Time of Isolation

When an idea has found its time, it seems to show up everywhere. Who didn’t know about climate change a decade ago? Now, despite the best efforts of corporate idiots in the fossil fuel business, we learn more about it daily. No Milwaukeean over 60 can resist recounting deep snow and bitter cold of the old days.…

In Memorium

You have served many, many freshman and sophomore students with warm, personal, and solid advice about their academic programs, just as you served many generations of English majors before your retirement. Advising is an essential, though usually unheralded, form of teaching. By continuing to advise students, you have continued to teach; and the College is…

Deed to the property

The research is ambiguous about whether women apologize significantly more frequently than men, though it certainly seems that they do. In the numerous blog posts I have read about the issue, however, I haven’t seen any discussion about men apologizing less than women. It might sound at first like that means the same thing, but…

Closing a door

The countdown to my encore launch has begun. At 5:00 PM Central Time July 31, 2015 I am closing the door on this chapter of my life as the President and CEO of Diverse and Resilient. The following Monday, I will be attending more specifically to my work in community development with projects in Milwaukee and…

Retail therapy

This week in a dressing room in a well-recognized Seattle department store, I had a major melt-down. It wasn’t the I-look-fat-in-these-jeans sort of experience when I am sure that the mirror is distorted and comes from a fun house. Nor was it the where-in-the-universe-are-jeans-actually-$200 hissy fit. No, this was a I-cannot-decide-on-a-purchase-because-my-husband-is-dead flat out bawl. Paul…

Everyone is needed

Having an adolescence was sort of a new thing when I was growing up. I know that my parents didn’t have an adolescence. They went from school to work. In fact, more accurately they did them both simultaneously. It is possible that other people, perhaps the middle class, had those teen years as depicted by…