The Blaisdell Blog

Children can be so cruel.   Yesterday I was having a grand conversation with one of my daughters when she casually mentioned that she did not like a dish I had grown up with, Norwegian krub (rhymes with “boob”). Readers of this column know that my two grandmothers were immigrant Norwegian.   As is usually the case, that means that their culture was the one their children were raised in.   I may love my English heritage, but it is the Lutheran Church, Vikings and the cool, low tones of Norwegian laissez faire upbringing that ruled my home roost.                 Along with this came typically Norwegian cuisine.   Forget about lutefisk (a nasty fish cured in lye)--even the dog won’t eat that, but lefsa (imagine a rye flour tortilla) is good stuff and riskrem (rice pudding) is a real treat.   But none of that is what I remember with a smile when I think of down home Norwegian cooking.   N...

In honor of International Women's Day I am reprinting this column from 2012.  This long line of smart, savvy, self-possessed women lives on in my daughters and granddaughters.  They make me proud, joyful and, most of all, hopeful for a better tomorrow.   In a little over two weeks my husband and I both lost our mothers.   One 89 the other 91 years of age, they died of the rigors and complications of old age.   No on lives forever, and if we do it right, our children bury us, never the other way around.   The fact is that our mothers lived lives that were celebrated more than they were mourned.             These women were made of steel.   They had lived through it all: the great depression, the dust bowl, wars, economic and social upheaval.   They sent their husbands to battle in World War II and their sons to the jungles of Viet Nam.   They saw their grandsons—and granddaught...

There are some 130 jurisdictional regions that represent over half of the nation’s population.   Some of these are big cities (Chicago, Boston…) others are smaller cities like Nashville, TN; dense urbanized counties like Fulton, GA; places with a small town feel but dense populations like Lancaster County, PA.   But they all have populations of 500,000 or above.   The Brookings Institute recently did a report on employment in each of these areas.        Seventy-two percent of all working-age Americans (18-64 years old) are employed.   Jurisdictions with high employment are peppered across the country:   Kansas, Minnesota, Washington, Maryland and Nebraska all have communities with 80%+ employment.   Yet, the employment rate varies from 51% in Detroit to 82% in Johnson County, Kansas.   Each jurisdiction studied suffered from the same economic ailments but they responded to them in different ways and with different lev...