Odds & ends for the weekend

• Yesterday felt kind of like when my grandparents died (in October 1998 and October 1999). It was a day that I knew was coming, sooner versus later -- but hoped never would. It's hard to believe the Queen is gone. She's been such a constant my entire life.... most people's lives! and sometimes it was easy to believe she would always be there, because she always had been. If you're under 70, you've never known another monarch. 
• Dh told me when I got up that the Queen was not well. We flipped around between coverage on CBC, CNN & BBC World all morning. 
• I was itching to get out, having spent the past several days at home, and we had a couple of errands to run, so we went out shortly after lunch. I went into one store while dh waited outside in the car... got in line for the checkout & got out my phone to text him that I'd be out soon -- and found a text from him from 20 minutes earlier saying the Queen had died. I didn't even hear the notification. 
• As I've written here before, I've been an almost lifelong fan of the Queen and the Royal Family, at least as far back as when I was in Grade 1 (about 1967):  we had two lovely young practice teachers with us for a few weeks, and they did a unit with us about the Queen and the Royal Family, which piqued my interest in the subject. 
• A few years later, in July 1970, we saw the Queen, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne at an outdoor church service at the fairgrounds grandstand in Dauphin, Manitoba, part of the Manitoba Centennial celebrations. My grandparents came for the occasion, and my sister & I wore the dresses we'd worn a few weeks earlier for our aunt's wedding. :)  They drove by us on the way out in an open convertible, so close that, as my Grandpa marvelled, "I could have reached out and touched her." (There are photos, somewhere!) 
• No matter what you think of monarchy as an institution, I don't think anyone can deny that she was a remarkable woman who did her job extremely well -- for SEVENTY! YEARS!!  
• It's the end of an era. :(  
• Past posts about the Royals here. 
• I know the Queen's death has hit a nerve with a few CNBCers -- the images of the family rushing to be with her at Balmoral in particular (who's going to be at MY deathbed??).  
• I had to bite my cybertongue soooooo hard on Tuesday, when a friend posted on social media that she was feeling "a little left out"... everyone was posting their kids' back-to-school photos, and it was the first year she wasn't sending hers off to school.  
• SHE'S feeling left out??!! 
• To add insult to injury, she's a fellow loss mom. (!!) 
• Jennie Agg, who blogs at The Uterus Monologues, also has a Substack newsletter by the same name. (Substack is the new blogging, lol.) Loved this recent repost from her archives, "Sharp objects: when back-to-school week hurts." Here's the opening: 
  

"It’s back to school season, and that means running the daily social media assault course of first-day-of-school pictures (I can’t be alone in thinking of it in these combative terms, can I?). A week-long parade of other people’s babies – and they do often look like mere babies, play-acting in their Big School uniforms – heading out of the door, grown, growing…

 

"In the first week in September, the online chorus from mums of ‘please don’t get any bigger!’ and ‘where has my baby gone?’ seems to get louder. It’s unfair of me, perhaps, but I find these declamations hard to hear and even harder to sympathise with. They hurt, frankly, when your doorway is empty."

• Earlier this week, I wrote about the sad recent events in Saskatchewan. I've been thinking about when we lived in that area, in the early 1960s, from the time I was 2 until I was 5 (we then moved to another town -- still small, but larger -- down the road, where we lived until I was 8, before we then moved back to Manitoba). 
• The James Smith Cree Nation, where many of the murders took place, was not a familiar name to me -- but I remember my mother telling me about taking us to a rodeo/carnival on a reservation at a place called "Fort La Corne," where there were costumed native dancers, and she said my eyes were as big as saucers when I saw them!  I do have a very vivid memory of seeing a man in a full feathered headdress -- just like the Indians I saw in the movies and on TV. ;)  
• I Googled to see where exactly Fort LaCorne was and found an article on it in Wikipedia. It was actually Fort de la Corne, a fur-trading post founded in the 1750s (more than 200 years before we lived there!) -- and the area is currently being developed to mine diamonds (!).  And there was this sentence:  "Today the Fort à la Corne Provincial Forest surrounds the site of the old fur trade posts. The site was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1926. The James Smith First Nation is nearby." Both places are almost directly north of the town where we lived.