I started my radio show Up in Your Business to pay forward my earned business knowledge. Business principles are the…
Unlike the winter of 2021 when Arkansas had a rare 14-inch snowstorm, this past week we had a typical winter accumulation of 4–6 inches.
It’s happening again. Another state, Minnesota, is adopting a new flag design. It was just 10 months ago, after 18 months of debating and $500,000, that Utah adopted their new flag, which I really like because it uses simple graphics to tell the Utah story.
Son Matthew uses the phrase “Keep dreaming,” when he closes his emails that go out to the hundreds of dedicated supporters of the Friends of Dreamland Ballroom. It reminds me of this quote from Thoreau …
Besides finding out my melanoma was stage one and confined to only my nose, the second-best Christmas gift I got this year was a new puppy.
Don’t look too closely, unless you’re gross like me and want to. No, that is not a red Christmas decoration in the picture above. It is an amelanotic melanoma that Dr. Chris Shewmake dug out of the tip of my nose. Gross!
After watching a segment on 60 Minutes (my favorite show) about recycling plastic, I have been obsessed about reducing my consumption. Recycling is a myth. We’ve lulled ourselves into believing that by sorting and recycling, we were being good stewards of mother earth.
When traveling, I like to catch up on movies in my hotel room. The Ruth Bader Ginsberg movie, On the Basis of Sex, is a walk down history lane and should possibly be required-watching for all Americans. It is easy, when reciting a gratitude list, to omit and take for granted today’s equality for both men and women. It was a mere 40 years ago that men were not recognized in a court of law as care givers and therefore disqualified from tax relief and other compensations like women. Likewise, women weren’t recognized as head of household, thus unable to apply for credit cards or a mortgage without a husband’s signature.
After traveling, I’m burned out on eating out and, yet, bored with my own home cooking. I’d love a plain-old BLT, but tomatoes aren’t in season. Currently, very little is in season. It is late for apples and oranges and too early for summer produce, but strawberries are close to being harvested in Arkansas.
My mother always said, no matter how old her children got, she wanted to see where they lived. That it made her rest better. And now, that is the way I feel, too.
At the funeral for a friend’s father, I thought about the deceased.…
At first, I thought it was just the flag business that was seeing unprecedented sales. But, after noticing all the bare shelves in other retail stores and after asking around, I realized that this phenomenon is all over the place. People are shopping and spending their eating-at-home savings and newfound stimulus money like crazy.
When I first started Flag and Banner, I waitressed at Sir Loin’s Inn to supplement my income. I was young and my boss at the restaurant, Mr. Aaron Ross, was a business mentor, of sorts. One day, I asked, “What’s it like to be the boss?” I’ll never forget what he said because it’s proved true over and over again. He said, “Being the boss is doing all the things you can’t pay other people to do.”
As the shipping boxes began to pile up by the recycle bin, so, too, did my guilt. How many trees had to die in the fulfillment of my consumerism? Shipping a single item per box with all its packing waste is not exactly earth friendly, but I rationalized that I was saving on fuel and reducing air pollution. It seems that, in all of life, there is a trade-off.


