Living Out Loud
I happen to be one of the lucky winners of the parent lottery. I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked here about my mum, but in case I haven’t, she’s the kind of person who makes this a conversation I’ve had more times than I can count, word-for-word: Me, to any number of friends: “My mum said to say hi.” The friend: “I love your mum.” Many of those same friends have rarely or never met my dad. Most of us think we lead pretty busy lives, but my dad truly is the poster child for busy people. This week, to celebrate his “retirement”, a tribute dinner was held in his honour. They didn’t bother to call it a retirement dinner, because everyone knows that would be ridiculous. In truth, while he has retired from his primary position, he continues as president of two companies and is still serving in major volunteer positions, a combination that would easily add up to more than a full-time job for most people. For him, it adds up to semi-retirement. But even though he’s not about to settle into a rocking chair on a porch, retiring after more than 30 years with London Drugs offered an opportunity for people to come and celebrate his contributions to their lives, their companies, their organizations, and more, and come they did. It was pretty special to be there and see over 700 people (the ones who managed to get tickets before they were all gone) fill the largest ballroom at the Hotel Vancouver to celebrate him and to contribute to the event’s secondary purpose as a fundraiser for bursaries at BCIT, his alma mater for which he has been a life-long champion. In his speech, Brandt Louie, head of the family that owns London Drugs, summed up my dad nicely: “If you know Wynne at all, you will know that telling him something is impossible is his idea of a challenge. While others are still thinking about it, he will just push ahead and show you how it gets done.” Even though that’s absolutely true, he’s the kind of person who believes that his success relies on the good team of people around him. His own speech that night touched on many of the experiences that have humbled him, moved him, excited him, and inspired him over the years, from spending time with well-known people like Walter Cronkite and Bill Clinton, whose attitude and intelligence, not their fame, impressed him, to the way the London Drugs family pulled together in the aftermath of the Stanley Cup riots, when the downtown store was hit hard by vandals and the staff was terrorized. There has been nothing boring about his career. He is often asked to speak to people about leadership, and in his speech on Wednesday, he gave his quick five tips for success. They are pretty straightforward, but they sum up his life pretty well, and I think they should apply to all of our journeys, too: 1. Work hard. 2. Love what you do: if you don’t, find something you do love and make the change. 3. Choose courage over popularity: popularity will keep you safe, he said, but it won’t let you make hard decisions that break new ground and move you forward. 4. Be curious. Never stop asking questions and learning. 5. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen to people who know more than you do, to good people whose opinions you value, to your own intuition, but never to naysayers and critics. “The critic club,” he said, “is the easiest one to join.” If you’re interested, there’s a great press release about the evening here. Share...
Weekend Wanders
How did it get to be Tuesday already? Here in BC, we’ve just come out of a much-needed, welcome long weekend, and I don’t really know how it disappeared so quickly. But of course it did, and now it’s time to leap into another busy week. But first, I thought I’d share a few things I’ve seen and places I’ve been in the last few days, IRL and online: The recent cold snap brought with it glorious sunshine here in the Lower Mainland. This meant that the treadmill at the gym suddenly had a most excellent view of the mountains and, one morning, a giant bald eagle circling the clear blue sky above the buildings. Not a bad place to work up a sweat, that’s for sure. At my local coffee shop on one of the coldest days last week, a handful of hardy customers (aka smokers, mostly, with this notable exception) sat outside on the patio. One of them, sitting up straight and tall in a patio chair the whole time, appearing to be part of the conversation, was a brindle Pitbull wearing a purple sweater and a knowing smile. It often takes me a few days to get to the links I open from tweets or Facebook, which puts me behind on things some of you may already have seen. But if you’re like me, maybe these are new to you: Russell Brand, who is a great writer, wrote this excellent piece for the Spectator in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. One of my favourite landscape photographers, mostly of the West Highlands in Scotland, is composer Steve Carter (@highlandrampage). Recently, he added a page to his website for the Rivendell Guest House in Shieldaig. Generations of my ancestors came from Shieldaig and the surrounding area, and this guest house was, for many years, the Temperance Inn run by my great great grandmother. I had the pleasure of eating dinner in the dining room at Rivendell in 2008, and even though I know the work that went into restoring a building that had fallen into terrible disrepair in the years between the Temperance and Rivendell, I could still feel the history of the place and imagine my ancestors in it. I’d love to go back again. And finally for today, Susanna Kearsley (I do occasionally remember who posted something I like!) linked to this lovely Bell’s Whisky ad from South Africa: Share...
Letter Month Guest Post
Have you signed up for the Month of Letters yet? The delightful Mary Robinette Kowal’s annual letter writing challenge kicks off tomorrow. Check it out here: http://lettermo.com/ Today, I have a guest post on the Month of Letters blog about fountain pen love. Share...
Sunday Morning Musing
Musing this Sunday morning about the fact that no matter how hard I try to pack it all in, there will never be enough hours to spend with the people I care about spend alone write all the books I want to write read all the books I want to read travel to all the places I want to go learn all the things I want to learn stop and admire all the views sleep see all the art, watch all the movies, listen to all the music explore all the nooks and crannies hang out and do nothing have all the conversations I want to have and so much more. Suddenly, that big pile of laundry I’d planned to do today seems a whole lot less important. Except, of course, for the problem of not wanting to do most of those things naked… Share...
New Year, New Schedule
Happy new year! It’s taken me this long to settle in to my regular routine again after the holidays, and I’m not sure I’m there even yet. But I’m working on it. I’m not a resolution kind of person, exactly. But I do find the quiet days between Boxing Day and New Year’s, and between New Year’s and the first day of school, some of the best of the year for reflecting on the things I’ve been working on and the year to come. I suppose those days feel a bit like I’ve hit the pause button. They’re quiet, without the busy socializing of the actual holidays, but also without the demands of my regular routine, and I tend to spend a fair bit of time in my head, assessing and looking ahead. And eating chocolate. There’ s no denying a lot of chocolate gets eaten during those days. But this past week, it was back to work and back to routine. And back, of course, to writing. I’ve set some pretty frightening goals for my writing year, given all the things other than writing that demand my time. I’ve talked here before about my Yahtzee-like schedule. Today, I finally sat down and made one for all of 2014. This time, I didn’t just do the daily word count part, but also added sections for bigger goals for each of the projects I’m working on (ie MS1: 10k, 20k, 30k and so on), so that I can keep track not only of what I want to accomplish this year, but of how those daily words add up to bigger achievements. It’s important, I think, to make note of our own successes. And for the first time, I also added in the other writing-related things I want to do this year, including places to indicate I’d written a blog post or sent a piece of snail mail (more on that in another post). It’s daunting, looking at it. So much so that I actually cringe when I see it and don’t want to look directly at it for fear of being entirely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the work ahead. But that’s the inherent beauty of this kind of schedule: I don’t have to look at the magnitude. All I have to do today is fill in that one little box. Just one. That’s all. I can do that. Share...
Happy Christmas
Whatever you celebrate and however you spend the holidays, I wish you joy, hope, wonder, and great reading material now and every day. See you in the new year! Share...
A Few Feel-Good Things
It’s nearly Christmas, and I’m feeling nostalgic for holidays past, and with that, am in the mood for touching stories. Thought I’d share a few things I’ve come across in the last few days. None of them are new, I don’t think, but with the exception of the last one, which is a holiday staple for me, I hadn’t come across any of them before, so maybe they’re new to you, too. Enjoy! I don’t know who linked to this (thank you), but it’s a story in tweets of a journalist’s experience with a couple of kids in difficult circumstances: http://storify.com/BostonDotCom/making-good-from-almost-nothing I can’t believe I’m sharing an ad, but parents of teenagers will probably like this offering from Apple: From last year, but new to me, is a fifteen-year-old storyteller. Loved this. And lastly, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without at least one viewing of Tim Minchin’s White Wine in the Sun. Merry Christmas! Share...
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