I felt like a kid in a candy store – mouth watering as I scanned all the choices, knowing I could select anything I saw on the shelves in front of me. In reality, I could choose just one item. But it could be anything I wanted, and it was absolutely free. I wasn’t actually in a candy store. In fact, it wasn’t a store at all. It was the Chanhassen Library. I don’t go to the library nearly as often as I used to. [...]
“Remember,” the Tour Director told us, “this is not a vacation. And it is not a tour. It’s a pilgrimage.” Say the word, “pilgrimage,” and I immediately think of a procession of people walking toward Mecca. Or caravans of people in Biblical times, on camels and donkeys, in wagons or on foot, crossing the desert to get to Jerusalem. And if you say, “pilgrims,” I automatically envision early American settlers – women in long, heavy dresses, with white aprons and bonnets, and men in black [...]
The conference officially started at 9:30, but the doors opened at 8:30 for coffee, networking, and shopping – not necessarily in that order. I decided to get there right at 8:30 in order to beat the crowd, but apparently “the crowd” had the same idea. There were over a thousand women at the conference, and it seemed as though most of them were already there when I arrived. The conference I was attending was the second annual WINE Conference, but it had nothing to do [...]
I didn’t know whether it was a bug I picked up, or something I ate, but I spent several days last week being violently ill. Just getting out of bed drained all my energy, the very thought of food made me sick to my stomach, and I couldn’t even read without getting a headache. One of the things that kept going through my mind – besides how achy and uncomfortable I was – was what a waste of time this was. It was bad enough [...]
Our discussion started with the Zika virus. None of us had ever heard about it before, so we began by filling each other in on whatever information we had read or heard about it since it began showing up in the news. It was interesting to note that we each had different information. Not conflicting, just different. We quickly realized it was because each of us got our information from different sources. Newspapers for some, TV news for others, online sources for still others. That [...]
I’m going to get the “Full Disclosure” business out of the way right up front. Since my husband and I grew up in the Chicago area and still have family ties there, it’s Chicago sports teams that we cheer for. Also, I’m not a super-sports-fan to begin with. I enjoy watching the games with family and friends, but it’s the social aspect, not the sport itself, that I’m most interested in. All of this is to explain that even though I – like so many [...]
“Look it up on the Google.” My husband and I have been having fun saying this to each other ever since we heard it in a movie we watched over the Christmas holiday. The movie was about four guys who have been best friends since they were kids some fifty years ago, and who are having a reunion in Vegas. As you can probably guess, the movie is a comedy, with much of the humor coming from age-related assumptions and misconceptions on both ends of [...]
As always, I spent some time thinking about what my New Year’s Resolution/s would be this year. Part of this process was reviewing my resolutions from the last few years – which is easy for me to do since I devote a column every year to the subject. It’s become a stroll down Memory Lane for me, as well as a good analytical tool. I can see which resolutions became habits and routines that I still follow today, as well as ones that I’m still [...]