Book Hippo

Friday, May 22, 2015

Cold Nights

Finally, winter is over. The nights in Ottawa are very cold this year. When I went out shopping today, it was only 8 degrees. I was wanting to wear my flip flops but it was not possible. So I wore my leopard shoes. The streets were not heavy with pedestrians so it was quite pleasant walking to Sparks Street Mall to buy a couple of dolls. I purchased one princess and one Lucy-from-peanuts doll. Only seven dollars each. I was pleasantly surprised to see the jigsaw puzzles. For a long while the pictures to put together have been drawings, not photos. So when I looked at the puzzles and saw a whole bunch of photos - and nice ones, too - I was happy. I also notice how many businesses are closing down. Of course Zellars is gone and also one restaurant is gone and has been replaced by another. I can't figure out why some restaurants succeed and some fail. They all seem to be about the same. I wandered over to the book store and bought a couple of kiddie books and then over to Shoppers Drug Mart to buy some milk for David. So a good day with lots of walking but not too much, my flip-flops are better for walking than my leopard shoes and hopefully next time I go out, I can wear them.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Past and Future

So much changes from when a person is a child to when they are older. There's the obvious change for me, at least, to living near a beach - so much fun to spend summers on the beach - to now, when I live in a land-locked province. We do have lakes and then there's the Ottawa River. Some sections have been made into beaches. Unfortunately, they are not near the downtown. Yet, there's other, social changes. Remember standing up in the car when you were little? Life before seat belts. No one was afraid to die but my father, in the mid-sixties, had seat belts put in. He made us use them. In some way, I suspect to get us to stop horsing around in the back. We never got into an accident so we never had to see if they worked but at my age, I'm grateful he took the time to care. Related to summer, I wanted to go to the beach by myself when I was four. No way, my mother was adamant, not until you're in school. Six. Now, I just want to say, my mother wasn't an awful woman but there are a lot of people who may not agree with letting a six year old go on her own to the beach or anywhere not under adult supervision. But like I said, it was a different age. There was not much said about people who kill children, in fact, there weren't many people who did that kind of thing. Nobody thought some man in a car would bother me. And I never did get bothered. And then there's what you might call generation changes. The sixties when I grew up began to get fearful after drugs came around. People warned us that we would think we were birds and jump out a window if we took LSD and other such things. Come to think of it, it was all different after kids began taking drugs. The generation gap began but for kids my age, who were being told by teenagers not to trust anyone over thirty and people over thirty telling us not to trust teenagers, it was all very confusing. I think that's where kids began to think they had to do everything themselves. They had to learn all they could, not from their parents, but from their peers and life. So now we're in a very distrustful age, where hockey coaches molest children and nobody looks up to anyone except celebrities anymore. I think that's because celebrities don't mind saying that they're screwed up whereas 'respectable' people who molest kids will lie about who they really are. That being said, I'm glad I made it through to this time of life, just to see all the changes, especially the ones I never knew were coming. I don't know what young people will make of the future but I expect that it will be a complete surprise to them. Just like it is for me.