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The Reds lost another game tonight. If they lose another one tomorrow, they’ll have their second 3-18 start in the last 5 seasons. It’s not good folks and things aren’t looking better anytime soon. Hunter Greene, despite not having his velocity for a second straight start, had a solid outing until he didn’t. Outside of a 2nd inning home run, Greene had kept the Rockies offense mostly at bay. Then, in the bottom of the 5th, the 3rd time through the order would come back to get him. After a strikeout to start he inning, he let 2 batters reach via base hit and then gave up an absolute tank to Ryan McMahon. That gave the Rockies a 4-1 lead, effectively ending the game with 4 innings left to play.
More worrisome is than the thrashing the Reds took tonight is what’s going on with Hunter Greene. This is the 2nd straight start, after missing a turn in the rotation in between, where his fastball has sat in the 96-97 MPH range instead of his 99-101 heater that has made him such an exciting prospect. Hopefully some things get figured out and he can return to form soon.
Anyway, it’s 9-1 in the 7th and there’s really no point to dragging this out any further. You can pick your own ending. The Reds are calling up Connor Overton to make the start tomorrow.
The thin plastic thread running between one leaf on my pineapple and its tag does me in. I don’t see it when I put the pineapple in my shopping cart, when I load the check out conveyor belt or when I unpack groceries at home. It isn’t until I chop off the top and tug on the tag that it hits me.
I broke the rules again.
That damn plastic tag tie joins the long list of mistakes I made in just one week of trying to eat plastic-free.
As part of WBUR’s new newsletter, “Cooked: the search for sustainable eats,” my challenge was to purchase a week’s worth of food and leave the grocery store without any plastic in my bag. That meant no jugs of juice, yogurt containers, cellophane windows in chip bags, plastic packages or even stickers on some produce.
Why did I do this? Because very few of the plastic packages and containers we use once get recycled. Because there’s growing concern about the harmful health effects, and because I can't stand the idea that I may consume a credit card’s worth of plastic in a week.
My budget was $115.00 (roughly half-way between the average weekly grocery bill for a family of two in Massachusetts and the food stamp allotment for that same household). On a Saturday afternoon, I pulled into the parking lot of my local chain grocery store feeling reasonably plastic-aware, not ready for the butt-kicking I was about to get.
The experiment
I started in the produce section, where I typically grab a plastic bag of organic baby carrots. They’re off limits, as is pretty much every vegetable in the organic section. I found some beautifully bunched carrots among the non-organic produce. Then I saw the plastic tags hanging off their rubber bands. I spotted a dozen loose ones down by the produce shelf drain and scooped them up, sans bag.
I rolled my cart past the cauliflower, green beans, asparagus, lettuces and grapes, all glinting inside their plastic. I weighed loose beets, apples, onions and sweet potatoes. My anxiety kicked in — that feeling that I wouldn’t have enough. So, I bought a head of cabbage.
I tapped prices into the calculator on my phone. Leaving the produce section, I was in good shape, at $31.30. It was time to search for protein.
I don’t eat meat. But I headed to the meat counter to shop for one of my sons. Everything prepackaged was in plastic, but the man behind the glass kindly agreed to wrap two hamburger patties and some chicken, separately, in butcher paper. Together they were $21.62.
Tofu, cheese, yogurt and pretty much everything in the dairy section was out. Even the bottled milk had a plastic cap. There were lots of eggs in those paper pulp cartons. Whew.
To avoid eating eggs every meal, I got some cans of beans and rice in a box. I wanted pasta, but the box had a cellophane window. I chose a brand of spaghetti with the smallest window (1”x1”), telling myself that eating a lot of cabbage would earn me the right to this violation.
If I was going to consume a lot of cabbage, I’d need some oil or salad dressing. The search for plastic-free oil and vinegar took me into the "house of mirrors" stage of my plastic-free odyssey.
There were lots of options in glass bottles. After careful tapping, I found some with metal lids. But the bottles with metal lids all had a plastic seal, except for one brand of sesame oil and another of red wine vinegar. The vinegar label was peeling away at one corner. And that made me wonder: what are jar labels made of? You probably guessed: many are plastic. The sesame oil and rice wine vinegar went back on the shelf, as did jars of marina, salsa and juice.
I can live without salsa and juice for a week. But I certainly did not volunteer to go a week without chocolate. I spent a lot of time in the candy aisle before finding some bars wrapped in foil, packaged in a box.
At checkout, I added the labels on paper-wrapped beef and chicken to my list of shame (I realized they are plastic). Then when the cashier scanned the barcode on bell peppers, I chalked up another defeat. They each had little plastic stickers with barcodes. I bought them anyway. I was hungry, discouraged and ready to move on.
I still had $21.96. Maybe I could find a bulk store with some of the items I had to put back.
To the bulk stores
At home, I scanned some zero-waste sites and made a few calls. Several stores had bulk oil and vinegar, but I’d have to buy their bottle with a plastic lid and label, use up the contents and bring it back in for a refill. Pemberton Farms, in Cambridge, said I could bring in my own mason jars. They had bread wrapped in paper and bulk items like cereal and nuts in bins, the latter of which put me $1.23 over budget — but was worth every almond.
While I’m out of money, I might want to do this again, so I had some questions for general manager Greg Saidnawey. Pemberton Farms is known as a zero-waste shopping destination, but there are still many things I couldn’t buy here plastic-free. There was no dairy, juice, peanut butter or tahini options without plastic.
Saidnawey says he used to have more than 300 foods and spices in bulk. That shrank to about 100 items during the pandemic. And Saidnawey says he doesn’t expect to add more bulk shopping options anytime soon.
“There was so much forward momentum in zero waste, especially in the Boston area, before COVID,” Saidnawey says. But during the pandemic, “customers just wanted peace of mind. They didn’t want a broken seal; they didn’t want anything that had already been touched by anybody else, and I think we’ve just gone in reverse in a lot of ways.”
The CDC says the risk of getting COVID-19 after touching a contaminated surface is low, but Saidnawey says his plastic suppliers report they’ve never been busier. There’s another factor that may be ramping up use of plastic in food packaging. Plastics are made with fossil fuels. That industry is looking for new outlets in the shift to electric vehicles.
Saidnawey says he’s interested in using more compostable containers, but they are 30-40% more expensive. It’s hard to add that cost to the rising price of food. And compostable boxes for nuts, beans or snacks (a lot of what Pemberton Farms offers in bulk) aren’t as attractive on shelves as plastic.
“I want to find a package that isn’t going to wind up in the oceans or a landfill forever,” Saidnawey says, but “customers shop with their eyes.”
My takeaways
My week of plastic-free eating produced some pretty boring meals. I wasn’t prepared. I didn’t realize how many things would be off limits. There are some zero-waste cookbooks, but I didn’t look at them before I went shopping. And I didn’t budget for herbs or spices, things that might have made life a little more exciting.
To reduce my plastic use moving forward, I’m going to have to make more things from scratch, like hummus, marina, salsa, maybe even yogurt. I’m switching brands of juice so I can buy OJ and lemonade in reusable glass bottles. I’ll have to drive around a bit to explore more bulk food options, and I may need to spend a little more on things like cheese wrapped in paper. I’ve got to beef up my supply of refillable jars. If anyone is thinking ahead to my birthday or Hanukkah, I want some of those reusable food container bags and that beeswax cling wrap alternative.
I asked Star Market, where I shopped this week, what they’re doing to reduce plastic food packaging. They pointed me to a web page about the company's plans to reduce plastic waste, which might mean using less plastic packaging. And Costco, where I shop a few times a year, says it's currently reviewing packaging of all products to reduce plastic use.
Maybe we can slow some of the projected growth in plastic we use once and throw away, and major oil, gas and petrochemical corporations that make most of our plastic will shift to more renewable products. In the meantime, I aim to up my game. I avoided using 27 plastic containers and packages in one week; I can do better.
Need some tips on where to start? NPR’s Life Kit pulled together some helpful tips for starting to audit the plastic in your life, even beyond your grocery list.
By now I should be used to “Top Chef Houston’s” tonal ricochets, which carom from cornball cartoonishness to kumbaya solemnity. I always wonder which Padma we’ll see as mistress of ceremonies: the gung-ho camp counselor or the earnest high school social studies teacher.
This week, as the seven remaining chefs visited our Freedmen’s Town national historic district, we got the social studies teacher. All to the good, as far as I’m concerned. I’d rather see the contestants cook for a Fourth Ward fundraiser than watch them engage in a tortured mock football battle.
The setting in the shadow of downtown’s skyscrapers was rich. Magnificent, even. The front facade and empty shell of Bethel Baptist Church, built by the Reverend Jack Yates in 1889 and destroyed by fire in 2005, now delineate a grassy pocket park. From the front, the soaring Gothic Revival facade has a Petra-like grandeur.
Step through the vaulting doorway, and an airy steel grid conjures an imaginary nave. It made the perfect place for an outdoor food-fest on a sunny afternoon. Forget those token skyline shots and the manicured aisles of Whole Foods Market; for once Houston looked like it had some juice.
First, however, came a ratatat Quickfire Challenge. Cook a monochromatic vegetable dish, the chefs were told, as they pulled knives for their assigned color. Our gal Evelyn pulled black. She did not take it as a good omen.
“I’ve eaten a lot of meat since I’ve been in Houston,” said Padma, sounding slightly aggrieved. Um, yeah. No kidding. For better or worse, that’s us.
Los Angeles chef Nyesha Arrington, the winner from Season 9, parachuted in to guest judge this week. Nick’s fried rice on an orange theme and Ashleigh’s curried vegetables in yellow both fell a little flat with her and Padma.
But Noma-guy Luke’s handsome plating of roasted purple cauliflower, brown-buttered purple carrots and purple potato puree earned plaudits — finally! — and that sauce-like puree had such an enticing rosy-magenta hue I longed to taste it. His relief to earn compliments was palpable.
Buddha’s structural white composition involved regular cauliflower roasted over a wood fire with butter, garlic and thyme; with vadouvan spice and salted grapes for contrast. “Menu-ready,” said Padma. “Really, really high art.”
But here came Evelyn’s charred eggplant-and-black-bean soup, seasoned with black lemon (actually dried limes) and black garlic, with a snowcap of dilled yogurt and one of her signature crumbles — this a dark melange of black radish and walnut. “It’s delicious!” said Padma. “Impeccable,” added Nyesha during final judgments, and “I have to say super-bold of you to make a soup.”
That sounded pretty encouraging for our hometown fave. But Jae rang some bells with her vivid red plate of strawberry-gochujang glazed beets streaked in walnut puree, too. And look out, here came stealth candidate Damarr for the win, with a green-on-green dish of harissa-glazed broccoli “steak” with a flourish of chermoula spiked with hazelnuts and shavings of romanesco, the fractal broccoli. He got immunity.
Then it was on to the educational and good works portion of our show. Dawn Burrell showed up, looking super glam, to instruct the chefs on the history of Houston’s Freedmen’s town. They heard how rural Texas Blacks congregated and flourished here after Juneteenth, in 1866, when word of the Emancipation Proclamation finally reached the state, two and a half years after the fact.
With Zion Escobar, a drop-dead gorgeous guide from the Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservervancy, they walked the surviving narrow brick streets, peeked into the park at Bethel Church and surveyed the 19th century frame cottages that still remain.
They ate a soul food lunch from This is It, which was located on Andrews Street back when I first ate there as a baby restaurant critic in the 1970s. This is It now holds forth on Blodgett in the busier Third Ward, but I recognized the deep gooey glaze on the candied yams and the gelatinous glisten of the oxtails on the contestants’ plates. Buildings may come and go, but foodways persist.
Then they shopped for dishes meant to reflect their own souls and family generations. They’d have to feed 100 paying guests, with the proceeds going to the Conservancy. I immediately loved the sounds of Nick’s cast-iron salmon cakes, a festive dish from his Nana, which he made his own with a remoulade sauce and … the kicker … a cap of Hoppin’ John relish.
As they prepped, Jae dove into childhood memories of her Korean mom deboning fish for her and putting it in her spoon. “I want to create the moment of Korean baby eating fish!” she exclaimed as she peeled bulbous purplish Korean sweet potatoes to make a puree.
Damarr wrestled sheaves of collard greens while narrating the origin of hoecakes, the simple batter of cornmeal and water cooked on the blade of a garden hoe.
Evelyn tinkered with a sope idea involving her mom’s chorizo recipe. Buddha worked on his grandma’s Malaysian curry and returned to the touchstone of his dad’s recent death. He never got to tell his dad he’d made “Top Chef.” “I’m gonna win this for him,” he swore.
Luke gravitated to his mom’s meatloaf, only griddled in Danish frikadeller (meatball) form. Ashleigh hit on combining her Low Country dad’s crab rice with her mom’s famous oyster gravy. “She is the gravy queen!”
Then it was the next day, sunny and perfect in the Bethel churchyard. As the guests filed in, I looked for familiar faces. Mayor Sylvester Turner was on hand with Councilwoman Abbie Kamin, who wore turquoise sunglasses. They schmoozed the judges’ table and rated identifying captions. I caught a glimpse of Gracie Cavnar, Recipe for Success founder; and Eileen Lawal, president of the board of the Freedmen’s Town Conservancy.
As Evelyn pinched up the sides of her sopes, she explained their unusual rosy hue. The little masa boats were tinted with beet juice, a decorative tribute to her grandma. “She always got done up even for the simplest task,” she said. Hair dyed, lipstick applied … ergo these blushing little balls of dough to flatten and pinch just so.
Damarr had trouble keeping his hoecakes from burning at first. It looked like he might crater under the pressure. “It’s a volume thing,” he muttered. “They take six minutes to cook. I do not have enough batter to continuously throw these in the garbage.”
But … fake out! His greens, rich with smoked ham hocks, ended up great, served with a hoecake the judges pronounced “so tender,” plus a livening spritz of pepper vinegar. “This shows how a few things put together well can be so delicious,” said Tom.
The judges found good things to say about everyone’s dishes. And great things to say about some: including Evelyn’s beet sopes, filled with her family-recipe chorizo, charred pineapple pico (yum!), pureed black beans and salsa verde. I’d eat more than my share of those.
The judges kept muttering about how hard it would be to send anyone home as they made their rounds. “There were no bad dishes,” announced one. “The competition must go on,” Padma said more than once. Eventually Luke got the axe, felled by the “tight” texture of his meatballs; while Ashleigh and Buddha’s offerings both came in for some criticism.
It was Jae who won the night with her meltingly tender flaked cod, Korean sweet potato puree and shrimp bisque, set off by a kimchi salad sharpened with pomegranate.
“That’s one of those things that you eat and go, ‘Where have you been all my life?’” raved Tom.
I was happy for her. I have learned to admire Jae’s pluck and resilience, as well as her off-kilter humor and great laugh.
And I was happy the Freedman’s Town Conservancy — and Houston itself — got its moment in the sun.
During prep for the fundraiser, Ashleigh said something illuminating for me. “Being a top chef is technique, it’s flavor, but it’s also being able to communicate with your community. Chefs have to start seeing themselves as community leaders.”
That’s a movement well underway in Houston. It first crystallized for me during Harvey, when local chefs leaped into action to feed our flooded, stricken city. Chris Shepherd’s Southern Smoke keeps raising funds to support food and beverage folks in need. The industry women of I’ll Have What She’s Having have stepped to the forefront of women’s health issues.
The pandemic, when chefs like Chris Williams and so many others came forward to do what they could, has made such efforts even more meaningful.
That, to me, was the episode’s big takeaway. Good show.
ANAHEIM, Calif. — It’s hard to believe right now, but there was a time this season that the Guardians offense was performing at an elite level relative to the rest of the American League. Even more stunning is that the time was about a week ago.
After losing seven straight, including back-to-back sweeps at the hands of the Yankees and Angels, the numbers tell the tale of a dramatic drop-off in run creation for the team with baseball’s youngest active roster.
One week ago, Cleveland’s offense led the AL in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging, OPS, triples, RBI and runs scored. Its +25 run differential topped the league and ranked third in all of baseball.
Through 12 games, the club had scored 68 runs, the most through the first dozen games of a season for Cleveland since 2012.
| Guardians offense | On 4/21 | AL rank | On 4/28 | AL Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Batting average | .280 | 1st | .253 | 2nd |
| On-base | .346 | 1st | .313 | 5th |
| Slugging | .442 | 1st | .405 | 4th |
| OPS | .788 | 1st | .717 | 5th |
| Triples | 6 | 1st | 7 | 1st |
| RBI | 67 | 1st | 80 | 3rd |
| Runs | 68 | 1st | 81 | 3rd |
Then the Guardians headed out on the road for a 10-game trip that started on manager Terry Francona’s 63rd birthday in New York and continued to Los Angeles on Monday.
Through April 21, Cleveland was 34% better than the league average at creating runs as indicated by a 134 wRC+ per Fangraphs.com. Guardians hitters produced a 3.5 fWAR and an offensive runs above average of 16.1, nearly five points better than second-place Seattle at the time.
But in the space of just seven days, Cleveland hitters managed to produce a meager 0.3 fWAR and tumbled to 20% below league average run creation with an 80 wRC+ against the Yankees and Angels. The club’s -5.5 offensive runs above replacement was fourth-worst in the AL during that stretch.
If a club struggles to score runs like that, it doesn’t matter how good its young pitching staff is. Winning games becomes impossible.
Two factors contributed to Cleveland’s dramatic drop over the last seven days: the leadoff and No. 2 hitters fell off their record-setting pace of getting on base in front of Jose Ramirez, and cleanup hitter Franmil Reyes steered headlong into his month-long tailspin at the plate.
The combination of those two factors allowed New York to effectively pitch around Ramirez, while Los Angeles simply let Ramirez get what he could, knowing the players around him in the lineup were not much of a threat.
Ramirez went 1-for-11 with a walk in New York while Myles Straw and Steven Kwan combined for three hits in 22 at-bats with no walks. That trend improved slightly against LA with Straw reaching base six times in 14 plate appearances, but Amed Rosario, who moved into the second spot for an injured Kwan, reached base just twice in 17 plate appearances.
Reyes homered in the opening game of the Yankees series, but failed to reach base outside of that. Once he got to LA, Reyes was already in the throes of a slump that stands at 0-for-15 with 11 strikeouts in his last four games.
Francona admitted that the club’s current offensive funk is something his young players are going to have to work themselves out of, because clubs like Los Angeles are going to keep applying pressure up and down the lineup.
“They certainly held us down,” Francona said. “Sometimes we hit some balls hard, at people. We’re going to have to continue doing that and not fall into feeling sorry for ourselves and keep battling, because that’s the only way that it’ll get better.”
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More Guardians coverage
Guardians swept out of LA with 4-1 defeat
Guardians must be more than just Ramirez: Hoynes
Which players are on the May 2 hot seat? Podcast
Finding a pitching grip proves elusive in latest loss
Losing streak reaches six with 9-5 defeat
Dropping Reyes in lineup aims to protect Ramírez
Guardians’ offense sure to induce sleep: Hoynes
Slumping bats creating West Coast nightmares: Podcast
Hitters arrive too late in 4-1 loss to Angels
Oviedo back with Cleveland: Takeaways
The Link LonkSure, there are holes in Patrick Wisdom’s game – but no one is ever going to claim he doesn’t hit the ball hard. En route to setting a Cubs rookie home run record in 2021, he drove the ball out of the yard at a staggering pace, and now it’s all eyes on Wisdom as he looks to avoid a sophomore slump.
Coming off Chicago’s extra-inning victory over the Braves on Wednesday night, in which Wisdom belted a late two-run home run, the 30-year-old infielder carries a 134 OPS+, due largely in part to his .491 slugging percentage. That’s largely in line with what he did last season, although there are some key differentiators that stand out.
After ranking below the league average in walk rate in 2021, Wisdom has shown early improvements this year, clocking in at the 68th percentile. The big hole in his game, unfortunately, remains the strikeout. He’s in the bottom five percent of the league in strikeout rate (36.5 percent) – but has cut that mark pretty substantially from 2021 (40.8 percent).
He’s definitely hit the ball hard – but he’s also done something we’ve seen Cubs players up and down the lineup fall victim to – hitting the ball on the ground. His ground ball rate is up 10 percent year-over-year and if there’s one thing we don’t need Wisdom doing, it’s hitting the ball on the ground.
The 2012 first-rounder is barreling the ball more than ever before, but he’ll need to do more damage against fastballs. He carries a .171 xBA against heaters in 2021 – and with his power, he’ll need to find a way to put bat to ball more regularly.
Want your voice heard? Join the Cubbies Crib team!
Write for us!At this point, Wisdom is still the clear-cut guy to turn to at the hot corner. Jonathan Villar has been a disaster defensively and there’s just not another viable option to play there regularly. If all you were looking for was for him to maintain what he did in 2021, so far at least, things are off to a good start.
The Link Lonk
(CNN)President Joe Biden said Thursday he's considering ways to deal with reducing student debt burdens, but forgiving $50,000 in loans isn't in the cards.
NEW YORK — It took Jack Craven 20 years to grasp that running his family's wholesale business selling goods to discount stores wasn't how he wanted to spend the second half of his life. He also figured out his ever-mounting unhappiness had taken a toll on his relationships with loved ones.
"I realized that I wasn't taking ownership of what I really wanted," said Craven, who lives in suburban Chicago. "I was more focused on blaming others."
So how did he make it through to the other side?
With the pandemic's Great Resignation has come a Great Reinvention as more people of all ages have given up on jobs and find themselves pondering the work-life balance that lends meaning to their lives. At times, it's transforming a side hustle as Craven did. In other cases, it's chasing a long-dormant dream. In still more, it's a complete surprise.
After a stint as a trial lawyer, then taking the reins of the business his father founded, Craven said he had no idea what he really wanted. That's when he turned to a holistic leadership retreat and dug deep into every aspect of his life.
The retreat turned into a long-term support system of like-minded business people offering both direction and support. In 2015, out of the emotional work he did on himself, came his new full-time gig as an executive coach, helping CEOs and presidents of companies and organizations overcome the things that bog them down. Turns out, he said, helping others was exactly what he needed.
"Being vulnerable is definitely the first step," Craven said.
His family closed the business after he left, but not all second acts — also called second curves — need to be complete life overhauls.
With a doctorate, Michal Strahilevitz in Moraga, California, had been a marketing professor for more than 20 years.
"At some point I loved it and found it exciting," she said. "More recently, I was doing it because it was what I had always done. Then COVID hit and so many of my students were dealing with anxiety and depression. Truthfully, I was struggling, too. I wanted to do something more meaningful."
That's when she developed a course on the science of happiness and well-being, where all the homework was designed to make her students happier and healthier. She did the homework, too.
"My advice for those considering a second curve is to make sure it is something that truly lights you up and allows you to shine and grow," Strahilevitz said. "If I won a billion dollars in some crazy lottery, I would still keep doing this. I don't expect to ever look for a third curve. This is the curve that I was made for."
Whether it's a new job or making changes to the roles in your existing job, she said, "people around the world are looking for greater fulfillment and more happiness. We're no longer willing to settle for just a paycheck."
When Strahilevitz half-pivoted (she still teaches marketing as well), she embraced a growing field of social research: Happiness with a capital H.
Nobody does it quite like Arthur C. Brooks, first a professional classical French hornist, then president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute and now on the faculty of the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. He's also an author, happiness podcaster and writer of the "How to Build a Life" column at The Atlantic.
Brooks has amassed vast research on happiness and the second half of life in his latest book, "From Strength to Strength." A social scientist, he filled the book with explanations and theories about brain function and its ups and downs through time, and anecdotes about the capacities of some of history's most famous figures, from Charles Darwin to Linus Pauling, the only person to win two different Nobel Prizes — one for chemistry and one for peace.
Brooks describes two kinds of intelligence, one that decreases as we age and one that increases and stays high.
"Early on, we have fluid intelligence, which is kind of raw smarts and focusing ability," he told The Associated Press. "That's the harder you work, the better you get in your first career. That tends to decrease in your 40s and 50s. The second curve is your ability to understand what things mean, to combine ideas, to teach, to form teams. That's your wisdom curve."
The latter, he said, increases through your 40s and 50s and stays high in your 60s and 70s. "It's really, really important that you deal with going from one to the other if you want to stay strong and happy," Brooks said.
For strivers, such deficits are what they fear the most. "People are always afraid of decline," he said, "but for strivers really invested in professional excellence, it's their death fear."
Confronting that fear is another step, he said. Also key, according to Brooks, is to embrace weakness in a way that turns it into strength. He called satisfaction "one of the three macronutrients of happiness," the others being enjoyment and purpose.
"You need all three, and balance in abundance, but satisfaction is not the hardest to get. It's the hardest to keep," Brooks explained.
Rita Goodroe, 45, in suburban Washington, D.C., knows exactly what he's talking about. Her pivot came earlier than most.
Before becoming a full-time entrepreneur, working as a business strategist, sales coach and public speaker, she spent 13 years as an attorney, including long stints in the world of real estate and on contract at the Justice Department, a job she fell into when her dream of becoming an entertainment industry lawyer failed to materialize.
"All my life people said, you're going to be an attorney," Goodroe said. She said her transition came on slowly.
"It was a series of moments and they all build. And I think that's really important to note. Everybody keeps waiting for the sign. The moment that, here's this sign that I should quit this and do something else, whether that's leave a relationship or leave a job. Whatever it is, and it's not like that," she said.
Her road wasn't a straight one. In 2006, while still practicing law, she started a Meetup group for singles like her in the Washington area that quickly gained members and sponsors. Soon, she met a guy, but he broke up with her just before her 35th birthday after five years of dating. That's when she decided to pivot again, blogging about dating 35 guys in 35 days to mark her birthday.
"The point for me at that moment was not to find love," Goodroe said. "It was to meet people I would normally not meet and do things I would normally not do, so I had to be really uncomfortable and see how I reacted and what my habits were and what my defaults were so that I could learn about myself. That was the moment of, oh my gosh, things need to change."
Her revelations ("I realized how much I let fear keep me back") led her to quit the law for good and go all-in on her own ventures, including a stretch as a dating coach. She then began speaking to groups and organizations about her dating project and realized she was good at it.
The self-doubt was easy to focus on in the beginning after she gave up a regular paycheck. By projecting that into the world, Goodroe said, she made it difficult for others to support her.
Brooks stressed that not all second acts are about business. A second act could be a spiritual journey, or a commitment to long-term volunteer work, he said. Whatever it is, it's not an easy quest.
"You need a problem-filled life if you want to have a lot of opportunities," he said. "If you have smooth sailing, if you get everything that you want, you're going to be basically bored out of your mind."
___
Follow Leanne Italie on Twitter at http://twitter.com/litalie
The Link Lonk
The Veterans Affairs Department is largely on track with its financial management modernization program, though the program could benefit from establishing firm goals to better measure progress, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The Financial Management Business Transformation, or FMBT, program is one of three major ongoing IT projects at VA, along with the electronic health record modernization program and a new scheduling system, both commercial products developed by Cerner.
The latest financial modernization program started in 2016 as a shared services project with the Agriculture Department. The agencies worked together to pen a contract to deploy the cloud-based Momentum financial management system developed by CGI at an initial cost estimate of $887 million and timeline for full deployment by 2025. However, in December 2017, Agriculture pulled out of the deal, leaving VA to continue on its own.
Since then, VA has revised the cost estimate to upwards of $2.5 billion and projects full deployment by 2030.
The FMBT program follows two previous failed attempts to overhaul VA’s financial systems, including the latest—known as the Financial and Logistics Integrated Technology Enterprise, or FLITE, program—which was canceled in 2010.
The finance system being deployed today, dubbed the Integrated Financial and Acquisition Management System, or iFAMS, was launched at the National Cemetery Administration and Veterans Benefits Administration in 2020 and 2021, respectively.
Users in NCA offices reported general dissatisfaction with the new system and none of those surveyed “felt they had been provided effective training,” according to a GAO report. VA seemed to learn some lessons from that initial deployment, as VBA users “showed improved satisfaction compared to the NCA users.”
According to GAO, program officials have “developed metrics, established baselines and begun to measure operational benefits for NCA and VBA,” but have yet to establish goals for those metrics to hit based on the new setup, which “is a significantly more complex financial system than the previous system.”
VA officials told GAO the agency developed a baseline using performance metrics for the previous system, which were then adjusted as users learned the new system.
“Officials determined that generally understanding the metric performance as improving or not would allow them to see if performance was moving in the wrong direction. However, they also noted that in the future, the program might work to define more specific targets,” the report states. “Until the program identifies specific targets for performance, it will be limited to comparing metric results to the baseline. As such, the program may not be positioned to report that measurable progress has been made over time to fully meet the needs of the department and maximize the return on its multibillion-dollar investment.”
Overall, “The FMBT program’s organizational change management activities were consistent with four leading practices and partially consistent with the remaining three,” auditors wrote. The report urges VA to focus on increasing workforce skills and competencies, assessing each office’s readiness for change and fully assessing the results of change once implemented.
VA officials concurred with all six recommendations GAO included in the report.
The Link Lonk
The San Diego Padres raced out to a mighty lead off Vlad Gutierrez and the Cincinnati Reds, one the home team could not overcome. It’s a story that’s become all too common of late, as the young Cincinnati pitching staff struggles to get its footing in the early going.
The end result was yet another loss, a second 3-15 start to a season within the last five years, and the kind of creeping malaise we normally reserve around here for at least the middle of May.
San Diego won 8-5, won the series, and moved to 5-0 on the season against the Reds, with Mackenzie Gore and his 10 K night probably stealing the headlines around the baseball world.
It’s always a special moment when a local product gets a chance to shine in front his hometown crowd, and Phillip Diehl got that opportunity for the first time on Wednesday evening. The local lefty was no stranger to MLB ball - he appeared in 16 games with the Colorado Rockies between the 2019-2020 seasons - but he finally got a chance to rep the Reds for the first time tonight after his call-up yesterday, and that was special in and of itself.
That he managed to fire a pair of perfect innings in relief was merely icing on the cake, though in a season where few Reds pitchers have been able to pair innings like that together, it was that much nicer to behold.
Honorable Mentions are due to: Kyle Farmer, who doubled four times (tied for an all-time team record), ribbie’d twice, and scored; Brandon Drury, who socked a solo homer; and Tommy Pham, who singled so hard off the RF wall his would-be double was just a one-bagger, homered, walked, scored thrice, and continued to haunt the San Diego Padres.
No roads lead to Shadow Lake Lodge, in the backcountry near Banff, and reaching it requires an eight-mile hike. The payoff: solitude, adventure and ease.
From our lunch spot atop Ball Pass, a windswept notch in the Rocky Mountains that straddles the border between the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, we could see our destination in the distance. A sinuous, densely forested valley unfurled below us, flanked by glacier-clad peaks, leading to the tiny turquoise dot of Shadow Lake.
To get there, we first had to descend along a trail that switchbacked down a sheer slope of unstable scree. Each errant step sent a mini-avalanche of rocks sliding downward. After a few slips, my 5-year-old daughter, Natalie, her legs already jellied by the five uphill miles we’d hiked to reach the pass, began to balk like a nervous horse. As we gently coaxed her down, my wife, Lauren, and I couldn’t help exchanging nervous glances as the gravity of the situation became clear. We were in serious danger, we realized, of missing afternoon tea.
We were in our third full day of a four-night stay at Shadow Lake Lodge, a luxurious backcountry retreat accessible only by foot. We’d come in search of a seemingly impossible combination: an intrepid, immersive, uncrowded and physically challenging wilderness experience that would nonetheless be feasible and fun for Natalie and her 7-year-old sister, Ella.
The uphill, eight-mile hike to reach the lodge, from a trailhead 15 minutes west of Banff, took us beyond the reach of the summer day-hiking crowds. Once we were there, private cabins with solar power, heated showers and three-course meals — plus a decadent teatime spread if you made it back from your day’s adventure in time — made the trip more family-friendly than the spartan and grueling backpacking trips Lauren and I had bonded over in our pre-kid days.
We first visited Shadow Lake in 2014, five months after Ella was born, when she was small enough to ride the trails in an infant carrier on my or Lauren’s back. But there had been a major change since that trip. In late 2019, the Brewsters, a prominent local family who had purchased the original lodge in 1938 and run it ever since, sold the entire operation to the Alpine Club of Canada, which is best known for its network of bare-bones communal mountain huts.
The decision to sell wasn’t an easy one, according to the fifth-generation owner, Alison Brewster, whose daughters, Morgan and Joleen, worked as the chef and the manager of the lodge. But the operation’s future was uncertain because of its location within Banff National Park, where it operated on a 10-year renewable lease.
“Parks Canada made it very clear to us that we would not be permitted to pass it down to my daughters,” she said. Instead, the family decided to approach the A.C.C. about taking it over, since the nonprofit already worked closely with Parks Canada and shared their commitment to the Brewsters’ vision: that, as Alison’s sister Cori put it, “people should be able to access the backcountry without having to put on a 50-pound pack and carry their freeze-dried food.”
On the surface, the new arrangement seems like an odd fit: The A.C.C.’s usual spartan accommodations can seem like the antithesis of a luxury lodge. “It’s a little outside our normal experience,” said Keith Sanford, the group’s interim executive director. But Shadow Lake, along with one other hike-in retreat in Banff National Park called Skoki Lodge, occupies an underpopulated middle ground between those two extremes.
With cabin rates starting at 730 Canadian dollars a night (about $570), including meals for two adults, it’s cheaper than helicopter-access options like Selkirk Lodge and Purcell Mountain Lodge. On the other hand, it requires far less physical labor and backcountry know-how than an uncatered hut.
That fits with the A.C.C.’s mission of making mountain adventures accessible to a broader range of people at a reasonable price. So, with the help of a significant bequest, the A.C.C. took over the lodge in 2020, and soon introduced innovations such as an expanded operating season, opening it up to ski- or snowshoe-in access during the winter for the first time.
Still, we couldn’t help wondering whether our stay with the nonprofit would be as cushy as our previous trip.
Our biggest worry, though, was the hike in. Once we were there, we could choose to spend our days as vigorously or as languidly as we liked. But the first day’s eight miles were nonnegotiable, so we started early. Fortunately the trail, a former fire road, was smooth and gentle. The main hindrance to our progress was the berry bushes that lined the route: wild strawberries, raspberries, currants, bitterly soap-flavored buffaloberries, and a bewildering variety of blueberry-like plants with local names like whortleberry, huckleberry and bilberry. Dashing back and forth between patches, the kids covered far more than eight miles, but arrived at the lodge with stained fingers and full bellies before 3 p.m.
Once there, the daily rhythm is as follows. Breakfast in the dining cabin starts at 8 a.m. Along with a buffet of fruit, yogurt and granola, you order from an ever-changing menu of hot cereals, cooked entrees and baked goods the night before — and “all of the above” is a perfectly acceptable choice. Then you pick up the bag lunch that you also pre-ordered, and hit the trails. Get back by teatime, between 3:30 and 5 p.m., or, failing that, for the dinner bell at 6 p.m. Try to stay awake long enough to see the stars. Sleep, then repeat.
There are three main routes you can take from the lodge, each leading you farther from the nearest road and thus making them essentially unreachable by day hikers. With three full days at our disposal, we tackled each of them, and over the course of six- to nine-hour days crossed paths with two or three sets of tired-looking backpackers each day. Other than that, we were alone with the pikas, small rabbit-like animals that chattered at us from boulder fields overlooking the trails.
On the first day, we followed a path that wound through technicolor meadows up to a broad and grassy saddle called Gibbon Pass. From there, a short scramble took us to the rocky summit of Little Copper Mountain at 8,200 feet, the very first peak the girls had ever bagged. We ate our sandwiches at the top, marveling at the 360-degree view of layer after layer of mountain ridges stretching to the horizon.
We dined that night on half a zucchini each, roasted and topped with a scoop of quinoa and grated cheese. It was interesting, unexpected and tasty; it was not, however, particularly hearty after a full day of hiking in the brisk mountain air. There was grumbling in the ranks, and not just at our table.
The next morning, as we finished breakfast, a staff member asked us all to stay put in the dining hall for a few minutes. There was a whirring sound and suddenly a helicopter was landing in the grass right outside the window. More staff converged from all directions to unload crates of provisions for the next two weeks, while Ella and Natalie were allowed to wander outside and climb into the cockpit.
We headed out for our day of hiking feeling optimistic about the restocked larder. Our route led us up into a towering alpine valley called the Amphitheater, where we peeked into an ice cave, splashed in a tarn and lunched on a glacier, all to a soundtrack of tinkling waterfalls plunging down from the sheer cliffs around us. And sure enough, dinner that night, served al fresco on picnic tables in the meadow, included generous slabs of roast beef with braised cabbage, chocolate cake for dessert and chocolate-covered strawberries for all to mark someone’s wedding anniversary. The freshly baked bread at dinner now came with butter.
Each night, we shared a dinner table with other guests. For one couple in their 50s, it was their first ever backcountry trip. Another couple looked to be in their 70s or perhaps (the rest of us speculated wildly), even their early 80s. They were true backcountry veterans, brimming with anecdotes and advice: which berries to eat, which side trails to explore, where in the sky to watch for the Perseid meteor shower when I tiptoed out of my cabin to lie in the meadow at 2 a.m.
That all of us — neophytes, retirees, parents — could be here, reveling in this remote and beautiful place, during a summer in which road-accessible mountain trailheads were regularly packed beyond capacity by 8 a.m., struck me as a pretty good vindication of the Alpine Club’s decision to take over the lodge.
We’d gambled that Ella and Natalie, too, would see the payoff as worth the effort it took to get there — and they did. Even on our longest day, returning from Ball Peak, there was always something to keep them going: more berries around the next corner, the sight and sound of an avalanche tumbling down a mountain face, or even a dip in the icy glacial waters of Shadow Lake. It was the swim, in the end, that made us miss afternoon tea, but we all agreed it was worth the sacrifice.
The easiest of several trails to Shadow Lake Lodge begins at the Redearth Creek parking lot in Banff National Park, a 90-minute drive west from Calgary International Airport. The eight-mile, steadily uphill hike takes four to five hours one-way. Rates begin at 730 Canadian dollars (about $570) a night for two people, including all food and linens, with a minimum stay of two nights. This summer’s season runs from June 20 to Sept. 25.
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places for a Changed World for 2022.
No roads lead to Shadow Lake Lodge, in the backcountry near Banff, and reaching it requires an eight-mile hike. The payoff: solitude, adventure and ease.
From our lunch spot atop Ball Pass, a windswept notch in the Rocky Mountains that straddles the border between the Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, we could see our destination in the distance. A sinuous, densely forested valley unfurled below us, flanked by glacier-clad peaks, leading to the tiny turquoise dot of Shadow Lake.
To get there, we first had to descend along a trail that switchbacked down a sheer slope of unstable scree. Each errant step sent a mini-avalanche of rocks sliding downward. After a few slips, my 5-year-old daughter, Natalie, her legs already jellied by the five uphill miles we’d hiked to reach the pass, began to balk like a nervous horse. As we gently coaxed her down, my wife, Lauren, and I couldn’t help exchanging nervous glances as the gravity of the situation became clear. We were in serious danger, we realized, of missing afternoon tea.
We were in our third full day of a four-night stay at Shadow Lake Lodge, a luxurious backcountry retreat accessible only by foot. We’d come in search of a seemingly impossible combination: an intrepid, immersive, uncrowded and physically challenging wilderness experience that would nonetheless be feasible and fun for Natalie and her 7-year-old sister, Ella.
The uphill, eight-mile hike to reach the lodge, from a trailhead 15 minutes west of Banff, took us beyond the reach of the summer day-hiking crowds. Once we were there, private cabins with solar power, heated showers and three-course meals — plus a decadent teatime spread if you made it back from your day’s adventure in time — made the trip more family-friendly than the spartan and grueling backpacking trips Lauren and I had bonded over in our pre-kid days.
We first visited Shadow Lake in 2014, five months after Ella was born, when she was small enough to ride the trails in an infant carrier on my or Lauren’s back. But there had been a major change since that trip. In late 2019, the Brewsters, a prominent local family who had purchased the original lodge in 1938 and run it ever since, sold the entire operation to the Alpine Club of Canada, which is best known for its network of bare-bones communal mountain huts.
The decision to sell wasn’t an easy one, according to the fifth-generation owner, Alison Brewster, whose daughters, Morgan and Joleen, worked as the chef and the manager of the lodge. But the operation’s future was uncertain because of its location within Banff National Park, where it operated on a 10-year renewable lease.
“Parks Canada made it very clear to us that we would not be permitted to pass it down to my daughters,” she said. Instead, the family decided to approach the A.C.C. about taking it over, since the nonprofit already worked closely with Parks Canada and shared their commitment to the Brewsters’ vision: that, as Alison’s sister Cori put it, “people should be able to access the backcountry without having to put on a 50-pound pack and carry their freeze-dried food.”
On the surface, the new arrangement seems like an odd fit: The A.C.C.’s usual spartan accommodations can seem like the antithesis of a luxury lodge. “It’s a little outside our normal experience,” said Keith Sanford, the group’s interim executive director. But Shadow Lake, along with one other hike-in retreat in Banff National Park called Skoki Lodge, occupies an underpopulated middle ground between those two extremes.
With cabin rates starting at 730 Canadian dollars a night (about $570), including meals for two adults, it’s cheaper than helicopter-access options like Selkirk Lodge and Purcell Mountain Lodge. On the other hand, it requires far less physical labor and backcountry know-how than an uncatered hut.
That fits with the A.C.C.’s mission of making mountain adventures accessible to a broader range of people at a reasonable price. So, with the help of a significant bequest, the A.C.C. took over the lodge in 2020, and soon introduced innovations such as an expanded operating season, opening it up to ski- or snowshoe-in access during the winter for the first time.
Still, we couldn’t help wondering whether our stay with the nonprofit would be as cushy as our previous trip.
Our biggest worry, though, was the hike in. Once we were there, we could choose to spend our days as vigorously or as languidly as we liked. But the first day’s eight miles were nonnegotiable, so we started early. Fortunately the trail, a former fire road, was smooth and gentle. The main hindrance to our progress was the berry bushes that lined the route: wild strawberries, raspberries, currants, bitterly soap-flavored buffaloberries, and a bewildering variety of blueberry-like plants with local names like whortleberry, huckleberry and bilberry. Dashing back and forth between patches, the kids covered far more than eight miles, but arrived at the lodge with stained fingers and full bellies before 3 p.m.
Once there, the daily rhythm is as follows. Breakfast in the dining cabin starts at 8 a.m. Along with a buffet of fruit, yogurt and granola, you order from an ever-changing menu of hot cereals, cooked entrees and baked goods the night before — and “all of the above” is a perfectly acceptable choice. Then you pick up the bag lunch that you also pre-ordered, and hit the trails. Get back by teatime, between 3:30 and 5 p.m., or, failing that, for the dinner bell at 6 p.m. Try to stay awake long enough to see the stars. Sleep, then repeat.
There are three main routes you can take from the lodge, each leading you farther from the nearest road and thus making them essentially unreachable by day hikers. With three full days at our disposal, we tackled each of them, and over the course of six- to nine-hour days crossed paths with two or three sets of tired-looking backpackers each day. Other than that, we were alone with the pikas, small rabbit-like animals that chattered at us from boulder fields overlooking the trails.
On the first day, we followed a path that wound through technicolor meadows up to a broad and grassy saddle called Gibbon Pass. From there, a short scramble took us to the rocky summit of Little Copper Mountain at 8,200 feet, the very first peak the girls had ever bagged. We ate our sandwiches at the top, marveling at the 360-degree view of layer after layer of mountain ridges stretching to the horizon.
We dined that night on half a zucchini each, roasted and topped with a scoop of quinoa and grated cheese. It was interesting, unexpected and tasty; it was not, however, particularly hearty after a full day of hiking in the brisk mountain air. There was grumbling in the ranks, and not just at our table.
The next morning, as we finished breakfast, a staff member asked us all to stay put in the dining hall for a few minutes. There was a whirring sound and suddenly a helicopter was landing in the grass right outside the window. More staff converged from all directions to unload crates of provisions for the next two weeks, while Ella and Natalie were allowed to wander outside and climb into the cockpit.
We headed out for our day of hiking feeling optimistic about the restocked larder. Our route led us up into a towering alpine valley called the Amphitheater, where we peeked into an ice cave, splashed in a tarn and lunched on a glacier, all to a soundtrack of tinkling waterfalls plunging down from the sheer cliffs around us. And sure enough, dinner that night, served al fresco on picnic tables in the meadow, included generous slabs of roast beef with braised cabbage, chocolate cake for dessert and chocolate-covered strawberries for all to mark someone’s wedding anniversary. The freshly baked bread at dinner now came with butter.
Each night, we shared a dinner table with other guests. For one couple in their 50s, it was their first ever backcountry trip. Another couple looked to be in their 70s or perhaps (the rest of us speculated wildly), even their early 80s. They were true backcountry veterans, brimming with anecdotes and advice: which berries to eat, which side trails to explore, where in the sky to watch for the Perseid meteor shower when I tiptoed out of my cabin to lie in the meadow at 2 a.m.
That all of us — neophytes, retirees, parents — could be here, reveling in this remote and beautiful place, during a summer in which road-accessible mountain trailheads were regularly packed beyond capacity by 8 a.m., struck me as a pretty good vindication of the Alpine Club’s decision to take over the lodge.
We’d gambled that Ella and Natalie, too, would see the payoff as worth the effort it took to get there — and they did. Even on our longest day, returning from Ball Peak, there was always something to keep them going: more berries around the next corner, the sight and sound of an avalanche tumbling down a mountain face, or even a dip in the icy glacial waters of Shadow Lake. It was the swim, in the end, that made us miss afternoon tea, but we all agreed it was worth the sacrifice.
The easiest of several trails to Shadow Lake Lodge begins at the Redearth Creek parking lot in Banff National Park, a 90-minute drive west from Calgary International Airport. The eight-mile, steadily uphill hike takes four to five hours one-way. Rates begin at 730 Canadian dollars (about $570) a night for two people, including all food and linens, with a minimum stay of two nights. This summer’s season runs from June 20 to Sept. 25.
Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places for a Changed World for 2022.
