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The Last Blog of the Year–Time for the Best Stories of 2012!

Sudan image from last year

I have a few year end challenges that I hope I can manage to finish today.  It’s still what feels like holiday time, despite it being Monday morning, so we’ve gotten a slow start. Outside is about as cold as it gets around here, 16 degrees, and inside it’s taking […]

The Best Books I Read This Year

It’s that funny week between the holidays when nothing gets done except more eating, drinking and lazing around. It’s also a time that I often get wracked with guilt, as if I should be working harder and beat myself up for not really trying. But social engagements trump any obligations, […]

The Christmases of Years Past Are Measured Against Eachother

It’s Christmas night, and the guests have all gone. We took a hike up the slippery mountain, cooked a big meal, sat around and enjoyed our Christmas presents by the fire, and played a card game. Now the house is empty and the cat is back where she belongs, right […]

Downton Abbey is the Theme for a Masterpiece Ball on January 5

Downton Abbey is the Theme for a Masterpiece Ball on January 5

Last week  a friend and I shared our enthusiasm for the upcoming Masterpiece Ball we’re going to at the Log Cabin. It’s a theme ball, we explained to another friend, about Downton Abbey. A blank stare followed. “Downton Abbey, the great show on PBS. You must have seen it. It’s […]

Like Root Canals, Getting a New Roof is Pretty Much Inevitable

“You’re overdue,” said my friend over lunch. “Everyone has to get a new roof at least once in their lives!”  And so it was, I finally bit the bullet and yesterday, the house that I’ve owned for twenty years got its own new roof.   I had been staring up […]

An Intern’s Lament Pushes Me Further Down

Is there a malaise going around? Do things just seem not as good as they used to be? I hate to admit that but I am truly feeling that type of a feeling as I proceed in my 54th year of life.  I have always been such an optimist, always […]

Is Everything Else Trivial in the Aftermath of this Tragedy?

Some times when a tragedy strikes and when everything on the news relates to terrible details of heinous crimes, it feels like a violation to be writing about other topics…as if anything else at this moment is trivial and off point.  When I was in Jamaica over the past five […]

Jamaica’s Leader Asks for Investments to Upgrade Roads and Keep Growing

Jamaica’s Leader Asks for Investments to Upgrade Roads and Keep Growing

Yesterday we met Jamaica’s prime minister, the very elegant and stately Hon. Portia Simpson Miller, who officially opened the island’s first airport departure lounge in Montego Bay.  It would seem this isn’t a big deal, another airport perk for the high and mighty business class traveler, but it’s a milestone […]

Visiting the Rum factory, enjoying the scenery of St Elizabeth

We drove past vast fields lined with hand made wooden fences, carved branches from the vast forests of Jamaica, used for the fences to keep in the good looking brown cows that are raised here on the South Coast. This part of Jamaica is wide open, spacious, and utterly perfectly […]

Jason Henzell Wants to Create the Martha’s Vineyard of Jamaica

Jason Henzell Wants to Create the Martha’s Vineyard of Jamaica

Jason Henzell has the accent and the pedigree to do quite well in Jamaica.  His father Perry Henzell produced and directed the defining film about Jamaica heard ’round the world, The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff.  A movie poster decorates Henzell and his family’s inn, Jake’s Hotel, on Treasure […]

Drive With Me from Montego Bay to the Treasure Coast

Ride with me from Montego Bay to Treasure Bay, across the vast mountainous hump of this large-feeling island, in a comfortable large eleven passenger Ford van.  We zigzagged out way up around and across the heights until finally we were on our way home. The big van lurches around corners, […]

Milk Sales Hit the Skids, and the Dairy Industry Fights Back

Do you know about the milk crisis?  Yep. Since the 1970s, consumption of milk in the US has plunged by 30 percent, according to a story in today’s WSJ.  That’s a true bummer on top of the lowest prices in decades, which are creating a situation where the end result […]

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