More and more I’ve come to appreciate and relish the place where I call home. I still maintain that I’d rather be cozy and warm in front of a crackling woodstove or fireplace than sitting on a sandy beach in the sun. It’s warmer and there are more options. I think getting warm in the […]
We’ve spent a week here in Norway and so far we have been slightly amazed by how much things cost here. Below are some examples, based on our exchange rate of 5.1 Norwegian kroner per dollar. Since people here make at least two or three times as much as we do, it’s not hard for […]
Ørnulf Opdahl has never given up on a painting. In his 50 years of creating landscape abstracts in oil and watercolors, he always finishes what he begins–eventually. Sometimes, he said, it might take a while, but he never leaves the canvas unfinished or painted over. On a rainy Sunday afternoon, we visited Opdahl’s two studios […]
After floods took out a section of railroad track that we were supposed to travel on along the coast of Norway, we took the alternate route and bussed our way from Oslo through Andalsnes down to the ocean here at the seaside town of Alesund. The scenery along the road included sharp rock faces, dramatic […]
One of the offshoots of the podcasting revolution is that spoken word, storytelling, is becoming a big deal. All over the U.S. people are sharing their stories, either in long forms like Tedx, and doing stand-up comedy or a particularly interesting new concept–the story slam. I have enjoyed several of these shows locally including a […]
Sometimes I think about my life and realize it’s kind of a throwback to an earlier time. Here’s why. I do almost everything without leaving my small New England village. I love it. Here is what I can do in South Deerfield with a minimum of driving and never, ever a traffic jam or parking […]
I’ve spent the past few days immersing myself in all things Southern here in Myrtle Beach SC at the Travel South Conference, bringing in tourism people and journalists from southern states. From fried seafood and veggies to strip malls and endless, nearly identical beach supply stores, I’ve sunk myself into this world and have enjoyed […]
We drove out of Myrtle Beach heading south, past the world’s longest selection of chain stores, big boxes, tacky seafood joints and a lot of scrub emptiness, until we reached a striking aluminum statue of two stallions, reared up on their hind legs, in battle. We were just south of Murrell’s Inlet. We had reached […]
“Wild Thing” is a play originally written in Spanish in 1613 by Luis Velez de Guevara, and tonight I saw the first time it’s ever been performed in English on stage at Rand Theater at UMass. Director Gina Kaufmann had a wild script to work with, and although the circular stage was bare of sets, […]
I am just in from snow shoveling. I was using an ingenious old Yankee device that I saw on Facebook, then remembered I had one just like that in my garage gathering dust. I took the red snow spiraler machine and began to try to use it to clear about five inches of dry snow. It […]
Dinner on our last night in Turkey really captured a lot of what I loved about the country. It was in an exotic setting, we climbed a tall stairway to get into this cave house, and on the walls there were many square cut-outs that were once used for pigeons. The house has three levels, […]
It’s officially February, and the Superbowl has come and gone with a familiar result. The Pats win it….again, for the sixth time! Anyway, now that football is gone from my life for the next eight months, I see life unfolding differently than it has in the past. I am determined not to repeat the mistake […]
