About Me

Hullo! I am Ashley, and this is my site.

I’m a writer & photographer living in Calgary. I have a husband, and a daughter, and a cat.

…What’s that Marigold? Well… yes, that was me in Harriet’s Magic Hats. …No, I can’t send
you copies of the show. And no, Ralph wasn’t a real parrot. Yes, I was paid. Yes, a lot. I did that
show when I was 11 years old. Now I’m 32. Let the full force of the 21 years since my time as a child
tv star sink in: twenty one years. Now: don’t you feel old? Yes. We all do. …Ow my knees, etc. (A lot of
my traffic comes from seeking the answer to this question, and I thought I’d just get it out in the
open right here. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about here, just forget it. Really. Nothing
to see here, move along.)

Before I had a child I went and got lots of schooling, and I lived overseas in a variety of “developing”
countries, and I worked at a bunch of jobs that were kind of related to my schooling and kind of related to
my life overseas, depending. I’m a self-taught photographer and have even done actual professional work with
fancy lenses and a serious budget and everything; my portfolio is here. I’ve also written a few things for
magazines, and worked in radio. I also do online and hard-copy editing and proofreading, and I’m damn good.

I am married to the love of my life, Chris Turner. I tease and poke and bug Turner all the time, and doing
so is one of the great joys of my life. And in the words of my brother, Turner is the most patient man in the
world. He’s also a writer and some might even say an “author”. He writes for magazines in Canada and the US and
has won all sorts of awards, and he even wrote a book this one time… and, y’know, it was a bestseller. He’s
working on his next book now, and you can see the site for it here. Turner and I toil together on a lot of
projects, which is good because we both work from home and if we weren’t in cahoots there’d be lots of arguing
about who’d do the dishes, who’d take out the recycling, and who’d take care of the baby. Luckily we have it
all clear in our house: Turner does that stuff. I sit around and eat bon-bons. In truth, I do logistics and
management and coordination, and web work for the books and their tours, and it’s waaaaayy more interesting
and stimulating and fulfilling than it sounds.

I call my husband Turner. This isn’t my fault. I met him through friends a very long time ago, and they
called him Turner. So I called him Turner. Months and months and months later, we started dating, and I
sort of wondered if I shouldn’t start calling him Chris. But by then it was too late, he’d been Turner for
almost a year at that point. How do you go back? You don’t. You just keep calling him Turner and eventually
realize he’s going to be Turner for the rest of your lives, together. And that’s okay. Except that we have
to explain it to people. Like I just did, here. (Some people call him Chris, anyway. People he knows through
work, editors, his family. But lots of his friends call him Turner – it’s not just me. And my whole family
calls him Turner, too, btw. So you can go ahead and choose whichever name of the two that best suits your
comfort level. He doesn’t mind. I’ve asked.)

I don’t get a lot of comments in my postings, though I love to read the comments people do leave. I
think I just don’t generate a single sort of community or I don’t ask enough questions or something. I’m
not quite a mommyblogger, and I’m not a photoblogger, and I’m not a “day in the life” blogger, and I do
very specific shout-outs to people that I never explain to the wider reading audience. I have about a
kabillion categories, mainly for my own navigation so I can go back and find stuff later, but it doesn’t
do much for people who are looking just to browse. I get emails sometimes from sleuthy types, and my family
goes on and on (do go on!), but the comments more often than not remain empty. My traffic is kinda solid,
though, so I kind of get a kick out of the weird fact that people come and read my blog every day and never
ever comment. That’s kind of interesting. You know all kinds of esoteric and random stuff about me, and I
don’t know you. But rest assured that if I put something on the site and I say, “Hey, does anybody want
this? I’ll send it to you!” and I’ve never met you but you think to yourself, “Gee, I DO like that. I
want it!” – go ahead and ask for it, in the comments, even. Go ahead! I’ll send it to you, I
promise. Because I like people, and I like to send packages. You win.

For a long time I didn’t make an email address readily available on this site. I’d really had it up to
fucking here with spam in all its shapes and forms and guises, and I’d even irrevocably lost one
email account (that had all kinds of cool and funny stuff in the ‘saved’ folder) to spam when the volume
coming in overtook my ability to delete it. My excuse was that I was in India, and far away from Brother
John, who usually does internetty and computerish security things for our family. But it still made me mad
and sometimes I sit around thinking about that lost email address.

I still hate spam as much as everyone else, and god help you if you put me on a list for that cute forward
you send to everyone in your address book. I hate those goddamn forwards and I never, ever, ever, read them.
I delete them straight off, so save yourself the fricken trouble and save me the headache. I’ll remind you
that my brother is a computer genius and he can blow up your computer, your television, and your toaster
oven from the comfort of his own bathroom (wireless internet!), so beware. More politely, please: please
please please don’t send me garbage. Thank you.

All that said, if you have anything you’d like to tell me that you don’t want to put in the comments,
feel free to email me at abristowe at yahoo dot com, unless, like I say, you are a bastard spamming asshole
person – please see above. And I’ll just make it perfectly clear: do leave comments in the posts, if you
are so inclined; I love to read them, because I am a squird that way. Halfway between a squid and a nerd.

Enjoy!