It's live! A new eBook!

It's available now!  New!  Finally!  Remember my 'special project' in July?

Here it is.  It's taken a while.  This collection is a year and a half of my newspaper columns.  It’s a first-person essay that runs twice a month, covering community building, holidays, family life, Jewish learning, and other issues. It focuses particularly on my local community, but my understanding is that it may be useful in a broader context.

This has been a very steep learning curve. :) However, a very kind woman (who does a lot for our community) came to me after services one week, pulled me aside, and told me she was clipping all my columns and saving them in a file folder. This was such a surprise---and it seemed like a very good reason to put a year and a half of these articles in the same place. It’s about Winnipeg, and about our city’s Jewish community, but from the feedback I’ve gotten so far, it’s probably a little bit about where you live, too.


The eBook is available in a variety of places for $3.99US.  (The price of a big cup of joe)

Kindle:
From the Outside In: Jewish News & Post Columns, 2015-2016

and through this universal link, you can connect with it on iBooks, Kobo, Nook, and Scribd, as well as a pile of other platforms.

The official "launch" date is December 16th, but in some cases, it is available now.  If you pre-order it, the file should magically appear on your e-reader tomorrow.

The paperbook will be available on Amazon soon, but it's not quite ready for the big time.  In the meanwhile, I was too excited to keep this news to myself. :)

If you're a knitter and you visit my blog for knitting info and designs, Please use the coupon code:
Launch
and get 20% off my Ravelry patterns until midnight (CT) on December 29th.  Help me celebrate!

like a stab in the eye...

This infill development is proposed for two residential lots, about two blocks from my house.  Here's my opinion piece for the CBC about the issue.

PS: I guess I posted too soon about our trying week--if I'd just waited til this was published, I would have had something more positive to say!  (I didn't know then that it would be published. Surprises make life interesting, right?)

Oh my gosh

Sorry for the blog silence over here.  I thought I'd have something interesting to post by now.  Really.  I checked in about that sock yarn contest--no news about voting or winners yet over there.  I submitted a couple of essays to different places.  I have been to (no kidding) three different medical specialists in the last couple of weeks, too.  Still not any definitive diagnosis on why I have been feeling subpar for 6 months.  I have heard several different theories though, and I'm still trying to sort that out.

Then, in between one of those "get this to Fed Ex right away" lab tests, a drop off at kindergarten, and a few other details?  It snowed about 30 cm (1 foot) on Tuesday and Wednesday.  It has been an enormous, messy mess.  No one cancelled anything in the city, although on Tuesday, when I got to my special physio Pilates class, it was just me and the instructor...and I told her that walking (through completely uncleared snow) two blocks to see her had been downright aerobic on its own!

Since nothing got cancelled, and nothing gets plowed here until the snow stops, it has been a trying few days.  My twins are teary and tired, and I have to admit, sometimes I am too.  I'd leave the house early, shoveling like crazy (more than once) during the day to make sure everyone could get in and out of the house and car.  Then, I'd hop in the car, only to discover I was trapped.  Watching the car behind me flounder around in the backlane, getting itself stuck and unstuck (twice) as I waited to try to get out of my now cleared parking space?  That summarized things...until the Professor told me how he had to stop in the middle of a road on the way to pick up the boys from kindergarten.

A car was stuck in the snow.  A well-intentioned but small man (from the car behind) tried to push out the stuck car.  Stuck behind two cars now, my Professor hopped out of his car, gave a serious push to the car that was stuck---and whoosh, he got to drive to school.  Sometimes I think it is lucky we have the opportunity to shovel, push like heck, and that the snow muffles our screams.  All this is a good way to vent our frustrations...

Soon, soon, I will be giving you news about my Jewish Post & News columns and the eBook release...and soon the plows will come.  Soon it will be the weekend...when the temperature will drop to -25F. (-30C windchill)

I hope we can all stop screaming and crying around here long enough to rest on the couch. :)

Note: No picture.  Imagine a lot of blowy white stuff.  It's getting a little dirty and looks like lumpy mashed potatoes on the streets.  Yup.  You got it.