This is the barn that still stands on the 160-acre farm where I grew up 10 miles southeast of Brainerd (Minnesota)… the barn that I have known since I was a little girl.      My brother Ron's intent is to assure that it remains as it looked back then for many years to come. He stabilized the…

I completed the final exam in my Food Preparation for Holistic Nutrition class! My granddaughter O'Malley's drawing expresses my present emotional and physical state perfectly. This dreamy inactivity will be short-lived, however. Another class this term, Holistic Nutrition Consulting: Concepts and Issues, awaits. Upon its completion, I will have one year down and two years to go.…

I was inching my way ever so slowly through the grocery store checkout line today, scanning the magazine covers.   The cover's headline… WALK OFF MORE WEIGHT… Donuts dripping with icing… Hmmmm. Right then and there, I recommitted to my monthly goal of logging a minimum of 50 miles (e.g., walking, biking) each month and recording…

The month of October has been unseasonably chilly. By mid-October, we have had three snowfalls and morning lows in the 20s for more days than I care to keep track of. It's just not right. Our normally amazing peak autumn leaf color, that generally occurs around the 3rd week in September, didn't occur because September was too warm…

There are just not enough bars in South Dakota… the bars indicating a strong cell phone service signal, that is. As we traveled west across the plains of South Dakota, wound our way through the Black Hills, then today began our trek east back to Minnesota, cell phone service has been hit and miss. Disappointedly, I was not able to access this nonrequired conference call tonight that…

The buses are running once again. Each year, since I left the teaching profession twelve years ago, I have made a point to go out for breakfast on the first day of school so that I can watch the buses pass by enroute to their dropoff sites… just because I can. This year was different. Since…

I have returned to the classroom… not as a teacher but as a student. A load of laundry is sloshing round and round in my front-loading washer, my dishwasher is so graciously cleaning my dishes for me, and my bread machine is kneading and providing a perfectly controlled temperature for my honey whole wheat bread's first rise so…