Articles 2022

PART 2 What I’ve discovered after so many years, is that each of us has a story.  The story is composed of special moments that happened during the various chapters of our lives and our reactions to them. These stories or chapters in our book of life made us who we are and led us […]

Chapala resident since 2018. Many readers will remember Barry Michael Neil from his convincing performance as Oscar in Lakeside Little Theatre’s Musical of 2019 Sweet Charity. As he had never acted on stage, this performance was a remarkable achievement. Having said that, Barry was no stranger to public performance, but his performances were on Radio!

It wasn’t what I expected at all. So far north, almost like driving in northern Scotland, a harsh windswept landscape. How could anyone survive when the potato crops failed and food dwindled over several years? But to look at Castlebar now, you would think it was a suburb of Dublin. Sleek medical clinics and supermarkets

It’s the night before Christmas, but I live at the beach. I’m afraid a white Christmas is out of my reach. No snow, no sleigh bells, no Santa’s reindeer, The sound of the surf is all that I hear. I miss mistletoe and I miss all the holly Strung lights on my cactus, it wasn’t

All That I Can Be John Thomas Dodds only ever one glass of wine no matter how beautiful the pair might seem together, each crafted individually, exquisitely unique engendered with a particular essence a minion among snowflakes, crystals, stars. Yet nothing about us uniquely other than one person, an individual cell, a single being, being

“The first tropical storm of the season is forming west of Guatemala,” the online weather site reported. “OK,” I thought, and clicked on YouTube and watched a video of schnauzers juggling bowling balls. Then I watched a seven-month-old boy recite the Gettysburg Address in Latin. I didn’t give the announcement a second thought. I should

Part 1 The top reason that people don’t experience elation from their lives is… they are unwittingly not intimate with what a perfect for them life looks like. As a certified life coach I see this condition often in people who are struggling to make their lives feel better. It’s problematic because over the course

Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán Just how bad was “Bloody” Guzmán? One of his biographers, Santana, claimed he was known for “cruelty of the highest order, ambition without limit, a refined hypocrisy, great immorality, ingratitude without equal, and a fierce hatred for Cortés.” Guzmán went down in history as, by far, the worst of all the

In 1907, to bring attention to The New York Times’s new headquarters in Times Square, the paper’s owner, Adolph Ochs, came up with the idea of drawing a crowd to watch a giant ball drop at the stroke of midnight. Thus began a spectacle that attracts millions of television viewers and tens of thousands—not infrequently

Arrest the city! If Chiangmai were in America, the entire city would be arrested. No one seems to agree on what the Loi Kratong Festival in November means or celebrates, but I think the closest translation is “legal chaos.” In the USA, the army would surround the city, build a huge, maximum-security fence around it,