Update: Website and Awards

I wrote a few weeks ago about problems some readers and I have experienced with this website. After receiving feedback from readers about their issues, I hired WPBeginner to figure out what was wrong with the site. They found some malware on the website and cleaned it off. They also recommended additional security safeguards, which […]

Help From a Tall, Cheerful Person

I’ve written several posts in the past about my children as adults. The last such post was in January 2022. At that point, I didn’t have much more to say on the subject. And I still don’t have much to add, though it remains a marvel and a blessing to me that my children have […]

Almost Eighteen Months Old!

In just a few days, my granddaughter will be eighteen months old. I won’t be with her, but I ask my daughter regularly about the toddler’s accomplishments. Plus, my daughter and son-in-law are good about sending us frequent pictures on our Aura frame. So I can attest, she is growing up so fast! Recently, my […]

The Ice Trade in the 19th Century

Sometimes, I link to posts from this blog in my monthly newsletter. And sometimes, I take blurbs from the newsletter and expand them into a full post. This is one of the latter. In my July 1 newsletter, I described the beginnings of refrigeration in the 1870s. Prior to the 1870s, most people could only […]

Website Woes — Seeking Reader Input

My website is now seven and a half years old, and the blog posts date back several years before that. Things on the site are starting to break. As the administrator of the site, I don’t experience the site or links to it the same way readers do. So this post is a plea for […]

Traveling with Parkinson’s: A Trip to Omaha

My husband and I hadn’t spent a night outside Kansas City since our trip to Seattle in February. We decided we needed a getaway. But, because of his Parkinson’s Disease, there were limits on where we could go: Our favorite place within a few hours of Kansas City—Lied Lodge in Nebraska City—was booked for the […]

Ten Years After My Mother’s Death

Tomorrow, July 4, 2024, marks the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death. As I wrote at the time, it felt like she was regaining her independence from Alzheimer’s. Although it was hard to lose her, she was ready to leave us. I’ve also written before that I spent the first thirty years of my life […]

My History with THE OREGONIAN

The big city newspaper when I grew up was The Oregonian, a Portland newspaper. My parents subscribed when we lived in Corvallis, Oregon, and to the Sunday Oregonian for many years during the time we lived in Richland. When I went to Middlebury College, I was often homesick for the West. My friends and I […]

Fish Stories, and a Forgotten Photograph

I mentioned last week that I failed to gather many photographs and a few albums before I sent everything off to be digitized. This week’s post is about one of the photographs discovered after the digitization project. I know I’ve seen this snapshot before, but I did not remember it until my husband found it […]

Success on My Photo Digitization Project

I wrote recently (see here and here) about sorting my old photographs and taking them to be digitized. I have them back now, and I’m so glad I got this project done! The seven (or more) boxes of snapshots, and framed photos and memorabilia are now on one small flash drive. And there are back-ups […]