SENSE AND NONSENSE

  • DAY TRIP TO JERUSALEM

    Day Trip To Jerusalem [SCRIPT TO GO WITH SLIDE SHOW] Mar. 9 We had lined up a tour of Jerusalem via a travel company . Had to leave Haifa on the 5:30 am. train in order to catch the tour bus leaving from a hotel in Tel Aviv. Our guide that day was a perky…

  • VICTORIA DAY ANTICS

    1999 Sense and Nonsense Today I commemorated the birth of Britain’s longest reigning monarch by kneeling, scraping and bowing in the drizzling rain, as I attempted to uproot weeds in what will one day be the garden at our newly acquired acreage.  While I reposed upon the dampening soil, my derriere shielded by a garbage-bag-encased…

  • BERRY PICKING BLUES

    It is the middle of August and my berry picking muscles are twitching. Last month I was laid up and missed out on the gathering of what I hear was a super-abundant crop of larger-than-usual wild strawberries. Luckily for me the huckleberries which should be well past their prime, are just beginning to ripen. This…

  • ALBERTA CLICHES

    1999  Sense and Nonsense I caught the flu bug just before Christmas. Although my husband and I refrained from kissing and engaging in any germ-exchanging activities, he managed to catch it anyway.  We spent the holidays hacking and coughing and complaining, each one of us convinced that the other was not nearly as sick as…

  • HORSE SENSE

    1998 Sense and Nonsense I am from the generation that loves country and western music. The old stuff– not the guitar-busting, belly button revealing, new style of warbling. I like Garth and Shania but it’s the classic horse loving, gut-wrenchingly lonesome kind of music that stirs my country soul. Every once in awhile I like…

  • MYSTERIOUS MOBILITY?

    1999 Sense and Nonsense There are two things that intrigue me greatly at the present time: one is the crop circles that appeared last year in a farmer’s field in Vanderhoof, and the other is the mysterious mobility of our living room rug. I am beginning to wonder if the two circumstances are related. There…

  • THE BEARS AND ME

    circa 1990 Sense and Nonsense My first unhappy experience with a bear happened one dark night during the early nineteen-sixties when I was employed as company cook at an isolated sawmill camp. A section of the cookhouse had been partitioned off to make sleeping quarters for our family. In those days I did not have…

  • COMEDY OF ERRORS VACATION

    1999  Sense and Nonsense The other evening my friend Donna related a “comedy of errors” tale concerning a recent trip to the Coast. Her journey, as were those of her two daughters who flew in from various parts of the province to join her at the Vancouver airport, was complicated by delayed flights due to…

  • IT’S A STRANGE WORLD

    Circa 1997 Sense and Nonsense It is a strange world that we live in at the present time, especially for those like me who have survived the era of one-channel television (and even that was blurry!) as well as the Volkswagen beetle in winter–before they came equipped with heaters that actually worked. Back then the…

  • SENIOR CITIZEN-HOOD

    1998 SENSE AND NONSENSE by Doris Ray As I approach my junior-senior citizen-hood (I’m about to enter the sixth decade of my life) I find myself blaming most shortcomings on the fact that I am now youthfully deprived. Especially my poor memory. The truth is I cannot recall ever having much of a memory. Even…