Serve by Design

Our beautiful, aware, and precocious fourth-grade granddaughter, Eloise, can be quite direct at times. The other day on the ride home, during an afterschool conversation in the car with her dad, she let loose a volley of words that our son wasn’t expecting. He had just told her that he was going to call Poppi because he (Moi!) had a window of time to visit before an out-of-town meeting that night. It was the word “meeting” that unsettled her and triggered the comment, “I have never once heard him mention the word meeting!”😲  Image Credit: www.pexels.com Matt surmised that this sounded a lot like what she often hears from both of her parents who work remotely from home much of the time. They will often comment to Eloise and her siblings, “You’re going to have to entertain yourself for a little while this afternoon. I have a meeting for about an hour, and I cannot be disturbed!”   Now, she is hearing for the first time that her beloved Poppi is also a “meetings-type person!” An...

The meteorological fall is upon us now that September has come. Soon, on the 22nd, it will become official. With this season, pecan, pumpkin, and apple pies will begin to take the center stage of our preferred desserts at family dinner gatherings. While I delight in the peaches of late summer, Monique can’t wait for fall and the apple harvest. She recently purchased a special batch of Granny Smith’s and turned them (pun intended!) into a delicious pastry of apple turnovers! Culinary turnovers are triangular pockets of puffy pastry dough, stuffed with fresh fruit filling, sealed with a fork in a decorative pattern, and then baked to perfection. We love to eat them warm out of the oven! Warm, Yummy Apple Turnovers! There are other definitions for “turnovers.” This word can have business and financial applications. It is also used frequently in sports when, for example, a basketball team loses possession of the ball due to a personal foul, a pass that goes out of bounds, or because of tra...