Bits and Bobs

Tag: Family

  • The Best Dementia Care Tools Aren’t Always an App

    My Low-Tech System That Keeps Mom Safe I’ve discovered that the most effective “care tech” in my house isn’t an app or a smart speaker, it’s several whiteboards and a handful of laminated 8 x 11 sheets taped up like mission-critical command centers. They don’t glitch, they don’t require passwords, and most importantly, they meet…

  • My Kitchen Travel Souvenirs: A Curio Tray Full of Stories from Around the World

    Here’s the small kitchen curio tray where I display travel souvenirs and family heirlooms collected from Greece, Norway, Thailand, Ireland, Alaska, and beyond. Let’s take a little tour around this curio tray of travel souvenirs I made for my kitchen. (The stain color is a regret, but let’s not focus on that. If you’d rather…

  • Ready for Takeoff: How to Prepare for Travel When Your Loved One Needs Extra Care

    Travelogue 8/14 Pre-Flight I had help.  Thankfully  After working a half day to clean up any unfinished work projects, namely my 2025 Statement of Duties (because nothing says procrastination like waiting eight months to write your goals for the year), I faced numerous errands and tasks, but so little time to do them. Especially since…

  • Building the Perfect Pandemic Bar, One Martini Spreadsheet at a Time

    Where Project Management Meets Martinis When the world went into lockdown due to the 2020 pandemic, humanity split into two camps: those who baked sourdough and those of us who chose a different path. If there were smell-a-rama technology on social media, it would have smelled like freshly baked sourdough bread. I stood at a…

  • Guilt Vase; Uncovering Secrets in the Laundry Closet

    Sometime in the late 1980s, my mother-in-law, Margaret, had asked me to come clean out her laundry closet. It seemed like an innocent mission: organize the chaos, recover anything useful, and toss the rest. Silly thinking on my part! This was a weird cubby hole built into the top of the basement stairs. It was…

  • Choosing Peace Over Politics One Pillow at a Time

    It was a well-known and often joked-about fact that my father-in-law, Eddie, was a Democrat through and through, just as his father, a first-generation Irish immigrant, had been. And my mother-in-law, Margaret, was an old-school Republican. Her father was a Republican, and if his father had been a United States citizen, I suspect he would…

  • When the Sky Held Its Breath: Uncle Ernie

    Great Uncle Ernie stared down at the photos I had given him. With a dreamy look in his rummy eyes, he said, “I remember that day.”  Escaping the farm In November 1934, Uncle Ernie was starting his second decade in the Marine Corps. He enlisted in the army in 1924 at the age of 21.…