Rae's Blog
Welcome to Rae Stonehouse's Blog. Your source of rants, musings & free, unsolicited sage advice from Rae Stonehouse.
It seems a little weird talking about yourself in the 3rd person at times.
While I'm fairly new to blogging, I'm not new to writing advice articles and offering opinions on subjects that I know something about. As well as subjects that I don't know much about for that matter! I just haven't shared them via a formalized blog.
I have been fairly active on Quora.com, having written over 800 responses and over one million views of my responses. I post many of my responses here in this website. I was awarded a Quora Top Writer Award for 2018.
If you are interested in learning tips, techniques & solutions for everyday challenges and thought-provoking on subjects such as mental health, workplace conflict, public speaking, personal & business networking, job search strategies, to name a few, then I would expect you will find this blog to be of interest and value.
Feel free to comment on any of my blog posting and keep the converstation going, on-line and among your own circle of contacts.
Onwards & upwards!
Rae Stonehouse
On the Roof: A Lesson from the School Of Hard Knocks Series
Written by Rae Stonehouse
Welcome to the first offering in my Lessons from the School of Hard Knocks Series.
Some people seem to learn things easily. Not me, I’ve had to learn many lessons the hard way, hence the reference to the School of Hard Knocks. Yes, I’ve been knocked around more than a few times in my quest for knowledge.
They say that experience is a good teacher. The saying ‘you learn through your pocketbook’ holds true for me. Many of my life’s lessons had to paid for with cash. Money I had to earn elsewhere.
The concept behind these lessons will be that I will share a few short personal anecdotes, then conclude with a teaching point.
Kelowna City Hall: Officious & Unapologetic … Business as Usual?
Written by Rae Stonehouse
This is an announcement advising all my friends, relatives and connections that my family and I will be moving from our home of 16 years to our new location of … well … exactly the same location!
File this one under ‘Absolutely Ridiculous.’
Last week I received a registered letter from the City of Kelowna.
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Here’s the scenario:
My desktop PC decides to display the dreaded blue screen of death. I haven’t seen one for years. After numerous restarts, nothing but blue screen.
The next step was to fire up the laptop to visit Mr. Google to research how to reboot a PC after a Windows 10 crash.
My laptop booted successfully and I was able to locate several pages that offered ‘solutions’ to my problem. And I use the term solutions, lightly.
As I didn’t have a start-up disk or thumb-drive with fix-it technology installed, I worked my way through the other options.
Nothing worked. This necessitated bringing out the big hammer in PC repair … reinstalling Windows 10. Ouch!
Smokanagan 2018: Smoke on the Water - Fire in the Hills
Written by Rae Stonehouse
Once upon a time, the hot dry summers of the Okanagan Valley were anticipated by its citizens and tourists from far off lands … well, at least from Alberta. Sun worshippers would travel here to languish in the endless sunshine and take in all the benefits the Okanagan lifestyle has to offer.
That Okanagan summer vacation destination perspective may become a distant memory if the trend of the past few years continues.
The electrical storm of last week sparked at least seven different forest fires in a twenty-mile radius of Kelowna, with more seemingly random fires popping up on a daily basis.
We are a Valley under siege by Mother Nature. The fires and the damage they cause are horrific. Firefighters are staying ahead of this round of the battle and I don’t believe there has been any major property loss i.e. buildings and homes.
Cats are known for being extremely agile creatures.
Scientific research has shown that if you push a cat off a fence it will almost always land on its four feet.
And before your mind starts wandering and wondering about that particular fact, I want to let you know that I don't go around pushing cats off fences for research purposes.
However, I have pushed quite a few household cats off our kitchen countertops and believe me, they are not so agile when they go flying through the air.
I was listening to Billy Joel’s Piano Man on my truck stereo on the way into work this evening.
And whenever I hear the song, there’s one phrase that catches my attention every time, ‘when I wore a younger man’s clothes.’
Back in my college days, in the mid 70s, I considered myself dapper. I wouldn’t go as far to say dashing though, nor likely would anybody else.
Bell-bottomed and elephant pants were the style of the day. I owned three pair of bell-bottomed pants, two of which boasted bold plaid patterns. One in a red-green-yellow pattern reminiscent of a Scottish tartan and the other in a green-blue-yellow pattern. Perhaps that of a rival clan.
How old do you have to be to be considered old?
Case in point: I returned to work recently after a several week vacation. I work in residential healthcare. In my shift report I was told that we had a new resident. When I asked how old he was … ‘oh, he’s really old … sixty-four!”
My immediate response was “Hmmm… that’s not that old, I’m sixty-four in a month and I certainly don’t feel old.
I work in a multi-generational profession. I could understand if the comment came from a young person, but the individual wasn’t too far from my age, at least within the lesser part of a decade.
I grew up in the 60s and 70s listening to Paul McCartney and the Beatles singing ‘Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four?’
Paul supposedly wrote this song back when he was 15 or 16 years old. I’ve been listening to the song for over five decades and each time I hear it, I have given thought to what it would be like being sixty-four years old.
As I recall, it seemed to be so far off into the future that I dismissed it. ‘I’ll worry about it when I get there.’
It’s that time of year again when I accompany my wife on our annual trip to the west coast to take in some so-called R & R. What some might refer to as rest & relaxation. I’m not one of them though.
The whole concept of R&R seems a little confusing to me, when you consider the amount of work and preparation that goes into getting ready to spend quality time … relaxing.
For the past decade or so we have been travelling to the Sunshine Coast on the West coast of British Columbia for our annual R&R retreat. We have been renting ocean front cottages for anywhere from 4 to 6 nights.
When I say cottages, I don't mean a rustic log cabin the smells moldy and dusty. Most of these cottages are fairly new, modern in their decorating and usually contain everything that you would expect in a home away from home setting.
Preparation for these annual getaways usually starts about two weeks in advance. My wife locates her master list of things to take with her. Then she starts collecting all the items on the list.
I was recently asked my thoughts on the effects of publicizing high-profile suicides? ‘I know there has been studies showing a rise in average suicide rates and emergency room admissions for attempted suicide following a celebrity death.’
I had to give some thought to the question.
I haven’t seen the studies asserting that there is an increase in average suicide rates and emergency room admissions for attempted suicide following a celebrity death.
