Harry Potter: Do Fictional Characters Impact Our Lives?
Proman (short for Project Manager aka my beloved husband) has a big birthday coming up. You know what I mean, don’t you? One of those birthdays with a zero? Luckily he’s not adverse to flaunting it. To celebrate, all our children are arriving this week, along with their children, and by the weekend our little…
Read MoreSunday Inspiration: Making a Difference
This is either a frightening message or an exhilarating one. But no matter how it strikes me on any given day, I always know it’s true. We leave a footprint, how large, how small, how welcome, how menacing? It’s up to us. What impact have you had today? What impact would you like to have?…
Read MoreThe Swallow’s Nest and Dr. Seuss
How many of you read Dr. Seuss to your children. Oh, I’m looking at a sea of hands out there. Do you remember Horton Hatches the Egg? Horton, an elephant, is conned into hatching the egg of a lazy bird named Maysie who wants it back many days later when it begins to hatch. Horton,…
Read MoreSunday Inspiration: How To Be A Rescuer
“A drowning person doesn’t rescue herself.” -Julie Schumacker Talk about inspiring, did you see the story last week about the family at the Panama City Beach that was carried out by a riptide and were desperately in need of being rescued? Check out this link and be sure to look at the video. Two boys…
Read MoreSunday Inspiration: Exploration
“Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.” -Frank Borman Exploration was the theme of this week at Chautauqua Institution, and it’s been exciting. National Geographic partnered with Chautauqua to provide the programming, as they’ve done several times in the past, and the speakers shared a wide variety of experiences. We’ve had a paleo-anthropologist,…
Read MoreSympathetic and Unsympathetic Characters. Black and White or Shades of Gray?
**No real spoilers, but I do give some insights about The Swallow’s Nest, so beware. Part of the joy of publishing a book is learning that you’ve reached readers with your words. The Joyful: Sometimes I’ve brought my readers hours of pleasurable reading. Some of you have told me that you were able to lose yourself…
Read MoreSunday Inspiration: Does Anybody Know the Right Answer?
“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.” -John F. Kennedy I know. Easier said than done, isn’t it? Here we are a couple of days from another…
Read MoreInvention Week at Chautauqua: What Can It Teach Us About Creativity?
Many of you know I spend my summers at Chautauqua Institution, or what I like to think of as Creativity Central. Chautauqua bills itself this way: “The Chautauqua Institution is a not-for-profit, 750-acre educational center beside Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York State, where approximately 7,500 persons are in residence on any day during a…
Read MoreSunday Inspiration: Making Friends
“One of the wonderful things about spending time with people completely unlike you is you discover how much you have in common. The same fears, the same hopes, the same concerns,” -Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks How many friends do you have from different religions? A recent article in the Huffington Post, informed us that some of…
Read More1,000+ Blog Posts: What Have I Learned?
Proman (short for project manager husband) informed me last month that I have written more than a thousand blog posts. Really? All this from the same woman who never kept or wanted to keep a journal? The woman who, when recently confronted with earlier scribblings from a spiral notebook, tore them to shreds so nobody…
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