Bits and Bobs

Tag: memories

  • 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…