My Portfolio

This is the recorded conversation between my Mom Alene Poe and me on February 7, 2015. We were talking about my Mom's experiences during WW2.

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Courier   Another dream-inspired chronicle, but hey! Whatever works.  Truth be told, the seeds of many chronicles germinated during dreams but the pre-writing phase was usually shortly after waking, and the first draft started...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   A Tenderfoot Practicing Living   The tenderfoot practicing life, who also calls himself the Footloose Forester , had another dream last night and decided that he would share the fragments of his innermost thoughts as...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Where Am I?   The main thought running through his head in another of those disjointed dreams was, “where am I?”  A sunny scene flashed by, a few loaded words, another scene in a plain,...

 On the road, again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     The Gold is Buried at …   His dying words were numbers that I cannot remember, but as he feebly put the hand-written scrap of paper into my hand, I knew that the...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   A Better Bagel and Brand Loyalty   We all have our favorite foods.  But we don’t all agree on what those dishes or recipes are, thus the eternal discussions about foods and one of the...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams   Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek    Stories, Blogs, Essays, and Peer Review      The recent decision of Facebook to encourage account holders to contribute text and photo stories in a special window of their website is an invitation to greater sharing of...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Flashes of Memory   One unplanned adventure was so short-lived that the bits and pieces of the story framework were so scattered throughout his latest dream that they had to be assembled during consciousness to be cogent. The...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     On Inspiration Looking back over the years and wondering why certain pronouncements by prominent people that were published for all of us to read were featured in the first place, the introspective Footloose Forester saw a pattern. ...

This is a hike that I just don't remember much about. As per the description below, it was somewhat unremarkable, other than the story about Zorro in the video attached. The Mt Hillyer Trail hike takes you on a mellow summit loop through a little-hiked area of Angeles National Forest. The...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Yesterday the Subject was Tigers   We three neighbors sat down yesterday in social distancing, of course, when the subject of tigers came up.  It is a favorite topic of the Footloose Forester who had a tiger...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Ghost Towns   Part of the allure of being On the road…again!!! in so many rural places was the anticipation of knowing that there were going to be a few ghost towns here and there.  Most of...

  Found in Arizona, the Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon which was sculpted by the Colorado River and housed by the Grand Canyon National Park. Former US President Theodore Roosevelt was a major proponent in the preservation of the area and he had visited the canyon a number of times....

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek    Bengal Tiger - Dive Buddy   The legacy of the Bengal Tiger, that fearless lady who put up her dukes to stare down a surly marine in Senegal and a coterie of young thieves in Madagascar who thought...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Gerunds Headlining the News What do the words Reducing , Deterring , and Obstructing have in common?  All of them are gerunds, all of them are words suggesting restriction, and all of them are the leading words used...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Hard Wiring of the Brain   Time and again a casual conversation will steer itself toward something that happened last week, last year, or many years ago.  It seems that some people can remember many details about...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Passport to Story Telling Tales of the Bengal Tiger reach back to the time when she was growing up in Cambodia and Viet Nam and continued to be written until a few days before her...

COVID-19, or coronavirus, turned our lives upside down. A vaccine against this infectious disease has not yet been developed, and those over the age of 65 and over need special care during this pandemic. So how do we take care of our older adults? Read on to receive all your questions...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   The Lumper and the Splitter Meet Again   The Footloose Forester has been a life-long splitter: dividing seemingly simple observations into more refined, detailed considerations into the possibilities about the presumed complexity of those observations. A photograph of...

We hiked Waterman Mountain some years ago and could see Winston Peak from the top, so it was well past time to bag this peak. Winston Ridge was a pleasant surprise! This was such a special hike, I would consider this one of our better peak hikes that we have done!...