No Title 1464
Guest Opinion: Dressing for respect
Stories from the horse’s mouth
Co-op Postcard: Setting the energy research agenda
You can create your own blown-glass ornament with the help of the glass artists at Flame Run contemporary-art glass studio in Louisville. Guests have the opportunity to choose their own colors and then actually blow their own ornament.
Personal ornament sessions with a Flame Run artist are available by appointment only through December 22. Slots are available on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, as well as the week before Christmas. The cost is $35 per person per ornament.
Children ages 5 and up may participate. Flame Run is located at 828 East Market Street near downtown. Log on to www.flamerun.com or call (502) 584-5353 for more information.
Guest Opinion: Dressing for respect
by Alison Schaefer
In recent months, I have noticed that Kentucky Living has printed opinions relating to the sad demise of good manners in this country and around the world.
Although modernization and technology are wonderful, along with them we have lost a gentle, more dignified society, where manners and chivalry made a difference in how we felt about each other and how we perceived ourselves.
I remember a gentleman I knew many years ago in eastern Kentucky. He lived into his 90s, raised a garden, and kept his family fed and clothed. While at home his manner of dress was, of course, bib overalls, the only practical attire for his work and his generation. However, when he went to town he wore dress pants, a jacket, and a hat, and raised that hat in greeting to anybody he encountered while there.
Nowadays we see all manner of dress around town: jeans that are loose and falling down, T-shirts and blouses that show things we really do not want to see, including bare midriffs, tattoos, and piercing in places that make many of us cringe. Business casual has become the manner of dress in most offices, and Casual Friday has become the license to wear jeans and a T-shirt to work. I remember when women in offices wore dresses or skirts only, and when the word came that pantsuits could be worn to the office, it was truly pantsuits only, not just slacks and a blouse.
The first thing a military person learns in boot camp is how to keep his or her uniform clean and in perfect condition, so that the uniform can be worn with pride and dignity to honor his or her country and those predecessors who gave their all for that very uniform and the country it represented.
I am not saying that we need to go back to dressing up wherever we go, or that women should only wear skirts and dresses to work. What I find sad is that we have lost the kind of society in which people took the time to think about making themselves presentable to go to town—it mattered how others perceived them and how they perceived themselves.
I remember a time when many people had only one dress outfit, but they wore it to present themselves to society. Respect has become an old-fashioned word, but sometimes what we wear reflects respect for ourselves and for those around us.
Alison Schaefer is a retired secretary, English immigrant, and adopted Kentuckian. She lives with her husband, Don, manager of Jackson Energy Co-op, and her dog Rocky in London, Kentucky.
Kentucky Habitat for Humanity’s Prison Partnership program was selected as the winner of the 2006 Fifth Third Bank Innovative Nonprofit award.
The award was presented in September at the Kentucky Nonprofit Leadership Forum, hosted by the University of Kentucky Nonprofit Leadership Initiative, an outreach program of the College of Agriculture.
The Prison Partnership program engages offender volunteers from county jails and state correctional facilities in building homes and other tasks.
To date, local Habitat affiliates in Boyle, Pike, and Hopkins counties have benefited from the program.
You could lose 18 pounds a year just by drinking three cups of skim milk a day rather than whole milk, says Amy Meador, clinical nutritionist with the Barren River District Health Department in Bowling Green.
The Barren River health department is in the midst of serving as a test program for a state health department “1% or less” campaign, aimed at encouraging use of low-fat dairy products.
Barren River staff have been taking presentations to area schools, businesses, childcare centers, and health fairs. As part of that work, they survey the audience, with plans to return later and find out if they have changed their eating habits.
Meador says one of the biggest surprises to her audiences is that, although 2 percent milk has less fat content than whole milk, it is not considered low-fat. She says people are also surprised to learn that skim milk has just as much nutritional value as whole milk, and that skim even has slightly more calcium compared with whole milk.
Still, Meador advises a gradual switch. She says moving over time from whole milk to 2 percent, to 1 percent, to skim will be more likely to succeed because it will avoid unfamiliar tastes.
For healthier holiday cooking, Meador recommends using lower-fat dairy products in recipes, and substituting yogurt for sour cream.
Kentucky WIDE takes you on a scenic trip across the state through the panoramic pictures of Lexington photographer Jeff Rogers. From sunrise to sunset, through parks, fields, streams, forests, racetracks, and the seasons of tree leaves and tobacco harvests, 75 photos offer an incredible range of soothing and stunning images. Most of the pictures are spread across two facing pages—giving the book its apt title. Rogers, whose photos have appeared in Kentucky Living, writes in the introduction, “I love getting lost. This book is the result of time spent wandering the towns and back roads of Kentucky.” The book is published by RatDog Publishing of Lexington, and retails for $39.95 at bookstores, many state park gift shops, or through the Web at www.jeffrogers.com/kentuckywide.
Stories from the horse’s mouth
The University of Kentucky Libraries’ Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, in cooperation with the Kentucky Historical Society, is initiating an ambitious project to document the history of the Kentucky horse industry. With start-up funds provided by the Kentucky Equine Education Project and UK, the Nunn Center has begun collecting the firsthand experiences and stories of people who work with horses in Kentucky.
In the more than 6,500 interviews currently housed in the Nunn Center for Oral History collection, fewer than 75 focus on horse-related topics. This project will collect a minimum of 150 interviews over a three-year period. The history of thoroughbreds will be one focus of the interviews, but the project will include all breeds in Kentucky and the many occupations that are a part of the entire industry.
For more information on UK and the Kentucky Equine Education Project’s partnership on oral histories documenting the Kentucky horse industry, contact Jeffrey Suchanek, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, at (859) 257-8634.
Co-op Postcard: Setting the energy research agenda
