I am packing for a 4-day trip to Montreal. Don’t need any of my usual fashion items, since I’ll be there for a meeting of a bunch of engineers, and they will NOT expect any style from me. Except maybe the usual “urban utilitarian” as my friend Sue labelled it. (She is famous for Florida-retirement-villa capris.) I’ll be…
Some of you know how close I am to the fashion world. And those people will know the extent of the gap! However, I do have some claims to fashion fame – starting with Barbara Tfank , who has become justly famous for dressing Michelle Obama very elegantly and now Adele. Last year I put…
I’ve told you about poor Emma Bailey, my great great grandmother who had an illegitimate son (my great grandfather) in 1860 and then died in 1863. We never knew why she died at the age of 25 until my sister requested a copy of her death certificate, which arrived recently. I apologize for the poor…
Anne attended Vancouver School of Art on a scholarship one year after high school, but couldn`t continue, for financial reasons. She went to work as a keypunch operator for BC Packers, a big fish-packing company in Vancouver. A mutual friend introduced Anne to my father, Ray, at an ice skating rink. He drove her and her friend…
Have I mentioned that my husband and I are budget travellers? When we travel, instead of souvenir shopping we look for local rocks and, of course, sea shells. We pick nice ones and carry them around for the rest of the trip and bring them home. The price is right, as long as you don’t have to pay…
In the summer of 1931, family friends took 9-year-old Anne on a driving trip to Vancouver, BC, so she could spend 3 months with her mother. The 2-week trip from California was in a big old touring car, equipped with running boards full of camping gear, staying in river-side campsites on the way north. She remembers being…
In January 1931, Anne was living with Claire, who had some limited correspondence with Florence, Anne’s mother. The period from 1923 to about 1930 was quite difficult for Florence, but the detailed information is a little scant. The details are probably available in her voluminous correspondence and notes (much of which my mother still has),…
Image by CIFOR via Flickr An adventure in the Amazon is always at the top of my bucket list, even though I’ve could have crossed it off after my 2009 trip to Peru. The Unconquered is subtitled “In Search of the Amazon’s Last Unconquered Tribes” and that pretty much sums it up. Published in 2011, the…
Seeing Clarely 