Last week, my father moved from Winnipeg to Leader. Now, born and raised in Montreal, he also lived in Jasper and Edmonton before settling down in Winnipeg for the last 40 years or so.
I was scheduled to fly to Winnipeg to help him move, but that plan was thrown awry by a sudden and debilitating flu-like illness. Perfect timing.

Dear editor,
I was speaking to a gentleman on the street yesterday about the H1N1 Vaccine. I could not help but note the irony of the situation when he stated, “I’m not going to let someone put a needle of junk in me” as I watched him work his way through his first pack of a two-pack a day tobacco habit.

With Sheri Monk
sheri@thebadger.ca
As an adventurous, curious woman, there’s a few valuable life lessons I’ve learned over the years. Like, for instance, bigger isn’t always better (though it can come remarkably close).

With Ryan Kiedrowski
ryan@thebadger.ca
Could selling off the Vatican solve the world hunger problem? That’s what controversial comedian Sarah Silverman is proposing in her latest sorry attempt to gain attention. In a three minute profanity-laced plea for Pope Benedict XVI to ‘move out of his house that is a city,’ Silverman makes the argument that selling off the Vatican and its holdings (which she estimates to be $500 billion) would surely feed all the starving people in the world – thus removing the images of the poverty-stricken poor from her television in …

by Sheri Monk
It was an all-nighter before we printed our first paper. The last stories were written just 30 minutes before we were scheduled to upload the files to our Moose Jaw printer. Exhausted and totally spent, this is when we realized the Internet upload speed in Leader is s-l-o-w. So slow, hopping on one foot all the way there would almost be faster.

by Sheri Monk
We moved to Leader at the end of July and after taking one week to unpack and organize the house, we spent the next 1,867 hours of our lives transforming the building into a newspaper shop.
Meanwhile, I endured nightmares about emergencies and fires I couldn’t report on. The theme of the dream was always the same – something newsworthy was happening and I was unable to find the car or the camera and I’d miss it.

with  Paige Gyldersleve
With fall and winter on the way, my six-year-old daughter and I have been busy planting the containers on our deck with cold-climate vegetables