It’s COLD in Toronto and will only get colder for at least the next week. The thermometer won’t creep above 0 C. and will go down to -11 C. most nights. So it’s ‘stay in the igloo’ time here. No matter what the weather I’ll walk outside every day. That’s not part of my New Year’s resolution, though. For that, I plan two things: Reading a short story every day and writing something, no matter what, every day for 2025.
The past couple of days I’ve been working on the e-seminar on ‘The Benefits of Writing (Journaling and Blogging) for Seniors’. My daughters suggested Google Slides and I started to create something on Thursday. At first, I found it overwhelming with all of the choices of templates as well as the various tools. But overnight Thursday I decided to start by simply choosing a template. My eldest daughter shared an excellent presentation that she had done and funnily enough, we both chose the same template.
If you’re looking for a template in Google Slides, I would recommend the ‘Book Club’. It seems to be easy to change but still maintain the formatting for titles, subtitles, etc. More than anything, I wanted the presentation to look professional, having everything lined up, etc. I don’t want to embarrass anyone, mainly the woman who asked me to do this.
Google Slides has a ‘find and replace’ feature that allows you to quickly adjust whatever template you start out with. The Book Club one has ‘book club’ all the way through the template’s pages and changing 69 of them one by one is a pain. Thank goodness for the find and replace feature. Look for it under Edit. Good luck!
Side Note: I went out and bought some sake just now. This evening I will try a bit with my supper. During my NHK and coffee half hour this morning. I watched a 28 minute documentary on Japanese sake and how UNESCO has put on the ‘intangible cultural heritage of humanity’ list. I found out that sake has been around in Japan for over 1,000 years and was created by trial and error, no science involved. It’s not a simple rice wine and certainly not easy to make. With rice, yeast and koji, the Japanese have made a very special drink. And it’s twice fermented while grape wine is only fermented once. I’ll let you know what I think of the sake I bought today in a later post.
Writing about sake, I’m reminded of the best man at our wedding. Martin and I used to eat (and drink) at Nami, a wonderful Japanese restaurant in downtown Toronto, steps from where I used to live on Adelaide Street. We played a drinking game there. The game had one rule, drink with your left hand and you had to buy the next round. I’m left-handed so you can see how that went. Martin is gone, as a matter of fact many of my friends from that period are as well. Sadly, my wife is also gone but she left me with our three wonderful children and memories…years of memories.
That’s it. Stay warm!
Cheers,
Brian Mahoney
January 4, 2025