Author Archives: videochick1

THE SWEETNESS OF FORGETTING by Kristin Harmel Your very worst memories, put behind you, may become more vague as years advance…there is a SWEETNESS of FORGETTING. But those memories are part of who you are for as long as you live. That’s one of the lessons…one of the premises behind Kristin Harmel’s best-seller, “The Sweetness […]

The hip, urban heart of Florida’s Gulf Coast beats in Tampa, our destination for a long weekend…not so much to see Tampa, but to bask in the extraordinary voice of Andrea Bocelli!! Just recovering from a week’s bout with laryngitis (for the first time in his career,) we were fortunate that he didn’t postpone our […]

There are strange and mysterious sounds when the winds of winter blow, the long nights are crystal clear and cold and my world is covered with snow. The stars are frosty against the sky and the wind’s whistle is shrill as the snow blows against the house and drifts against the hill. Yet, in winter […]

“Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens Once upon a time , in the mid-twentieth century North Carolina wetlands, there lived a forgotten girl named Kya…aka Catherine…aka “The Marsh Girl” Clark. Abandoned by her parents and siblings at a very young age and further rejected by the school system, the entire town surrounding her and […]

THE HUNTRESS by Kate Quinn Ok, I admit it! I’m obsessed, morbidly fascinated with…and appalled by WWII books and the horrors of the time…before, during and after the war. I love the genre of Historical Fiction as it never fails to introduce me to little known areas of history that school and history books never […]

Their parents are longtime friends. Andrew was my first charter pilot on the earliest trips to Africa. He and his wife, Ingrid, have become dear friends… special people in my life. Naturally, I’ve known their daughters, Emma and Holly, since they were born…I visit with them in their South African town, East London, every couple […]

September-October, 2019 WHY MONGOLIA? Think about Mongolia for just a moment. What visions come to mind? (It’s the land that gave us Genghis Khan…remember him from our history classes? He was Mongolia’s founding father…their George Washington.) Yes, he was a brutal warrior, amassing the largest contiguous empire in history… but he also established Mongolia’s first […]

A southern neighbor of the Kara tribe…(the tribe of my two Ethiopian families)…the MOST southerly tribe living in the country’s Omo Valley are the DASSANECH people. Despite their close proximity to Lake Turkana, they live in an incredibly dry region with desert to their west and southwest. Part of our visit to Ethiopia this time […]

Hi Dear Family and Friends, I just wanted to let you know that my old blog posts…years of them…are still available for viewing. I was using BLOGSPOT, but switched to WORDPRESS because it affords more flexibility in posting from ANYWHERE! The previous postings are also about travels, art, book reviews, as well as many photos. […]

BONOBOS are the “hippy chimps,” found only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo…in the second largest solid stretch of rainforest in the world. You may not have heard of them before as these GREAT APES (there are only 4 GREAT APES in our world, as seen below…) live in an extremely remote, sparsely populated, […]