The Blaisdell Blog

  “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.”   Hamlet My mother and I managed to fight about almost everything.   She was always trying to raise me.   To top it all off, Mom considered me to be the, “strange” one of our bunch.   [Trust me, I am not.   I know who the strange one is, and that free radical has been darting around the gene pool, luring people toward the drain for some time now!]    While Mom expected us to do well is school, she didn’t expect me to adopt what she considered to be, “exotic” tastes.   Mom was a constant reader, but she liked Edna Ferber and Willa Cather.   Her favorite book was, The Shepherd of the Hills , a soap opera of a book about the settlers of the Ozarks.   Mother thought I had gone way off the rails when I discovered a taste for Shakespeare. “If you prick us do we not bleed?   If you tickle us do we not laugh?   If you poison us do we not die?   And if y...

The First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay on January 20, 1788.   There were 775 convicts on board the 11 vessels of the fleet, and an almost equal number of military personnel, civil servants and their families.   Great Britain was solving a problem at home and populating a remote colony of the British Empire abroad, all with one stroke.   It was the birth of a nation.   Over the next 80 years more than 165,000 convicts—men, women and children—were taken from over-crowded British jails and exported to Australia .   Upon settlement, the convicts were still prisoners.   They were kept in compounds, assigned to forced labor and, upon completion of their sentence, were set free.             Britain ’s decision to send its native sons and daughters to a primitive and hostile environment literally half a planet away started, as all fateful decisions do, with a miscalculation and unforeseen circumstan...

President Obama said Friday that he was nominating his budget director, Sylvia Mathews Burwell, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.   This is an attempt to take up some slack from the frayed ends of Kathleen Sebelius’s disastrous rollout of the flag ship of Obama’s armada, Obamacare.   Never mind that Obama’s armada is meeting the same fate as Spain ’s in 1588 after the Battle of Gravelines.   [Actually the popular, “Armada portrait” of Elizabeth I graces the cover of my book about her, Glorianna!   And her speech prior to the battle is one of the best given by any world leader:   “Let tyrants fear, I have always so behaved myself, that under God I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects…I am come amongst you as you see at this time.. in the midst and heat of battle, to live or die amongst you all – to lay down for my God, and for my kingdoms, and for my people, my honour and my bloo...

I am a good swimmer.   In the water I am totally relaxed, not fighting my body, moving in sync with the buoyancy.   It offers an amazing feeling of freedom and tranquility.               Earlier this week, while exploring Australian waterfalls, Tom and I got to one that had a small swimming beach bordering the plunge pool.   I swam through the cascade on the far side of the pool, sat on the rocks under the waterfall and then swam back out again.   Tom was taking pictures the whole time.   Later than night we were looking at the pics on his computer and I was delighted with the sight of me in the water.   Head down, arms reaching in smooth strokes, I looked as good as I ever did.   I felt great, but fate was setting me up for a fall.   The next picture showed me coming out of the water.    There I was, a 67 year old woman: saggy, baggy, covered in cellulite, and wearing an ...

The book Giants in the Earth by O. E. Rolvaag is the first in a trilogy of books about the world of Norwegian immigrants in pioneer era Dakota Territory .   If you liked O, Pioneers!   by Willa Cather you will like Giants in the Earth .   Rolvaag, a Norwegian-American immigrant himself, takes an approach to the tale that is reminiscent of the great Viking sagas.   Gods must be placated. The blood price paid.   Rolvaag’s world wears down strong men, and breaks women in two.   [This last comment may be a little harsh.   Let’s face it ladies, who among us hasn’t stared into the sunset while thumbing the blade of our best kitchen knife?   But, I digress.]   The book deals with the immigrants’ lives of struggle and privation, but even more with the emotional isolation of strangers in a strange land.   Rolvaag is not so interested in telling a story as he is in dissecting the psychology of pioneers.   He wants to know what creates...