The Seated View

We were officially reached the time when a nice, sunny day means that it's cold outside, I am wearing socks (and not presenting it) and the Santa Claus Parade is this weekend. It's inevitable. The holidays are just around the corner. Which naturally means that it's time for the annual The Seated View Calendar ! This year, the front cover is graced by this little guy And he's not alone. Birds are a bit of a theme this year, appearing on a sparrow card , as well And speaking of cards, this year I picked a few scenes. One where it looked like the Christmas Light Fairy went a little berserk in this very festive Toronto neighbourhood Another reminds me that snow can be beautiful I also created some posters and prints of some of my favourite shots from the year. These grasses remind me that summer will be back And this scene from under the sea ? I want to live there. Hop on over to The Seated View shop on Zazzle to see these and many more des...

Late Monday night, through a perfect storm of triggering factors, I experienced a nasty migraine aura, the likes of which I haven’t had in a very long time. This was no namby-pamby aura. No, this was the kind that came with flashing lights and shapes obscuring half of my visual field, leaving me with a simile of going blind that I didn’t appreciate at all. Luckily, I managed to snag an attendant and get to bed very quickly. Since then, I’ve had the companionship of a particularly insistent migraine. Which I also haven’t appreciated at all. As I was seeing the nurse at my doctor’s office for my Humira shot on Tuesday anyway, I asked if it was possible I could hop in to see my doctor to get a medication that kicked more butt than Tylenol. After I explained the situation, she asked a number of questions, clearly screening me for something more serious (like a stroke): Had my speech been affected? Well, not so much this time, but verbal clumsiness and having trouble finding th...

Two weeks ago, we went to the new Ripley's Aquarium in Toronto. We'd been waiting on tenterhooks for months, if not longer in this wasn't helped it owl by their really excellent buzz building marketing before opening. I'm pretty sure thousands of people in Toronto were bursting from anticipation. It's taken a while working through the many, many (and many) photos from the day. In fact, there are so many, that the story of the day needs to be told in two different posts. Today, I'm focusing on the jaw-dropping beauty. Which it took a while to figure out how to photograph, but after 50 or so very blurred photos, I think I finally got there. I'll do the second post about the aquarium in the next few weeks and so, telling the story of us there. Today, though, not so many words. I'll just let the undersea world speak for itself.      

Every now and again, the universe tells me in no uncertain terms that it’s time to write about a certain topic. This is one of those times. Between talking about my own dark time as part of the RA multimedia project and reading this heart wrenching and beautiful post from my friend RA Guy about his trip into the abyss earlier this year, suicide has been on my mind.   Chronic illness and depression go hand-in-hand and so it is with RA. According to Johns Hopkins, chronic pain exacerbates depression and from an intellectual standpoint, it’s not surprising that some of those people who are depressed consider suicide . And some do more than consider. But this is not an intellectual post that delves into the research. This post is very personal. Nine years ago, I was in the middle of a horrendous flare and waiting for funding so I could start a biologic. Nine years ago, the only way I could get through each day was to set a limit on how long I would have to endure the pain t...

Never in a million years did I imagine that someday, I would be in this situation   But I get ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning. You may have noticed that I’ve been rather absent from the blog lately. As you may have suspected based on that photo up there, I have a very good reason. Recently, HealthCentral started a brand-new project, something really exciting. They’re going to do a multimedia profile of three people with different conditions. These types of projects are a wonderful blend of different types of media, allowing for rich and textured in-depth storytelling. Yeah, I know. It sounds like I was just pitching something, but really. It’s the only way I can describe it. See Snowfall . Or Firestorm . Anyway! The conditions they’re focusing on are Chron’s, psoriasis and RA. I helped put together profiles for a number of people, both writers for HealthCentral's RA site and others in the community and submitted them to the team in charg...