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Keeping current in wellness, in and out of the water
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Part of the Community
September 2, 2013
— 6 Comments
“Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.” Confucius
Packing light is a good idea, but never leave your heart at home. To do justice to any travel experience an open mind and flexible attitude are both needed. You bring your culture with you, know it or not, and you either decide to break out of it and meet new ones, or not. It is now possible in the United States to stay in chain hotels, and eat in chain restaurants, shop in chain stores, and wear the exact same fashion to the point at all destinations can be reduced to a low and common denominator.
My trip to Pennsylvania was prompted by a reunion with old schoolmates. My curiosity was strong about the town where I grew up and went to school through 8th grade. I wanted to know how my old friends and classmates are now. The weekend was full of parties, visiting, and remembering our younger selves. I like the chance to be in different environments and see plants and architectural styles that are out of my normal range. Destination Oakmont, PA is almost the exact opposite of Tucson, AZ. Being present for leaves changing and the reunion parties has made this an exciting and fulfilling visit.
How do you choose the places you will visit? Do you always go to places where you know people? AirBnB is a great way to be a guest in a community and be part of it. The agency facilitates on-line rentals of rooms, guest houses, apartments and more in private homes. I have stayed in a spacious clean home with kitchen privileges, coffee machine and private bathroom en suite. My host family is helpful and knowledgeable about the area. I was given some local history books to read upon arrival that were excellent. Staying in a neighborhood also gave me the perfect location. Our class reunion party was only a block from my place. I do like hotels for certain purposes, but the growth and popularity of airbnb shows the increasing interest in a new way of traveling. It offers a chance to take part in the life of the community more than a hotel can. Before your next trip, take a look at the available rental properties in the system. I believe you will be pleasantly surprised. I have been more than happy both times I have rented with the company.
Labor and Time
September 1, 2013
— 2 Comments
Big man Little man
I grew up in heavily industrialized Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Coal Mines, steel mills, and other factories were staffed by union labor. The cruel and unusual history of Andrew Carnegie vs. the labor unions was close to the surface and burned into the memory of the workers. They had decent wages and retirement benefits won through very tough negotiation, but they would not guess how the tables would turn on both the workers and the owners of steel mills. Today the city has a strong economy based in part on the petroleum industry boom, but the mills went under, stripping the retirement benefits from the workers as they went into bankruptcy. The old way of creating and defining value no longer exists.
Today the new magazine from Chris Brogan, my first and favorite SoMe teacher has launched. The free publication is called Owner, and I subscribed instantly since Chris has never let me down in the past. His good friend and fellow entrepreneur, S Anthony Innarino, has written an excellent article for the first issue which takes a good look at value and expectations. Welcome to the Disruptive Age tells it like it is and invites the reader to take ownership of his or her own time and energy. We have entered a time in which it is not only extremely important to define and create value, but also to find ways to harvest more value for ourselves. This will involve knowing both what is most valuable to your customers and what you value most. Time is not money; It never has been, but the contracts of the past created a structure in which labor, time and money seemed hard to disentangle. In today’s economy disruption is the key to value.
business
business pigs
How I Became so Bossy
August 30, 2013
— 6 Comments
I was the youngest in all the groups in my childhood. I was never considered for the key roles such as Davy Crockett, or his wife, when we dramatized that story. I would be lucky to be a horse. The kids in my immediate neighborhood just happened to be older. I played and hung out with a couple of girls who were in the class above me, but our games included the kids who were several years older. Every kid knows that the oldest person gets to choose first..at least that was the standard in our neighborhood. Like all oppressed people, the youngest one just waits for the tables to turn, and they eventually do.
I know that I am bossy from my career as a fitness instructor; that is exactly what people are paying you to do..boss them around. What I have never analyzed is the way my youth had an effect on my commanding nature. I left my neighborhood and school to move to Venezuela where I was the daughter of the boss of all my friends’ parents. He was even the boss of my teachers in school because the oil company hired the teachers and ran the school. Suddenly my relative underdog position was reversed in a big way. Much older guys wanted to date me because that was culturally normal in South America. Virtually everyone I knew sucked up to me with gifts and every privilege I could never have imagined. I was the capitalist imperialist teenager with everything…and way more than anyone I knew in the states could have dreamed. Servants, yacht, DC3 with private living room configuration and pilots who let me “land the plane” in Caracas……. I thought it was all just dandy. I had a large sense of entitlement that came with the territory.
Once you have lived in another country the United States can never be the same. Once you have been immersed in another culture, you can no longer stay completely within the old cultural bounds. When I returned to life in the US I never lived east of the Mississippi or north of the line (Mason/Dixon, that is) ever again. There is something very powerful about being bilingual, but it is even more empowering to be bicultural. My life developed from a tight and limited beginning to a progressively wider and higher view of the world. I crossed more international borders before I was 15 than most Americans do in a lifetime. I was fully fluent in colloquial Spanish, never missing a beat. This short lesson in international diplomacy took place when I was 13-15; My confidence and self awareness significantly changed forever. I took command.
I do not try to convince others to think like I do because I honestly appreciate diverse points of view. I would not waste my persuasive talents to change anyone’s mind for any reason. However, when any group lacks leadership I instinctively boss the group around…sort of like a sheepdog. I sense the inertia and take the situation as a call to action. Giving orders is an interesting experiment. I find that people obey me, not so much because they respect my authority as because they know I am not going to stop…sort of like a sheepdog. I see this model very clearly as I herd my elementary classmates into a video chat with each other. I am sure that I did not have this nature as a young child, although I do want to ask my class if they remember me as a bossy kid. I believe that I developed a certain ability to seek and destroy inertia. We all know that in the end inertia wins, but my life is a symbolic effort to create action from inaction. Some of us are simply born to herd.
Digital Personas and Delusion
August 27, 2013
— 4 Comments
bloom
The era of likes with mouse clicks has ushered in various forms of approval that may or may not be sincere. Approval requires judgement and investigation. False approval requires nothing but a click on a button. This false world of endorse, like, share is the nightmare underlying quid pro quo SoMe relationships. I know people on various platforms with whom I almost always agree, and others with whom I never agree. This is not so different from daily social life. Social clicks, clubs and groups in real life at least have the opportunity to see each other engage. Some avatars and auto retweeters my be the social media equivalent of codependent. They thrive on false acceptance and deliver the same to others. They both spend and accept the fake currency of unfounded and insincere mutual praise.
Experience teaches us how to avoid being spammed or interrupted by endless chatter as we learn the ropes in social media. I openly joke around with my social media image, freely admitting I edit out any content unflattering to me. Everyone does; nobody uses a personal platform to highlight the worst in themselves. In the past mad men produced media to sell to consumers. Today we are all both the consumer and the media producers. Much ado has been made about the commercial value of this new influence horizon. I agree that consumers benefit form the vast array of information available to them today. The social influence and digital bonds of personal branding may be insidiously damaging as well as lucrative.
The unintended consequences of the digital edited public persona create havoc with the self image and the soul. Being fully present in a community or personal relationship is a high standard to keep. Making basic decisions today about budgeting time and resources is generally stressful. Conscious deliberate action will make the difference between finding a happy medium and wasting precious time creating delusions. It is a brave new world. Caveat emptor.
Emiline P Nicholls, 3rd Great Grandmother
August 25, 2013
— 3 Comments
The grandmothers
My 3rd great-grandmother was born in Somerset, PA in 1837. She became the second wife of Thomas Peterson, a widower, in Ohio in 1855. Her parents had moved from Pennsylvania to Ohio before 1850. I know her father, Amos, was a teacher, but have no records of the schools, or the times. After the Civil War she moved with her husband and children to Kansas to homestead. She survived Thomas by many years, and in 1920 was living at the home of her daughter, Harriet. She is the short one on the right side of this photo. The age of my Uncle Ernest on the left side tells us this was taken in Ladore, Kansas about 1918.
Emiline P Nicholls (1837 – )
is my 3rd great grandmother
Harriet Peterson (1856 – 1933)
daughter of Emiline P Nicholls
Sarah Helena Byrne (1878 – 1962)
daughter of Harriet Peterson
Olga Fern Scott (1897 – 1968)
daughter of Sarah Helena Byrne
Richard Arden Morse (1920 – 2004)
son of Olga Fern Scott
Pamela Morse
I am the daughter of Richard Arden Morse
Since both Emiline and her mother were born in Somerset I have joined the Somerset Historical Society and have engaged the services of the professional genealogists on the staff. Next week I will have the chance to visit not only the place, but also have the fun of doing some fully professional investigation. I expect to learn a lot about the history of the area and what was happening when my family lived there. If I am lucky I will also find some information on Emiline’s husband, Thomas. Since I have been doing this research for so long I am excited to learn how the pros approach it.
Exorcist Archetype
August 24, 2013
— 5 Comments
What kind of power does an exorcist have? Technically Catholic priests are in the business of exorcism, but in day to day life some people play the role of the exorcist to friends or family. I personally do not have much experience with this archetype, but we all recently witnessed a bookkeeper in a school in Georgia display extraordinary ability to drain the evil out of a situation. Antoinette Tuff found the strength to talk down a deranged gunman with 500 rounds of ammunition. Later in an interview she told the 911 dispatcher with whom she had been on the phone that she had been terrified. She called the courage to act the grace of God. I imagine that priest or not, it is always the grace of God that provides the purging of evil. Do you have any experience with exorcist archetypes?
George Harvey Taylor, Suicide Victim
August 23, 2013
— 3 Comments
George Harvey Taylor
I have found a true treasure today as I prepared to write this post about my grandfather, George Harvey Taylor. Somebody has placed his photo on Ancestry.com. I instantly knew it was he because he strongly resembles his children, one of my uncles in particular. This is the first time I have seen his image. He committed suicide ten years before I was born, and for at least the first ten years of my life he was never mentioned. I am not sure how old I was when I learned from a cousin that he had killed himself at home at night, his youngest son discovering the body in the morning. It shocked me out of my wits. It still does. The tightly held secret probably had some initial seed of the suicide of one of my cousins in about 1970.
George Harvey Taylor (1884 – 1941)
is my maternal grandfather
Ruby Lee Taylor (1922 – 2008)
daughter of George Harvey Taylor
Pamela Morse
I am the daughter of Ruby Lee Taylor
George Harvey was born in Texas in 1884 to parents who had moved there from Selma, Taledega to be precise, Alabama, after the Civil War. He met his wife, Hattie May Long, who had been adopted in Mississippi during or shortly after the war. Her adopted parents, the Longs, brought Hattie May with them to Texas, but seem to have left her brother, Fidel, back in Mississippi. After George and Hattie married they moved to Humble, TX, where George was a meter reader for Texaco on a very large oil lease. He rode a black horse around the lease and read various meters to document production. They had ten living children;Hattie lost a couple of pregnancies; then Hattie May died in childbirth, along with the baby….at home, in 1932. George Harvey was left to raise ten kids, the youngest being only two years of age.
grave in Waller TX
When my mother was near death and demented I asked about her father’s suicide and how she felt. She was not in the house that morning, but had gone to Houston to visit her sister. She said she was very angry at him; the reason given was that the lady next door turned down his proposal of marriage. He had carried on as a single father for 9 years and was severely depressed, I suppose. Suicide often leaves the family ashamed like my mother’s religious family. The taboo subject has strange and subtle effects on those who are left on earth. I know that it shaped my mother’s view of life.
Please join me in raising awareness and hopefully some funding for IAMalive.org. during suicide prevention week, Sept8-14, 2013. This 24 hour hot line is created to help people like my grandpa make it through an irrational moment of fear and loathing. This issue belongs to all of us. You can find the easy donation bottom here, along with a list of thank you gifts. My grandpa George and I thank you as well.
Memory Therapy
August 22, 2013
— 3 Comments
forsythia
One week from today I will be visiting the town near Pittsburgh where I grew up and went to school through 8th grade. I have not been there for almost 50 years, so things will be different…and yet the same. I tune in to the daily tweets of @thomasmooreSoul because I find them to be just the right amount of therapy for a single day. A long time ago he tweeted that talking about your childhood openly, telling stories you remember, is a great way to make sense of the past. I have been exchanging pictures and comments with some of the former classmates for about 4 months now, as we prepare to meet in Oakmont, PA for their (I was already gone) high school reunion. I can say that Tom’s advice about childhood stories is powerful. Each one of us remembers different parts of our class story; I am sure being physically in our old school will spark some memories we have not discovered. There is something unaltered about all our personalities that I can’t put into words, but next week maybe I will.
Before we all get hauled off to the memory wing of some care home we have the opportunity to get together to reminisce about our seriously good old days. A few of us are already gone, naturally. Such is life. It ends. I look forward to stirring up some memory/emotions from my childhood with the classmates with whom I shared them. I have travelled the world, but this is time travel in a sense. I am not sure what kind of deeper meaning will be revealed, but I expect it will be more helpful to my psyche than years of analysis might be (I am too thrifty to find out). Buckle up, gentle readers, and prepare to time travel with me to the ‘Burgh next week…back to the future.
Suicide Prevention
August 22, 2013
— 4 Comments
Everything I know about suicide prevention I learned as a volunteer at the VA. We were given training in order to spot and prevent suicidal tendencies. The powerpoint included many graphs that drew a grim picture of the rise in military suicide. The number killing themselves had already surpassed the number killed in battle, and the line was hyperbolic. They also showed us the most at risk groups by state, age, and other demographics. They showed us how many Vets had committed suicide within days of a visit to a VA facility. They showed us in scientific and very graphic terms how seriously they were failing to prevent suicide. At the end of the factual part of the presentation they told us the solution for all involved was trust the VA. They said if we reported the suicidal patient to the VA they would make sure it would be handled professionally. They saw no irony in showing us how miserably they were failing, and then asking us to trust them. I had worked with them for years, and had not seen them execute reasonable care for the patients I visited. My guys were frustrated and unhappy with VA services. I was unhappy too because it was impossible to upgrade any of them.
My last Vet had been not only vocally suicidal for a long time, but had been allowed to go alone out in traffic with his electric scooter on a busy street. Demographically, he was in the top percentile of the group most likely to kill themselves. He lived in a care home, care being the obvious missing feature. He had problems too numerous to mention that were never solved by his visiting VA social worker who was dispatched to help his with his day to day issues. My experience trying to help him from within a wasteful, non functional system funded by my tax dollars made me feel angry and hopeless. They asked us to report problems with the Vet’s care, but then did nothing to remedy the problems. I had to eventually resign from the program because it made me feel much worse knowing how the Vets are really treated. To say it left a bitter taste in my mouth is an understatement. I need to remedy that.
It is never a good idea to go around with a bitterness. Some bloggers I admire and want to emulate are promoting a fund raising effort for Suicide Prevention Week, Sept 8-14, 2013. Funds raised in this campaign will be used to keep the IamAlive hotline open 24 hours a day. I am proud to support this effort. Suicide is not a personal problem as much as society’s issue, especially when our retired and active duty service members are so much at risk. This simple fundraiser benefits any and everyone who may be in a moment of terror. That could be anyone, any time.
Sarah Rebecca Lewis
August 21, 2013
— 2 Comments
Seal of Virginia
Sara Rebecca Lewis, my 7th great grandmother, was born in colonial Virginia. She married James Jones in 1665.
Sarah Rebecca Lewis (1643 – 1725)
is my 7th great grandmother
daughter of Sarah Rebecca Lewis
son of Ann Williams Jones
son of George Darden
daughter of David Darden
daughter of Minerva Truly Darden
daughter of Sarah E Hughes
son of Lucinda Jane Armer
daughter of George Harvey Taylor
I am the daughter of Ruby Lee
When her husband died she was given 4 human beings and the right to live on the plantation for life. Reading her husband’s will I notice how all the slaves, even the unborn ones, are willed as chattel to the members of the Jones family. The document starts with Almighty God and then moves directly into slavery. This is how Virginia was colonized:
Will of James Jones (I) (Chappell, Dickie & Other Kindred Families, p.63-4)
In the name of God. Amen. I James Jones (I) being weake and sick but of sound and perfect mind and memory, praise be therefore given to God, doe make and ordain this my present Last Will and Testament in the manner and form following, that is to say. First and principally I commend my soul into the hands of Almighty God, hoping through the merritts, Death and passion of my savior Jesus Christ to have full and free pardon of all my sins and to inherit everlasting life; and my body I commit to the earth to be decently buried at the discretion of my Executor, hereinafter named, and as touching the Disposition of all such temporal estate as it hath pleased Almighty God to bestow on me I give and dispose thereof as follows:
First. I will that all my debts and funeral expenses shall be paid and discharged.
Item. I will that my loving wife have the Labour of four negroes during her natural life, they are named Will, Robin, Maria and Betty. Provided they are not removed off the plantation I now live upon, if they are, then Immediately to return to my executor, which plantation I will my wife shall live Upon during her life.
Item. I give my wifes two sons two Negro children, one named James, the other unborn, the first child that either Betty or Maria shall bring to be the other, which two negro children to be Disposed of to my wifes two sons as she shall think fit, the unborn and the born child James to be and remain with their mothers till they come to the age of two years and a half year. My will is likewise that my wife have during her life what household stuff my executor shall see fit and that she have a reasonable yearly maintenance out of my stock.
Item. I give to my daughter Mary Dardin my negro man Jo –during her life.
Item. I give to my daughter Elizabeth a negro named Hanna to be at her disposal to do as she sees fit.
Item. I give to my daughter Hanna one negro named Jack to be at her disposal at her death or before as she sees fit.
Item. I give to my daughter Rebecca two hundred acres of land, lying in Surrey county, beginning from the Swamp up by the Spring, South, to the outline, that to be the headline, to her and her heirs forever.
Item. I give to my Granddaughter Eliza Glover, one hundred acres of land on the south side of Pond Runn, to be her and her heirs forever.
Item. I give to my grandson James Jones, this my plantation I live upon after my wifes Decease and all my land in Prince George county, after his father and mothers Decease, to him and his heirs forever.
Item. I give to my Grandson Thomas Chappell (Thomas Chappell Sr. (III)) one hundred acres of land lying in Surrey county from the Swamp South, joining upon William Cocke above the outline, to him and his heirs forever.
Item. I give to my Granddaughter Jane Cocke, daughter of John Cocke, one negro named Amy to her and her heirs forever as also one feather bed and bolster, one rug and one blanket, and if the ticke be bad Lett a new ticke be bought, as also two young cows, one young mair, One Iron Pot, two Pewter Dishes and one Doz.of Spoons.
All the rest and Residue of my personal Estate, goods and chattel whatsoever, I do give and bequeath to my Loving son James Jones, full and sole Executor of this my last Will and testament and I do hereby revoke, disannul and make void all former wills and Testaments by me heretofore made.
In Witness whereof I, the said James Jones (I) to this my last will and testament do set my hand and seal this the 6th day of April A.D.1719.
James Jones Seal (Sealed with wafer)
Signed and sealed in the presence of: Gilbert Hay Edward Prince Thomas Temple
At a Court held at Merchant’s Hope for Prince George County on the second Tuesday, in May, being the twelfth day of said month, A.D.1719, the above written last will of James Jones, deceased, was exhibited in Court by James Jones, his Executor, who made oath thereto and it being proven by the oaths of the witnesses thereto a certificate was granted to the said James Jones for obtaining a Probate in due form. Teste: Wm. Hamlin, Clerk
Wife’s letter to the Court:
Worthy Sirs: Having seen and heard read the Last Will of my late husband, James Jones, deceased, I therefore think fit to acquaint your W.p.T. that I think myself justly dealt by therein and to prevent further disputes I desire the will probated, I being willing to rely on the Legacy left me in said will. Given under my hand and seale this 20th April 1719.
Her Sarah X Jones Mark Seal (Sealed with red wafer)
Teste: E. Goodrich Mary Loyd
To the Worshipfull: His Majesty’s Justice of the Peace for Prince George County
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