Ever look around your house and feel buried by your possessions? Well, I was visiting a friend of mine recently. She and her husband have moved into a spacious new condo. It’s sleek and uncluttered, and comfortable. What makes it feel spacious, however, is the total lack of clutter of any kind. Understated. Classy. That’s…

Last week I widened the gap between the teens of the 60’s who are the mothers of teens at the end of the 90’s as I shared some of the content of one of the top teen girls’ magazines in 1963. I ventured into the magazine racks this week in search of an enlightened magazine…

What a trip down memory lane the other day. My work associate, Simone, brought in a couple of her old issues of Co-ed Magazine. This is the magazine most of us drooled over in the 60’s. April. September. 1963. When my daughter looked at these issues last night, she had only one comment… oh, my!…

In every community there are people who receive and people who give. When I moved here 30 years ago, what struck me then is how healthy this community is. And part of that health is the tremendous efforts of volunteers who make untallied contributions to all aspects of community life. Some are more visible than…

I dropped in to see Flory Pavlik the other day. Flory hails from Czechoslovakia and his wife, Wilma, from Yorkton, Saskatchewan. But these are real Barrie people. Just like me. We met back in 1972 when Wilma Pavlik invited me to their home for a discussion. I had recently been appointed Editor of a struggling,…

Today is Sunday. Next Thursday I will be standing with hundreds of others at the Cenotaph in downtown Barrie. I’ll be thinking about the young men especially who, without warning and with little choice, went off to foreign countries and died on foreign soil to maintain a democracy that they’d always known. I’ll also think…

We’re all customers, every one of us. And to some extent, we all serve customers, whether we work for someone else or we’re self employed. A group of us, who are self employed, talked the other night about the customers we’d like to fire… those people that suck up gobs of time and still belittle…

When I started writing this column, I promised myself that I wanted this space to reflect the positive, exciting, pro-active side of life in the Barrie region. There are enough words and airwaves devoted to the negatives in our lives. This week, I want to venture outside Barrie, to the north and the east a…

Gail French is one of those givers in life. She has donated her incredible skills at creating websites to a number of non profit organizations. The recent Destination: Leadership Conference at Georgian College is a case in point. The conference was a top flight event featuring internationally reknowned speakers and splendid local talent, all pooled…

So you own a business and you need somebody to anchor the front desk at night. Or you need cleaning staff part time mid-day. Or, maybe somebody to enter reams of data on a repetitive basis. Most business owners go the traditional route when looking to fill part time or full time, permanent or temporary,…