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Prepared for Your Next Big Trip? Here’s a playbook to help
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., American physician, poet and essayist, once said: “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” Many seniors who are retired or have cut back on their work hours find Holmes’ statement to be true. They want another adventure in their lives and are traveling to destinations on their bucket list, especially to far-away places with diverse cultures, sights, foods and languages, from South Africa to Japan, the Arctic and Easter Island, to name a few. These places and others require long flights and lots of...
In It Together: The pros and cons of cliques
Being left out of a group can be excruciating. Trying to fit in can be as formidable as hand-to-hand combat. For example, the opera Peter Grimes (by Benjamin Britten), named for a gruff and nasty fisherman living in a fictional small village on the East Anglian coast of England around the year 1830, is about an outsider and emotionally wounded man accused of killing his apprentice, a child from the workhouse. Is he guilty? The answer is ambiguous. Yet he wants nothing more than to fit in with the townsfolk (a collective clique) and imagines this will happen if he...
Bad Day? Let’s Focus on all the ‘Right Stuff’ instead
“I’m having such a bad day. Nothing is going right,” a friend decries. “I am about to lose my mind.” We all have days like this. A clerk at the pharmacy is rude. You lose your glasses. Forget a doctor’s appointment or lunch date. Miss a deadline. Stub your little toe and ouch, it hurts to walk. Drop a glass that shatters on the kitchen floor. Sound like a babbling fool when discussing a movie in a Lifelong Learning Class. Had blood drawn and the results weren’t what you hoped for. We could go on… but… what if… we...
With Kitchens, is Anything Simply Black or White? It's all in the eye of the beholder and designer
A KITCHEN IN BLACK OR WHITE PHOTO CREDITS: Beauty and the Beach photo creditBrad Nicol; Park View Pied a Terre photo creditChas Metivier We like to think of ourselves, modestly, as kitchen aficionados ever since we wrote two kitchen tomes, first The Kitchen Bible, followed by Kitchen Conversations (both from Images Publishing). The kitchen (and we know you’ve heard this ad nauseam) is the heart of our homes. In recent years, that heart has been beating even stronger. After...
Grief Extends to More Than Losing a Loved One (or Pet) to Death
One of the difficult realities of aging is loss. Sadly, we all lose loved ones through the years. That’s just a fact, and it’s gut-wrenching. But grief can extend to any loss, and the longer we live, the more losses we incur in our lives that are constantly shifting. Do you wince? Do you shout? Do you cry? All. With such losses, you can feel like you’ve fallen off a cliff and aren’t sure, without any playbook, where and how you’re going to land. To add to the grief is guilt--for grieving something not as important as a...