Hobbies

I tried for years to get Tristan Gooley on my podcast Your Outside Mindset where I speak with guests about how spending time outside and noticing new things makes you feel better about yourself and the world around you. Gooley is in great demand…

Much has been written about the fact that singing is a powerful way to enhance our lives. As a long time singer and vocal coach, I have observed first hand how singing can improve our mood immediately. Lifting our voices in song can bring new life to our imaginations…

A current best-seller – interesting book about nurses in Vietnam. Hannah does an excellent job of spinning a plot around three nurses who bond in the triage centers and then follow each other’s lives post-war. The Army claimed there were never…

Fall is the perfect time to breathe new life into your garden! As the sweltering summer heat fades away, cool temperatures create ideal conditions for a variety of plants to thrive. You can extend your growing season and enjoy a bountiful harvest well into autumn…

Retirement is like a second adolescence, only with more naps and hopefully, fewer pimples. We’ve spent decades clocking in, clocking out, and now, suddenly, every day is a Saturday. But with all this newfound freedom, the big question looms…

Many women I talk to say that creativity and self-expression is something they cannot live without, and that perhaps it has become even more important in their life as they age. How do you express yourself? And how do you incorporate creativity in your daily life?

I was a sucker for firsts – just like every other new mom. The first steps, the first words, the first time my boys, Michael and Sam, slept through the night. Sam, at 2 months old; Michael, at age 8. Sigh. Even their first caterpillar in a jar, oblivious to the coming trauma if it didn’t make…

Get thee behind me summer! In the U.S. we’ve been bombarded by political conventions, extreme heat, and lots of big, fat books. It’s 93° in Chicago as of this writing, but I’m off to the Inside Passage on Thursday for my first visit to Alaska. Rain and 50° are promised…

Claude Monet is perhaps the most widely known of the Impressionist painters, and it was one of his paintings, which a critic disparagingly called only ‘an impression’ of a painting, which gave the group their name. He completed almost 250 water lily paintings of the pond in his beloved flower garden in Giverny, and they […]

Television is the most popular form of entertainment as we age. It has probably been our most popular form of entertainment through the years also. We were bombarded with warnings of turning our brains to mush if we engaged with the boob tube, idiot box, squawk box…