Holy Mackerel in Ottawa

Mary Moore is a mom blogger in Ottawa who tells honest stories and gets points for being so candid. The woman just started out on the web last year, but her skill is obvious, and so is her dedication. Her latest passion is photography, and she shoots crisp digital images with her Canon EOS Rebel Xsi. Unlike other Ottawa citizens, Mary is not political; “It’s a waste of time”, she writes, “I’d rather spend my days smelling the fresh air and watching my kids enjoy life”

Holy Mackerel is a random gathering of anecdotes and daily inspirations. It’s a blog about homemaking from a loving housewife who calls her husband ‘Mr. Handsome’. She details her life with her two kids, their dog Gryphon, her quilting, old movies and television shows, Octamom, and sadly, cancer treatments.

When she wrote about a tornado that touched down in Ottawa last month, I bookmarked her blog because it was pure citizen journalism. A little while later, I went back and read more. When I found the post she wrote about the last month of her Dad’s life, she made me cry. The piece is filled with precious little details and perfectly painted with her own sadness. It’s how a blog should be, filled with reliable data and insights and observations mixed with the author’s opinions and emotions. I’ve never met Mary, but after reading her blog I feel like I’ve known her all my life.

What’s not so perfect is her blogspot template choice (personally, I’ve never liked white text on black), and there are so many sidebar widgets that some pages don’t load properly because of javascript conflicts. But let’s remember that Mary is still finding the balance between her content and all the other facets of social media available to Mom bloggers. There are lots of attractions out there and lots of distractions too.

Mary Moore was born and raised in Ottawa and got her start in journalism in high school working on the school newspapers. She was first employed as a journalist in Wetaskiwin Alberta, on a small weekly newspaper where she worked for two years as a reporter covering crime and local politics. Back in Ontario she landed a spot at the daily paper in Cornwall as a crime reporter and there covered a few national murder stories and found it to be “very exciting stuff”. That’s where Mary met Mr Handsome and right around the same time she landed her dream job as the new managing editor for Feliciter, the national magazine of the Canadian Library Association, where she worked for twelve years.

Today, Mary is a real estate agent in Ottawa. She’s thinking about setting up a photography business and has just begun to realize her blog’s potential as a marketing tool for that ambition. “My best friend introduced the whole world of blogging to me, and told me I needed to do this. So, after some humming and hawing, I just went for it, and now it’s a big part of my life, to my family’s consternation. As my husband puts it, there’s an umbilical cord connecting me to my laptop.”

Mary Moore admits that she’s “obsessed with getting old” and her posts sometimes evidence some contempt for the young. But for the most part her work is positive, especially when she shares invasive medical procedures with her readers to mitigate the psychological affects of these treatments in her own brain.  Mary is passionate about volunteering, especially for kids with cancer and seniors.

Unlike so many other Moms who set out to chronicle one or another facets of their existence, Mary didn’t have a goal when she began blogging; “I found that just being able to write again, and actually have someone (anyone!) read it was an amazing feeling. I would love to be a successful, well-known blogger/writer, and maybe someday I will be, but right now, just writing and using my creative side is enough for me.”