I have written before about our fur babies. About our special girl, Zoey, who we adopted when we first moved to New Orleans in 2009 and who was diagnosed with a brain tumor 6 years ago around this time. She was our Outlier. I’ve also written about our Boy Bleu, who we adopted in late […]
Category Archives: Being Active
I am starting this post, nestled up comfortably on the couch, during the weekend leading up to my 52nd birthday. I’m kind of excited, actually, for this birthday and year. This wasn’t quite true for my birthday in 2018. As a milestone year, turning 50 had a lot of pressure attached to it. Just like there […]
Part of my Peace Corps service in the Eastern Caribbean included 5 weeks of Pre-Service Training on the island of St. Lucia. I was 24 and this was my first–and to date, only–experience living outside of the United States. The 70+ members of EC58, who after training would disburse to Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, St. […]
Life has been flying along so far this year and it seems like a good point to put together an update. First, my dad. In my post Fortitude on an Empty Stomach, I wrote about how my dad was hit by a car on May 1st, while bike riding with my mother and he ended […]
Pulling out another post from my ‘rough draft bin’ seems fitting for this 200th post. I can’t believe I have been blogging for 6.5 years! Wow!!! March 24, 2013 About a year ago, my brain started to realize that I wasn’t in active treatment any longer for breast cancer. After my outpatient mastectomy on December […]
So, my writing challenge this year has been a spring cleaning from A to Z in my Searching for EMWA world. One of the things I’m trying to do is clean out my old drafts with some revisions and post them. This post was started in March 2015 when winter was wrapping up here in Chicago. I […]
For the majority of the past 20 years, I have worked in extremely challenging positions within educational institutions. Many of the students I have worked with have been ‘at-risk’, growing up in environments that are economically challenged and that poverty which they are born into places special demands on each of them. Their needs are […]
My parents were elementary school teachers in the most formative years of their careers, years that happened to coincide with raising their children, and so they channeled that knowledge and understanding into how they raised us. One of the things they always said, is that if a child doesn’t get enough positive attention, they will […]
Back in the late 1970s, my Grandpa Cooper was able to take retirement from his work with the City of Detroit on the early side and planned to spend it living year-round at the newly winterized Cottage on Lake Charlevoix with Grams. He swore that he never wanted to visit Florida and he definitely didn’t […]
One of the most brilliant pieces of advice I have ever received was given to me as a newly sworn in PCV by our Associate Peace Corps Director, Ms. Elnora Lake. Her advice? “Find Your Bridges.” The 1992-3 school year had started and while I lived in the Antiguan village of Willikies, I taught at […]
Searching for EMWA 