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Today when a patient comes with memory problems, doctors might say that the person has a chance of developing Alzheimer’s in the next decade, a chance of not getting much worse for several years, and a chance of actually getting better. Tests like brain scans, Dr. Petersen said, “will allow us to be much more definitive.” If the tests show changes characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease, a doctor can say, “I think you are on the Alzheimer’s road.” That can be a difficult conversation, but it can allow patients and their families to plan. “At least it’s a conversation the physician can have with the patient,” Dr. Petersen said.

The DiMeo farming family owns and operates several of the largest blueberry farms in the world, in the “blueberry capital of the world” Hammonton, New Jersey.

Check out the new site I helped them launch at Dimeoblueberryfarms.com. I also profiled them over on MartinKelley.com.

New MartinKelley.com designed site:
Michael Oliveras is a long-time union carpenter making the entrepreneurial jump and starting his own business: Mike’s Precision Carpentry. He came to me looking for a webpage to advertise his new enterprise.

It’s a simple design, a typical small-business site of half-a-dozen pages. The color scheme matches his business cards for a bit of branding. Oliveras faced a problem typical for new businesses: a lack of good photos. The work he’s done for many years is not technically his own (per the employment contracts) so for now the pictures are a mix of the few jobs he has done on his own and a few stock images. I’m sure he’ll have a well-rounded portfolio before long and we’ll be able to fill out the site with his own work. In the meantimes, he added a couple of great pictures of him and his family on the “About Us” page to give it that personal touch.

See it live: www.mikes-precision-carpentry.com

Family at St Mary’s Feast of the Assumption:

St Mary’s Feast of the Assumption. See Feast Day One and Day Two sets on the Savestmary’s Flickr account

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

it is as fairy tales rendered from experience, rather than as blunt records of life, that his mid-’80s movies live on. They capture — with a winning mixture of optimism and melancholy, with a generosity of spirit tempered by a punitive sense of right and wrong — something essential in the experience of youth. Not only in that specific era, but also before and, I’m guessing, since. Like most artists who are perceived as the voice of a generation, Mr. Hughes did not belong to the generation in question. He was a baby boomer, a member of the high school class of 1968 in Northbrook, Ill. And his vision of the classes of 1984 and after was certainly colored by a post-’60s sense of wariness and counter-counterculture suspicion. A few years ago an article in Slate pegged Mr. Hughes as a conservative, even a reactionary, whose celebration of rebellion had more to do with the middle-class resentments that brought Reagan into office than with residual anti-establishment radicalism. The answers to this accusation are: maybe so, and so what? It is true that while his heroes, most notably Ferris Bueller and the members of the Breakfast Club, are in conflict with authority, they are also stubborn in their individualism and often unapologetically materialistic. Which is part of what makes them authentic, and authentically confused. The unspecified North Shore Chicago suburb where most of these stories take place is, at first glance and in its own mind, a paradise of uniformity and privilege. And this setting, rather than being the facile hell imagined in movies like “American Beauty,” is shown as a genuine expression of the American utopian ideal, a pastoral city on a hill where everyone is comfortable and everyone’s the same. The paradox is that most people feel, and want to be, different. Not to smash the system or flee its clutches, but rather to find a place within it where they can be themselves, even if they like strange music, come from a poorer family or favor eccentric styles of dress. That desire is what motivates Sam, the birthday girl in “Sixteen Candles,” and it also drives both the cocky Ferris Bueller and his nervous buddy Cameron. The great, paradoxical insight of “The Breakfast Club” is that alienation is the norm, that nerds, jocks, stoners, popular girls and weirdos are all, in their own ways, outsiders.

Alice Morningstar Yaxley, Gil Skidmore and other members of the wider QuakerQuaker family are live blogging the yearly meeting!

Favorite quote:

The thing that confuses me is that my UU congregation seems to do a better job with living out Christian values than my partner’s Christian church does. (Yes, we are now an interfaith family of sorts.) But nobody wants to talk about Jesus.

A.K.A. the Deshler-Morris House, where George Washington really did sleep! From the National Park Service site:

President George Washington also briefly occupied the Deshler-Morris House, a two and a half story stuccoed stone house at 5442 Germantown Avenue. The National Park Service restored this building to the way it looked when George Washington was the occupant between 1793 and 1794. A group of dedicated volunteers provides tours of the property, while the National Park Service continues to maintain the house and grounds. Here in 1793, the executive branch of the government dealt with the problem of Edward Genet, the former French minister. He had commissioned privateers in American ports to prey on British ships along the American coast and in so doing jeopardized relations and risked war between Great Britain and the new nation. The next summer, Washington rented the house again hoping to protect his family from yellow fever, while he carried out his duties as president. The home became known as “the Summer White House.”

My mother Liz says she was given a lot of reading to prepare herself to give tours. I’m not too worried about qualifications, as we had framed pictures of Germantown on our walls growing up (she carefully cut out her favorite scenes from a neat old book and framed them herself with red felt matting!). I think the “summer White House” was actually one of the pictures on our walls!

The PPA announced winners for the their photography contest. I didn’t win, but I was beaten out by some great pictures. Below are some, follow the link for all. My Quaker peeps should know that Jaime Cromartie is a member of Atlantic City Area meeting, so at least one of the family made it!

Early photos from Julie’s family. Mostly East Vineland, NJ from the 1920s-1950s.

Julie’s grandmother Laura Picconi DeMarchi is on right with probably a brother and friend in this picture circa 1926.

There’s more about this tragedy on various Facebook pages and Twitter streams. Bonnie is most well known for her work with Love Makes a Family.

And while my life has not really been an imitation of Tom Mullen’s, I could have done far worse than imitating him. His kindness, ready wit, caring, love of his family, generous Christian faith, and so much more make him a hero of the faith to me. The kind of man that I hope to grow into.

The Convincement of John L. of Michigan’s Crossroads Friends Worship Group

John shares the story of his family’s journey to Friends. They are members of Crossroads Friends Worship Group, a group of Christian Friends in Michigan, USA, under the care of Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative). Recorded 6/21/09 at the Conservative Friends Gathering in Lancaster County, Pa.

Note from Martin: my apologies about the quality here: the sun’s glare made the screen almost invisible and I didn’t realize I was videoing my neck for part of the interview!

Originally I was born LDS, into the Mormon church. My parents were there but they fell away from it about the time I time I was eight, right before the time I would have been baptized. We spent some time in a First Christian church but quit going. I had a friend at school who asked if I would be interested in going back [to the Mormon church] right after I got my license at 16 so I started doing that. After a period in there I found Christ and was baptized. I was attached to a very small portion of their doctrine, but the basic way I lived my life matched what they said for the most part. Then my wife converted… well, before she was my wife, I converted her, got married, had five children then quit going for no particular reason.

We homeschool and try to eat right. We did a lot of research on the schooling and on the eating and on a lot of other things we do in our life and we realized we had never actually done any research on our religion. We had seen Quaker Jane and some other people primarily due to my daughter looking for modest dresses. They were very hard to find anyplace. After a period of time my wife decided we should really start researching the church we belong to. The more we researched it the more we realized it didn’t match our beliefs.

We started to actively looking for a group that did match our beliefs and started going back to some of the Quaker websites. After a period of time we found that truly was the path we were being led on by God. We became “anonymous” Quakers. We had no meeting, we didn’t know any other Quakers. We just started dressing plain and effectively became Quaker. I was transferring from my job in California to my job in Michigan and we got here we decided to find a Quaker meeting that was Christ-centered and un-programmed. There aren’t a whole lot of them out there. It just so happens that when we moved to Michigan we were an hour and a half of a worship group that was un-programmed and Christ-centered. After another year and a half we became members—that was just a few weeks ago.

Luckily we moved right by it, as far as the distances I’m used to traveling. We’ve been attending there regularly now and are very happy with the choice and the children are doing very well.

Quaker schools can excel, I believe, by practicing the Quaker testimonies, putting Christ at their center and emphasizing education—and life— not as a way to get “a competitive advantage” over…