My Portfolio

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Into The Volcano The seminal Chronicles of a Footloose Forester has always been an unscheduled mélange of essays, stories, dreams, and adventures.  If he had his way, the adventures would predominate and the stories would follow.  The dreams...

I came upon a love letter that I wrote to my dear husband George in 1995. Over two decades have since passed, and when I reread the letter it reminded me of just how deeply we loved each other, and how much we still do today after 70 years married.  Instead...

  Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Let’s Go Bend The Fig Tree   The Bengal Tiger first coined the words to the love sonnet “let’s go shake the mango tree” when we lived in Hawaii in the 1970s.  She sang that sweet...

    Like a slow-motion train wreck, with nary a whimper or a scream, the extended family and all the benefits it provides are disappearing one ‘byte’ at a time.     The typical American family has changed over the last couple of generations from predominantly ‘extended families’ to majority ‘nuclear families’....

Chapt 9           1987-1994              Columbus Ohio The next 8 years of 1987 through 1995 marked a new period for us as I finished my graduate work at Ohio State University and expanded my music teaching from a part time avocation to...

CHAPT 8 1978-1986 Columbus, Ohio These years were the most difficult period for our family in so many ways. There certainly were positive things that happened along the way, but it was also a period of many challenges, the likes of which we had never experienced as a family before. In...

                                Chapt 7                  1972-1978            Columbus, Ohio      As I  began to record this entry for the period of our lives between 1972 and 1978, it seems like it was just yesterday!  Yet, now at our...

Chapt 6     1968-1971      At Home in Devonshire Subdivision, Columbus, Ohio      In 1967 Keith and I, now in our thirties, were so happy!  We had a beautiful house in Columbus, Ohio with three children and our first foster daughter too.  Keith’s job at OSU was exactly...

On the road…again! Afghanistan to Zambia Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Fliegerhorst 2017   The old Fliegerhorst Kaserne of World War II is becoming a modern housing complex.  Based on the construction activity seen on the most recent Google Earth satellite photos, the old military barracks building...

  On the road…again! Afghanistan to Zambia Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   The New Fliegerhorst   The old Fliegerhorst Kaserne of World War II is becoming a modern housing complex.  Based on the construction activity seen on the most recent Google Earth satellite photos, the old military...

Acer rubrum To Zyzyphus jujuba Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   The Beautiful Benjamin Fig   At last, the time has come to share information about the most beautiful tree in the world.  You will have to use some of your navigational skills to...

Chapt 5                  1965-1968            Ohio State University, Columbus,  Ohio       During ‘our” graduate school days, Keith and I had moved from Lawrence, Kansas to Champaign, Urbana, where Keith began his graduate studies in earnest at University of Illinois.  Scott was a year old by then and soon would be...

  When the generations of a family stop interacting on a daily basis the spontaneity of the interactions begins to suffer. Likewise, family visits with an elder under care become stilted and awkward, and ultimately less frequent. Changing the dynamic of the family visit to become engaging, rewarding, purposeful and productive...

Marv and I wanting to bag another peak in the San Gabriel Mountains, so we turned to our trusty hiking book and settled on Mount Waterman with a possible side trip over to one of the twin peaks. We made it as far as Twin Peaks saddle, then turned around and...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Why Footloose Forester Won’t Write A Novel As snippets of clichés and other prompts for new chronicles popped into his head, the Footloose Forester decided that at least two of them were determining factors in his decision to...

On the road…again! Afghanistan to Zambia Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Canal House   The intention of this chronicle was to document with Google Earth screenshots one or more of the places where the Bengal Tiger and the Footloose Forester once lived.  When they were successfully captured...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Fantastic Sale - Moral Compass   Own a piece of history.             Order your very own Moral Compass.                         Designed and field tested in the USA.                                     Made in China by factory representative of noted fabricators.                                                 Don’t...

                                                  Professor of Physiology at Ohio State University         During ‘our” graduate school days at U of I, we had lived very frugally on the...

On the road…again! Afghanistan to Zambia Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Hacking the Russian Environmental Report   Once in a while when a suspect news report gets aired with a misleading spin, the Footloose Forester goes into one of his petulant moods and yearns to compose a...

On the road…again! Afghanistan to Zambia Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   You Remember Birdies and Eagles   One of the differences between daydreams and night time dreams is the simple proposition that daydreams are induced recollections and night time dreams are involuntary.  We may awaken to recall...