sunday: Browse The Strips

Sunday January 28, 2024

Lynn's Comments: When I was training our new puppy, the breeder told me to clap loudly when he was doing something wrong—that he would be shocked by the loud noise and stop. I did this and it seemed to work, as did the use of a water spray bottle. Puppy training was the only thing I knew anything about, so when my son was a toddler, I found myself clapping my hands and shouting, "NO!" the way I'd done with the dog. Somehow this wasn't such a good kid-training method. Since he knew the loud noise came from me, he simply enjoyed the opportunity to see me do it again and again!

Sunday February 4, 2024

Lynn's Comments: Yup...this was fun—speaking in an arrogant, sophisticated encyclopedic jargon that even we had trouble understanding. These days, I just wait for "Question Period" in the House of Commons.

Sunday February 18, 2024

Lynn's Comments: My husband was a do-it-your-selfer, so we always had a good supply of tools around the house. One day I found my daughter undoing all the screws she could find. The following day, I caught her trying to take the license plate off the car. It was then that I realized she was going to be a handy person, too. We just had to wait until she was old enough to figure out how to put things together as well as take them apart!

Sunday April 7, 2024

Lynn's Comments: My rule for a birthday party was to allow my kids to invite the number of friends his/her age was. If Aaron was 5, he could invite 5 friends. This worked well until they were teenagers and the numbers soared. Teenagers were easier to clean up after. I'd always get them to help.

Sunday April 21, 2024

Lynn's Comments: Because some papers only carried the colour Sunday page, the story of Farley's passing had to happen, almost separately, on the Sunday page as well. This meant having to craft dialogue that covered all of the important points without going into the details of the story. For the papers that carried both the daily and the Sunday page, it was important to show a reasonable flow of information without writing too much! Normally, I didn't continue a storyline into the weekend because of this conundrum, but in this case, I had no choice. Readers who only had access to the Sunday page needed to know what had happened during the week.

Sunday April 28, 2024

Lynn's Comments: Some readers made fun of this idea—that Farley lived on in a spiritual form...but others were comforted by this Sunday page. The death of the Patterson family dog was an emotional story and I wanted it to end on a positive note.

Sunday June 9, 2024

Lynn's Comments: I said in a previous note that the only thing my dog would bark at was the snow plow. I was wrong. He would also bark at squirrels. He’d stand at the porch window and wait for them to come to the bird feeder and then he’d bark like crazy. If I let him out, he’d run after them—with no hope at all of ever catching one. Eventually, this routine was as much fun for the squirrels as it was for the dog. They knew which window he would come to and which door he’d be coming from, and they’d taunt him until he was desperate. He made a lot of noise, but it didn’t bother anyone but me. It’s a good thing we lived waaaay out in the country!

Sunday June 30, 2024

Lynn's Comments: These kinds of calls did happen. In the small town where we lived in Northern Manitoba, everyone knew where we lived and what our home phone number was. It was a few minute walk to the dental clinic, so folks expected my husband to be able to see them at any time—no matter how inconvenient it was. It wasn’t until the "new dentist" aura wore off that he had the nerve to say, "Take two aspirin and all me in the morning!"