Baseball. A long-time sign of spring as much as early crocus, sneezing, and if you live in the north, a snowstorm. The crocuses will make way for other plants, the sneezing will wane, and the snow will melt. But baseball is just getting started and for the month of March, spring training is our tease of the promise our favorite teams might hold for the upcoming season. I have just concluded my first year as a volunteer at the Surprise, Arizona ballpark, spring home of the Kansas Continue Reading
The delicate art of gift giving
Ahhh, the holiday season. That special time of year when too many people over-stress, over-shop, and over-spend, all for the sake of giving the perfect gifts. Do we select a gift from a mass-produced list that goes to other family members, or perhaps something a bit more special? Maybe we chose something the gift receiver wouldn’t purchase, or an item they didn’t even know they needed, but we wanted to buy. Maybe the question to ask is “why am I giving this gift in the first place, and what Continue Reading
London, a story in the making
As soon as I began talking to Mina, I knew my cast of characters was complete. An Iranian born architect now working in Toronto, she was the perfect person to design the house with the secret room that led to a hidden passageway. How serendipitous that we shared a bench and began talking while waiting for our tour of the Tower of London, two days before our trip ended. I already had Irina, the Bulgarian beauty who greeted every guest at our hotel with her mile-wide smile. She monitored the Continue Reading
“Today’s rain is tomorrow’s whiskey”
If they gave awards for the country’s best, Scotland would win the following: Our Scottish holiday started with the beat of a bass drum leading a 45-member pipe band in their colorful red and black kilts in the 2023 Pipe Band World Championships. It was quite by accident that we discovered this was happening in Glasgow after we landed there for our two-day rest between the end of our Ireland tour and the beginning of our Scotland tour. But we snapped up two tickets to the Friday Continue Reading