Today is a very sad day. I don’t know if many of you have heard of the pine beetle or not. It has been devastating the pine forests in the mountains of Colorado for several years now. We saw a similar epidemic on the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska several years ago when we were visiting. Over a million acres of forest in the Kenai have been killed by the beetle in...

Today I went shopping for the first time for a homecoming dress with my 14 year old daughter, Mary Mac. Yes, my baby has a date to a homecoming dance. What a day! Mary Mac loves to shop. She could spend hours in a mall just trying on clothes. It takes her a long time to make up her mind. I, on the other hand, don’t shop for more than an hour at a time, usually...

met my daughter, Lindsay, at IKEA today to get her the kitchen table she wanted for her birthday. This was my first trip to the massive retail store. IKEA is a Swedish based company. This strikes me as really being out of whack since the Swedish are not mass consumers. I think I wrote about the Swedish concept of “lagom” meaning “enough” or...

 I grew up in the South. Not the deep South depicted in the movie “The Help” but the South nonetheless. I was born in 1962 so I was just a baby during the era in the movie. I went to see it tonight with 2 of my children and it has me reflecting back on my childhood growing up – what I saw and didn’t see or maybe didn’t want to see....

Last night I decided to tackle the countertop of zucchinis that had been accumulating all week.  This time of year you just can’t give them away fast enough.  Well, let’s face it.  You can’t really give them away at all.  My neighbor, Cathy said, “Sure I take some if you put them in zucchini bread”. With that little nudge I decided...

When I was growing up people used to stop by the house just to visit. They might stop by in the evening and end up staying for a hour or they might stop on a weekend afternoon and stay for several hours. They might bring something from their garden or just themselves to say hello. In our hustle and bustle world today this really doesn’t happen much. Impromptu...

I love peaches. Not the one’s you get in the grocery store. The peaches you buy at a roadside farm stand or at the farmer’s market. If you leave in Colorado, its a Western slope/Palisade peach that’s the one I am talking about. If you leave in Georgia or South Carolina, I imagine they are similar. I was riding home the other night when this story...

During our trip out guides taught us a few Swahili words. I don’t think I am going to spell them right but here they are. Jambo – Hello/How are you Pole Pole – slowly, slowly Haraka Haraka – quickly, quickly Chacoola kitam – delicious Maisha Marefu – Long Life – this is their toast Muzungu – White tourist –...

Our journey as a big group has just ended. We are in the parking lot waiving our final goodbyes to our new friends. They will be boarding one of the small planes soon to fly back to Kilimanjaro airport. I wonder if the runway is smoother than these Serengeti roads. We really don’t have much idea of what our adventure today will be. We have a new driven Solomon...

We woke up before the wake up “call” came to knock at our door. We were tired but anxious to get to the balloon ride. It didn’t take us long to repack. After two weeks of packing up your stuff every morning you get to be an expert at getting it done quickly. As we start for the lobby one of the porters shows up to carry our bags. We are the first...