13 Hours of Rain

Kids, this is as profound as I'm getting during the craziest week of the school year when your Daddy is off to see the Wizard... P.S. The church we go to is pretty much a non-hand raising church except for a few token types. :)

Okay kids, my last post might have given you (and my readers) the impression that I absolutely, positively hate pets. Not true. Instead, my personal position on pets has changed, for now. And yes, I do understand the numerous reasons why people own fish, cats, dogs or horses. As a little girl, our family had a black mutt-of-a-dog named Pepper. We lived on an acreage in the northern part of our province. It was so not prairie there. We were surrounded by towering pines, pristine lakes, and lush rolling hills. There my parents decided it was wise to own a dog to protect the premises. So Pepper faithfully guarded our home by yipping and barking at almost anything that came by. When we moved to a town approximately 200 km south, we gifted Pepper to trusted neighbors. Your Nana & Nani didn’t think it was appropriate to relocate a freedom-loving, exploring dog to a small fenced yard. I remember the day we packed up the last of our stuff in our red station wagon and drove away from ...

 Major J.D. My dear daughter, you stood bravely in front of your entire school during the Remembrance Day Assembly and spoke these words into the microphone: "This is my Great-Grandfather." Then the Principal of your school proceeded to read about your Great-Grandfather's contributions to both World Wars. War. I have been blessed to live almost four decades without experiencing the loss and agony of war. True, I was born when the Vietnam War was ending. I was a teenager during the Gulf War . And I was an academic when America declared the War on Terror after September 11, 2001. Yet, I've lived in peace in this corner of the prairies. No one in my immediate family has been deployed to fight. Your Daddy's Mennonite heritage includes the right to be a conscientious objector to war. War was not considered an option to global conflicts. Non-violent solutions were preferred. Your Daddy's ancestors have fled countries to avoid being conscripted. ...

We now have celebrity status. We can be followed, pinned, and liked. We can put our best image forward and make everyone love us. After all, we live in a carefully edited sparkly world *. It is nothing new, really. Humanity has always strived to make themselves look good even though the underneath in an impossible mess. Women have been applying cosmetics for centuries to cover up their flaws. Men have been holding on to their expected image of stoic strength and control in spite of the raging emotions inside. Whole cultures have made it tradition to constantly wear psychological masks in public even though their private lives are full of perceived shame. And now we have social media that allows all our "friends" to see how happy we were on our last holiday to exotic somewhere, even though we had several not-so-happy arguments along the way. You see, our world desperately wants to believe, "I'm okay, you're okay, we are ALL okay." But we are not. Just fli...