a peek inside the fishbowl

I have a very long story to share in the New Year about a special challenge my family has undertaken this past year. For now, I will say this: Mark and I aren’t exchanging Christmas gifts this year and we have laid out some criteria as it pertains to our stockings. The criteria is this: […]

How do you show someone you love them, honour them, respect them? You can definitely buy a gift, a bouquet of flowers, a box of chocolates, or send a card. Teachers get mugs, retirees get a cake, graduates get a laptop. These are great – and HELLO – who wouldn’t like cake! Certainly, gifts have […]

A Fishbowl reader was looking for last-minute gift ideas for tweens and teens this week. I pointed her to this past post, but I wanted to add a few of my personal faves here too: Texting gloves so they can text without their fingers freezing (Here’s a pair from MEC.) Blanket scarves – apparently it’s cool to bundle […]

This is where my brain has been these past couple of weeks: This is where my brain has been as I walked and up down Westboro and West Wellington/Hintonburg (two of my favourite shopping districts in Ottawa!), and this is where my brain was as I spent untold minutes idling in abysmal Merivale Road traffic yesterday. […]

When I was a teenager I wanted a tattoo of an ankh. It looks like a cross but it’s looped at the top, a symbol used in ancient Egypt to mean eternal life. (Here’s the Wikipedia entry about it if you’re not sure what I mean.) At one point I even tossed around the idea of having it branded into […]