The world would be a much darker place without music. All types of music can inspire and energize us, mark our special moments, and fill our days with cheer. And while any kind of music that you enjoy can help with the winter blues, there are a number of studies on how classical music can […]
Author: Sheryl Kirby
Meditate – Self Care Month Day 11
When you’re feeling blue and not especially enthused about life, sitting and doing nothing can either seem ideal or absolutely horrible. There are lots of good excuses to avoid meditating, such as; what if my back starts to hurt, I don’t know how to do it, what type of meditation should I try, should I […]
15 Minute Tidy – Self Care Month Day 10
Depression can be a huge Catch 22. We feel too terrible to get up and do anything, and because we don’t get up to do anything, we feel even more terrible. This theory applies to the space around us as well. When we can’t find the energy to get out of bed, general tidying can […]
Get a Massage – Self Care Month Day 9
If some of the self care suggestions I offer sound decadent or unaffordable, trust me when I tell you that they’re not. Take massage, for instance. We often think of a relaxing massage as part of a larger “spa day”, when in fact, massage on its own can do much not only to aid relaxation […]
Get Talking – Self Care Month Day 8
When I went through a depressive period a couple of years ago, one of the things I really wanted to do was talk about it. This was mostly me trying to understand what was happening in my head (the depression and anxiety originally started because of a weird drug reaction), but I quickly realized that […]
Get Some Fresh Air – Self Care Month Day 7
So I know that yesterday I advised keeping warm, and that still stands, but please also consider opening a window. Or all of your windows. At least for a bit each day. Here’s the thing – indoor air quality can be worse than the outdoors. Stuff like dust, mildew and pet dander can trigger allergies […]
Things Are Heating Up – Self Care Month Day 6
February is cold. Here in Toronto, the first two weeks of February are typically the coldest of the year. For many of us with illnesses such as arthritis, or chronic injuries (old sprains, herniated discs), the cold weather also means extra aches and pains. Keeping warm is an important self care activity at this time, […]
Boost Your Signal to Noise Ratio – Self Care Month Day 5
In olde internet times, we would talk about the quality of the information we’d encounter by referring to the good stuff as “signal” and all the other crap as “noise”. So a high signal-to-noise ratio mean that the group or community was enjoyable and useful. If the ratio was low, then that meant it was […]
Get a Good Night’s Sleep – Self Care Month Day 4
Five more minutes! We’ve all heard, or said, this refrain. Some of us multiple times each morning. But a proper sleep is the most basic, and one of the most important, forms of self care. I mean, I know why people don’t sleep enough, because there is so much to do and not enough time […]
Pat a Dog – Self Care Month Day 3
Or a cat, or a bird. I advise against chasing down animals in the wild, but having animals in our lives has huge health benefits, from increasing our circle of friends and acquaintances to lowering stress. Having a dog will get you up and moving, for both walks and play; will likely make you more […]
You’ve got to Move It, Move It – Self Care Month Day 2
No, wait, come back. I didn’t mean you have to, you know, jog… or anything. I promise. But if we’re going to be honest about self care, we do have to talk about exercise. Seeing as we’ve hit February, it’s probably safe to say that there are fewer people at the gyms than there were […]
Let There Be Light – Self Care Month Day 1
Welcome to February. February sucks. In the northern hemisphere, February is likely to be the coldest month, and the time when we’re most likely to feel down, either because of mental health issues such as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or just because the cold weather makes it feel as if there just isn’t that much to […]
Book Review – The Neapolitan Quartet by Elena Ferrante
My Brilliant Friend The Story of a New Name Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay The Story of the Lost Child Elena Ferrante It’s January and with this chilly month comes the typical list of resolutions, including the one to read more. I don’t necessarily want to read more, but I do want to […]
Book Review – 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl Mona Awad It’s not easy being a fat girl. It’s hard to find clothes, airplane seats and uncomfortable and everybody seems to have an opinion on your girth. Especially yourself. Mona Awad’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl is a collection of 13 short stories […]
I’m An Adult Now – Steam Cleaners
One of the important parts of adulting is knowing the how, when and why of keeping things clean. When I recently posted to Facebook about steam cleaning my sofa I got an incredulous reply from a friend exclaiming that they didn’t even know you could do such a thing, and please would I explain how. […]
Book Review – Four Great Books About Strong, Amazing Women
Not by design, my fiction selections recently have all been about strong, amazing women, and have all been written by women. This is the general inclination of my taste in fiction anyway (more Colette, less Hemingway), but there seems to be a general consensus in the mainstream that there just aren’t great stories about strong […]
TV Party Tonight – The Royle Family
There’s some serendipity in how Greg and I came to find ourselves marathoning all three seasons and five specials of The Royle Family recently. We had been watching a UK series called Born On The Same Day, which followed three notable Brits who were all born on the same day. On July 2, we watched […]
Theatre Review – The Elephant Girls
The very best live theatre is the stuff that piques the curiosity and sends the viewer off down a rabbit hole of learning and experience. Shortly after my husband told me about an upcoming BBC series about the 40 Elephants, we came across a listing for Margo MacDonald’s one-woman play The Elephant Girls at Buddies […]
Delight of the Day – The Most-Loved Recipe
Here in Toronto, we don’t often have a lot of events akin to the car boot sale or flea market. (We have flea markets but they’re posher things with a mix of antique dealers, local artisans and food trucks.) People wanting to get rid of stuff, especially if they live in flats, tend to either […]
The Man in the Blue Jacket
I never met Bill Cunningham. He never took my photo and published in in the New York Times. But like millions of people around the world, the news of his death at 87 this past Saturday brought me to tears. He seemed – from the 2010 documentary about him and from the voice-overs he did […]