Blackhawks winger Patrick Kane has been keeping things more or less close to his vest when it comes to the possibility of him being moved before the trade deadline.

But something squeezed out today when he indicated that he wasn’t the happiest to hear that Blues winger Vladimir Tarasenko had been acquired by the New York Rangers.

How fortunate are we to have a hospital of the stature of Renfrew Victoria Hospital?  Simply put, very.

RVH is about as modern a health care facility as you’re going to find anywhere, providing numerous services alongside its chief mandate of being a local, in fact, regional hospital.  As an institution, it wears these many hats well.

The professional staff is top shelf, the supporting staff right there along with them.  And there’s a robust cadre of volunteers and support groups existing in the community that lean into the overall effort to offer top-quality health care.  We are, indeed, very fortunate.

Dolly, my nearly fourteen year old Maltese/Shitzu mix and remaining comrade-at-arms, had herself a close call today.  Because when I left for the vet’s this morning with her, I was pretty sure I’d be driving home alone.

Driving into Ottawa these past several months would have you witnessing the progress being made on the interchange at Highway 17 and the Calabogie Road turnoff.  This $25 million operation represents stage 1 of the larger project of expanding Highway 17 from Scheel Drive to Bruce Street, in Horton Township.

If someone had a magic wand that could wave away the scourge of mental health, I imagine they’d have waved it a long time ago.

Mental health issues are commonplace. Most people are simply born with it. Didn’t deserve it, nobody does, just part of the bargain of life, I guess. Part of having a life to live, as simple as that.

Mental health-related issues are very common, hitting all type of people, not caring how much money you have, what you look like, or what your last name is.  The stigma attached to mental health makes many fearful of reaching out for any kind of help.  There are no easy solutions, medicinal or otherwise.  No easy fixes.  No preventative vaccines.

We hear the term a lot, maybe almost to the point of being desensitized to it, which would be too bad. If true, we’d be looking at things more shallowly than maybe we should.  And that’s not what needs to happen.  As to what does need to happen, I’m not really sure to be honest.

Some of how you treat yourself has to do, I think, with how you treat other people.  We have no idea the impact we have on the lives of others, and no knowing what depths we reach with a simple act of kindness to a stranger

Not just to the stranger, but to ourselves as well.

It’s not that she won that bothered me.   It’s that she won on her first shot, firing blindly, yet putting it dead-centre for a bulls-eye.  She had to be talked into it by her grandfather, coached by her father, reminded by her co-worker, and now back to the father again to manage the mess she’s made.

Winning Lotto 649 can really throw a wrench into things, right?

I’ll bet way back when he was spending a lot of his time in jail, Yevgeny Prigozhin was wondering, like all of us would, where his life was going to end up.

Checking in with Yevgeny, we see that he is head of the Wagner Group, that sinister-sounding band of mercenaries. It also appears that Prigozhin has put himself in a position where he may be rightly considered a political rival to Vladimir Putin.

Dangerous business that.

To say Jacob Trouba is one of the most feared body-checkers in professional hockey would be a bit of an understatement. Perhaps another way of putting it would be to say that Trouba is hockey’s version of a professional assassin.

Trouba laid out Nazem Khadri of the Calgary Flames last night for what has to be the latest in a league-leading highlight reel of rock ’em-sock em’ that Don Cherry would be proud of.

Nice to see Shania Twain out and about at the Grammys recently.

From Timmins, Ontario, this little girl named Eilleen sang and performed her heart out until she ended up taking the country/pop genre by storm in the 1990’s.

A victim of abuse in her early years, she lost both parents at age 22 and became the sole bread-winner for her three siblings. She moved them out of Timmins and brought them with her to Huntsville where she was performing at the Deerhurst Inn resort. It was after they grew and moved out on their own that she was able to submit demo tapes to producers and be, as they say, discovered.

I was never a huge fan even though I recognized her work. There was always something about her that I found odd. I recently saw a biography of her on Netflix that helped me appreciate her so much better as an artist, and also as a person.

I can’t speak to her new album, which I’ve not yet heard. Nor can I comfortably comment on the red hair, other than to say I hope that’s not a perma-thing. She’s always been a beautiful girl and that continues to hold true in her 50’s, so for me, hair gimmickry isn’t really a necessity. But it’s her thing and she’s earned it if she wants it, not that one has to earn their red hair.

Whatever your personal stance on COVID-19 vaccinations, or whatever your vaccination status might be, recent data shows a lot fewer of us getting jabbed than before.

There’s a number of reasons for this, vaccination fatigue probably at the top of the list.  I’ve received three doses but seem to be having difficulty motivating myself to go get the fourth, despite having an abundance of time to do so.