Author: Iris Ruth Pastor

What Do I Love?Lists! I love thinking about them. I love making them. I love organizing them. And I LOVE crossing items OFF of them! Why am I so enamored by Lists? Lists quantify and provide a sense of progress and completeness Lists simplify – breaking down information into easily digestible bite-size chunks Lists create Continue reading

Father’s Day is coming up soon – on June 21. Never too early to start planning how to honor our dads. And I hope the below column jumpstarts your thoughts on how to honor the man whose genes you carry. Father’s Day memories are most poignant when specific. I love it when every year my research turns up Continue reading

Dear Sophie, Benjy, Charlie, Bobbie, Lucy, Levi, Remi and Zoe,  Your Nana is not perfect – which probably will come as no surprise to you – as who knows what my loving sons say about me in the privacy of their own homes. Hee Hee! Either way – by my own admission right now or your dads’– Continue reading

I’m driving down the highway half listening to NPR in my car. “Florida Matters Live & Local” is on the air and Dr. Deby Cassill, an associate professor of biology at USF, is chatting about the role of love bugs in the ecosystem and how in the past they inflicted damage on our cars’ paint Continue reading

Nancy Pelosi – after an almost 40-year run in the United States Congress – has retired. Pelosi, 86 years old, often talks about “time running short”.  My sentiments exactly and I’m eight years younger than Nancy. My own mother was always in a hurry – and I never understood her sense of cosmic rushing until Continue reading

15 Reasons Why I Could Divorce My Husband He never throws away his used tissues – rather, he leaves the crumpled up messes on any available surface – for me to dispose of them. His organizational method post-retirement is to throw everything he needs to deal with in his grandmother’s wicker wash basket and go Continue reading

For so many years, my mother was my North Star. After she died, I realized I had internalized many of her life lessons – along with a modicum of her amazing creativity and her unending zest for life – all residing securely within me in my gut. Thus, after she passed away, my own gut became Continue reading

People say becoming a grandparent is like falling in love. I never understood that until I became a grandmother. And then I understood it powerfully. I simply couldn’t get enough of those grand babies.  Facetime. Real time. Any time. I thought about my grandkids constantly. I gazed at their pictures obsessively. I counted the days until I would see them once again.And when I Continue reading

My husband and I recently traveled to Connecticut and New Jersey for a whirlwind three days jammed packed with seeing three of our sons and their families.  I let it all go. E-mails went unanswered. Texts flooding my phone got no responses. I ordered nothing from Amazon. And I didn’t key into my Tasks app once. However, anxiety about Continue reading

Drowning in minutiae? Longing to embrace a life less harnessed to your To-Do List? Read on….  Every three months a super glossy magazine comes out called “Where Women Create – Inspiring Work Spaces of Extraordinary Women.”  Published by Stampington &Company’s Somerset Studio, it’s a delight to the senses – filled with feature articles on women Continue reading