I've been having them. Down days. Days when everything I touch turns to waste matter, not one single thing works the way it should, and piles of little things add up to an unassailable mountain range of huge proportions that defeat me with their mere presence.

Every day has been starting the same, with a frustrating battle I lose between me and the cyber-power that rules these blogs. Slow loading leads to not being able to upload photos at all, to having nothing work, to having me screaming, to tearing my hair out, to wanting to never blog again.

An electrical storm on Sunday made things ever so much worse by knocking out power to everything for hours, then having lingering... more

All right, already, I'll admit it ... I'm not as young as I used to be. In my defense, however, I must point out that no one is. Unless yesterday was one's last day, today everybody is that much older. Even my mother, about as adamant a woman as ever walked the Earth, has stopped complaining to me about getting old, because what she gets back is a reminder of the alternative.

We live. We age. So what?

So what?

So what?

I'll tell me "so what?"!

So what is, at fifty-five, a cold ricochets... more

Continued from here, where I was about to point out how and why having kids as an older parent works for me ...

There are differences between parenting in my twenties and doing it now that I'm in my mid-fifties. Many of these have to do with maturity, security, life on a tropical island, a sense of humor and so on, but I'm too wrung to go into depth or detail, so I'm sticking with just big differences ...

Big... more

I'm tired.

Wrung, is probably closer to the physical consequence of a week spent up to my ankles in snot ... those very same ankles being the ones covered in clinging, whiny, grumpy, bored, cantankerous snot-factories: AKA Sam and Cj. In addition to my mucus-encrusted appendages exerting extra drag, therefore requiring more of an output of energy than it normally takes to get through a day, the work load has been bumped by the fact that the month is February, so short, yet still due the 86 blog posts a 31 day month gets, and I'm behinder... more

Sorry if the photo scares anyone. Believe me, I wouldn't be posting anything so hideous unless it was a necessary visual aid.

Was it ever explained to anyone you know that one obvious consequence of aging is asymmetry? I know I never heard this one.

Sure, gray hair, crows feet stamped around eyes, spreading butt, sagging knees, arm wattle, receding gums, splaying feet, creaks, moans, cracks, snaps, groans, blah, blah, blah ... but looking like two distantly related people stuck together at my meridian? That... more

Ladies and Gentlemen!

Look at nothing in my hat.

Now, I'm going to lay an egg.

Abadabba.

Ta da!

Thank you ... thank you very much.

Continued from here, where we've been talking about parental 'must haves' like music systems with faces and such ...

And how about this amazing innovation ... a thermometer!

This funky little egg is a colour-changing digital room thermometer. Designed to promote safer sleeping for babies, and peace of mind for... more

Okay. It's official. I have now been living outside the realm of the real world for long enough to be completely out of the loop when it comes to stuff. I've worried about this for years, dreading the day when I take a trip home to the US and find myself standing around shopping malls and private homes endlessly repeating some version of, "Golly, gee whiz ... willya looky that hoozit! What that heck does it DO?"

Well, I don't have to wait for the crunch of American soil under my flip-flops to feel like a totally clueless dork. I just... more

Guess what we did yesterday! While I should have been writing interesting blog posts on important topics, we were on a mission ... a mission to save baby sea turtles.

My friend, Julie, phoned in the early afternoon to say that the sea turtle nest in her garden was seeing some action. (She'd relocated the nest a couple of months ago, after realizing the mother had laid eggs too close to the waterline.) She found one baby in her kitchen the night before, obviously disoriented by the house lights and missing the ocean... more

Continued from here ...

Because I live on the other side of the world, I've missed far too much in the lives my of brother's children ... all my brothers' children, actually, since I have three of them -- brothers, that is ... but suddenly I find myself in a position to play catch-up, at least with one niece. We're now pen pals! Rebecca was eight in October, but reads, writes and thinks like kids much, much older.... more