Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

A COVID Plea to County Government

A plea to County government for assistance to residents to keep us as safe as possible during the COVID vaccine roll-out Positive COVID cases are rising in Dutchess County at an alarming rate, and the threat of the UK, and perhaps other, more infectious variants are on the horizon if not already here. While the vaccine roll-out has begun, it…

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Food, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Thank You Poughkeepsie Farm Project

This is a shout-out to all the farmers, staff, and administration at the Poughkeepsie Farm Project (PFP). Thank you for all the great produce this year and for making the weekly pick-up of veggies the highlight of the hunkered week!. COVID-19 be damned. Veggies A to Z:  A Shadorma Chain  for the PFP Acorn squash and baby bok choy, cilantro…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

The New Abnormal

It’s not coronavirus alone but it was almost a final straw on top of other financial threats. Schools are braced for a dose of tough reality.- UK private schools feel pandemic squeeze And so it begins – the great corona virus contraction of 2020. The old new normal is now the new abnormal normal. After the global recession of 2008-2009…

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Books, RattleBag and Rhubarb

A Marvelous Remedy for Wanton Vanity of Women

There I was I was minding my own business drinking an early morning cuppa in isolation, socially distanced and hunkered when there was a flash of lightning and a tremendous thunderclap right overhead. Just one, followed a quick pelt of rain. And because I was deep in The Black Death – the way one is in the novelty phase of…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Schools and COVID-19: Gloom and Doom, Hope and Glory

What Schools Have To Be About Now A colleague shared an article  – That Discomfort You’re  Feeling Is Grief from the Harvard Business Review and it struck a chord. Suddenly – with the pandemic – the future, that had been lurking and looming on a horizon in plain sight, had arrived all at once. And everything was different and everything…

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Books, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb

COVIDIOTS 2020 and Hellish Trumpery

So many parallels between our current pandemic and the plague that swept through London in 1665, at least as described by Daniel Defoe in Journal  of the Plague Year.  It’s a novel, written many years later in – 1722 – by a remarkably talented fabulator. So always good to take it with a shovel of salt. But here’s one big…

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