Protect your beautiful face! Wearing a sunhat is cool, because skin cancer is the real dork

Jun 22, 2025

May I recommend…

Investing in a sunhat.

For my last newsletter before my July-August break, I thought I’d delve into the most important summer accoutrement — The Sun Hat. Here are some reasons to invest in one, if you don’t already have one (also, why don’t you already have one?)

You will look cool.
You will be also BE (slightly) cooler without our mutual and agreed upon hated nemesis, the sun, beating down upon you
Your hair will go flat/frizzy/ weird. That is a fact. I don’t know how to avoid that. How do you avoid that? Does anyone know? Tell me!
You have a myriad of options!
1. The Fedora—to feel like you are lounging at a sidewalk café in Rome, sipping an espresso whilst watching humanity’s parade saunter past…instead of trying to find a parking spot at Costco whilst suppressing the nameless existential torment of the question, “is this what my life is, really?”
2. The straw boater — to feel like Anne and Diana, racing hand-in-hand through the fields of Prince Edward Island en route to an ice cream social and a prickly conversation with Gilbert Blythe, which is nominally about the Avery Scholarship, but is actually laden with inexpressible sexual longing…
3. The Bucket — to look like a dork, but maybe a cute one? Whatever, the brim is not wide enough to really protect your beautiful face. This was a trick suggestion. The bucket hat is not a good sun hat!
4. The gigantic rigid one — you can’t pack it, so you must sit with it awkwardly on your lap for the entire flight, like a service animal or a baby. It gets ripped off your head by even the slightest breeze. It tricks you into thinking you look glamorous and enigmatic, when really you’re just a middle aged lady with a patchily shaved bikini line stomp-walking to the diving board. For these reasons, despite its enormous brim: not a good sun hat (controversial!)
5. The baseball cap — it’s not optimal, but will do in a pinch… If you do go BBC, don’t forget to sunscreen the tops of your ears. A neglected and oft-skin-cancered spot.
Last year I bought this hat from Solbari, an Aussie company that was (not to brag) obsessed with me for a while on Instagram:
I quite love it. It’s sort of stylish. It’s foldable and packable, and stuff-in-a-drawer-able. It doesn’t wrinkle. It’s got a hole for ponytails. You can make it tighter or looser. You can remove that string. It’s good!

Article Roundup!

Okay, so the downside of my love of a sunhat is that it makes me a little nonchalant about putting sunscreen on my face, which I HATE doing because it feels so gloopy and gross. I know I should! If you have recommendations for good, non-greasy sunscreen I am all ears (and cheeks, and nose… ha ha)
Sun Protection Tips to Lower Your Skin Cancer Risk
I’m a wedge girl, myself…
Nine Watermelon Cutting Techniques Tried and Ranked
This is a beautiful article about mothers and daughters and aging and death and continuity
Do you have a family? Midlife with no kids, aging parents and no crisis
Some good ones in this list! Many I haven’t watched since they originally came out. Still, Clueless, is an obvious classic and I recently rewatched Reality Bites, where I realised that the Ben Stiller character is the WAY better boyfriend than the horrible Ethan Hawke character and that the Winona Rider character is also a terrible person.
World-weary wisdom or loss of youthful optimism and joie de vivre? Who can say!
The Fifteen best Gen X movies of all time

Reels!

(warning, you will be taken to Instagram when you click)

Now I want to live in Italy and own a herd of border collies…

gioacchino.bono.91

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This lady’s reading process is intense

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Book Stuff

I went to Bianca Marais’ MEGA book launch in Toronto - 400 people in a fun event that briefly made me feel like I was part of an exciting literary scene. There were poetry readings, comedians and songs!

Bianca is very generous and literally shared the spotlight with a dozen other authors (including me!) by having our book covers as the backdrop during the pre-show.

A Former Much Music VeeJay hosted it (Erika M, I think?) I am not familiar with Much Music because we didn’t have cable growing up, so I was forced to watch the state run CBC’s Video Hits, with Sam Taylor. In this clip she’s inexplicably dressed like the prettiest insurance adjuster in Sarnia !

I also had a much more local experience, hanging out with my neighbour and Canada Reads finalist Jamie Liew in support of art in community and our local book store, The Spaniels Tale at Hintonburg’s Arts Park.

I’ve got two more summer events lined up:

What is better than a small town literary festival in gorgeous cottage country?!

ReStore Reads: A community Book Fair

I’m really excited about this one, because it will give me a chance to hang out in Habitat for Humanity’s Stittsville ReStore and we need a new fridge, but I hate shopping for anything house-related. I am hoping that I will just absorb a variety of different fridge styles via osmosis whilst I’m shilling my books and one will magically float to my house and get installed by the time I get home! Just being in the general vicinity of a new(ish) fridge will do the job for me, right?

The event goes all weekend, but I’ll be there on Saturday August 9 from 10-4pm! Habitat ReStore, 3 Iber Road, Stittsville, K2S 1E6. (It's just south of Hazeldean Road.)