Family Fun...in the snow

If you ask my family about show-shoeing, you’ll get a range of answers, but for my money, it’s one of the best winter outdoor activities (weather permitting of course). When the snow falls, you just strap on these funny-looking contraptions and head out for a walk. We’ve trekked locally and in the high peaks of the Adirondacks. It’s a great cardio workout, an opportunity to have a rigorous but quiet communion with nature, and is low impact on the environment and your knees!

Beauty & Fury

Glenn Close’s performance as the wife of a Nobel Prize-winning novelist in the Academy Award-nominated film, The Wife, is stunning, and not only because this is great acting. In the midst of the #MeToo movement, it is an arresting and indelible commentary on the toll paid by women when their voices are muted. The film is painful because it lands so squarely on the sad truth – that for eons women artists (and others) could only have their work seen and heard when challenged through men. The film is beautiful, infuriating and essential viewing.

"...power of learning..."

This highly regarded memoir is a stunning story filled with courage, humility, love, grit, and humanity.  I was moved by Tara Westover’s extraordinary strength and her ability to describe her family members as complicated characters that elicited anger and compassion.  The value of an education achieved by many means and in many places is a testament to the power of learning as a goal unto itself and a means of deliverance.