One of the things I miss about radio is the immediate feedback, people calling in to tell you they appreciate the song you just played, to make a request or sometimes just to chat. I don’t get that in my current radio gig, though there is the occasional email contact with listeners, if the customer […]

When we went for our walk Sunday afternoon, the first thing we came across was this sign. We hadn’t planned on tobogganing, so it wasn’t too much of a disappointment to discover that the hill was closed. It is April after all. Looking at the hill though. I didn’t see why it should be closed. […]

Sunday was a beautiful Spring day, so instead of going home right after church we went for a walk. Ottawa is blessed with an abundance of urban forest. I looked it up and though the numbers seemed a little fluid, it seems the city has about 40,000 hectares of forest and parkland. That number seemed […]

I ignored the news story at first. Rick Hansen’s daughter gave birth to a stillborn child. I wondered, why is that news? Canadians recognize Rick Hansen‘s name. Confined to a wheelchair after an accident when he was 15, he rolled across Canada (and 33 other countries, more than 40,000 kilometres) from 1985-87, to raise money […]

The guys wanted barbecue, which obviously meant something different from my understanding of the word. They were from Louisiana after all, and I gathered this was some sort of southern cooking, not sticking hot dogs on a grill. I had met up with the guys in LeRoux (see the previous two posts) and they wanted […]

“Rock and roll is not pretty, but somebody’s gotta do it.” – Bobby Campo. I only met him once, but that statement has been stuck in my head for more than 30 years. Bobby Campo was then (and for most of the past four decades) percussionist, horn player and violinist for LeRoux (or Louisiana’s LeRoux […]

It was Easter weekend, 1982 I think, and I was in Detroit. I had made the 11 hour bus ride because a friend had called and said LeRoux was playing at Harpo’s and did I want to go? I had been intrigued by LeRoux’s latest album, which would turn out to be their last with […]

The National Hockey League playoffs start tonight, and the Ottawa Senators will be squaring off against the Montreal Canadiens. Does anyone care? Apparently millions of people do. Montreal has always been hockey mad, and the Canadiens are the league’s most storied franchise, an obsession throughout the province of Quebec. The Senators don’t have the same […]

I’m typing this on Sunday night at the end of a busy weekend. I have half a dozen posts that are ready to go, but none of them feel quite right for a Monday morning. Or maybe it is just that I don’t feel like reading them over to make sure they make sense  sometimes […]

While in Germany last summer we visited Museum Abtei Liesborn, which has the largest collection of crucifixes in Germany, more than 800 of them. I have written about that visit already, but thought today i would share just a couple more photos from that exhibit. These crucifixes are from different times and places, but I […]