Looking Back and Looking Forward

If it snows in London, it’s like a sprinkling of wet confectioner’s sugar. Although, frozen precipitation is inevitable during the winter season, Londoners always seem completely unprepared. Sidewalks become skating rinks as commuters walked to and from work in far from suitable shoes for … (read more…)

As I threw my collection of used plastic bags onto the back seat of my car, with the intention to drop them off at the recycling center of my local supermarket, I vowed to stop using plastic bags altogether.

Of course, the dilemma is how to make purchases in a shop without having it bagged and … (read more…)

Christmas lights in London are never very stunning, yet in January Londoners and the city’s visitors are going to be dazzled.

Huge areas of the city will be transformed with lighted art displays.

An event called (read more…)

We had a wild turkey in our yard one winter. I spotted it through the window from the kitchen. “How the heck did it get inside our fenced yard?” I asked myself.

It strutted menacingly—head jerking back and forth—towards the chicken coop. “It’s after their food,” I thought, … (read more…)

I’d call myself a pretty good skier, although one particular afternoon on the slopes I faced a challenge beyond my ability, or so I thought.

Skiing with my family, we took a chairlift higher up the mountain where only single and double black diamond runs—for experts only—could be accessed. … (read more…)

On a visit to the Simon Pearce mill in Vermont, I saw glassblowers at work.

I watched as one glassblower carefully extracted a glowing orange glob of molten glass from a searing furnace using a long metal rod, the blowpipe.

The glassblower sat down and gently rolled the rod backwards and … (read more…)