Last year, I was inspired by Philippa at Feisty Blue Gecko, Marie at Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer and AnneMarie at Chemobrainfog to create a 3 word mantra to help guide me through 2013. I liked my 3 words: agility, openness, and creativity and they were a surprisingly rewarding addition to my year. Looking back over […]

After spending nearly 2 weeks traveling in a wintry Michigan, ice is on my mind. I’m entering 2014 with some trepidation and I’m likening this concern to potentially encountering ice patches that are going to send me off in uncontrollable spins, that could wreck havoc to my life. Ice can be a scary thing. 5 […]

On my way back to New Orleans this summer, I made a quick stop in western Kentucky. I wanted to visit the cemetery where my grandparents are buried and check on the little town where my grandparents retired and where we used to visit when I was a kid. It was the first time I […]

Late-November 2004 On our way to our Stay-Elopement at the Cook County Courthouse, Downtown Chicago.

Carolyn Thomas of HeartSisters wrote a great piece yesterday entitled “I went from the driver’s seat of my life to the trunk” about the experience of confronting a life changing diagnosis. She writes of Jamia Crockett being diagnosed with Multiple Scleroisis in 2005: “In my life experience, being a ‘patient’ comes from a place of […]

com•pen•di•um [kuh m-pen-dee-uh m] noun, plural com•pen•di•ums, com•pen•di•a 1. a brief treatment or account of a subject, especially an extensive subject; concise treatment: a compendium of medicine. 2. a summary, epitome, or abridgment. 3. a full list or inventory: a compendium of their complaints. Marie at Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer does a very cool Weekly […]

Off the top of my head, I can go through a list of women who were my ‘heroines’ from childhood: Annie Oakley Queen Elizabeth (the present) Amelia Earhart Elizabeth I Helen Keller Wonder Woman Isis The Bionic Woman Nancy Drew Trixie Belden Laura Ingalls Jo March Babe Didrickson Eleanor Roosevelt I either read a biography […]

I took my old copy of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States into school a couple of weeks ago and the above document popped out. It was from high school and one of my amazing writing/reading/thinking/creating/living out loud English classes. It reads: WRITING          WRITING           WRITING           WRITING             RESEARCH           DREAMING            WALKING Study (research) a planet.  […]

Facebook has not only connected me to friends, family and former students, but it has also connected me to friends of other friends. When I first moved to NOLA four years ago, a good Peace Corps friend, Mary, suggested I ‘friend’ her friend Daniele here in New Orleans. I did, and have been intrigued by […]

Back in the spring, I mentioned that thanks to my shot every three months bringing on menopause, I was experiencing major night sweats and they were not only making me miserable, but they were enhancing my snoring. In turn, my snoring was driving Terry crazy. Over the years, he has tried ear plugs, but they […]