The Storyteller | Mary Vee

Photo by Mary Vee Probably my favorite of the year. No, I didn't forget you.  I kinda hoped you would be busy with family, new Christmas gifts, cookies, etc. I hope you are. Let's meet again next week...are you thinking about your resolution for this year? I am. Will I keep it? Probably not...but I most likely will for the first few weeks...or at least days.

Photo credit: Pixaby I typically don't see anything good about drones. Many articles have reported them used for invasive reasons. Some have even been used to look in apartment windows. So, I tend to not have a high opinion of them. EXCEPT. I recently read about a remote mountain people group on an island called Erromango, one of a chain of islands making up Vanuatu. See map to the left. As you can see the island is far away from a large land mass. According to Google maps, Vanuatu is a South Pacific Ocean nation made up of roughly eighty islands that stretch a little more than 807 miles and has a Melanesian culture. Tourists can enjoy scuba diving at coral reefs, underwater caverns, and shipwrecks. I tried to imagine myself growing up on this remote island of lush greens. Where vibrant palm trees reach the sky and thick jungle plants fill the land. Where mountains keep the people isolated from the world, and I wouldn't know what a skyscraper looked like, but ...

Scam artists are getting better at their craft. Photo by Mary Vee- A real phone booth - Luzern, Switzerland My heart breaks when I read about a person conned by these people, especially the elderly. I know several personally.  It is so easy to say, "How can they be duped? Don't they know..." The answer is, scam artists are very good at deception. For every word we say to them, they have a prepared script to keep us on the phone. The longer we are on the phone, the better their chances are to reel us in. Like a fisherman dangling bait for fish.  I asked a friend who knows how to deal with these situations, "How can you know for sure if the vendor whom you've dealt with for years is really the one calling or writing an email or sending a snail mail letter?" He said, "The bottom line is you can't. Hang up. Never say the word "yes" or the word "no" to the caller. They can record your response and use it to say you ...

Photo courtesy: wikimedia.org I listened to the live broadcast of the service in memory of George H.W. Bush today and was surprised at all I learned about this man who was a former president of the United States. Keynote speakers told of former president Bush's time as a navel jet pilot whose plane went down in the ocean off the coast of Japan. He was rescued before enemy soldiers found him. This event happened when he was twenty. From there he built a life of honoring others and establishing friendships. It is said he never hated anyone.   He celebrated life to his last days, taking a speedboat out on the water and outrunning his secret service detail in his eighties, and parachuting from a plane in his nineties to mention only a few. President Bush was known for his international efforts, receiving honors from a former Canadian Prime Minister and a German president, in addition to others. While speakers shared the list of his many notable and great historical ac...

PHOTO CREDIT: en.wikipedia.org They said it couldn't be done.  Who "they" are is undefined, but it wasn't the scientists at NASA. NASA has taken on a Never Give Up attitude since its beginning. You know their successes and failures. The agency has lived through great criticism and threats to defund. Thankfully Thomas Edison didn't have to deal with the same worldwide critical audience or we might not have light bulbs!  Well, actually I think we would. Someone else would have invented the mechanism between 1879 and today. Most likely the Brits whose research resulted in the arc lamp would have designed a commercial lightbulb or another group of scientists. I'm glad Edison's success gave an avenue to his quotes: "Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." So, NASA can boast a succe...

Friends - Photo by Mary Vee Island of Bolero, Venice, Italy Thanksgiving week blessings. Hubby walks out to his car dressed for work and lunch in hand. He happens to look down at the front tire, something I wouldn't do, and walks back to the house. The tire is flat. This morning, he fills the tire with air and nurses it up to the tire store. Across the street is one of those hometown restaurants with basic food, servers with pads of paper and pencils, and unlimited gut rot coffee. "So, yah wanna get breakfast?" He asks me. How could I refuse? Two hours later the car disappears into the shop. Although Hubby devoured southern style biscuits and gravy et all the trimmings, he is nervous he won't have the car in time to leave for work. We walk across the road, yes we paid the bill plus tip, and walk inside the tire store. Before hubby can ask, the tire guy grabs keys off his counter walks them to my hubby and says, "Everything is taken care of."...

Photo by Mary Vee Bakery in Germany Amazing, but true.  John Chhan opened his shop in California at 4:30 a.m. then had to close the doors at 8:30 a.m. because of the community. What had the community done? The story started when a woman brought her daughter into Chhan's bakery. His wife had been there all the years the woman stopped in the shop in the past, but she wasn't that day. The woman discovered John's wife had an aneurysm and was home recovering from surgery. After the woman returned home, she thought about Mrs. Chhan. The couple came to the U.S. as refugees from Cambodia many years before and set up this bakery. Every day the couple arrived at the shop at 2 a.m. to make the donuts then opened the doors at 4:30 a.m. to sell the treats. When all the donuts were sold, the workday ended. They closed the doors and went home. The woman told neighbors and wrote a blog post about the Chhan's saying, if everyone went to the bakery early and bought in the...