That’s the question asked particularly on the anniversaries of historically significant events. The following are at least fifty years in the past! I’m dating myself to include the day Kennedy was assassinated. I had been sent into the hall for talking in class, no surprise, when a big 5th grader told me the president was…

I remember these feelings of the initial stages of grief from when my dad died when I was 16. It was a monumental event, but the world around us didn’t stop.  Our family was consumed in a vacuum of grief while the rest of the world continued on. Noises seemed louder, traffic quicker. Loss takes a…

Though few of us old time bloggers are left, absences in posting leads remaining followers to imagine possibilities, tragic to amazing. In this case it is the former.  Lightening has struck our family again, with the loss of daughter M and KC’s son, baby Everett, in July on his mother’s birthday. The circumstances were identical…

Camping, 12 nights in a row, it’s my new record. You can teach this old dog new tricks. I’m enjoying it. There are a few things I didn’t like, as in one day of rain so heavy, we watched a mouse running from underneath one car to the next in WalMart parking lot, so as…

It’s been great hiking weather in the Pacific Northwest, warm and sunny after some drenching rain, the perfect recipe for mushrooming. Two Sunday’s worth of walks in the woods produced fresh springtime Oyster Mushrooms. These entwined trunks called for a painting. Might do this one larger. It’s a Sitka Spruce and a Cedar. The biggest…

I always knew a walk in the woods did something for me. Little did I know I was practicing the Japanese health tradition of Shinrin-yoku, forest bathing. This is an article from Time, that explains it well. It’s the one thing I miss from living in the rain forest, my almost daily forays onto the…

I thought retirement meant a more relaxed pace to accomplish the activities of daily life and extra time for the things you love to do. Problem is, my to-do list hasn’t retired and continues to grow daily, hence the title of this post. So here I am sneaking in a smidgen of blog time.  An…

Perplexing So, why are there gas masks in hotel room closets? Someone in the group guessed their use was  for pollution. It’s smoggy, but not gas mask worthy. I thought maybe for protection in case of attack. You never know with the state of the world and China’s proximity to threatening regimes. The real answer?…

What to do when faced with 27 hours of flying, a six hour train ride and four days on a river boat, all in a two week period? You need to know that I’m not a big travel sleeper nor watcher of TV or movies (especially Air China’s selections this trip), so those don’t appear…

Most meals, other than breakfast, were not included in our tour, but the two most memorable lunches were.  The first was in a family’s courtyard house in a Hutong in Beijing’s old town. A Hutong is a maze of attached one level houses and courtyards, built hundreds of years ago. We squeezed into a living…