Sunday Soundtrack: “Just Do You”

Happy New Year! 2016 took a chunk out of a bunch of folks, me included. Looking forward to making positive changes in myself and for others in 2017. This song, one of my favorites by India.Arie, pretty much says it all. Be...
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Stay Young, Don’t Look Back

Welcome to 2016! Since I’m in the very large crowd that habitually makes New Year’s resolutions but doesn’t keep them, this year I’ll try something different. Instead of coming up with my own list, I’ll borrow one from baseball legend Satchel Paige. His famous “How to Stay Young” was published in Collier’s in 1953. It’s great advice. Here’s how I...
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Feeling Like a 900-Year-Old Woman

As a good friend of mine says, anything worth doing is worth overdoing. In my case, that means I went from what I thought was really impressive heartburn (something totally normal for teacher types with too much to do and too little time to do it in) to an inflamed gall bladder. There’s nothing like “gall bladder surgery” to make you feel like a 900-year-old woman. Seriously,...
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Life in Three Words

Ah, New Year’s Day—that one day of the year designed for self-flagellation and list-making and vows and whatnot designed to make us all 21st-century Bionic Men and Women (“We can rebuild her…we have the technology…”). It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing. It’s abusive in its own twisted way. Is it any wonder so many resolutions fail before January...
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Bears With Furniture

One problem with living in a creative family is the amount of stuff we all tend to accumulate. When Mr. Man decided he wanted to play guitar, the Yamaha acoustic cutaway was soon joined by five electrics and Frick’s Squier jazz bass and Martin dreadnought. We have piles of movies and video games, boxes of art supplies, and yarns for both knitting and needlepoint. We’re all readers,...
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