Writing Companions by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan/


My Writing Companions

I first began my writing career with a short story about an injured hawk my son and I found beside the highway. We took him home to our acreage and named him Highway. We nursed him for a few days then set him free. He decided he liked us and moved into the bushes around our acreage.

       This story lead to the publication of historical and travel articles and finally seven travel books. To research these books over the years I travelled and camped throughout British Columbia, Alberta, and the Yukon and Alaska. My travelling companion was a cockapoo dog named Chevy. He inspected attractions with me, hikes trails with me, and waited patiently in my vehicle when I had to go into a building. We would be on the road for a month or more at a time taking pictures, learning history, and meeting people.

       At the end of each trip I’d be glad to get home and begin to unload my vehicle. Chevy would jump out and check the house and yard. I thought he was happy to be home also until I would go into my vehicle and find him lying in his place on the seat. I’d tell him we were home to stay and put him on the ground. I’d gather up more stuff to carry into the house and when I came out for my next load he was once again on the seat. I guess he wasn’t taking a chance that I would leave him. That little guy lived to be seventeen and was a great companion.

       I have had as many as five cats at a time over the years—I’m now down to three. When I am writing, one’s favourite spot is on my lap, another likes to sit on the desk between me and my computer screen, and the third one sits on the floor and talks to me trying to distract my thoughts. But I don’t mind. They are a joy to have.

Cold Capitals are Cool

For more information about Susan Calder's books, or to purchase visit her Books We Love Author Page.

This winter, rather than escape for a week on a warm beach I went to Ottawa, Canada, one of the coldest national capital cities in the world.

On December 27, 2017, Ottawa, with temperatures of -29 degrees Celsius, was the world's coldest capital city.  

The draw was my son, his wife and their six-month old daughter. Fortunately, Ottawa weather co-operated for the long family weekend in February. With temperatures hovering around the freezing mark, we were able to get out and enjoy the city's annual festival, Winterlude.

Winterlude - ice carving demonstration

While the rest of us watched the action, my son skated on the Rideau Canal, the world's largest skating rink.

We continued to Parliament Hill, which features a hockey rink set up for Canada's 150th birthday.

Winter isn't cold when you're bundled-up

The next day we drove to a maple sugar farm outside of Ottawa. It was a few days early for the sap to run, but we enjoyed the taffy pull on snow and pancake brunch.

The Rideau Canal Skateway runs a distance of 7.8 km from Dow's Lake to downtown Ottawa, enabling energetic commuters to skate to work. On day three we walked from my son's house to the lake. The next day the city closed the whole Skateway for the season due to the increasingly mild temperatures.

Rain started that night and continued for two days. My husband and I escaped indoors with friends at the Museum of Science and Technology. Fun activities included steam trains, a Crazy Kitchen with a cock-eyed design that left me feeling queasy, and a computer game exhibit with holograph costumes.

The exhibit reminded me that many computer games take players through a story and developing game scripts is an up-and-coming field for writers. Perhaps my young granddaughter will one day combine math and writing skills and choose this intriguing career.  

The winter holiday made me curious about where Ottawa ranks on the list of cold national capital cities. My Internet source, Worldatlas, rates Canada's capital #7, based on average annual daily (24 hour) temperature. Ottawa lost its 3rd place status after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when Moscow ceded second place to Astana, Kazakhstan.

Moscow, Russia, the world's third coldest national capital city. 

All of the world's coldest capital cities are in the Northern hemisphere. The southern capitals don't reach far enough south. The world's southernmost capital is Wellington, New Zealand. Due to water currents, the northernmost capital, Reykjavik, Iceland, only makes #5 on the list.

Reykjavik, Iceland

And the winner (or should we say loser?) of the coldest capital city award is --

Ulaan-Baatar, Mongolia, with an average annual temperature of -1.3 degrees Celsius (29.7 F) and below zero temperatures for five months of the year.

Ulaan-Baatar, Mongolia

Here's the complete list of the world's top seven coldest capital cities.

1. Ulaan-Baatar, largest city in Mongolia. In January and February, the coldest months, temperatures range between -15 C and -40 C.

2. Astana, Kazakhstan. The climate is extreme. In summer temperatures occasionally reach 35 C (95 F) while winter temperatures fall to -35 C (-22 to -31 F) between mid-December and early March. Annual average is 3.5 C.

Astana - futuristic towers rise abruptly from the steppe

3. Moscow, Russia, 'enjoys' long, cold winters from mid-November to late March. Summer temperatures range from 10-35 C (50-95 F). Average annual daily temperature 4.1 C (39.4 F). 

4. Helsinki, Finland (4.5 C / 40.1 F). The average winter temperature in the coldest months, January and February, is -5 C. The Baltic Sea and North Atlantic Current moderate temperatures, keeping the city somewhat warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

5. Reykjavik, Iceland (4.6 C / 40.3 F) is also moderated by the North Atlantic Current, an extension of the Gulf Stream.

6. Tallinn, Estonia (4.8 C / 40.6 F), the capital and largest city of Estonia, is called 'the Silicon Valley of Europe.' Skype got its start here. Tallinn's location on the Gulf of Finland moderates its climate.

7. Ottawa, Canada, average annual temperature 5.5 C / 41.9 F. Canada's fourth largest city, with the country's most educated population and highest standard of living. Winters are snowy and cold; summers warm and humid. In July the average daily high is 26.6 C (80 F). Despite being #7 on the cold capitals list, my friends in Ottawa wouldn't live there without air conditioning.

But now it's March, the coldest days of winter are past and Ottawa looks forward to its spring tulip festival, when millions of tulips bloom through Canada's capital city. Every year The Netherlands sends tulip bulbs for the festival as thanks to Ottawa for housing the Dutch royal family during World War II.

.

  

If it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It! By Gail Roughton

And Speaking of Broken...

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed this thing humans do?  Something can be working just fine, and then, out of the blue--Bam!  Somebody sneaks up behind you and something you depend on as being fixed and immutable isn't fixed and immutable anymore.  It's changed.  

I guess in the back of my mind I always knew this, but this past Christmas brought that little fact forcibly to my attention.  See, we're a board game family.  Always were, and the good Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, always will be.  Certainly we go to a lot of effort to insure that the two current members of the next generation, presently 11 and 5, are very well acquainted with all the classic board games their mother and uncles grew up with.  Said classic board games having resided in the hall closet--some going on thirty and even forty years old now--a few of them had, to all intents and purposes, bitten the dust and were in dire need of replacement.  

Monopoly's gone modern and global to a large extent, producing different versions offering global properties, complete with electronic banks and debit cards, all of which I carefully avoided when ordering our original, standard Monopoly's replacement.  I have this insane theory that punching a debit card into an electronic bank that instantly computes a player's assets and deducts or adds the appropriate amounts of money to the players' balances really doesn't do much insofar as teaching grammar school students how to add and subtract and make change, go figure.  So I was very careful to buy the version that still uses paper money. The same version my children had grown up playing.  Not.

Well, not exactly, anyway.  Did y'all know the rules for initial distribution of money in Monopoly have changed?  The rules I still remember learning at age 6 or 7 specified each player received ten $1.00's, five $5.00's, five $10.00's, six $20.00's, two $50.00's, two $100.00, and two $500.00's.  And all the money came in a long, narrow cardboard compartment made like a cash register drawer, with each individual compartment actually holding all the different denominations securely in place.  So imagine my surprise when we first opened the new Monopoly Grandmama and Granddaddy had wrapped for the kids for Christmas and found out the money rules had changed?  Now the proper distribution is five $1.00's, one $5.00, two $10.00's, one $20.00, one $50.00, four $100.00's and two $500.00's.  And Grandmama's street cred as the Knower of All Rules of all board games took a nosedive.  Not only that, but the little cardboard compartments are no more, there's a plastic tray with compartments at each end to hold the deeds, Community Chest and Chance cards and little slots between them for standing each denomination up vertically, which means they fall all over themselves during actual play.  Now I ask you--what were they thinking when they figured that was an improvement?  

All that's manageable, though.  A bit of an adjustment but hey! I'm flexible.  Then we opened the new Stratego because that was the one our 5 year old granddaughter wanted to play. It's a two player game, but no way is a 5 year old playing it by herself, so she played with Granddaddy and I played the other side.  And the world rocked in its orbit.  Rocked, I tell you, rocked!  The version of Stratego my boys grew up playing assigned  the higher numbers to the lower ranks, with Scouts being 9's, Miner's being 8's, on up through Colonels being 3's, the General 2 and the Marshall 1.  The board for our original game's actually still in pretty good shape and it even says so. Plus we still have the pieces and since there's only one 1 for each color, it's a sure bet that's gotta be the Marshall dude, am I right?

But the rules for the new edition?  Oh, dear Lord.  They reversed it!!  The higher numbers are assigned to the highest ranks and the lower numbers to the lower ranks.  The Marshall's a 10! The Miners, the most valuable of all pieces regardless of how high an opinion the Marshall has of himself, the only ones who can diffuse a mine field, the ones who'd been 8's since the beginning of time--they're 3's!!!! Do you have any idea how hard it is switch-hit retired brains from an 8 to a 3?  And the Scouts are 2's, not 9's! Forget any of that for a minute when you're setting up and you're doomed, because you've put all your high ranking officers right up in the front lines and you're using them as Scouts! 

Do you know what this means? It means sometime in the last twenty years, somebody somewhere decided it was a good idea to completely reverse the rules of Stratego.  Minds. Blown. Hubby and I, despite ourselves, kept right on playing as though Miners were 8s' and then groaning, "Oh, no! That's not right, I did it again!" We haven't been the same since. Stratego wasn't broken, I can't understand why they had to fix it.  

Speaking of broken, though, did you know--legend has it there're a few "broken" spots in a stretch of ocean known as the Bermuda Triangle, a spot where things just disappear.  In reality though, maybe there's nothing "broken" about it.  Maybe there's a door or two that just pick and choose when they open and who comes through...

You ain't in Kansas anymore!

For More by Gail Roughton, Visit BWL!