Life on the Vine

Last night before heading to bed I did a quick search to scan through the day's news headlines and a Los Angeles Times article caught my eye.  Here is a link to the story: On anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation, world remembers Holocaust amid signs of rising hate . Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the 73rd anniversary of the Soviet army liberating the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in occupied Poland.  I wanted to mark and remember that day by spending some time today sharing photos from our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau two weekends ago. I think, like most American students, my first exposure and introduction to the Holocaust came through reading Night by Elie Wiesel.  In the book, Wiesel shares his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald during 1944-1945.  Wiesel and his family were among an estimated 430,000 Hungarian Jews deported to the death camp.   His father died just three months before liberation and his mother and little sister were kil

I lived in Germany for nearly three years, moving back to the states in 2012.  Tom had moved back to the states about 10 months ahead of me.  While living overseas, Tom and I did a good amount of traveling.  Some of it together and some of it solo.  Trips included Italy, France, Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands, England, Scotland, Malta, Latvia, Belgium, Romania, Spain and of course traveling around Germany.  Our travels, however, never included Poland. When we moved back overseas last year, this time moving to Italy, I promised myself we would not leave Europe again without getting ourselves over to Poland.  The main draw for me was getting to Auschwitz-Birkenau .  I'm going to dedicate a separate blog post about our visit there but I want to first share about our time in Kraków. We had a long weekend in January over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and we were trying to figure out what to do.  We had originally planned on driving south of Tuscany to visit the Umbria region

So here it is.  The final set of books I read in 2017 from about mid-August through the end of the year.  It's an eclectic mix of fifteen, heavy on the nonfiction.  The connections between books and themes was probably a bit stronger earlier in the year with Part 1 and Part 2 .  My reading the rest of the year was, admittedly, a bit all over the map. My reading included several books that had been on my Amazon Wish List for years, finishing a lengthy e-book that I'd put down over a year ago, and reading a few books from my own collection.   The bulk of our personal books are in long-term storage back in Arizona.  I was intentional about the books I did bring...choosing specific books I hoped to read while overseas.  My version of "books I'm going to read before I die" but rather "books I'm going to read before returning to the States." Inspirational Three   Anne Lamott is an author I was introduced to in college when I read her Bird by Bird

One of my not-to-be-missed annual events the past couple years has been the Tucson Festival of Books .  The festival is held on the University of Arizona main campus the weekend before Spring Break and has been a Tucson mainstay since its debut in March 2009. The two-day festival features hundreds of authors and has drawn crowds of 135,000 the past couple years.  I'm so grateful my adopted hometown fosters a love and appreciation for books, authors and reading.  It is a fantastic event and has remained a free event thanks to tremendous supporters and sponsors, and an army of volunteers who help make it all happen. The 2017 festival was March 11-12 and I spent both days going from one author event to another.  Five events on Saturday and four events on Sunday.  Two of my sessions on March 11 led to the dog-palooza of reading that followed. One session was "Rescuing Animals" featuring Andrew Bloomfield and his book Call of the Cats: What I Learned About Life and Love

Ever since mentioning the idea of doing this blog back in early November I've been looking forward to writing this post.  I'm currently reading two books and had hoped to finish them before the New Year but they'll end up on the 2018 list.  The final count for 2017 is 34 books.  My list is almost evenly split between fiction and nonfiction but a little bit heavier on the nonfiction side with 19 books.  It's probably not surprising that before moving halfway across the world, to another country, that I was reading books like Finding My Balance by Mariel Hemingway and Shonda Rhimes' Year of Yes .  2017 was a year I needed to be encouraged with both concepts. Trying to Stay Balanced and Saying "Yes" to Opportunities in 2017 A treasure in 2017 was Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, which I picked up and read in about two days while visiting my mom in Michigan for a winter adventure, cross-country skiing trip.  When you live in southern Arizona, y