Hi folks! I’m finally back to the blog after five weeks off. My last post was written on May 14, three days before we departed on our big trip to France. My intentions were good about writing some posts from the road, but that never happened. I think I started one post early on and never came back to it; after that I just let it slide. When we got home I had tons of ideas I wanted to write about, but they weren’t the kind of thing that lends itself to an article. Rather, I’m working on a short book, tentatively titled “The Intentional Traveler: An Insanely Detailed and Practical Guide” or some such. Originally I thought of it as a Kindle single and a downloadable PDF, thinking that I’d shoot for about 10,000 words. Well, I’ve written only two sections and am already well over that mark. There’s just so much about traveling, just as there is about life in general, that never gets discussed. Well, I’m your person on the spot for that. I always want to know that backstory, the details, the procedure. If you’ve ever read one of my recipes you’ll know that my notes are sometimes as long as the recipe itself. I want you to know all about how to make it!
Well, we take off on Wednesday for a three-week trip to France. Now that the Chorale concert season is over and I’ve done the shopping for tomorrow night’s member dinner, I’m sitting down for one last post before we leave. Don’t know if I’ll get anything posted during the trip. May I encourage you, by the way, if you enjoy my posts, to forward your e-mail to someone who might also enjoy them? You can pick an individual post that you think will be particularly interesting to your forwardee. I’d like to see the blog grow.
Next Wednesday, May 16, Jim and I will be boarding a plane for FRANCE. I said last year that I’d like to visit Paris for our 25th anniversary, but with everything that was going on in 2017 (our move, a big trip already planned that included a family reunion and taking Gideon to grad school) it just didn’t seem doable. There was some talk of perhaps going in the fall, but that just never got off the ground. (Ha.) So we decided to go this year. _(cropped).jpg)
Yes, I know. We’re all so tired of being told to drink lots of water. And there’s plenty of evidence out there that the whole thing has been somewhat overblown. The original standard of eight glasses of water a day came from a paper written back in the 1940’s, and references to that study usually don’t include its caveat that much of the needed water comes from food. Also, other liquids besides water count. So if you drink orange juice (which you shouldn’t be doing, as it’s just sugar water, but never mind), or coffee, tea, or other beverages, all of those count as water. (Contrary to a very silly idea that circulated for awhile, coffee doesn’t cause you to excrete more water than was in the coffee to begin with.) The current state of medical advice is that your body will tell you if you need water, because guess what? You’ll feel thirsty.
I posted an article from one of my favorite blogs, “Addicted2Decorating,” sometime last week on my Facebook page, and the more I thought about it the more I wanted to write something about it myself because it’s such excellent advice for every area of life. I can’t remember how much I’ve said about the author of this blog, so let me briefly recap: 
One of the joys of my participation in The Magic Flute over the past weeks, culminating with the performances on April 21 & 22, was the great privilege of just being around a whole group of talented people and getting to overhear things they said and did. I told one of the other MF chorus performers that I’d be willing to crawl over broken glass to be able to sing Mozart and work with 
I was struck with this thought while working on the material I presented a couple of weekends ago at a Christian women’s retreat. My actual topic was about the different choices we make about the food we eat, which I placed in the following hierarchy: