St Thomas

My wife and I just returned from a two-week Spanish language immersion experience in Cuernavaca, Mexico. It was indeed one of the most profound experiences of my life. We lived with a local host family, and so our learning experience was not just limited to the six hours of formal instruction we received each day. Mexico has always been our favorite place to visit because the people are so warm, soulful, and welcoming. This recent experience only confirmed this truth many times over. We had been considering taking this plunge for some time and finally got up our courage to do it. I thought that deciding to sign up and go would be the hardest part of the process, but soon after arriving, I faced an even more difficult decision that I had to make. I have studied Spanish sporadically throughout my adult life, even taking private online lessons with…

You can just feel the rhythms of daily routines and habits changing this time of year, not just in the changing of the seasons, but in the changing rhythms of households with children who have started a new school year. Even if you don’t have children in your household, you most likely know some child – niece or nephew, a grandchild, neighbor, or a child of a friend – who is back in school. Families everywhere are now adjusting to routines of more structured days and evenings. While there is the inevitable sense of loss over the ending of the free patterns of summer, one positive addition that many families rediscover this time of year is family dinner time. Even if it can only happen a few nights a week, time around the dinner table is precious and meaningful. This week, I read an article by a blogger, Meg Conley,…

Do you ever suffer from sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia? If you do, you have no one to blame but yourself. That may sound harsh, but I know first hand about this because I, through my own doing, suffered from it again last week. That’s right, just a few days ago I made the mistake of eating my two scoop mint chocolate chip ice cream cone way too fast. Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia is the scientific name for what we normally refer to as a brain freeze or a dreaded ice cream headache. A brain freeze, I learned after doing a little research, is caused when the nerve fibers on the roof of one’s mouth get overwhelmed with too much of a cold sensation. When this happens the nerve fibers begin to constrict and the brain interprets the signals it is getting as pain. A brain freeze will pass relatively quickly (although it doesn’t feel…

I have always loved going to farmers markets, but the last two years, my weekly visits to buy freshly harvested vegetables have taken on a whole additional level of significance for me. That’s because the market vendor I am buying my freshly harvested, chemical-free vegetables from is Blue Heron Community Farm, a Wisconsin farm started two and half years ago by my hard working daughter and son-in-law. I have learned more about how to grow and choose healthy food in the last few years than I ever knew was possible. To walk the fields with the farmers who are growing your food and to see first hand how food can be grown without herbicides and pesticides (but with a lot of hard, manual labor) has helped me to connect with the source of my food in a way that no trip to a grocery store ever will. I recently read…