1. Why is Chanukah early this year?
This year Chanukah falls as usual on the 25th day of Kislev in the year 5770 (according to the Jewish calendar).
But seriously folks…Jewish people and their friends will begin their celebration at sundown on Friday, December 11. (Sundown, by the way, is at a depressing 4:01 pm that day.) Reason: the earth revolves around the sun in about 365¼ days. The civil calendar is cool with that and arbitrarily assigns the number of days (28, 30 or 31) to each month.
The Jewish calendar also has a 365 1/4 day year. However, the months are based on the cycle of the moon revolving around the 
earth which takes 29 1/2 days. Do the math and you come up with 12.4 lunar months per year. To keep the months falling at the right time of year, the Jewish calendar is 12 months long with an extra month thrown in occasionally.
For a more detailed explanation of the Jewish calendar, click here.
Continue reading “Chanukah is not early this year. Ageless answers the Eight Questions including where to shop.” »
Last week, I had lunch with a friend who after 13 years of working for a large company was now starting his own business. We talked about the mixture of freedom and anxiety that accompanies that kind of change. It is a familiar topic for me, as I have been either on commission or self-employed over 25 years. While you may not have a boss or supervisor telling you what to do, there are voices in your head that eagerly fill this gap. And often, that voice is NOT your biggest fan.
Mendel the Doom Sayer (artist's conception)
My voice is “Mendel the Doom Sayer.” Mendel always seems to pop up when business is slow, I’ve made a mistake, or someone or something has triggered a negative emotion. Then Mendel is all over me. Mendel particularly enjoys berating me over things that I can’t control. Like time-travel. Why didn’t you go to graduate school in education? Or move to LA in 1973 and become a screenwriter? Or stay in the family business in Chicago? Or keep working for the government in the 80s? Then, Mendel says, you would be retired by now.
Continue reading “A Guide for the Newly Perplexed: Who are your Alter Egos?” »
Peta Kaplan-Sandzer in Granada, Nicaragua
Peta Kaplan-Sandzer came to the North Shore via Israel and South Africa; we met her in Highland Park, and last saw her at the 2008 Artist Project, part of the “Art Chicago” exhibition. Peta was exhibiting larger-than-life paintings of stray dogs in Nicaragua; before that we had seen her smaller-scale landscape paintings – and then we heard that Peta and her husband, Ben Sandzer-Bell, are now living in Nicaragua.
It turns out that Ben, a VP of strategy for an aerospace company, saw the writing on the wall as oil prices rose to $147 a barrel, and began planning his exit strategy. He founded “CO2 Bambú” (bambú is Spanish for bamboo), a company designed to capitalize on cap and trade, the selling of carbon credits to offset the production of greenhouse gasses. Ben wanted “green” issues to be central to his work.
Peta, what is CO2 Bambú, and why Nicaragua?
Continue reading “Going green: from Highland Park to Nicaragua” »
