Dolores and Hugh in article on not-really-retirement

Dolores and Hugh were featured in an article in the June edition of a newspaper that's distributed in all Erickson Living communities. The story, on the topic of keeping busy with work during retirement, included quotes from Dolores, along with this very nice photo of the couple on the balcony of their apartment.

Here's an excerpt:

A benefit that can’t be easily measured is the sense of purpose often found in work. Dolores Andrew is a self-employed artist, instructor, lecturer, and jurist at art shows across the mid-Atlantic. “Art has been my life’s passion,” says the resident of Oak Crest retirement community in Parkville, MD.

Read the article online
See how it appeared in printed form

Dolores gives talk on historic tapestry

Dolores this week gave a lecture at the Oakland, Md., library about the Bayeux Tapestry, a 900-plus-year-old embroidered record of the Battle of Hastings that's housed in a museum in Normandy, France.

As we've previously reported, Dolores filled a long-standing wish to see and examine the tapestry when she and Hugh visited Europe in 2014. She later wrote an article about it for the publication Needle Arts.

"The lecture was a great success," Hugh reports. "More than 40 people showed up and filled the room to standing-room-only. At the end of her talk, Dolores laid out her 1/4 scale model of the tapestry. It was a great hit."

The week before her talk, the local newspaper in Oakland published a very nice write-up about it, which probably helped draw the crowd. You can read the article on the Garret County Republican newspaper's web site, or click here to see how it was displayed in the printed paper.

Catching up on her other recent activities: In October, Dolores judged the 34th annual miniature show held by the Fells Point Gallery.

"Dolores selected prize winners ​in various media including oil, watercolor, pastel, drawing, mixed media and sculpture from among 220 entries," Hugh writes. "The entries were all limited in size to no more than 48 square inches overall including the matte and frame, and most were much smaller."

On Sunday, Oct. 8, Dolores and Hugh attended the opening reception for the show. (Hugh notes that the gallery is no longer in Fells Point, having moved to the Hamden neighborhood of Baltimore).

Dolores shares impressions of Bayeux Tapestry

During Dolores and Hugh's visit to Europe last spring, Dolores fulfilled a long-held wish to see the famous Bayeux Tapestry.

Now, her impressions and commentary have been published in the December issue of Needle Arts, the national publication of The Embroiderers Guild of America.



Click here to see her article (as pdf file), illustrated with details from the tapestry.

Related articles:
Dolores & Hugh's 2014 European Tour
A visit to Bayeux

Marie now writing for web-designer site

Marie on the "About" page at CSS-Tricks

Marie is now a member of the staff of CSS-Tricks, a web site that provides tutorials, tips and other information about CSS, a language for formatting web sites.

For the past few years, Marie has been operating her own blog about blog design, called codeitpretty.com.

She started editing and writing for CSS Tricks in late January. She continues to work from her home office.

Marie writes: "CSS-Tricks is one of the world's most popular websites about front-end web development. I learned so much about what I do from CSS-Tricks, so it's very exciting for me to be part of the team."

Dolores writes about Austen-inspired fiction

Dolores recently wrote an article about the proliferation of books that invent new stories using the characters of Jane Austen's novels.

"There now are countless books by contemporary authors who happily use Jane's characters, locations and situations, over and over. They expand on the plots, develop minor characters and continue stories beyond Jane's endings."

The article ran in the August issue of "Our Village Voice," the resident-produced newspaper of Oak Crest Village. Click here to see a scan of the article. (It's broken in pieces to fit the scanner, but just scroll down from one piece to the next.)

Book reviews by Hugh: 'The Scarecrow' and 'Roadside Crosses'

Hugh writes:
For recreational reading, I am attracted to various authors with crime solving main characters. Among others, I like Stuart Wood’s characters Stone Barrington and Holly Barker, Harlen Coben’s Myron Bolitar and his irrepressible sidekick Win, Michael Connelly’s detective Harry Bosh, John Standford’s Lucas Devenport, James Patterson’s Alex Cross, and of course Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, Jesse Stone, and Sunny Randall.

I have just read two recent books of the genre with plots relating to computers and the internet: "The Scarecrow" and "Roadside Crosses."

Click the "Continue reading..." link below to see Hugh's reviews.

Wise words about science and faith

"Both religion and science seek an understanding of the universe and our place in it, but from different perspectives. ... Properly pursued, the two fields are complementary, neither antagonistic nor mutually exclusive."

Those words from the introduction sum up the essential point of "Science and Faith: Partners in the Search for Truth," in which our own chemist and scholar debunks the idea that science and religion are incompatible rivals.

As a student of both fields, Daniel explains in very common-sense fashion how each has its limits but how together they can give us a fuller understanding of the world we live in.

In his writing, Daniel shares both his strong faith and his enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge.

The book, published this spring, is available from Amazon.com. Clicking the image here will take you to its page at Amazon, where you can also read the first few pages.

Waiting for the next step

This editorial by Dan ran in Monday's Star-Ledger.



It seemed like the future had truly arrived when Neil Armstrong’s boot touched the surface of the Moon 40 years ago tonight.

Those of us now of a certain age remember watching, enthralled, as the historic events unfolded in blurry black-and-white images on our 14-inch TV screens.

We knew we were living at the dawn of a new age when space travel would become commonplace and mankind would expand its realm beyond its home planet. It was only a matter of time.

Would be it 10 years, we wondered, or maybe 20, before we were all zipping around in rocket cars, taking weekend jaunts to our moon and vacations to Jupiter’s?

Countless TV shows, books and movies put our dreams into words and images. We imagined space travel as adventurous ("Star Trek"), mind-blowing ("2001: A Space Odyssey") and terrifying ("Alien"). David Bowie sang of it as captivating ("I think my spaceship knows which way to go") and Elton John as mundane ("All this science, I don’t understand/it’s just my job five days a week").

What we could not imagine, back then, was that we’d remain Earthbound. Yet come December, we will mark 37 years since the last time humans ventured to the Moon, or anywhere beyond Earth orbit.

Faced with the enormous costs of human space flight, we have settled for half-measures; we go, but not boldly. U.S. Space Shuttle and Russian Soyuz flights bring astronauts and scientists to the International Space Station for research programs that, however valuable scientifically, don’t inspire the public the way those Moon missions did.

NASA keeps the dreams alive: It has plans for new manned missions to the Moon by 2020, construction of a lunar outpost and research station, and then — someday — missions to Mars. Buzz Aldrin, the New Jersey native who stepped out on the Moon just after Armstrong, thinks we could get to the red planet in another 20 years if we put our minds and energy into it.

But there isn’t that kind of money in NASA’s budget, and at a time of economic recession when we're arguing over how to pay our medical bills, flights to Mars seem almost as fanciful now as they did pre-Apollo.

Meanwhile, technological advances — many of them spurred at least indirectly by the space program — have changed modern life in ways we did not imagine in 1969. We bounce signals off satellites in high orbit so a robot voice can tell us which street to turn on to get to the electronics store. There we can buy a hand-held device with more computing power than NASA mission control had for the Apollo missions.

Those black-and-white TV’s with antennas are now obsolete, replaced by digital high-definition screens on which we can watch . . . Well, a few of us saw last week’s lift off of Shuttle Endeavour, but we’re guessing a lot more people were watching SportsCenter.

The death of Walter Cronkite, for many of us the narrator of the lunar adventure -- which he later called "the most extraordinary story of our time" -- adds poignancy to today's anniversary.

Someday, assuredly, people will gaze at their LED screens (or whatever the latest version of television may be) and watch mankind take another giant leap into the future.

The question is whether it will happen in the lifetime of anyone who watched Armstrong’s one small step.

The story of the government grasshoppers

In his new post at The Star-Ledger, Dan's duties include writing occasional editorials. His first effort, a simple and fairly non-controversial comment about fiscally imprudent government, appeared in Sunday's paper and online on nj.com's opinion page.

Here is the text:

Dolores and Rehoboth Art League present annual outdoor show

As chairwoman of the Rehoboth Art League, Dolores was busy this month with the league's 35th Annual Outdoor Fine Art and Fine Craft Exhibit.

The Cape Gazette, an area weekly newspaper, carried a report on the show. The original article had photos but unfortunately they're not available online.

The article begins:

There’s something magical about the Rehoboth Art League’s outdoor shows where more than 100 artists present their works on three and a half beautiful acres surrounded by tall trees and flowering gardens. Drawing thousands of people annually, the two-weekend event is a highlight of each summer season.

If the first weekend is any indication, this year’s 35th Annual Outdoor Fine Art and Fine Craft Exhibit will be among the most successful ever, said Chairwoman Dolores Andrew.

Read the full article on the Cape Gazette web site, or in our archives.