There are many reasons why new year’s resolutions don’t stick. The one that seems to be the most compelling though, is their utility to us.
Is what we are setting ourselves to accomplish worth the time and effort we’ll put into it? Is the end result something we will like having or that we might really need?
Resolutions can’t be pulled out of a hat, willy-nilly at the last second. Good luck with yours, if you decide to set one up!
Traditionally, debriefing is an information-sharing and event-processing session conducted as a conversation between peers, in which group members become informants to each other about a situation or event that occurred to them as a group.
Recently, I was thinking, why not conduct the same session at the end of each day, as a personal exercise of introspection, critique, pat on the back and learning. 
That would revolve around an actual response and a summary of feelings about our daily plans and what was forced upon us by events that occurred during the course of that same day and the manners we handled them.
This, in my view, should be a great way of learning, remembering and improving one’s life, while counteracting a daily routine that keeps us into a static rut and precludes a continued and desirable personal growth.
Something I intend to explore in the near future and might even make my upcoming new year’s resolution...
I don’t know about your family, but mine as a special way with its members’ birth years. Look at the table and you’ll understand. Is that pure coincidence, serendipity or conspiracy theory?
I’d say the former, but it is simply amusing. What’s even more amazing is that the spacing always is multiple of 10.
What about yours?
This holiday season, I ski everyday with my daughter and my grandson.
To put it simply, in spite of skiing mostly on man-made snow and very limited terrain, we’re three crazy speed demons dodging other skiers and having lots of fun, even though our ages almost span a human lifetime: 12, 38 and 72 respectively!
That’s my quandary, as I’m supposed to be the pacesetter and the law-and-order element of that gang, but it’s so fun to be having so much fun in a three-generation ski outing!
It took me about almost seven decades to find out which way I should put my T-shirt in the appropriate direction.
In the past, I always relied on the tag stitched by the collar, but since shirts companies have been trying to save all the money they could, many of these are now imprinted and depending on the shirt color, barely legible if at all.
That’s about the time when I providentially discovered the presence of an inside tag on my T-shirts located on the left seam, that was meant to let me know for sure that my shirt was on the proper side of my body and, in the process, changed my humble daily life forever!
Ever since I can remember, I have received plenty of Christmas presents, except perhaps when I was a child when what I got was limited to an orange and some candies. My godparents, who owned a grocery store, once gave me a toy airplane that I really cherished…
The rest of the time, Christmas presents were objects that my wife and I purchased together, killing any element of surprise as we opened the package on Christmas Day. It was until this very Christmas Eve, when my daughter-in-law found for me a brand-new looking, used book about planning and architecture of French ski resorts.
The authors show how planners and architects addressed their real estate developments with solutions specific to each location. For each place, the book covers a time span ranging from the conception to the birth and the completion of these destination resorts, detailing multi-family to single family dwellings and common areas, plus including original drafts and an impressive array of interior photographs.
I’ve already began to read it and can’t wait to dig further into it!
In the late fifties, a French college professor who had bought a rustic chalet in my mountain hamlet used to come from the big city to spend three month into the fresh, Alpine air.
He and his wife had five daughters, and the seven of them would pile up inside a Renault Frégate, the largest French-made sedan at the time.
There was a little boy who might have been 6 or 7, that was attracted by the large automobile. In particular, it was its bulging chrome hubcaps that exerted a magnetic attraction for him.
Once he kicked one of them with his rugged mountain shoes and observed that it made a pretty big dent into the hemispheric shape of the wheel cover. His victory over seemingly hard-metal encouraged him to continue and to add dents to the first wheel and soon to the three other remaining ones.
He never got caught by the professor and I don’t know how the man reacted when he realized the extent of the vandalism. To this very day, I never could understand what happened in that little boy’s head to make him act in that manner.
Did he discover his unknown power in stamping metal or was it merely a matter of making his mark on things? Did he see breasts in the anatomically shaped hubcap?
I don’t think we’ll never ever know...
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