The Blaisdell Blog

If you are a woman of diminutive stature (I am only 5’2”) you appreciate the small advantage that comes from wearing high heels.   Wearing heels doesn’t make me as tall as everyone else, it just makes me a little more competitive in eye-to-eye conversations.    And that, oddly enough, explains why I love the Electoral College.   I am also a data-driven person, happy when surrounded by numbers instead of emotion.   Add an almost religious reverence for the Constitution and you have someone who is a hard sell on amendments.   So lets look at the Electoral College debate.             First, there is the self-serving nature of the anti-Electorals.   We all know that they would be defending the EC if their gal won by the Electoral vote but lost the popular vote.   Hypocrisy is easily identified by its stench.   So much for the “I’m in a snit” argument.               Second, and infinitely more important, there is the Constitutional issue.   We are the United STATES of America.   Th

St. Patrick's Day has once again come and gone and I missed it until too late.  I know it comes in March, but so does March Madness and who can remember that date?  At least the Ides of March gives you a numerical frame of reference.  I will try to remember that it is the 17th, but next year help a sister out and give me a hint some time around the 10th.              This brings to mind a much larger question.   Why does the whole country celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (March 17, as it turns out) but nobody celebrates St. Olaf’s Day (July 29)?   I am mostly Norwegian (though on St. Patrick’s Day I am allowed to be Irish through the use of large amounts of green and/or beer).   I know a little about St. Patrick, and a great deal more about St. Olaf and I can think of no reason for the lack of celebration for one and too much celebration for another except, maybe, good press.             Olafr Haroldsson (995-1030) was also known as Olaf the Fat, though now days he is called Olaf

March is Women’s History Month.   It coincides with International Women’s Day, which is celebrated March 8.   I was reminded of this when I was searching for a bread recipe.   I keep my cookbooks in a hall closet, along with two shelves of vintage books—one’s I have read and choose to keep for one reason or another.   Reaching for a cookbook I happened to see my biography of Baby Doe Tabor—the Silver Queen.             Baby Doe was not a paragon of womanly virtue.   In fact, she was a woman with a past, a questionable present and a fallen-from-grace future.   But she had true grit.   Tenacious, focused to the point of obsession and a die hard are the words that best describe this second, flamboyant wife of a Colorado silver mine baron.   Her life was marked by deprivation, soaring success, a precipitous fall and, finally, not just a return to deprivation, but a return to hopeless, lonely deprivation.             Elizabeth McCourt Tabor was born in 1854 the fourth of eleven chil