Late last year, I got the most amazing freelance gig: interview three University of Michigan graduates who all had connections to the recently closed Gourmet magazine. It started with an assignment from Michigan Alumnus magazine to profile Michael and Jane Stern, authors of the Roadfood series. Then Conde Nast announced it was folding Gourmet. Since the Sterns had a long-standing…
Editor’s note: Lisa and I are friends in part because we’ve lived parallel lives. We’re both Michigan natives living the life of a Manhattan suit. We both endured a relationship failure that helped us redefine what we wanted out of life. And we both lost our mothers at 51. Lisa saw my post on the anniversary of my mom’s death…
Leading up to Thanksgiving, each day I will blog about what I’m doing to be more grateful. I invite you to join me in a Month of Thanksgiving, and to share your thoughts, observations, suggestions and ideas. Day 24: Giving thanks for the simple pleasures in life Many Thanksgiving dinners I’ve been part of have included everyone going…
Leading up to Thanksgiving, each day I will blog about what I’m doing to be more grateful. I invite you to join me, and to share your thoughts, observations, suggestions and ideas. Day 22: Finding gratitude while we grieve It’s been a sad weekend for us. On Friday, we put down our 18-year-old cat, suffering from advanced heart disease. Then…
The following explanation might confuse you, but that’s OK. Stick with me anyway. My friend Carmen recently wrote a guest post on her friend Kristin’s blog, Halfway to Normal. Kristin launched something she calls the Love List Project, which is a wonderful idea: make a list of the things you love, consider why you love them, then share what you…
I adopted Haley when I was a senior in college. It was fall 1991, right around the first time I heard Nirvana. She proved to be an odd cat almost immediately. When I got home from working at the college newspaper late at night, I tried to get her to come to bed with me. She would have none of…
Thanks to Twitter, I learned about the Slow Money conference — I hadn’t heard of it until I saw Stowe Boyd’s 140-character updates Thursday. BusinessWeek writes: There’s a conference going on in Santa Fe this week about Slow Money. The idea behind slow money, modeled on the 20-year-old slow food movement, is to create an infrastructure for investing in local…
Believe it or not, the Internet is good for more than watching videos of skateboarding dogs — you can find loads of help on your journey to become a better person. One consistently great site is called Zen Habits. Articles on their Web site include: 20 Things I Wish I Had Known When Starting Out in Life Simple Living Manifesto:…
Matt and Rene Greff run two popular businesses – Arbor Brewing Co., a brewpub in Ann Arbor, which spawned Corner Brewery, a microbrewery in Ypsilanti where they bottle beer for retail distribution. Both places draw big crowds and reviewers praise their beer. It’s quite the successful little empire. Matt and Rene are two of our very favorite people back home, and…
The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival starts today. Jazz Fest runs the last weekend of April and first weekend of May, and we’re excitedly looking forward to being there for the second weekend. I didn’t expect to like Jazz Fest. Several years ago when our friend, Rachel, invited us to join her in a large rental house for the…
Imagine John McCain without the life-changing experience of being a prisoner of war. Imagine John Walsh without the devastating grief of his son, Adam, being murdered by a serial killer. In the news last week was the story of researchers working on a drug to erase certain memories. The spooky story in the Times starts off: Suppose scientists could erase…
Remember in high school art class, when you learned that two parallel lines like railroad tracks converge in the distance? Joel Zeff’s career path looks like that, with his day jobs as a reporter and PR guy merging with his hobby as a stand up comedian and improv troupe member in his current incarnation as a motivational speaker. The beauty…
Previously on Newvine Growing (read that in the Battlestar Galactica opening sequence voice) I’ve profiled people who’ve reinvented themselves by changing jobs and starting down a new career path. That’s all well and good, you think, but when unemployment is hitting double digits in some states, maybe this isn’t the best time to make that big switch. Not only are…
