My writing has taken center stage in my life as far as my free time lately. Last night, for example, I was rushing into my home office to finish a poem I had started. I had forgotten the deadline was December 6th. I ended up hitting the submittable button about fifteen minutes prior to the…
Culture
Looking for Horses not Zebras
Thirty years ago this month, we made a life transition. I left my jobs at Johns Hopkins Hospital as a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner and Johns Hopkins University as an adjunct nursing instructor. My husband left his job in Delaware at the Nemours Children’s Hospital in Newark and we moved, “home” to Buffalo, New York. We…
Slice of Life Tuesday: Early Decorating
It’s not even December yet, and my tree is up and decorated! I am impressed with myself, can’t you tell? For a lot of reasons, I’ve never decorated this early. My husband has a mid-December birthday and I usually aim for having the house decorated by then. The tree usually stays up until just past…
Holiday Cactus Resource on TpT
Few probably know that I have some classroom resources on the Teachers Pay Teachers website. My user name there is Garden Club Lessons. I taught an after-school garden club for 13 years at the elementary school my boys attended. For the most part, I researched topics and then developed my own lessons. It’s not anywhere…
Traveling While COVID is Still Raging
Today, I’m going to offer some tips on things we did to protect ourselves while traveling during the COVID 19 pandemic. We traveled three times in 2021 to see my parents in western New York, twice by car and once – the last time, in an emergent situation – by plane. The trip from Wisconsin…
The Tradition of Sending Christmas Cards
I’ve spent considerable time this morning making our Christmas cards. I’m not physically making them but digitally constructing them on Shutterfly. No, this is not an advertisement for Shutterfly. I use their site because I am used to it. Each year, in March, I make family calendars through their software. And, I occasionally order a…
There’s More than the Canyon that’s Grand in Arizona’s National Park: The Story of Mary Colter, Woman Architect
When my husband and I visited Grand Canyon National Park last month, our first stop inside the park grounds, late on our day of arrival, was the Desert View Lookout. It offers first-time visitors, such as us, their first expansive views of the Grand Canyon. I cannot come up with any adjectives that adequately describe…
Poetry Friday: The Rut
I thought about not posting today. But, when I considered this, I thought about how hard I’ve worked over the last one and a half years to network with fellow Poetry Friday participants. They have grown to be an important source of support and opportunity for me. Therefore, I knew I had to come up…
Poetry Friday: A Few Haiku
Some of my posts are long, I know that. I tend towards verbosity and although that comes from a place of wanting to explain where I stand or what my experience has been, it does not lend itself well to poetry. I believe this is one of the things that attracts me to poetry, and…
Slice of Life Tuesday: Giant Saguaros & Saguaro National Park
We are still on our national park tour of the Southwest. We’ve gone from Arches to the Grand Canyon to Sedona to Tucson so far. Today, we travel to the Petrified Forest National Park, completing the three parks that are in Arizona. The last two days have been spent exploring Saguaro National Park, outside of…