~~July 23, 2014~~ 

THIS IS A TEST

I’ve been in conversations with the WordPress Help/Support team. 

They have been giving me instructions on how to fix my problem. It’s frustrating for me and must be tedious for them.

“If the blog is loading that slowly, it’s perfectly natural that the sidebar would not appear; it is the last thing to load. But you ALSO have serious, cumulative HTML errors from pasting junk code into the blog.

Staff have fixed the Paste so now you cannot paste in junk code, but that doesn’t help you because the errors are already there.

To fix this, go to Settings – >Writing and select “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML” and save that setting. Then go to the dashboard Posts -> All posts page, set the posts to Private, then set them back to Public. Then scroll back and do the same for the…

~~July 23, 2014~~ 

THIS IS A TEST

I’ve been in conversations with the WordPress Help/Support team. 

They have been giving me instructions on how to fix my problem. It’s frustrating for me and must be tedious for them.

“If the blog is loading that slowly, it’s perfectly natural that the sidebar would not appear; it is the last thing to load. But you ALSO have serious, cumulative HTML errors from pasting junk code into the blog.

Staff have fixed the Paste so now you cannot paste in junk code, but that doesn’t help you because the errors are already there.

To fix this, go to Settings – >Writing and select “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML” and save that setting. Then go to the dashboard Posts -> All posts page, set the posts to Private, then set them back to Public. Then scroll back and do the same for the…

I have been thinking about children this week. The innocent victims of a wave of violence and madness that has swept through the international and local news, without a care for their souls and their small precious lives. Four children killed while playing on a beach in Palestine (not to mention the many others killed, injured and orphaned during the Israeli incursions); three children burned to death in a home in Jamaica, locked in and trapped by metal grilles and dying together in a bath filled with water; eighty children going on holiday, some homeward bound, with parents and family members, with their books and games and soft toys, blown out of the sky by a missile over a troubled area of Ukraine; two children found murdered in a pond in deep rural Jamaica. Why the suffering?

Three children died in this house fire in Negril, Westmoreland last Friday. They…

I have been thinking about children this week. The innocent victims of a wave of violence and madness that has swept through the international and local news, without a care for their souls and their small precious lives. Four children killed while playing on a beach in Palestine (not to mention the many others killed, injured and orphaned during the Israeli incursions); three children burned to death in a home in Jamaica, locked in and trapped by metal grilles and dying together in a bath filled with water; eighty children going on holiday, some homeward bound, with parents and family members, with their books and games and soft toys, blown out of the sky by a missile over a troubled area of Ukraine; two children found murdered in a pond in deep rural Jamaica. Why the suffering?

Three children died in this house fire in Negril, Westmoreland last Friday. They…

May their souls rest in peace

May their loved ones find strength

May this never happen again…

May their souls rest in peace

May their loved ones find strength

May this never happen again…

Some people inspire me no end.

Muriel Mason is one of them.

Muriel has been painting since childhood.

“Actually, for as long as I can remember,” she says.

She’s self-taught.

Born and raised in England, Muriel taught physical education and anatomy at a high school. She and her husband Michael, a professor of English, moved to Zimbabwe, then Canada, with their two sons in 1966. They live in a village east of Toronto.

Artistic talent runs in the family. Michael has written poetry and prose, son Paul is an accomplished author, and Robin is a lawyer who also writes.

Muriel and Michael Mason

Over several decades, Muriel’s art has been recognized repeatedly.

Since 1985, her work has been accepted into juried shows of watercolour miniatures in Washington, DC and Florida and in a special show in Sweden. In 1986, she was elected a fellow of the Ottawa Watercolour Society and…