Senior Women Web

Blog

  • Margaret Cullison

    Since retiring from work in California public schools, Margaret Cullison has written personal essays and articles about cooking, animals, and water gardens. She currently reviews self-published books and has begun a novel based on her fraternal grandfather’s experiences during the Civil War.

    After nine years living in southern Oregon, Margaret recently returned to northern California to be closer to family. She can be reached at margaretcullison at yahoo.com.

    (Editor’s Note: Margi is sporting her SeniorWomenWeb cap)

  • Joan La Prade Cannon

    Joan L. Cannon liked to use her middle initial because so few of her maiden namesakes are left anywhere (Huguenot LaPrades). She was retired teacher, retail manager and author of three novels in paperback, Settling and Maiden Run, a collection of short stories called Peripheral Vision and her latest, a collection of poetry,  My Mind Is Made of Crumbs,  all available from Amazon and on order from independent booksellers.

    Joan’s most recent novel is Second Growth and can be purchased through Amazon.  From childhood,  there have been toss-ups for her avocations among reading, riding horses, painting, local flora and fauna and writing.

    Editor’s note: We were gifted by Joan’s vibrant, inspired, writing for the website and plan to revisit her essays often.  Joan passed away on October 10, 2017.

  • Rose Madeline Mula

    Rose Madeline Mula’s Archive of Articles

    Rose Mula was an executive assistant, a public relations specialist, and an operations manager for a New England theater chain before discovering a passion for writing. She has written business and trade articles to earn a living, and humor for the fun of it.

    Her work has appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Yankee, Modern Maturity, The Christian Science Monitor, The Reader’s Digest, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, and more than a hundred other magazines and newspapers. Actually-thousands of newspapers, since one of her essays, The Stranger in My Mirror (originally titled, The Stranger in My House), was reprinted in Ann Landers’ nationally syndicated column in 1999, without Rose’s byline. Ms. Landers explained that she had received it from her cousin in Phoenix and wanted to share it with her readers even though she didn’t know the author. When Rose left a phone message for her, Landers returned the call personally, with gracious compliments and apologies, and she promptly printed an attribution.

    Meanwhile, Rose did some sleuthing and found her Stranger running rampant (and nameless) on dozens of websites, all but one of which claimed no prior knowledge of the author but were happy to hear from her and add her name. The exception was the owner of a site who claimed she had had the story for over twenty years. Not true, Rose pointed out, because in the essay she mentioned VCRs, which were very rare back then, and ATMs, which didn’t exist for years later.

    Rose never was able to identify the original kidnapper who stole her Stranger away. A couple of years before, her hometown newspaper, The Andover Townsman, published it. She assumes that a reader scanned it, without her byline, and started the whole distribution chain by emailing it to a friend who decided to share it with other cyber pals. And the saga continues to this day, the Stranger is still popping up in e-mails across the nation. Rose wishes she herself can achieve the same immortality. Meanwhile, she can reached by e-mail.


    Editor’s Note:  Rose’s self-published books (Grand Mother Goose — Rhymes For A Second Childhood and  Confessions of A Domestically-Challenged Homemaker) are available through Amazon. 

  • Elaine Soloway

    ElaineSoloway.jpg

    Elaine Soloway is the mother of Jill and Faith Soloway, and the inspiration for Shelly Pfefferman (Judith Light) on Amazon Video’s Golden Globe winning series, Transparent. She is the author of four books: The Division Street Princess, She’s Not The Type, Green Nails And Other Acts Of Rebellion: Life After Loss and most recently Bad Grandma and Other Chapters In A Life Lived Out Loud.

    Elaine is a public relations, marketing, and tech consultant; and was previously the Director of Communications for the Chicago Public Schools and a press aide to former Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne. She currently writes The Rookie Caregiver, The Rookie Widow and The Rookie Transplant blogs.

    Elaine’s website is elainesolowayconsulting.com and her email is elainesoloway (at) gmail.com.

     

  • Ferida Wolff

     

    Ferida Wolff is author of 21 children’s books and three essay books, her latest being  Rachel’s Roses, illustrated by Margeaux Lucas. New York: Holiday House, Available August  20, 2019. 112 pages.  Rachel's RosesBefore this latest, she wrote The Story Blanket (Peachtree Publishers) and Is a Worry Worrying You? (Tanglewood Books)  

    Her work appears in anthologies, newspapers, magazines, in seniorwomen.com and in her nature blog, http://feridasbackyard.blogspot.com.  A  book,  Chicken Soup for the Soul Married Life, contains two of her essays. 

    Visit her at http://feridawolff.net/.

  • Doris O’Brien

    Doris O’Brien is a retired college Speech teacher and banker. She has published two books of humor (Up or Down With Women’s Liberation and Humor Me a Little) and for many years contributed light verse to the Pepper ‘n Salt column of the Wall Street Journal. She is an avid writer of letters to the editors.

    Doris celebrated her 50th wedding anniversary in the same year she welcomed her first grandchild. She now lives in Pasadena with a great view of the San Gabriel mountains — and the annual Tournament of Roses Parade.

    She can be reached by e-mail: witsendob at (@) gmail.com

  • The Long Arty, Historical, and Scientific Summer: Blue Star Museums for Military and Their Families

    Through Blue Star Museums, museums across America will invite military personnel and their families to visit their museums to participate in the arts free of charge all summer long

    This year, more than 1,600 (and counting) museums in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa are taking part in the initiative, including more than 300 new museums this year.Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYCAR

    Museums are welcome to join Blue Star Museums throughout the summer. The effort to recruit museums has involved the partnership efforts of the American Association of Museums, the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Association of Children’s Museums, the American Association of State and Local History, and the Association of Science-Technology Centers.

    This year’s Blue Star Museums represent not just fine arts museums, but also science museums, history museums, nature centers, and 70 children’s museums. Among this year’s new participants are the American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar in Richmond, Virginia; the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, NM; the Cleveland Botanical Garden in Cleveland, Ohio; the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, California; the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas; and the World Figure Skating Museum & Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

    FOLLOW: Blue Star Museums is on Twitter at @NEAarts, hashtag #bluestarmuse. To learn more about the White House’s Joining Forces initiative visit JoiningForces.gov and follow on Twitter @JoiningForces and on Facebook. Follow Blue Star Families on Twitter, @BlueStarFamily, and on Facebook.

    About Blue Star Museums

    Blue Star Museums is a collaboration among the National Endowment for the Arts, Blue Star Families, the Department of Defense, and more than 1,600 museums across America. The program runs from Memorial Day, May 28, 2012 through Labor Day, September 3, 2012. The free admission program is available to active-duty military and their family members (military ID holder and up to five family members). Active duty military include Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and active duty National Guard and active duty Reserve members. Some special or limited-time museum exhibits may not be included in this free admission program. For questions on particular exhibits or museums, please contact the museum directly. To find out which museums are participating, visit www.arts.gov/bluestarmuseums. The site includes a list of participating museums and a map to help with visit planning.Cleveland Botancial Garden

    Museums that wish to participate in Blue Star Museums may contact bluestarmuseums@arts.gov, or Wendy Clark at 202-682-5451. See the complete list of participating museums.

    About Blue Star Families

    Blue Star Families is a national, nonprofit network of military families from all ranks and services, including guard and reserve, with a mission to support, connect and empower military families. In addition to morale and empowerment programs, Blue Star Families raises awareness of the challenges and strengths of military family life and works to make military life more sustainable through programs and partnerships like Operation Honor Cards, MilKidz Club and Blue Star Museums.

    Membership includes military spouses, children and parents as well as service members, veterans and the civilians who strongly support them. To learn more about Blue Star Families, visit www.bluestarfam.org.

    Photographs:

    The Great Hall of the Metropolitan  Museum of New York City, Wikipedia

    The Costa Rican rainforest as replicated in The Eleanor Armstrong Smith Glasshouse at the Cleveland Botanical Garden, Wikipedia

  • Do Internships Count? Rep. Paul Ryan is Entertaining Applications

    Lack of government data on internships leaves policymakers in the dark

    By Ross Eisenbrey, Vice President, Economic Policy Institute

    Experts at companies that track internships generally agree that about 75 percent of college graduates will have taken at least one internship over the course of their four-year college career. This means that each year, more than a million four-year college students work as interns during the summer or during the school year. Recent surveys suggest that more than half of these interns are unpaid.

    Add in interns from high schools, community colleges, university graduate programs, and even mid-career adults, and there may be as many as 2 million interns employed each year. Experts agree that the internship phenomenon was growing even before the Great Recession and has accelerated since. Yet, few can provide any information on the impact of internships, paid or unpaid, on the labor market or the wages and employment prospects of young people.

    The US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics provide the following data about internships:

    SeniorWomen.com’s Editor writes:

    Let’s look at one of the most sought-after categories of internships, that of a Congressional intern, most specifically the internships offered by Rep. Paul Ryan’s office in the 1st Congressional District of Wisconsin and at his Washington, DC office. Ryan has been mentioned as a possible running mate for the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney:Paul Ryan's Cong. photo

    District Internship Information

    If you are interested in interning in my Janesville District office, some of your duties may include:

    • Assisting with the research and writing of constituent correspondence
    • Assisting with our mobile office tours and listening sessions
    • Cataloging newspaper articles, including clipping, organizing and scanning into the computer distribution system.
    • Researching issues or agency policies
    • Data assembly and entry into Internet Quorum Government data system
    • Grant research

  • Isn’t There Any Mystery Left to Being Apart? The Obsession to Keeping in Touch With Those Out of Sight

    by Doris O’Brien

    There are many times when I wish I were a cartoonist.   I can think of all sorts of satire, political and otherwise, that  would  surely hit the mark  with a well-executed  cartoon. As it is, I’m incapable of  transferring  “think” to “ink”  because I can’t draw worth a damn.  In fact, my skills are so lacking I’m  generally the last one chosen as a partner in the board game “Pictionary.” I tried to draw a  girl in a bathing suit once, and she came out looking like the Michelin man.  Fellow players hilariously tacked that effort to the refrigerator door.weak ties

    This deficiency, however, has not prevented me from thinking about what I might draw as a cartoonist, any more than lack of money inhibits a poor person from imagining herself in a mansion.  The basic problem with all credible cartoon ideas, however, is that they are, in modern parlance, “time sensitive.” You have to jump on an opportunity and translate it instantly into a printed image ready for mass distribution.  References, like people, can grow obsolete in no time flat.

    With all the newsworthy subjects in today’s world, it shouldn’t be hard to land a pictorial bulls-eye.  One of my favorites presently is our slavish addiction to all things electronic.  Several times a week I walk a short distance from my apartment to the large senior center in the middle of an urban area.  Along the way I make a game of counting the number of people who are talking or listening  on their cellphones, wholly oblivious of me or anyone else around them.  If they didn’t have those little blinking  red and white signals at street corners,  these absorbed, far-away folks might  end up being  traffic statistics, along with the equally-addicted,oblivious types who insist on using hand-held cell phones while driving.

    In five blocks, I generally count at least a dozen texters or talkers.  Some have earphones, others not.  I observe them, but they do not return the favor.  When I step into an elevator in my  trendy apartment complex, most of the tenants younger than myself do not  appear to notice me, much less greet me.  They remain glued to their precious little phones, fondling them, staring into their depths as into the eyes of a lover.

    Last Christmas, I went to a family gathering where there were young people who really weren’t there. Two of them sat opposite me on a sofa, eyes lowered, busily texting or chatting with their absent buddies.  When I traveled on a train down the coast recently, the young woman sitting next to me called her boyfriend every five minutes or so, to inform him exactly where on the journey she was.  Isn’t there any mystery left to being apart?

    I don’t suppose these “electrono-holics” considered the possibility of meeting new relatives at the holiday season, greeting new neighbors in a lift, or peering out of a train window to observe the here and now.  They seem rather disinterested in living in the present.  It’s the absent that absorbs them more.

  • Genevieve Jones: 19th Century Naturalist and Artist Rediscovered

    Nearly everyone is familar with John James Audubon and his seminal color-plate book, The Birds of America. But few people are aware of another monumental volume of artwork, Illustrations of the Nests and Eggs of Birds of Ohio.

    Inspired by viewing Audubon’s lithographs at the 1876 World’s Fair in Philadelphia, twenty-nine-year-old amateur naturalist and artist Genevieve Jones began working on a companion volume to The Birds of America, illustrating the nests and eggs that Audubon omitted. Her brother collected the nests and eggs, her father paid for the publishing, and Genevieve learned lithography and began illustrating the specimens.

    When Genevieve died suddenly of typhoid fever, her family labored for seven years to finish the project in her memory. The original book, sold by subscription in twenty-three parts, included Presidents Rutherford B. Hayes and Theodore Roosevelt among its subscribers.

    Only ninety copies of the original book were published in 1886, and fewer than twenty-five copies now remain in institutions and private hands.

    Featuring reproductions of all sixty-eight original color lithographs, archival photographs, selected field notes, and a key to the eggs and birds, America’s Other Audubon chronicles for the first time the story behind the making of this extraordinary nineteenth century book. America’s Other Audubon includes a foreword by Leslie K. Overstreet, curator of Natural-History Rare Books at the Smithsonian Institution.

    Joy M. Kiser began her professional career as the librarian for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in 1995. In 2001, she moved to the Washington, DC area to become the librarian for National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). She now works as a writer/editor for the Federal Government.

    Editor’s Note: The Library of Congress has a copy of the Illustrations of the nests and eggs of birds of Ohio; illustrations by Mrs. N. E. Jones ; text by Howard Jones … which can be viewed online, page by page or downloaded.

    Spine title: Nests and eggs of birds of Ohio. The work of illustration was begun by Genevieve Estelle Jones and Eliza J. Schulze. Cf. preface. Issued in parts; pt. 1 published in 1879.

    Audubon Dallas and the North Texas Master Naturalists will present author Joy M. Kiser at the Dallas Museum of Art Saturday, June 23 at 1:00pm

    On July 19, 2012, Ms. Kiser will speak at a NOBS (Northern Ohio Bibliophilic Society) Forum at Loganberry Books.