Hop Skip Jump Happy Leap Year Into Spring

We celebrate President’s day, Valentine’s day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Mother and Father’s Day, but where is good ol’ Hallmark when it comes to commemorating Leap Year. Where is the fuss over February 29^th, which should be special, as it only rolls around every four years?

I was born on February 28, but my sister arrived in the wee hours of March 1, 1960 during a Leap Year. My mom said that other mothers in the hospital, who gave birth on the 29^th, begged doctors to change the date. Apparently in Scotland, it is unlucky to be born Leap Year Day. Since we are part Scottish, my sister and I could have been in for inauspicious times.

Born 3 years, 13 hours, 34 minutes apart-sisters celebrate birthdays together

However there is more likely a link with my Norwegian ancestry, like some stat showing the Nordic women give birth more often in late February. I am no mathematician, but statisticians will love this little known fact. A Norwegian family from Andenes holds the official record of number of children born on February 29. Karin Henriksen’s daughter, Heidi was born the same year as my sister, and her sons Olav and Leif-Martin followed in 1964 and 1968 respectively. Calculate those odds!

According to legend, February 29^th is also the one day of year when women can propose to men but hey, in the 21^st century, any day is good for a liberated gal with gumption to propose.

Many famous people were born on Leap Year. In 1692, the English poet John Byron, inventor of a system of shorthand, was born. Jimmy Dorsey, legendary saxophonist, conductor, songwriter, composer and bandleader, was born in 1904. In 1916 Dinah Shore, actress, singer, talk show host was born.

Astrologers swear that those born under sign of Pisces Feb. 20^th – Mar. 20^th have unusual talents and personalities. That fits, I am quirky as they come.

On a more serious note, February 29, 2012, twenty-five European countries coordinated by EURORDIS will mark the fifth international Rare Disease Day. Under the slogan “Rare but strong together” patient organizations from more than 40 countries worldwide unite to heighten public awareness. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBVug-GVLg0

I attempted to figure out the mind-boggling logistics of calculating Leap Year, which has to do with 60^th day in Gregorian calendar. We have one extra day this year, 366 instead of 365, which is great if you are old and retired but not so cool if your are employed because February 29^th falls on a Wednesday, which means an extra day of work. Can you deduct an extra day of work from taxes?

Leap year allows our Gregorian calendar to remain in alignment with the Earth’s revolution. It takes a little longer than a year to travel around the Sun, 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 6 seconds, or about 365.242199 days. It becomes even more complicated when I tried to figure out how Chinese, Jewish, Iranian, Islamic, Baha’i, Hindu and Ethiopian Calendars calculate Leap Year.

So let’s stop right there and leap into March, which brings us one day closer to spring! Oh yeah, and happy birthday little sister

Community Support Showered on Yorkville Farmer After Open Heart Surgery

If you live anywhere near Yorkville Illinois who do you call for an extra hand if your hay needs bailing, your field needs tilling, your electricity needs wiring? Family, friends and neighbors in the farming community-turned-to-sprawling-suburb have been seeking Cliff Westphal’s services for years. He is the first to lend a hand at the truck pull, 4-H stand, blood bank, local church and Yellowstone Lane neighborhood get together.

My brother-in-law has spent his lifetime serving others from a boyhood working the farm in the family for 65 years to his four-year tour in the Coast Guard during the Vietnam War as a young man, to donating his time for 17 seasons as an assistant coach at Yorkville High School where he once wrestled as a Red Fox.

A small town, family man with a strong sense of loyalty to his country and his community, Cliff understands the complicity between the land and man and shares its abundance with all.

He treats YHS staff to a hotdog and hay rack ride every fall, brings Westphal corn to cabin folk in Northern Wisconsin, works the best car deal for his nephew and drives his pick up half way cross the continent to follow his niece’s college basketball team. He runs a regular O’Hare airport shuttle for family and friends. Then he spoils the travelers with gourmet meals from the finest fare Mother Earth has on offer.

As beloved Bumpa to seven grandkids, he celebrates every passage of their lives, helping one granddaughter parade pet pigs at the fair and watching his grandson make his first tackle.

Ever the big kid at heart, he still sleds in winter and rides water park slides in the summer. The day after he retired as an electrician at Com Ed, he returned to farming; any energy to spare, he pours back to the community. There is nothing Cliff can’t fix, so we all felt shocked when his body broke down unexpectedly.

The day before his scheduled surgery to fix drippy sinuses, his family doctor discover his heart had a leaky faucet. So instead of a nose job, a cardiologist cracked open his sternum, borrowed a vein from his leg to bypass an artery, fined tuned the bicuspid valve and repaired the mitral valve, then wired him shut again. Twenty four hours later, he was sitting up in a chair, chatting about the latest Illini scores and asking « What’s for dinner? »

Oh sure, he’ll have to lay low a few weeks, but come spring planting season, he’ll be back on the tractor helping his brother in the fields on the Westphal Farm. This summer he’ll be driving the boat pulling the boat for gran kids on skis. And if all goes well, he’ll be flying abroad with his lovely wife, my sister Sue, to « climb » mountains in Switzerland.

After all you can’t keep a good man down. As Yorkville knows, Cliff is its best.

Bon rétablissement et bisous de ta famille overseas!

Chillin Out in Switzerland During Europe’s Record Freeze

Last night as I walked down a boulevard in Geneva, a young man passing by nodded his head and wished me a « bon froid » instead of good evening. Can a « good cold » exist ?

frozen lake front (lake Geneva 02.10.2012)

ready for a swim ??

We are having a record breaking cold spell in Europe. Parts of the Danube, Europe’s busiest waterway flowing through ten countries, closed due to ice blockages. Canals across Holland froze turning the entire city of Amsterdam into an open air skating ring. Strong winds whip across Switzerland, reminding me of back home in the Windy City and open plains of the Midwest. Once a tough kid, I turned into a big sissy. I love winter, but hate cold. Even though I am part Norwegian, I lack the fortitude of my Viking cousins living up by the North Pole.

In Switzerland, a northeast wind, called the Bise, blows shutters off houses and branches from trees. Everyone knows I love to exaggerate, but no kidding, docks on Lake Geneva look like chiseled ice sculptures, cars turned to blocks of ice and steel train tracks froze halting traffic.

car or ice sculpture ?

The cold even penetrates the walls of our concrete home and I am literally chilled to the bone. My lips turn blue, my fingertips grow white and my feet never thaw.

Snow and ice, crunch and crackle, underfoot, as I trudge to school reflecting on childhood when snow drifted as high as window ledges. As it nips my face and stings my eyes, I lean into wind. I feel rugged like Grandpa Mac who cleared a path through five-foot high snow banks to light a the fire in the pot belly stove of the one room school house where my grandma first taught.

The howling wind rattles the window frames of my school room under the tiled, mansard rooftop in the attic of the one hundred year old international school, where I teach without heat. Each room has a space heater, but if we plug in more than one appliance at a time, the lights go out and computers shut down. My colleagues and I toss coins to see who’s turn it is to freeze. On my Ice Day, I wear a hand-knit Norwegian sweater, three sweatshirts,long underwear, wool mittens and a scarf.

Brrrh. I don’t want to leave my house ; I don’t even want to leave the bed. Like the ground hog who sees his shadow in stark sunlight in a cobalt sky, I long to retreat to my burrow under a down comforter and hibernate for another six weeks.

My joints ache ; my fingers and toes go numb. I think I am suffering. Me, with a layers of clothes, heated lodgings and a hot meal every night. I wonder about the unemployed, poverty stricken street people without a roof over head or food to eat. How do they survive the night? Many don’t. Already over 600 people have died in Europe from the extreme weather.

I stop grumbling about winter and feel grateful. I am gifted. I have a home.

more winter pictures of Lake Geneva, Switzerland: http://gallery.me.com/geraldlechault#100343&bgcolor=black&view=grid

Cross-Country Skiing in Switzerland Precarious for a Flatlander from the Snow Belt

If you grow up in Switzerland, skiing is a birthright. Like riding a bike, no one forgets how to do it. Forget the thrill of school closing for inclement weather. Here we have the ultimate snow day! We even bus kindergarteners up in the mountains for skiing during regular school days and better yet have a ski week vacation in February.

cross-country skiing in the mountains

No one here can believe I don’t ski even though I grew up in the Snow Belt.

Maybe if I learned to ski when I was a child, I wouldn’t be so afraid. Where I grew up in the flatlands of Illinois, only the wealthy could afford to fly halfway across the continent to the nearest mountain.

Besides, no American coach in his or her right mind, would ever condone skiing for a star hoopster. A teammate and I broke training one season and attempted to ski on a golf course on campus where the highest elevation was a two-foot bunny hill on the back nine. Heck, I still fell down.

I am not afraid of heights, but I am downright speed phobic. Anytime the velocity picks up, I envision my previous accidents, flying over my bicycle handlebars on a hill in Germany or careening out the window of an air born car off an autoroute in France.

I still might enjoy skiing if my back never cracked, my knees could bend or I had a solid base to stand on. Just try balancing on a two inch by 6 foot slabs with bad feet. With my high arches and ankle pronation, I might remain upright if I skied barefoot and hung on by my claw toes. Strong thigh muscles, able to hold the squat position also help, but I lost those when I quit doing defensive slides back in the seventies.

Ah the great irony of life! In youth, when I was nowhere near a mountain, my greatest dream was to alpine ski; now in middle age I live at the foot of the Alps yet break out in hives just looking at the slopes. However to appease Le Frenchman, an avid skier extraordinaire, I don my skis once a winter. But in the mountains, cross-country skiing is a misnomer. It should be called up and down skiing and the only thing worse than sailing 25 miles an hour on sticks, is flailing at top speed downward on a curve!

Oups !!!

Luckily on groomed trails in the mountains, they strategically prop bright red, two-inch thick, gym mats against trees at the bottom of curving slopes.

Hey, I learned to drive in Illinois, I am no dummy. As soon as I see the red warning sign in the distance, I stop, remove skis and proceed with caution. Then I put away my gear for another year.

World’s Oldest, Greatest Vice – Chewing Gum Good for You

As soon as I got my first tooth, I fell in love with gum. At my grandparents’ summer camp, I begged the boys « Got any gum? » Then I swallowed it as fast as I could chew it until my parents forbid campers from giving me another stick.

If gum chewing contests existed, I would win. In grade school, learning to blow bubbles with a pink wad of Bazooka rated right up there with sinking my first jump shot. As a teen, chewing gum in class on the sly, made me feel rebellious. Before college basketball games, I chewed bubble gum to psyche up before battle. After the French teacher caught me chewing gum in the language lab, when I supposed to be busy rolling my r’s, I learned to hate to parler francais.

Remember good ol’ Bazooka Joe, who became one of the most famous 20th century advertizing characters for Bazooka gum marketed just after WWII in red, white, blue symbolized USA and patriotism

But the joke was on me – I wound up living in French speaking countries. When l first moved to Europe, gum chewing was a dead give away to one’s nationality, a trademark of being American like the stereotypical baseball cap and tennis shoes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZXRaVBf0pY

But, Le Frenchman I fell in love with considered it a disgusting habit, so I used to smuggle gum in my luggage on transatlantic flights. Now I purchase packets of my vice across the border in France, where surprisingly more gum is consumed than anywhere else in the world besides the U.S.A.

In June 1944, U.S. troops first brought chewing gum to France along with freedom. However, French chewing gum wasn’t launched until 1952 when former GI, Courtland Parfet, introduced the chlorophyll green mint stick, called Hollywood Chewing Gum.

Now much to parents’, teachers’ and Le Frenchman’s chagrin, it turns out that gum was good for us along.

Recent US studies (where else in the world would analyze statistics about gum’s virtues) show that students who chewed a piece before exams increased the blood flow to the brain helping with memorization.

Chewing also calmly helps relieve stress and control appetite by reducing hunger.

The xylitol in gum helps stop the progression of cavities and inhibits the growth of bacteria.

Finally something taboo that is actually good for you. However, Le Frenchman under ze roof still finds my gum chewing revolting, so like the little kid at camp, I sneak gum into the house. The illicit activity only makes it more enticing.

How to Beat the January Blues

Down & out? Feeling tired & fat? Frumpy & dumpy? What is it about January? When the snow piles up, the temperature plunges and the sun goes into hibernation, the mood starts to plummet.

The holiday hype has died down, Bowl games are over, the Packers stunk up the play offs, we ate one too many cookies or tipped back one too many hot toddies and now it is back to reality with nothing to look forward to.

Above the clouds in the Alps

To brighten my spirits in the spring, all I need to do is fling open windows to feel inspired by the Swiss Alps and French Jura, but in winter those same mountain tops lock in fine particles and pollutants in a fog so thick I can’t see my hand if front of my face. The locals recommend heading to the peaks to beat the blues…rise above the smog where the air is clean and clear, but not everybody lives near a mountain, nor has agility to ski or the money to afford the sport.

Check out my inexpensive quick pick-me-ups to brighten your bleak winter days especially if you live Up North on an empty pocketbook with a bad case of lumbago!

1. Read a good book.

2. Watch an old sit-com, back in the day when the special effects were so poor, the lines had to be great

3. Surprise a friend you haven’t talked to for years with a phone call

4. Write an old fashioned letter, you know, by hand with pen and paper.

5. Take a bubble bath by candle light

6. Listen to smooth jazz

7. Teach a child to do something new and watch their eyes light up

8. Lie on a yoga mat with your legs at a right angle against the wall and arms reaching overhead, then breath deeply in a full body stretch

9. Open a good bottle of wine and savor one glass

10. Turn off the computer, TV, iPhone, iPod, iPad. Stop text messaging, facebooking, linking –in, emailing and Tweeting on line and connect in person (ie. hug someone you love, speak face to face!)

How do you kick back the January blues ?