Musings of Two Creative Minds

When it comes to being thankful my first thought every day is about having Helen in my life.  She's  my wife, my heart's desire, my collaborator, and especially my best friend.   But I have many other things I am grateful for starting with the day I was brought to Joyce and Gerard Krummenacker as a foster baby (the only one they ever kept), to this moment here before my computer.  Perhaps someday I'll share more of those personal tales, but on this day I simply want to focus on the past year.  In October of 2016, I got the call for an interview with the County of Santa Cruz and a week later I was offered the job.  I was still attending classes at CSU Monterey Bay at the time and had to sacrifice my GPA by going down in flames in two of them gradewise.  I could have simply dropped those classes but at the time we were living in campus subsidized housing and I was under the  impression that I still had to be a full-time student to...

My thoughts on … Did you know that the phrase “Happy Holidays” was started by Christians?  Yes, that’s right folks, it was.  In fact it dates back to the 1600’s in England.  People were acknowledging the fact that there were more than one holiday.  Like the fact that after Christmas, there was the celebration of the New Year.  Plus there was the season of Advent, another very Christian custom, that this year begins on November 30 th  and ends December 24 th .  So right there we have more than one Christian holiday in December.  And do you know what?  Nobody has ever wished me a “Happy Advent”.  How annoying is that? Furthermore, let us remember that Christ was born a Jew.  How many of us really believe he never celebrated Chanukah with his family?  The tradition of Chanukah started over a hundred and fifty years before he was born, so I'm pretty sure he celebrated it more than once. I’d also like to poi...