Flashback: Sink, swim, or hold on!

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Flashback: Sink, swim, or hold on!

Dear readers: This flashback feature originally appeared on Grandma’s Briefs March 4, 2010. Update: I’m still holding on “with a steel-plated grip because I have no other option.” How about you? Thank you for reading my rerun.

Back in the '80s, before the real estate market crash that marked the end of that decade, I worked for a mortgage company. Business was good, and we were rewarded well by the company's owner.

One of the bigger rewards we once received was a day offwork ... and on the owner's boat. On a day we should be processing loans, the entire office (it was a small office) would get to don bathing suits and hang out at the reservoir, on a boat, sipping beer in the sunshine.

I didn't want to go. I really did not want to go.

I didn't want to go because despite having been born in Minnesota…

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Letting go

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Letting go

Letting go

I saw this sentiment on Instagram Sunday and was immediately smitten. It’s bold and brief (my favorite sort of inspiration) and gorgeously displays the grandeur of fall (my favorite season).

It’s a lovely reminder of the need to let go. And I have a lot of letting go to do.

Much of what I need to let go is related to…

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Flashback: Everyday inspiration

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Flashback: Everyday inspiration

I'm not a world-traveler who finds inspiration in ancient ruins, artful masterpieces, or in architectural—or natural—wonders.

I'm also not one of the fortunate few privileged to find inspiration in luculent discourse with the likes of Maya Angelou or other great orators of our time. (Although I have heard in person the likes of Kurt Vonnegut. And David Sedaris. More than once.)

No, I don't get my inspiration from such high-brow—and high-cost—pleasures. Yet.

Instead, I find inspiration—the impetus to be bigger, better, and more than I am—in everyday things. Things such as…

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Grandmas can change the world!

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Grandmas can change the world!

How grandmas can change the world!

Maria Shriver publishes a weekly newsletter, The Sunday Paper, that's chock-full of positive information and inspiration. I was once a diehard reader of the print Sunday local newspaper but nowadays The Sunday Paper is the one and only newspaper I peruse, nay, devour on Sundays. 

In yesterday's The Sunday Paper was a quote that especially resonated with me, as I think it...

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7 solaces in my sucky, stress-filled season

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hope versus despair

My husband was laid off at the end of September. Again. It's been less than a year since we were in the same boat. Once again, we're worrying about paying for PLUS loans, prescriptions, and more. All because "the company chose to go in a different direction with the department."

Such circumstances stink. Even more so when additional stinky stuff was packed into the months between Jim's layoff last year and this year's job loss.

What stuff? you may wonder. Well, soon after my husband found a new job last fall — yeah, the job he just lost — one of my dogs was diagnosed with...

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