There’s something about growing up on a farm. Maybe it’s having total responsibility for an animal. Maybe it¹s the early morning hours, frost on the grain stubble. Maybe it’s the cooperative effort that every farm family must have. Whatever… Rick Schaly grew up with two passions: hockey and healing. After Sunnybrae School in Stroud, he…

Aaahhh… take me back to the days of the typewriter ribbon. You bought the reel of ribbon, mucked up your fingers with ink as you placed each real on the spools under the lid. Snap the lid down and you¹re good to go… for thousands and thousands of words. The typewriter ribbon kindly let you…

In 12 days, the front doors at 445 Blake St swing open officially. Several thousand square feet of gleaming newness will extend its arms to its community. Standing quietly to the side, smiling, shaking hands, and greeting their business families will be two men approaching middle age. Sounds reasonably ordinary. But it isn’t. It’s an…

My daytimer is old fashioned. It has a zipper and index tabs, calendars, and well thumbed pages. It holds notecards and stamps, for meaningful correspondence. It spills over with theatre tickets, dental appointments and sticky notes, with birthdays and anniversaries, pencilled in, in thehopes that I’ll remember. It’s a portable office, really, with lists of…

It was a chance meeting after a home and school meeting at Codrington School. It was 1953. Eileen Hankin was a young mom with a brood of little ones and like most young moms in the 50’s, she helped out at school. The family lived on Blake St and Eileen walked home with another mom…

Twenty percent of kids today have asthma. Many more have breathing problems. And then there are people on chemotherapy with weakened immune systems. And let’s add in those with respiratory problems. And what about kidney transplant patients? And those on dialysis. And those diabetics on daily doses of insulin. Add to that our aging population…

Kid three was married yesterday. Today, if you¹re reading this on Saturday. It’s a miracle, really, when two people declare their love for each other. It’s a miracle because, first of all, they found each other after they travelled and worked the country separately and the moved back home. Stress the ‘back home’ part. It’s…

The preacher’s kid is packing it in. Edwina Douglas, sadly no relation to me, has become an icon of voice in the region in the past few years. She arrived here in 1978, newly married, and bringing with her a lifelong history of stages and singing. As a child, Edwina sang in churches, standing on…

Lance is one motivating young man. At 11 years old, he’s busy as all get-out. He fishes, plays with friends, enjoys racing and basketball. He loved games of any kind and is a recognized chess player. He skis as often as he can. Lance does all this with the help of a powered wheelchair, a…

What a great vacation I’ve just had. While I missed writing my columns, I also really enjoyed my time away. Thank you Maureen Stoeken of S.O.S. Technical Writing for making sure Advance readers had interesting new material in my absence. So, you’ve invested in sneakers for your kids, new computer software for your high school…