Hand Over Your Mouth
So this is day four. And I awake mostly free of symptoms–just as I had hoped and expected after my first common cold in some years. And I have tried to think where and from whom I might have received…
Category Health
The Alchemy of Hope
Hope, like faith and belief, lies in the “heart” of the hopeful. It has no volume, no mass, no chemical signature. It looks beyond what is seen towards that which can only become visible through trust in those things that…
Canola: Rapeseed Oil By Any Other Name
No small wonder, before supercharging the world-wide marketing of this cultivar of Brassica napa, that the Canucks would want to change its name from “rapeseed oil” to Canola–Canada Oil. So much for the power of words, even though the term…
Tell Congress: Don’t Sell Food Labeling Rights to THOSE GUYS
The illustrious US Congress is (again) being used as a blunt instrument against their constituents, wielded (again) by Big (fill-in-the-blank) In this case, Big Ag. I’m not perhaps as alarmed by the health risks of foods whose genes were modified…
Shifting Baselines: Visible with Age
I have not said much about my time with the visiting students a few weeks back. I was only with them as a central figure for a couple of hours, and it was an eye-opener. Granted, most of them were…
Down in the Mouth
As a blogger over the years, I’ve generally avoided sharing the nuances of bodily state or machinations of marital war and peace. (If there are regular readers out there, even on a Friday, you’ll have already nailed me as a…
Old Dog, New Budget
So here we go, entering the Wonderful Water Park of Later Life, splashing and giggling down the slippery slope into the years of total immersion in Blessed Retirement. The faucet by which the hot tub of spendable dollars will fill…
Waters Below. And Beyond.
From start to finish, horizontal fracturing (fracking) is a last-gasp means of making money at the cost of water. Every deep-well extraction requires up to 7 million gallons of water (combined with a cocktail of some 500 chemicals). A single…
Fountain of Youth
Want to live forever? Don’t drink from a water fountain in the waiting room of your doctor’s office. Â What were they thinking putting a contagion-collection contraption in the midst of so many microbes, free for sharing? [su_vimeo url=”http://vimeo.com/103414485″] So I…
Well-traveled. Still Well
We’ve just returned from a few thousand travel miles that afforded our little hands access to all sorts of public places, hardware, menus, crowds, sneezes and unavoidable road bush meat, and we are waiting for the other stinky shoe to…
My Water Is Our Water
There is NIMBY. Understandably, that is seen as an “all about me” attitude, dismissive of the harm done to others as long as I or my interests are not directly damaged. But in Floyd, there is NIMWS. Not In My…
Fit After Fifty
Once, briefly, I agreed to help promote an ebook about fitness in later life. For one reason or another, that project’s business model never gained altitude. I found this bit, which I’d written for that project, and thought maybe there…
100% Beef-ish: Show Don’t Sell
Wall-e meets Gromit goes grocery shopping. Chipotle scores in this un-commercial info-tainment animated moral tale. We have become the undead among unfoods. There is another way to feed ourselves. â–¶ Slow foods, local foods: buy â–¶ Fast foods, long-distance foods:…
Skin Stats and Stitches
I grew up southern. Our summers started in March and our clothes came off as the temps stayed high for the next 9 months. I worked shirtless for summer jobs that included life-guarding at a summer girl’s camp. I fished…