Category Archives: Health and Lifestyle

“Burn Fat, Not Oil”

Posted on by annandmeg

Meg has a J.D. in Urban, Land Use and Environmental Law. She focuses on maintaining the balance of community and environmental health, healthy lifestyles, and encouraging sustainable living.

Jake and I were in the city on Saturday. We had just visited the Ghirardelli Factory and ordered two of the most delicious ice cream cones known on the planet. Chocolate dipped waffle cones with Ghirardelli chocolate and coffee ice creams. Wow. We walked down toward the waterfront, found a park bench in the sun, and sat down to indulge in our afternoon treat. And then we heard it…

 

 

 

 

 

“Burn Fat, Not Oil!” The chanting was not overwhelming. The message, certainly something I can support. The scene, well, it definitely got our attention! It was the World Naked Bike Tour, in full view, and I mean FULL VIEW for all of us to see, riding their bicycles through the crowd. Their message was clear, that we should all get on a bicycle, or walk, or otherwise prevent the consumption of oil to get ourselves from place to place.

(Fair warning, these are images of the cyclists from Saturday, but I blurred out any body parts that were exposed.)

At first, the sight was shocking. Seeing a bunch of grown men and women riding through the streets of San Francisco, completely naked, was not exactly how I anticipated spending my Saturday afternoon or my Ghirardelli ice cream cone. However, after the shock had worn off, I began to see the method to their madness. They were trying to get people’s attention. Quite frankly, it worked, and now I am writing a post about it. Aside from the drastic measures to get people’s attention, which was clearly a success, I do think they have a good point. Too many people use up gallons and gallons of gasoline driving around. It might not always be feasible for someone to walk to the store, or ride a bicycle to work. However, it is important for all of us to do our part in reducing our dependence on foreign oil and coughing more pollution into our atmosphere. Plus, it’s much healthier to get out and move around.

I may not feel comfortable with the idea of riding naked through a heavily populated area (or any public area for that matter), but I do think the people involved in the World Naked Bike Tour on Saturday had a good point. Burn fat, not oil. Get out and move around, and don’t waste gas when it is clearly unnecessary.

The Politics of Faith–Who Speaks for God

Posted on by annandmeg

I’m a preacher’s kid (that is “PK” for short).  I was raised in church, or it seemed that way.  We were taught that we were part of the one “true” church.  But we were also raised to believe in loving one another, treating others with respect, working hard and following the adage that “to whom much is given, much is expected”.  God was the center of the family.

My family history is replete with relatives who were part of minority Christian religions.  My Mayflower ancestors , Thomas Rogers, John and Francis Cooke were Separatists who moved to the Leiden, Netherlands because of religious persecution in England, before sailing to a better life in Plymouth.  More recent ancestors participated in the Seventh Day Baptist Church, the Free Will Baptist Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Church.  I was always mindful of the ways in which my beliefs compared, and contrasted, with those of more vocal participants in public life.

My grandparents were “God-fearing” people, active in their religion. Unique for their time, they believed, as part of their faith, in equality of the sexes and equality of people of different races.   With the benefit of a rich religious heritage I have been privileged throughout my life to interact with people representing a wide variety of religious and moral perspectives. Many of my closest friends are not Christian.  I have been privileged to see glimpses of the world through their eyes.  I do not find their faith or their morality to be in any way deficient.

As an observer in the political process, I ask myself, what is the role of faith in public life?  How do we remain true to our beliefs, whatever they are, while also remaining true to the other teachings I remember from childhood about respect for others?  How do we  work for a better world when our own understandings of how to make such a world are so limited.  How do we appropriately show respect for the beliefs of others while remaining faithful to our own world views and beliefs.  As I struggled with these issues, it occurred to me that there were two books in my collection I could turn to for wisdom. They are Faith and Politics, by former U.S. Senator John Danforth, and The Mighty and the Almighty” by former U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright.  I hope  that my exploration of these books will be of interest to our followers.

Art on the Wall — Kansas City’s East Side

Posted on by annandmeg

Meg and I love to travel.  When we return home, she returns to Petaluma; I return to Kansas City. Missouri doesn’t have an ocean or a light house.  It doesn’t have sandy beaches.  It doesn’t have mountains.  But Kansas City does have art, lots of art.  Some amazing art is right in plain sight, but we don’t always notice it. I have spent a lot of time driving around the city recording this art. I thought I would share some of the art I found on Kansas City’s East Side.

Sometimes the artist is paid well for the paintings or is a professional who volunteers his/her time and talent. This mural on Troost Avenue presents images of Kansas City’s history: Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse, Martin Luther King, Jr., native Americans.

Some art is for children, such as the mural at Operation Breakthrough, which records the images of creatures, large and small.

Sometimes kids create their own art without permission on bridges, abandoned buildings and overpasses, ie graffiti. The vivid colors are impossible to ignore.

Frequently road art captures the essence  of a community  within a community.  Sometimes it conveys hope.


Other times it conveys the joy of creativity and the enthusiasm of youth.

International Women’s Day-March 8, 2012

Posted on by annandmeg
          March is Women’s History Month.  President Obama has described Women’s History Month as a time to reflect on “the extraordinary accomplishments of women” in shaping the country’s history.
          But it isn’t just Women’s History Month.  If you opened up google this morning, you saw the “google doodle” that announces that March 8th is International Women’s Day.  The UN also celebrates March 8th as UN Day for Women’s Rights and International Peace.
          We sometimes need to be reminded of the strides we have made in developing richer, fuller lives for women and our families. We live in an era when our women friends are highly educated, live rich full lives with significant control over our personal destinies.  We are mindful of the educational, employment and personal opportunities available to women in this country. But we recognize that women in many parts of the world live their lives subject to rigid societal expectations, unable to be educated, and unable to control their destinies.  We are also mindful of the current environment in which women’s issues are once again a focus of political and media attention that harkens back to less progressive times.
          Meg and I take seriously the challenge of conflicting personal values concerning the role of women in society.  We recognize that people have differing opinions on a wide variety of issues from child care to contraception to employment opportunities. With that said, we believe in the right of all people to be treated with equal respect and equal dignity. We share U.S Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall’s belief that for women there is little difference between a pedestal and a cage. We believe that Title IX, which requires that women and men receive equal educational opportunities, is invaluable in developing the equal role of women in society.  We respect and appreciate the men in our lives. We consider them our equals and consider ourselves equal to them. We respect the choices of women who dedicate themselves to family, home and community.  We believe that their choices, like ours, contribute to strong families and to rearing children who are happy, and who are physically and emotionally healthy.
          In 1995, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women that “women must enjoy the right to participate fully in the social and political lives of their countries if we want freedom and democracy to thrive and endure.”  What is true of the rights of women in developing countries is also true of women in this country.
           As we support the equal rights of men and women, we should also follow her wisdom that, “What we have to do…is to find a way to celebrate our diversity and debate our differences without fracturing our communities.”  We are grateful for being part of a community of friends who love and care about each other and endeavor to create a better and more just society.

Sophia’s Grand Tour

Posted on by annandmeg

When I think about a grand tour, I envision the Italian Riviera, Big Ben, ancient cities and wonderful museums.  But we are talking about Sophia.  She is only two.  Besides, she already lives in the one the world’s most wonderful cities, with its canals, museums and tulips.  So for Sophia, a grand tour involved flying to the United States to see what we have to offer.

Kansas City

Sophia and her mom and dad arrived in Kansas City International Airport for a 3-week vacation to visit relatives and have a change of pace from the cold European winter.  Granddad met her at the airport.

Our schedule revolved around her naps, her bath and her periods of high energy.

Food was always a source of entertainment.  She prefers dark breads, tangy cheeses and her dad’s great cooking. She also ate local foods that were unusual for her.  We tried to remain consistent with mom and dad’s preference that she eat only organic eggs, milk fruits and vegetables.

She visited many of our favorite haunts: including the Country Club Plaza and Kauffman Gardens.  She ate dinner at a lovely little restaurant at 17th and Summit.

Her uncle Bill and Aunt Sherry came to see her.  She spent a lot of quality time with Casey.

Way too soon, it was time for her to leave Kansas City for a week in:

The Heart of Texas

Sophia and her parents flew to Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas to visit family and old friends.  She went to the zoo with her Aunt Christina.

She visited her great aunts and uncle in Springtown, Texas, where she got to get “up close and personal” with cattle and donkeys on the family farm.  

She went shopping with her mom and dad.  She visited her Grandmother Judy and all her family.

We know how hard it must have been for her grandmother Judy when she got back on a jet to travel

Sunny Florida

The real treat for Laura and Michel was the week in Southern Florida.  Despite Amsterdam’s beauty, they cold gray weather is a great motivator to get Laura, Michel and Sophia to meet us somewhere warm and sunny.  Siesta Key fit the bill perfectly.

Siesta Key is such an amazing place for children.  Sophia loves the water and the sun.  

She loved to run back and forth into the water, seeming to mimic the water birds nearby.

Way too soon for Terry and me it was time for Sophia and her parents to return home.  It is always bitter-sweet to see them because the joy of the visit is tempered by the knowledge that every visit is a gift, and that she will change and grow during the months we are not with her.  But, we love every minute we have with her.  We also know that waiting for her in Amsterdam are her wonderful grandparents.

Return to Amsterdam

Sophia’s grandparents, Rudy (Opa) and Evelyn (Oma) are waiting at home to welcome Sophia with open arms and happy hearts.

We miss Sophia every day and wish we could be with her, but we are so grateful that she is surrounded by wonderful parents and grandparents and that her world is filled with love.

All the news that’s fit to print

Posted on by annandmeg
Layoffs are the order of the day for print media.  An estimated 3775 newsroom jobs were lost in 2011 alone, spread among newspapers large and small. Across the nation, newspapers papers, magazines, even books are giving way to Internet-based news and literature. The Washington Post, an icon in the publishing world, has recently reduced its staff.  Our own Kansas City Star has announced repeated layoffs including, most recently, in mid February, 2012.  As readers we are concerned with the ways in which the loss of traditional sources of information shrinks our ability to gather meaningful date on the important issues of the day.
Does this really matter if Internet sources are ready to provide us information?  The question, at least in part, is whether internet media will assume the mantel of investigative and in-depth reporting, on a local and national level, that inevitably declines as newspapers that have sustained reductions in news room staff.
Remember All the President’s Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? They spent months meeting with an anonymous informer identified only as “deep throat” before publishing a series of articles in the Washington Post exposing the Watergate scandal that resulted in President Nixon’s resignation and prison sentences for key members of his staff.  Our own Kansas City Star has repeatedly exposed incompetence and corruption throughout the metropolitan area.  The repeated reductions in staff leave the news room gutted, with at best only limited ability to seek out corruption, or report more than minimal local news.

The reduction in paid subscriptions and advertising revenues may make staff downsizing inevitable.  At the same time, competition between and among internet news source makes the competition for audiences more intense.  Facing that challenge, the Washington Post has expressed a commitment to continue it’s in-depth reporting, while moving aggressively to increase readership of its Internet paper.  Relying on online metrics to identify the number of clicks each of its articles receives, it is able to monitor constantly the popularity of each article, identify those with limited interest and replace low performing articles on a ongoing basis.  In this environment, is it reasonable to worry that articles about Kardashian weddings and celebrity probation violations will attract larger audiences than  school board meetings, second injury funds and low-level corruption. Focusing news and media attention on “easy news”, ie. news that is easily available through multiple sources, is cheaper and faster than authorizing journalists to spend months on a single article, or even a series of articles, requiring extensive research and exploration. It will be even more of a challenge to find a means by which journalists will be vigilant about reporting the mundane, but critical issues facing local communities.

It is difficult to criticize the paper media.  Their goal in 2012 is not to expand profit, but to secure survival while finding new resources and audiences.  In the interim we must, each of us, support and encourage  journalism that helps us to remain knowledgeable of the challenges that continue to confront us.  Certainly, this is essential to an educated citizenry.

Edward R. Murrow explained the problem this way: “the newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end, the communicator will be left with the problem of what to say and how to say it”.

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Old Soil and New Life

Posted on by annandmeg

I have been focused a lot lately on children. From childhood illness, to separation, to challenges at work, my world currently feels child centered.  Our family now is looking forward to two happy arrivals in the coming months.  As a future great-aunt, I am just filled with love and curiosity about the little ones who will join the current members of our next generation: Elliot, Asher and Sophia. I wonder about how their lives will be impacted by the world around them, the values that will come through our own children and those that will be formed by the outside world.

I love the description of family in Naomi Ragen’s book The Ghost of Hannah Mendes: We are planted in old soil, enriched by the lives of so many who came before us, the nourishment is meant to flow through us on to the newest branches so that every branch grows a little taller and blooms more beautifully still.

Our family is fortunate that Meg’s generation shows every indication of growing tall and blooming beautifully.  They seem to share the best of our family strengths and values rather than our weaknesses.  Universally they care about the environment, a healthy economy, healthy life habits.  They care about respect for human dignity.  They take an interest in government while maintaining a respectful regard for civility and understanding the importance of forming opinions based on research and study rather than on demagoguery.  We have raised them well, and now we rely on them to nurture their own children, nieces and nephews.  Understanding that, and understanding that it is they who will have the primary responsibility to shape the environment in which their children are raised, what wisdom can we pass on to them.

My mother used to say that when you have raised a child you become an expert in raising that child, but that it doesn’t really how to raise another child.  Of course, every child needs to be raised lovingly, with an early focus on healthy diet and healthy life habits. They need to be read to, to be given lots of hugs, and loving discipline.  They need to see modeled the values that have shaped us as strong, productive family.  They need to be intellectually stimulated from an early age, and to have parental involvement in the schools where their educations will continue.

But these basic parental responsibilities (and joys) do not directly speak to respect for the uniqueness of each child. Dr. Mel Levine, in his book A Mind at a Time, describes parenting this way: “Some minds  are wired to create symphonies and sonnets, while others are fitted out to build bridges, highways, and computers; design airplanes and road systems; drive trucks and taxicabs; or seek cures for breast cancer and hypertension . . . Parents have a special responsibility and joy as they get to know well and to cultivate their children’s individual minds.”

So the wisdom I would want to share with them is that parents support  their children best, when they learn to understand and nurture the uniqueness in each of them, helping them to develop their special strengths and to help them to accommodate to their inevitable limitations.  As to the future, I can only chuckle that Forrest Gump’s mother was probably right when she reminded us that “life is a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.”  I am excited to find out.

The Few, the Proud, the Montford Point Marines

Posted on by annandmeg

February is Black History Month.  It is an important time to celebrate African-American history.  It is equally to acknowledge the contributions of our friends of color. The successes of the present arise out of sacrifices from the past.  While they are too many to list, this is a great time to thank the Montford Point Marines who volunteered and served in World War II, after President Roosevelt entered a Presidential Directive integrating the Marine Corps.

We are all familiar with the Buffalo Soldiers formed at Fort Leavenworth in 1866 to fight in the Indian Wars.  We have also heard of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American aviators in the Army Air Corps, who trained at Tuskegee, Oklahoma, beginning in 1941.  However, I had never heard of the Montfort Point Marines. They were activated in August 1942.  Between 1942 and 1949, 20,000 men volunteered to serve in the Marines. They trained in a segregated facility in Montford Marine Camp[1] in Montford Point, N.C.  Point, North Carolina.   Initially, they were trained by white officers.  Quickly African-Americans took over their own training when, by 1943, American Americans finally became noncommissioned officers.  Like the Buffalo Soldiers and the Tuskegee Airmen, they chose to fight, despite segregation, in order to show their national commitment.  Cassandra L. Paschal has written about them that they believed “that if they could show their homeland their valor they would return to a country that in its gratitude would give them all of the freedoms provided in our Constitution.”

Montford Point Marines were assigned to support white troops.  However, they often found themselves in the thick of battle. They served, fought and died in the Pacific Theater in places with names like Saipan, Okinawa, Guam and the Mariana Islands.    Shortly after World War II, in September 1949, President Truman ordered the end of segregation in the armed forces.  Thereafter all armed forces were integrated.

On November 23, 2012, House Resolution 2447 was signed into law by President Obama.  The resolution granted the Congressional Medal or Honor to the Montford Point Marines.  While 11 members abstained from voting, not a single “no” vote was entered.

Equality under the law did not come quickly.  But the service of these brave men has finally been acknowledged and honored. To those who served, “Thank you for your service”.

[1] Renamed Camp Johnson on April 19, 1974, in honor of Sergeant Major, Gilbert H. “Hashmark” Johnson, a Distinguished Montford Point Drill Instructor

Loving Lila

Posted on by annandmeg

There are few joys in life more gratifying than the relationships we have with children.  They represent pure love and a joy that is unparalleled.  We thrive on their unconditional faith that we can make all things right.  But sometimes we cannot protect them from life’s great challenges. That is the case with Lila.

She is so young and so loved, surrounded by family and friends who have treasured her since before she was born.  Now Lila is ill.  The same loving community that has sought to love and protect her is now focused, for the next days, weeks, and months, on every step of her diagnosis, her treatment, her care and her recovery.  The outpouring of love and support for Lila and her family forms a protective shield around her as though to protect her from the dangers in her own body.  If love alone could cure, she would not be struggling now.

As I write this I am aware that there are many children just like Lila.  Children who are ill or injured.  Children whose families love them as we love Lila.  These children are no less precious.  Their pain is no less overwhelming.  Their fear no less all-consuming.  Committed families and friends draw on personal and spiritual communities as we place our precious children in the care of skilled physicians and pediatric specialists.

Surely there is no good that diminishes the suffering, no words that lessen the burden. Yet, somehow the love of a supportive community and the compassionate care of high quality doctors and nurses help Lila and her family navigate through the perils and fear.  Lila, and all the children like Lila, move through each step toward the future holding our hearts in their hands.  Be safe, Lila.

Hands Around Shollenberger: A day to demonstrate commitment to a local gem

Posted on by annandmeg

Meg has a J.D. in Urban, Land Use and Environmental Law. She focuses on maintaining the balance of community and environmental health, healthy lifestyles, and encouraging sustainable living.

Shollenberger Park is located on the south side of Petaluma. It also sits on the east side of the Petaluma River. This wonderful park is home to a huge variety of birds, many of which do not have an equally safe environment close by. The habitat created by the wetlands and the surrounding park is ideal for both birds and bird watchers alike, while also creating a beautiful sanctuary for walkers, runners, families and their canine companions. My husband and I have brought Lily and Cousteau here several times.

Though I am new to Petaluma, I have quickly become aware of the dedication to preserving local gems such as Shollenberger Park. Many of them fall under siege from developers and changing times, but the support from the community to protect these areas is quite amazing. Shollenberger in particular is at risk of having a new neighbor, an asphalt plant, which would be located directly across the river. Environmentalists are concerned that this addition would compromise the integrity of the wetlands and surrounding habitats, as well as destroying valuable resources for local wildlife.

As a demonstration of their commitment to protecting the park, over 1300 people gathered at Shollenberger on Sunday for “Hands Around Shollenberger.” Supporters wore red, as a Valentine’s Day dedication to the park, and stood hand to hand all the way around the two-mile trail. It was an amazing site to see. Neither the cold nor the wind could keep these hearty souls away. At 3:00pm, a plane flew overhead to take an aerial photograph of the event. I am excited to see the results. It truly was inspiring to see the dedication from local citizens to preserving Shollenberger Park.

If you are interested in learning more about the effort to protect Shollenberger, I recommend visiting the Save Shollenberger Website here.