching umbilical cords, or the joy/sorrow of letting kids go


I woke this morning thinking about how my kids, the hearts of my heart, are about as far away from me and each other that they can be, geographically. One is in Europe, one in Australia, one back in Kingston while I am in Vancouver. It reminded me of the imagery I tried to share with them (but of course they found repellent, because, kids) that I can almost feel the leftover umbilical threads tugging at times, especially when I am worrying about them, or when I know life is being challenging for them. It’s a weird thing.

I raised them to be independent, to question the status quo, to be unafraid of trying new things. This has resulted in them being all over the world. I miss them, still find such joy in their contact with me. I have fantasies of them all being together, chatting and laughing with each other again. I used to love listening to them talk amongst themselves. This is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

But that’s the thing – you’ve got to let those kids go. Let them vanish and like that old tiresome quote: If you love something, set it free. If it is yours, it will come back to you. It’s risky, though. They may never come back. One of mine hasn’t. Still have that psychic umbilical attachment, though, even if these days it is more of an ache.

In my upcoming book, Spit & Polish, my main character, Ruth, is dying to leave her small town and move to the slightly bigger city of Kingston, ON. She’s bored, the local boys are mean, and she dreads having nothing to do but wash diapers for her always increasing brood of siblings.

In that time period, the years after WW2, choices for single women were few. All the jobs that had opened up for women during the war were closed with a snap. Men needed the jobs, everyone thought. Women should get married and have babies. And endlessly support their husbands, no matter how unfulfilling that might be. Ruth, at her young age of 18, didn’t love that option. She wanted an alternative.

Cloyne in the 1930’s

But her parents wanted her nearby, of course. At least until she got married. Which is why Ruth was so surprised to find her mother supporting her to go away to nursing school. It meant a very real increase of work for her mother, and Ruth is frequently guilty about her escape. (Not so much that she wants to go home, though…)

While nursing might seem a stereotypical choice for women now (I beg to differ, having had a very varied and exciting career as a nurse myself), it certainly wasn’t then. Nursing was just becoming respectable, and nurses were continually being portrayed as being easy, loose, a bit tawdry. Nursing schools were incredibly strict to help control this image, and students were held to a very high standard for behaviour. Of course there were a few who snuck out after hours, misbehaved with patients, followed doctors like eager puppies. Ruth doesn’t dare. She knows she is there on a short leash from her father, and she is terrified of losing her route to what she hopes is a satisfying career.

It doesn’t help that challenges are thrown at her every time she steps just a wee bit out of line. Still, she keeps on, gradually becoming braver as she falls more in love with nursing. It gives her strength to stand up for her choice, even as another pregnancy makes her guilt about not being at home to help her mother. Fortunately, Mrs. Maclean is willing to do the letting go, to allow herself to accept the risk of losing Ruth forever.

I’ll be doing an interview about the book with OC Publishing, on their Author’s Journey sites : YouTube, and Facebook, on Tuesday February 27. I’m delighted to have a chance to visit with Anne O’Connell, who has been a tremendous supporter of writers and writing.

Spit & Polish officially launches February 29th. It’s on sale (the ebook) for pre-order until then on Kobo, Amazon, Apple Books and more. Why not grab a copy and see what happens to Ruth in this first in a series of books on Ruth, nursing education, medical care, and Kingston, ON in 1946.

Medical progress, quackery, and the profit motive


The last couple of days I’ve been disabled with back pain. This is new for me as my multiple sclerosis means most of the time I rarely feel any pain. Anywhere. Which can make for missing some essential things going on in my body. Right now I am wondering if it is a kidney stone or a bulging disc or I’m just generally falling apart but I have places to go and things to do and I haven’t got time for this.

Onto YouTube I go, for helpful (?) advice about self-diagnosis. It wasn’t helpful. I don’t have a doc to go see so the only alternative to self-diagnosis is sitting in the ER for hours which would likely aggravate everything with not much reward. SO YouTube it is.

After listening to a relatively sane doc tell me how to relieve things, the other videos cued up. The first one was about faecal impaction (it must sense my age and state of decrepitude). According to the handsome charlatan, drinking water or eating fibre or even exercise won’t help this – you have to pay for this doc’s special advice. (She was “once on a prestigious medical faculty” – I’d be interested in knowing where she is now, as fraudsters regularly assign names of people that don’t exist to their miracle cures. I’d look it up but sitting is painful.) He went on about how bits of stool linger in your bowel for years – that old chestnut. It just ain’t true. I do wish some of these people would look inside a bowel now and again. Or prep for a colonoscopy.

It all reminded me of the tuberculosis treatments back in the time of my upcoming book, Spit and Polish. Back in 1946, tuberculosis was common. Overcrowding, traveling to places where it was epidemic during the war, poverty, poor diet — all of these created a happy environment for mycobacterium tuberculosis. The bacterium that causes TB is a nasty wee thing, designed to defeat elimination. The cells have a waxy coating, which makes them resistant to drying out and to attack by antibiotics. Fortunately, it reproduces relatively slowly, so it isn’t as wildly infective as say, Covid, but once you have it, it is the devil to get rid of. Our usual immune system has a very hard time digesting the cells. And it can lay latent for years. My father had TB in 1946. He survived with no long term effects, but when he was going through chemotherapy in the 1980’s, those rotten little cells started coming alive again.

TB is often in the lungs, but as you will read in my novel, it can infect any part of the body, including the kidney, spine and brain. Back in 1946, there weren’t any antibiotics widely available that effectively treated it, so TB patients were put through all sorts of torment as their docs tried to keep ahead of the disease.

The chief therapy was bedrest and better nutrition, sunbathing and moderate exercise. That could go on for years, and did, in sanatoria all over the world. This was expensive and money was needed, so more interventions were invented to apply for grants. Things like inhalants like mercury and paraffin were tried, to ease coughing. They often eased patients into the next world.

Frequently patients with bone involvement were placed in traction or casted to keep the bones in place while a hoped for reconstruction could take place. Patients could remain casted for months, which led to other problems.

Surgical approaches were used, aimed at letting the lung “rest” and cure itself-and, as the mycobacterium tuberculosis are aerobes, so removing oxygen from the area would help slow its growth. Surgical treatments could be temporary, like a created pneumothorax, or permanent, like a Semb’s strip, phrenic nerve crushing, rib removal, lung collapses and resections and the like. Needless to say, patients who experienced these treatments were forever deformed and visible. This made it difficult for them to live in a tuberculosis-afraid society.

Add the prejudice that some types of people (I’ll leave you to imagine who, but hint hint, they are assumed to cause every bad thing that happens to them) were predisposed to TB, and no one even wanted the affected to deliver the paper. It was a bit like the early stages of AIDS.

Fortunately for the surgically maimed and those awaiting maiming, streptomycin came on the scene, with initial miraculous results. Other antibiotics followed, and combinations of antibiotics that worked well against the tiny foe.

Unfortunately, antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis is now on the rise, so the future surgically maimed may yet be waiting in the wings.

Want to know more? See my upcoming novel, available February 29, 2024.

Beautiful Kingston, Ontario: Antiquitate Civilitate Humanitate


(A Civil and Creative Community with a Proud Past)

Photo by Rasheeque Ahnaf (Piash) on Pexels.com

That slogan in English reads a bit like something from Winnie the Pooh, with all the capitals, but I’ve got to admit it does sound like Kingston.

Kingston was the first capital of the United Province of Canada. It is filled with limestone buildings, hospitals, universities, military structures, and prisons. We used to have a statue of local boy Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s First Prime Minister, but his history is at best mixed, so he’s been moved to think over his crimes in the local Cemetery. We still have his house from the 1840’s and you can go tour it and marvel at how the elegant of that time lived.

The area has been settled for hundreds of centuries, acting first as a home for Iroquois, and then for the “five nations” formed of Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Wyandot peoples. These residents traded furs with the French – beavers were everywhere and their fur much prized. Following this, the French and English traded ownership for years.

Kingston is ideally suited as a defence spot, situated on the shores of Lake Ontario, the end of the Rideau Canal, and near the end of the St. Lawrence Seaway. Various armies and navies have resided here, and there are leftovers. We have Fort Henry and Martello towers, and the military university, Royal Military College. Many of these places have been in use since the War of 1812, where Kingston played a significant role.

So Kingston was a friendly place for the military for decades. After WW2, Kingston’s Queen’s University opened up so many spaces for returning soldiers to get upgraded education, they had to be put up in tents all over the place. The population of the city increased madly, and I can only imagine the trials and tribulations that the local government went through.

In my book, Spit and Polish, I deliberately focused on the immediate post-war period. So many books talk about the war, but it’s often like those stories where the prince and princess marry and live happily ever after. I wanted to see the city coming back to life after losing so many of its population to the war effort.

Ruth has just dipped her toe into Kingston life. She’s coming from the tiny town of Cloyne, about an hour and a half north of the city. She’s so tasked with her nursing school work she barely sees everything else (except stores that sell new stockings!), but she already knows she loves the place. She does go to local eateries and shops, and you’ll see their names in the pages of the book. She also rides the beleaguered Wolfe Island Ferry, which was actually running at the time.

Cloyne overlook

In the current time, Kingston has a vibrant arts community, several colleges and universities, innovative research departments and businesses, and a wonderful climate. I can understand why Ruth loved it.

See Spit and Polish, launching February 29, 2024, for more about this enchanting city and the time.

Ho Ho Ho, and all that stuff


Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

And here we are again, in the festive season, the one filled with songs like “Silent Night/War is over,” “Do they know it’s Christmas after all,” and others filled with arias of hope and lightness and desire for togetherness – while all around us, the world is rumbling.

It is physically rumbling, as with the earthquakes in China and the Philippines and Iceland, and with volcanoes in similar locations…and it is politically rumbling, with fascism on the rise and the increasing lack of cooperative functioning. And wars, everywhere wars.

It all seems a bit harsh to celebrate the coming of the light when so many people have been denied electricity or food or safety. We shuffle off to Christmas, Hanukkah or Solstice services, feeling all warm and cozy in our middle class “I gave to the Red Cross” smugness, then come home and see on the news intolerable hardship, poverty, and violence. Or step over it on our way home…

Hey, I’m one of those smug safe ones, having donated where I could afford to. I understand the utter feeling of helplessness when looking at the larger problems we are facing. But I am feeling a growing sense of rage, as one after another, our politicians are shown to be corrupt (and yet, get reelected?), as corporations take over the world to enrich one at the expense of millions (and never get stopped), as the environment gets toastier and toastier and yet we don’t want to let those people who will be burned out by our greed move to someplace where they might be able to survive.

There’s got to be a way to stop some of this, slow it down, turn some of the madness back, I shout. Think about the future…or even the present, for vast numbers of us.

I’ve tried, over my life, to protest, write letters, get involved in causes that matter to me, but I always feel as if I am pushing the line only a tiny bit. I don’t have enough money to push things far enough to make a difference in the big scale of things. Violent attacks are frowned upon, and besides I’m too small and unfit to make an impact that way. And it’s not the example I want to make.

So instead I try to focus on the small, good, things. Try to help one or two people, offer my volunteer services where I can, donate to causes in my small way. Use less. Smile more. Be pleasant. Stay out of things that I don’t know enough about to converse intelligently. I do have opinions, increasingly crotchety ones as I get older, but I hope I am learning that I don’t need to share ALL of them with everyone. And hey, I might be wrong about some of them. I can always learn.

I’m trying to err on the side of adding grace to the world.

It’s the only thing that gives me hope, in this rumbling world we are all living in. And we need hope and grace. They are both pretty thin on the ground these days.

So ho, ho, ho, everyone. Light those candles and shut out the night. Bring joy. Laugh. In amongst it all, pray to whoever/whatever you believe in that we will smarten up as a species and stop killing one another, stop trying to crush one another, open our hearts. And then, get to work. We have a lot to do, even if our contribution is only a small flicker. It’s still progress, and together…

Photo by Mohammad reza Fathian on Pexels.com

Flaming grief, or missing Maui


Photo by Sippakorn Yamkasikorn on Pexels.com

Back when I was a young and adventurous type (at least before this past weekend), my dear uni friend Paula and I set sail for Hawaii. It was the first trip I’d taken as an adult without parental involvement (there was a jaunt to Copenhagen with my high school band but that was a different thing entirely, not involving liquor).

My mother was appalled that I would go on such a trip, particularly as I was engaged at the time and my fiancé was not travelling with us (not that that would have been permitted either, tbh, as we might get up to *bad* things). Despite my mother’s increasing hostility as the date drew closer, Paula and I leapt into planning with youthful enthusiasm.

The first and deadly expensive week would be on Oahu, where we did the touristy things like going to pork roasts and having our photos snapped and sold to us. We marvelled at the hotels with the lobbies OUTSIDE! Who ever heard of such a thing? As Canadians it seemed like paradise. The cool sea breezes and the sense of being away from everything, everyone, almost tempted me into staying – in fact, I researched nursing positions while I was there. Who knows what I meant to do with my fiancé. I was besotted, and couldn’t think.

We met a few locals, who took us drinking and generally around. We toured the volcanic mountainsides, took photos with our Instamatics.

And then, week two, we flew to Maui. And I lost my heart.

I am a sea child. Raised along the Atlantic coast, I am only happy near water. But Maui. Encircled by beautiful, dangerous seas. Shone on by sun unmeasurable. I even got a tan on my toes, something that has never happened since.

We drove the famous Maui ring road, laughing ourselves senseless as we dodged certain death – mountains on one side of the road, steep slopes to the sea on the other. Paula made me laugh so hard I very nearly drove us off the edge, but I also remember the technical joy of driving that road, its curves and sudden changes. Cape Breton has nothing on that, sorry, my CB friends.

We loved all of it, the town, the wilds. We had no money left so ate baloney from the tuck shop for a few days to save up for a final feast, and then regretfully, we flew home. She went back to Ottawa, I to Boston, from whence I eventually married my fiancé.

And now both Maui and my dear friend Paula are gone, both through impossibly harsh attacks, of fire for Maui and pulmonary hypertension for her. Seeing Maui burn has made me revisit the times we shared, and miss my friend all the more. I wish I could call her, share the horror, retell the stories. But she is no longer reachable, and I missed seeing her as often as I should have. She was a dear friend.

Instead I am left to triply grieve – for Paula, for Maui, for all the families of those lost in such horror.

The gods seem angry, my friends. Perhaps we need to affirm our care for the earth and each other, before it is too late to make amends.

Limping through Vancouver


My charge

I’ve been offered a delightful opportunity. Come to Vancouver, my son said, you can stay at our place and look after our dear cat, Jack, while we travel to exotic locations.

Well, that’s not really fair. He was going, and I offered. I mean, who am I to turn down a vacation in one of Canada’s most beautiful cities? Plus cat cuddling. What could be better?

Jack is taking some time to cuddle with me but we are making steps every day (as long as I hold the bag of treats nearby). I do hope I am not interfering with his healthy diet, but I suspect my son is a bigger treat giver than I am…

And I get to explore Vancouver! It’s perhaps NOT quite as festive as it might have been before I required a cane to keep my foot from tripping me up on flat surfaces, but I’m having fun. I got to see the Van Dusen Botanical Gardens (love these huge Jack in the Pulpits and monkey puzzle trees),

travel to where the big ships go to rest (nice beach, even with the rain),

and even check out the Shameful Tiki Room, where we drank from a volcanic-looking bowl filled with booze. It came accompanied by sound effects and smoke, making the presentation even more exciting. Of course, after a few sips through the unusually long straws, everything seemed exciting…walking, for example.

Since I’ve been left on my own with cat, my circuit is somewhat abbreviated, but I’m still sampling the delights. I’ve toddled around the neighbourhood, and even taken the sky train to the ‘burbs of Richmond.

Stopped in today to the Pacific Arts Market, an artists’ collective, where I met a woman drawing a spectacular hummingbird with sparkly pencils and markers, and another woman who explained the artists volunteer and then are charged no commission for displaying their art. Fabulous. Was less enchanted when they offered me info on the senior’s classes (it was the cane, right?).

First impressions are that Vancouver is truly almost unacceptably beautiful. Huge, full-grown trees of myriad types cluster the residential streets, even in heavily populated areas. The mountains loom magnificently. The air is soft and clear. The birds seem to know how good they have it and sing their hearts out all the time. Everyone is walking or riding bikes or propelling walkers along the streets, and so it feels a bit festive all the time.

Or it would, if people were friendlier. I find I miss the casual helloes of the Maritimes or even Ontario. Everyone here is distracted, turns their head away when you pass them on the sidewalk. It reminds me a bit of when I came back to the US after living in Germany. In Germany, everyone says “Guten Tag” as you pass them on the street. So I’d taken to smiling and nodding to everybody as I walked. Coming back to Boston this made me the recipient of stares and even malevolent following. I quickly learned to shut my face down as I walked.

Vancouver is a bit like that. People are friendly if you manage to break through, but it takes a bit. My attempts at smiling at passers by don’t have any traction.

When I told a friend I was coming out here, she asked me, “You are coming back, right?” Because apparently people, once they see Vancouver’s beauty, decide to stay. Well, I do love it and will gladly visit, but I must admit I am missing my friendly (ier) home. Of course, if Jack ever lets me cuddle him, this all may change…

Feeling the morbs


This wonderful word was used in Victorian times to describe feeling downhearted. I’m all over the morbs today.

I find it hard to believe the bombing in Ukraine is actually happening. How is it we haven’t evolved past the need to pound innocents with weaponry? It is obscene.

I can’t help but visualize the poor mums and babes in the maternity hospital, being forced to shelter in the basement, the patients of all ages in the hospitals with nowhere to hide, no supplies, no oxygen.

It is astonishingly evil, this attack on Ukraine and like so much astonishing evil these days, we seem helpless to stop it. I had thought we had safeguards built into our governments, our processes, but no. It seems that in the face of malevolence, we are stunned, stuck in space.

I am frustrated by my inability to be much help. I refuse to enter into the social media humble-bragging about how “the news is depressing so I have to remind myself that I live in safety and have nice things” miasma, though. It seems smug at the least and quite inexcusably tone-deaf to tell people how happy and warm you are while people are being exploded into smithereens by war-crime quality bombing.

We privileged folks have always done this, while people in other parts of the world survive hell (or don’t). It needs to stop. We live a life of good things on the backs of those who provide it, often at their cost. I am typing this on an Apple phone, something for which I feel guilty though it’s an old version and I can alleviate some anxiety by remembering that.

I have a lucky life. I know this. It was a result of the land of my birth. If I’d been born in Ukraine, or the Sudan, life would not be as lucky. So let’s stop being smug about our accidental location, and do what we can to help those elsewhere. Please? We need some humanity, not aversion of heads.

UNITED WE STAND
FOR
UKRAINE

And once more into the fray, my friends


Tubercle bacillus

It only seems right to write about infectious diseases in this endless time of plague. As a retired nurse with an epidemiology degree, I’ve always been fascinated by infectious thingies, and particularly by the above, tuberculosis, the gift that keeps on giving.

We keep thinking it isn’t much of a problem. After all we have drugs, right? Well, we did, until the recent AIDS epidemic caused a huge TB upsurge and the boosting of medication resistant bacilli. It’s lurking, people, it’s lurking, and until we do something about poverty and housing overcrowding and all those upstream causes of illness, it’s going to lurk on.

And sooner or later it’s going to come back, in a more generally aggressive format. Because infectious things have to live, man, much as we wish they wouldn’t.

So, having recently moved to Kingston, ON, where my father spent some time in the TB Sanitarium after WW2, what could be more natural than to want to research and write about that time in history?

As I research, it was the TB treatments that lured me in – hellishly invasive, involving total body casting for months, cutting away ribs, deflating lungs, and so many painful procedures – and yet the death rate remained high despite this and months of enforced bedrest. It wasn’t a good diagnosis. I remember my dad’s brief reference to getting his news: “All of the nurses were crying…”

He was quite a charmer, my gentleman dad, so I believe the scene. He survived only to have it come back when he was being treated for cancer. Because it’s one of those diseases that lingers, hiding in the back alleyways of your body, waiting to be reenergized. Scary stuff, no?

But as I looked into that time period, more fascinating details opened before me. The end of the war was a tumultuous time here in wee Kingston – yes, the war ended, and the fallout from that, but also the changing face of medicine with better antibiotics, the movements around the many nursing schools here – at KGH, at the Dieu, at Queen’s, at the mental hospital, even at the San. The movement of women from industry back to the home as the war ended. The development of a professional nursing organization. The growth of industry, the arrival of the common car, so many many changes.

And still the nurses graduated with bouquets of roses and the nurses’ cap, earning their literal stripes as they progressed through the years. Nursing work hours started as inhumane, shifted to merely gruelling. Training was always about deportment as well as technical skills; as nurses were expected to be the embodiment of virtue as well as technically proficient, filled with common sense but still feminine enough to charm. Endless jokes about getting a Mrs. degree or being on the “fishing fleet” to capture a man from RMC floated about even in my day. A few nurses carried a banner to establish nursing as a lifelong career, instead of a stopgap until marriage. Many of them gained traction during these years.

It was a difficult role, and in my time in the late 1970’s at Queen’s as a nursing student, I was called onto the red carpet many a time for failing in one way or another. And at the end of the four years, our caps didn’t even have one stripe – we were to be distinguished from our non-university peers by the lack of a stripe, which of course made us look like their probationary nurses. Which seemed appropriate when I graduated – I felt as if I still had so much to learn! As I did. SO thankful for my mentors along the way.

I’m combining my experience as a student here in Kingston with my research and writing a story about a nursing student at KGH in the last of the war years of WW2 (I find it infinitely sad I have to specify the war). She’s plucky, but a bit of a failure as she starts, only knows that she wants to get away from her claustrophobic home and preacher father. Will her time at the Kingston Sanitarium working with the TB patients help her develop her confidence? Or will she find the man of her dreams and escape that way?

Time will tell.

And so…or waiting waiting waiting


We seem to be stuck in a holding pattern- stuck in a growing pandemic, stuck with the defeated US president clinging to power, even stuck in autumn- we’ve had warm weather here in Ontario and, though lovely, I can’t help but feel like winter is waiting on the edge, ready to spring.

It all reminds me of a time we were in the Everglades watching a nature scene take place before us. A frog was catching insects. A snake was watching the frog, ready to spring. An egret was watching the snake, preparing an attack, and behind the egret we could see the watchful eyes of an alligator, looking for dinner.

In one instant, the frog leapt for a big, the snake leapt for the frog, the egret pounced on the snake, and slurp, the food chain played out. Fortunately for the egret, the alligator was just that bit too slow, and missed taking his place at the top.

So here I am feeling a bit like that egret. Or is it the frog? Waiting for winter to leap and release the Covid virus again, all while knowing there’s a democratic confrontation awaiting in the wings to gobble the whole disaster up.

It’s unsettling.

Will the alligator be able to take the whole mass down? Or will we have a narrow escape as the egret did and fly away with a full tummy and the will to fight another day?

Or will everything leap forward and manage to continue unabated- winter, Covid, democracy-undoing…

In trying to remain optimistic, but I can feel the tension like the sound of a violin A string, scraping along the bow.

Sitting on the Dock of the Bay


“Sittin’ in the mornin’ sun
I’ll be sittin’ when the evenin’ comes
Watchin’ the ships roll in
Then I watch ’em roll away again..”

Ah, Otis. Such an apt description of my last weeks here in paradise (aka Nova Scotia). It has been perishingly hot and humid and I’ve been forced to sit, beached carp-like, gasping for breath as my MS and the humidity do their little dance.

And then, mid-August, the cool nights arrived, the decreasing dampness. It happens every year and it is always a surprising gift – people start to walk about again, there are some twinkling eyes above the inevitable masks, the mackerel are running and the dock is filled with men casting their hooks into the sea. Sometimes they even catch things…and I fall in love with the place again.How to Get to Dartmouth from Downtown Halifax – Discover Halifax

It’s been an odder time here, of course, what with the constant refrain “stay home, stay home”, mixed with the hymn of “get out and shop local” buzzing in my ears. I am overdue for a voyage across the harbour on my sweet ferry to see one of my favourite art galleries (Argyle Fine Art), but the whole idea seems so daunting after months of hiding out at home it requires loin-girding of an unusual degree.Argyle Fine Art | Downtown Halifax

So I sit on my balcony with its wonderful view of harbour happenings and the occasional street crime (this IS Dartmouth, after all) and watch the tide roll in and out and in.

My motivation isn’t helped by the fact that 90% of my belongings are packed. Including most of my clothing. I have, of course, chosen the things to leave out unwisely. Getting dressed to go out to do the “shop local” part of my inner dialogue is usually a melee of shirt and dress-tossing, trying to adapt to the changing weather – a shift of 15 degrees Celsius is common these days – and somehow I have hidden all the things that go together.

From muumuu to Miu Miu: Turning thrift-store rejects into cute ...My friends are kindly silent about my selections, bless them.

No matter. Tomorrow the junk company comes by to en-lighten (unnecessarily hyphenation added in honour of LD) me of a great many things (they say they will donate much of it and I am grateful, if slightly skeptical, but at this point, I just do not want to know). Today’s task is to complete the junk assembly into a digestible chunk. After that, I’m down to the last lingering few things…

And back to:

“I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay
Watchin’ the tide roll away
I’m sittin’ on the dock of the bay, wastin’ time..”

I suppose there are worse ways to spend the next few days…