Our sweet Stinky passed away 2 days ago, on Friday, June 9, 2017. Erik and I are heartbroken. We got Stinky 18 years ago from a farm near Royalton, Minnesota. Our children were wee tots at the time and one of them decided she should be named Snowball because she was mostly white. That’s the name we used when we took her to the vet for her shots and spaying. However, we immediately started calling…
I don’t read as much fiction as I probably should, particularly because I would like to tackle writing a proper novel one day. I’m drawn to nonfiction and there is so much good nonfiction out there that I never seem to run out of informative books to read. Fiction feels like a luxury to me, so it’s harder to set aside time to read it. I also know that when I read fiction, really good…
Last Thursday I spent the day as a substitute teacher at two of our local schools. Teaching was, hands down, the Hardest Job I’ve Ever Done. I checked in at the middle school office and was handed a few pieces of paper that stressed the importance of emergency procedures and safety for the students. When I got to the classroom, I had to read the notes left for the sub by the teacher. Thankfully, the…
“Nonprofit With Balls” is a blog that’s all that and a bag of chips (with some unicorns thrown in for good measure). Its posts, written by Vu Le (pronounced “voo lay” – because I know how to read an About page), offer a typically irreverent, but uncomfortably honest look at the nonprofit world. Vu’s humor makes the uncomfieness easier to bear. (And, frankly, darn it, we do-gooders are not the dour types that we are…
Finally! It is done! Last night, I tied my crazy quilt and hand-sewed the binding, completing a project I started probably a decade ago. I can’t tell you exactly when I started it because I don’t remember. It was quite the process, though, with lots of lag time between tasks. I was inspired to create a crazy quilt after hanging and examining some at work. (I work at the Weyerhaeuser Museum, which gives me the…