The idea came from my daughter who’s in the Marines. She’s stationed in Japan and when I said I would come visit her this summer, she said “of course we’ll want to climb Mount Fuji.” I am an avid hiker but the idea of climbing up the side of this particular Japanese volcano hadn’t […]
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“Believe me, you never know the best about men till you know the worst about them.” — Horne Fisher, the sleuth of The Man Who Knew Too Much These are mystery stories, eight of them, deeply immersed in the world of Edwardian England. The stories are atmospheric. They present between the lines a picture
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To begin with: all right, I admit it. I was turning 60 and felt depressed. This is not something you like to talk about: depression or turning 60. After all, the trigger for this discouragement, the turning 60, it’s pretty unchangeable. Never mind all that talk about age is just a number. Age may be
My copy of How To Stop Worrying and Start Living is quite old now. The printing date is 1984. I can’t remember who gave it to me or if I bought it myself. But when you look at the outlined pages of my copy one thing is clear. As a young woman, I went through
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It’s only been a couple of years now since I passed beyond the idea that growing a profitable garden was simple. I was that person who, when it starts to get warm in the spring, would go out and dig up the garden bed with a shovel and then put some seeds in there and
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Mondo dismo: Noun. Definition: A man who is not to be trusted. To women in particular, a self-centered exploiter. Mondo Dismo is an expression that I first heard of in Romancing the Stone, the 1983 adventure/romance starring Katherine Turner and Michael Douglas The premise is that a homebody romance writer, Joan Wilder, finds herself suddenly
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Today’s Aphorism: “Lying to others is the exception. Mostly we lie to ourselves.” Friedrich Nietzsche We think we are only lying when we knowingly tell someone something else that isn’t true. In fact, we are often engaged in refusing to see the truth ourselves. Thus, Nietzsche says, “Lying to others is the expection.” What is
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Raise your expectations. There’s much to see in Twentynine Palms. You might have been told that Twentynine Palms is in the middle of nowhere, not far from Death Valley. This is not completely true. Here are restaurants, hotels, banks, a library, Starbucks …the town has all the comforts of home, really. The desert architecture
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“The way you spend your morning has an outsized effect.” Benjamin Spall While my evening routine really was just created this spring, my morning routine began more than 25 years ago. It began because I could not “do” my life unless I got my head clear before everyone else got up. As a young
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Having a good evening routine helps you get to sleep, stay asleep, and wake up ready for the new day. But I used to view evening as a kind of “free for all time” when I would do whatever I thought would be fun. I’d been working all day, right, so I deserved it …
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