I’m headed off the grid for a few days with my patient and long suffering mom, who has been waiting since February 26th to celebrate her 70th birthday with her only child.

Toasting our heritage in Meat Cove, Cape Breton

In case you want to hear the sound of my voice when I have a bad cold, give a listen to the World Cup preview chat I had with Christ Stafford at Dressage Radio a few days ago. As always, I try to make things easy for my readers: just click here to be whisked away into the world of internet radio, DQ style.

And since I’m on the topic of putting links to things, I’d like to apologize for the great hardship I have been causing a reader named Pamela, who complained on my last post that she has to go to more than one place in order to read all my blogs. She says she finds it “hard to be bothered to go to another site.” Pamela, I grieve for you. I realize that single click of the mouse can sometimes be more than a person can bear after a long day, or even at the beginning of one. For those of you who can bring yourselves to open more than one page in your browser at a time, I have made a point of embedding links (just like this one) from one blog to the other within posts; I have even put a permanent link to Low-Down on Straight-Up’s home page and vice versa.  I guess some readers have failed to note that, rather than spreading my opinions more thinly because of the second blog, I have in fact doubled down. More posts, more topics. Surely that helps to compensate for that exhausting extra mouse click, no?

Now I have to go pack the dog’s back pack (no, he is not made to carry it)  and rubber boots for the Tofino beaches,  and go buy some delicious treats to cook my mom for her belated birthday party.  TTY next week.