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Bat Boy of the Lake
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I was not prepared to share a bedroom with him. He clung there on the window while I squeezed myself onto a downstairs couch. My two cats were delighted. I woke up with muscle aches where I didn’t know I had muscles. The day before, I’d arrived at our cottage on a lovely sunny…
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Meet Sepia, An Unsung Pigment for Painting
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Sepia isn’t a colour that has a lot of star power. No wonder! It was named after the sepia cuttlefish, which is where sepia gets its pigment. These small cephalopods, related to their much larger cousins, the octopus and the squid, store ink in sacs situated between their gills. When under attack, they release…
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Painting the Blues
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Next time you run out of ultramarine blue, remind yourself that there was a time when the ultramarine blue pigment was so expensive, no one could afford to buy too much of it! Johannes Vermeer, for instance, used so much ultramarine to paint Girl with a Pear Earring that he put his family into…
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September Blues
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It is so quiet along the road here that you can hear a pin drop—or an acorn or two, to be precise. While the city is filling up with activity once again, cottage country has slipped into a great silence. Quiet is one of my favourite qualities (and rare), but the week following Labour…
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Who was the masked shopper?
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Okay, I know I shouldn’t take mask wearing lightly, but the other day I was in a bank where every one of us was wearing a mask. Honestly, how strange can our world get? (Don’t ask, we might find out.) To be honest, I was a reluctant mask convert. I held out until the…
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What’s the worst that could happen?
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Take yourself back a year when someone cut you off in traffic, causing you to miss a turn and making it certain you’d be late for your VERY IMPORTANT meeting. In a not-so-genial state, you tried to find some Zen by asked the age-old question, “Now, really, what’s the worst that could happen? Consider…
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Flattening the technology curve
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There’s lots of predictions “zooming” around these day as to how the world is going to look post COVID-19. Many, for instance, are celebrating the fact that thousands have now broken the technology barrier and embraced all manner of digital connecting, including the ubiquitous ZOOM call. (Some of us even wonder if too many…
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