Sunday paper tidbits

I'm back with some more.

- In the spirit of downsizing our lives, many are downsizing their vacations. If you are looking for some place to drive to rather than fly, the website at freemaptools.com can help out with this. An option at the location I linked too can let you look at what constitutes a 500 mile radius around any point, with the idea that 500 miles can easily be driven in a day's time. When I draw a radius from Newark, 500 miles includes Columbus(!), all of New England, Toronto, and just about down to South Carolina. It can open your eyes to places to visit without the expense of airline tickets. But Jim pointed out that since our move our 500 miles includes many more states than from Dallas where most of your distance is still just Texas.

- With the recession many more families are embracing "slow parenting." Pretty much cutting down kids activities and having family spend more time together - adding more quality time with the family. Wow, we've been "slow parenting" for quite a long time now. Maybe we're trendy and didn't know it.

- Our newspaper runs a "Meet Your Neighbors" section on Sunday where they feature an interesting person in Central NJ that maybe would not normally get much notice. This week they told about Clara Kramer, 81-years-old, who is a Holocaust survivor. During the Holocaust when Clara was 15 she spent 20 months in a crawl space under the house of her sympathetic neighbor in Poland. For as horrible as it was - vermin, hunger, thirst, fear - if she'd left the hiding place it would have been certain death for both her and the neighbors who hid her. In order to occupy herself she kept a total of four diaries during that time that she and her family were able to smuggle out of the country once they escaped. The diaries eventually made it to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum where they were rediscovered and Clara was convinced to turn her story into a book. Just the thought of what she went through at age 15 makes me want to buy it. So I think sometime after Tuesday I'll go out and do just that - "Clara's War: One Girl's Story of Survival" by Clara Kramer.