"Watercolour Toolbox focuses on simple solutions that anyone can learn, illustrated with step-by-step demonstrations for creating realistic stones, flowers, landscapes, and buildings"--Page 4 of cover.

On September 28, 1941, the same day that Robert Popple was born in Penetanguishene, Ontario, Ted Williams ended his baseball season with a .406 batting average, a MLB record that still stands today. Patterned after Mark Twain’s recently published autobiography, this memoir describes Popple’s life growing up in 1950s Huronia and later, making his way in the world. With public confidence in nuclear power declining after the Three Mile Island accident and CANDU reactors supplying the lion’s share of Ontario’s electric power, Popple acted as the Ontario Hydro nuclear spokesman for five years. An exact transcript of his mother’s 53-year Family Log is included, a prized source of detail on early events.

Set in the late 1800s, this well-researched biography takes us into the heart of newly settled Upper Canada, and the rich beginnings of Haliburton County, Ontario. We get a thoughtful and thorough look at the history of the area as we meet Alexander Niven; surveyor, politician, farmer, adventurer, educator, and influential businessman in a blossoming locale. We meet Niven’s contemporaries, who alongside this versatile surveyor, formed and shaped this “back woods” settlement into the beautiful area we are familiar with today. This very informative and entertaining biography will immerse you in the exciting and sometimes trying times of the period, and paint a picture of early settlement in Haliburton County.

JEFF PINNEY LOOKS BACK AT HIS STRUGGLES WITH MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS WHILE HOMESTEADING IN RURAL ONTARIO AS AN ARTIST AND WOOD CARVER. Jeff Pinney, a native of Hamilton, Ontario, had already gone through a series of dead-end jobs and luckless relationships by the age of thirty. He thought things couldn't get much worse until he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Knowing he would suffer progressive neuromuscular deterioration in the coming years, he struck out for the country to enjoy life. While homesteading in the Haliburton highlands, he enjoyed the beauty of the natural world. His life took on an increasingly spiritual dimension as he built his home, made art, and honed his skills as a wood-carver. He overcame pain and discomfort by concentrating, applying himself, and practising Zen meditation. Rather than dwell upon the ways the disease has affected him physically, Jeff explores how he dealt with it in mental and emotional terms. He also shares his candid thoughts on treatment options for MS patients. From his porch above the beaver meadow, Jeff Pinney contemplates storms of an inner and outer nature. Bound to his wheelchair, he is beset with cabin fever; but the beauty of the world, as he recounts in Zen and the Art of Multiple Sclerosis, consoles and uplifts him.