Bears and birds - Alaska and homeward bound
The last 10 days have been one big whirlwind. Our daughter, Kimberly, and niece, Lindsy, flew to Anchorage for the wedding of a close college friend. They managed to get a week to travel, which meant that the four of us took off right after the wedding and tried to see as much as possible in six days. After the young women caught red-eye flights home at midnight Saturday night, Helen and I also...
Remarriage may require refocus on financial goals
If youre planning to get remarried, you have plenty of company: More than 40 percent of all U.S. weddings are second marriages for at least one of the participants, according to an estimate by the National Stepfamily Resource Center. Naturally, a second marriage will bring many changes to your life not the least of which may be changes in your financial strategy and goals. In fact, your...
Thank You gardening neighbors
When we purchased our five acre mini-farm more than 25 years ago we were a young couple, married only four years with dreams of everything our property could provide. We had outbuildings, an animal barn, our own woods, clearings for pasture, a quarter mile lane, and wide open spaces for gardening. In the early years we raised a calf and a hog for butchering. We had a cat, and soon we got a dog...
August agricultural angst
Here goes my Almost Annual August Agricultural Angst column on whatever garden problem I had this year, with a nice little moral attached. My garden problem this year involved cucumbers errr, cantaloupe. I have been loath to plant cantaloupe because even though my husband and I love them, they have always been very hard to raise for us, frequently rotting in the millisecond between when...
Celebrating and remembering Chad Blooming
In 2004 Ellen Pill and her husband, Chad Blooming, received the devastating news that he had been stricken with a progressive neurological disease that leaves its victims unable to move, eat, speak and breathe and ultimately leads to death within 18 months to five years of diagnosis.The disease is ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease.In 2007, at the age...