Libraries as Havens

Photo: Clatskanie Library District via Oregon ArtsWatch. The Clatskanie Library hosted a Halloween puzzle race last fall. “We want to be the community hub,” says library director Maryanne Hirning. “I want everyone to find something at the library.” It would be hard to overstate the value of a library to a community, a refuge in […]

Libraries as Havens

“In many communities, libraries are a place where people experiencing homelessness can spend the day, where senior citizens find social interaction, and where kids can go after school.”

Gardens in Tribal Communities

Tribal communities are growing gardens of all forms from medicinal gardens and small community gardens to larger food production gardens to school gardens. This fact sheet highlights tribal school gardens.

Food and Nutrition Service: https://www.fns.usda.gov/f2s/gardens-tribal-communities

A Smaller Home Could Be Your Best Option

A Smaller Home Could Be Your Best Option Many people are reaching the point in their lives when they need to decide where they want to live when they retire. If you’re a homeowner approaching this stage, you have several options to explore. Jessica Lautz, Deputy Chief Economist and Vice President of Research at the National […]

A Smaller Home Could Be Your Best Option

Key West’s Drunken Parrot

Have you ever seen a drunken parrot? This wino with wings can be seen holding a glass of bubbly while lounging back on some bark. Small this is not, without whipping out a measuring tape I’d say it’s easily in the four to five foot range from the top of his hat to extended toes. It’s […]

Key West’s Drunken Parrot

“Robot makers including Boston Dynamics pledge not to weaponize their creations” by James Vincent

A quadrupedal robot armed with a machine gun built by Ghost Robotics, which has not signed the pledge. | Photo by Chris Jung/NurPhoto via Getty Images A group of robotics companies including Boston Dynamics — makers of the well-known quadrupedal robot Spot — have pledged not to weaponize their most advanced robots. However, the pledge […]

“Robot makers including Boston Dynamics pledge not to weaponize their creations” by James Vincent

A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything

Once you’ve thanked and said goodbye to the items that do not spark joy, what can you do with them? Patricia Marx, The New Yorker, February 21, 2022 online Kids have no interest in the loot amassed by their materialistic boomer parents. Illustration by Anna Haifisch Lately, I, a maximalist, have been yearning to be […]

A Guide to Getting Rid of Almost Everything

“This allows us the illusion of being minimalist. We’ve substituted spiritual clutter for stacks of paper.”

The Wild, Wonderful World of Estate Sales

“I got into this many years ago because I saw the elderly being taken advantage of, especially those with dementia,” Julie Hall, the director of the American Society of Estate Liquidators and a thirty-year veteran of the estate-sale business, told me. In one of her numerous books, which include “Inheriting Clutter: How to Calm the Chaos Your Parents Leave Behind” and “What Am I Going to Do with All My STUFF?,” she describes a woman with Alzheimer’s whose friends and neighbors, hearing that she was going to be institutionalized, showed up at her house and began looting the place. “What I witnessed,” Hall wrote, “was like watching a vulture strip a bone.”

the National Association of Senior & Specialty Move Managers® blog

The estate-sale industry is fragile and persistent in a way that doesn’t square with the story of the world as we have come to expect it.

By Lizzie Feidelson, January 7, 2022, The New Yorker

An estate sale is only a true estate sale if the homeowner is dead. If the owner is living, then it’s a tag sale, though many people use the terms interchangeably. When I went to one of my first “estate sales,” in Hewlett Harbor, Long Island, roughly two years ago, just before the pandemic temporarily forced much of the industry online, I was surprised to discover that the owner was not only alive but there, in her soon-to-be-former house. A recent widow, she wandered through the rooms, dazed, dressed in a fringed denim vest.

The house was a beige Colonial-style four-bedroom with prim hedges and a small, sloping lawn. I arrived thirty minutes early, but a…

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All I want is a good death. Is that too much to ask?

“We die in hospitals in the most unpleasant way, hooked up to tubes and machinery that unnecessarily delays the inevitable. Our lives may be prolonged slightly but the declining quality of life is hardly worth the price of suffering.”

Eye View

Like most Canadians, I’d like to die in my home surrounded by friends and family.

Or second best, a home-like setting like the lovely Kamloops Hospice House.  That peaceful setting is where my wife spent her last days as she was dying of cancer.

Kamloops Hospice House. image: CFJC Today

But contrary to Canadian’s wishes, only 15 per cent die at home.

More often we die in hospitals; more than comparable countries. Most Canadians, 61 percent, die in hospital. Far more than the Netherlands at 30 per cent. And although we like to boast about our health care system, only 20 per cent of Americans die in hospitals according to a report from the C.D. Howe Institute (Globe and Mail, Oct. 26, 2021).

We die in hospitals in the most unpleasant way, hooked up to tubes and machinery that unnecessarily delays the inevitable. Our lives may be prolonged slightly but…

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What’s Going to Happen to All the Crap I’ve Accumulated When I Die?

“We may be choosing cremation over burial these days, but self-storage units serve as the new cemeteries: hilltop monuments to our impoverished pasts, tributes to our heady successes, funerary urns holding all that will be left of us after we’re gone. I’ve come to think of them as shrines…”

the National Association of Senior & Specialty Move Managers® blog

All across America, we boomers are finding ourselves stuck with heirlooms and mementos that we can’t give away. By Sandy Hingston, Philly Magazine (October 2021).

You gather up a lot of flotsam and jetsam in a lifetime. What happens to all your stuff after you die? Illustration by Nathan Hackett

Not too long ago, we had guests over to the house — a rare event anymore, even as we all slowly reenter the World of Other People. The occasion was an annual picnic we host for relatives, back on again after a summer skipped because of COVID. As I welcomed the first arrivals in the living room, I felt compelled to apologize for all the crapola lining my bookcase shelves. I could see my niece and nephew taking in the array of ancient elementary-school art projects, nesting dolls, Rubik’s Cubes, animal carvings, music boxes and pieces of driftwood with a…

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A proven solution to ocean plastics

Mr. Trash Wheel^®

Known as “Mr. Trash Wheel,” this floating device sucks up plastic from polluted harbors.

Source: https://www.mrtrashwheel.com/