Editorial

Just last week Raul and I were driving a rental car on the backroads of Mallorca, a small Mediterranean Island off the coast of Spain. Not gonna lie, my nose may or may not have been pressed hard against the window admiring the stone walls lining the road and noting the red earth from which the olive trees grew. Once we reached our destination we found ourselves at a pristine cliff-lined beach. The water a color that I’ve only seen in the public swimming pools I grew up swimming in.

As…

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This week’s highly anticipated edition of the HPR is coming straight from Madrid, Spain, a city steeped in romance and tradition as well as contemporary nuances. Ever since I read “The Sun Also Rises” at the age of 14, I wanted to see this city and experience a bullfight. Not out of bloodlust, but out of cultural context. Ironically, it was the same year I became a vegetarian. 

Twenty years later Raul and I found ourselves at Madrid’s Plaza del Toro, the building itself was an…

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On Sunday Raul and I found ourselves sipping champagne on a plane flying to Spain for my 34th birthday with an unofficial HPR European vacation, but don’t worry pals, we’re still bringing you your favorite weekly news. In fact, you might not even realize we’re gone until you check our Instagram.

I started reading some Hemingway to prepare for Madrid. Who knew that in the glossary for “Death in the afternoon” he would include beer and wine recommendations. Now it’s on to see…

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I know bringing up William Gardner’s peeping Tom incident is like beating a dead horse, but it’s disturbing on a multitude of levels. CS Hagen made mention that this incident happened to slip the minds of the North Dakota Republican party in last week’s edition of HPR. In fact it even escaped the mind of prosecuting attorney Aaron Grayson Birst who also happened to be lobbying for the party.

So much for covering your tracks guys, now we can’t help but wonder who else’s tracks…

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“If I look like a kid on Christmas morning, it’s because that’s the way I feel right now. How I wish my parents could have heard the words you said about me,” Luci Baines Johnson said. She was preparing her commencement speech for Georgetown’s School of Nursing and Health Studies last Saturday. She dropped out of nursing school to get married in 1965. Now at 70 she was awarded an honorary doctorate. According to the Washington Post 105 undergraduates were in the audience and…

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Time and aging is weird. It flies, it fleets, it stands still and all too often it passes us by. I lose track of time too easily and it seems like when the years meld themselves together I’m reminded how much has gone by once I see my friends’ children. Instead of thinking, “Oh, that was only five years ago,” I realize that that is an entire lifetime for a Kindergartner.

My little sister was born right before my Freshman year in high school, I remember thinking to myself how old…

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I was working on a project in a small town in the south central part of the state this week and one of the women I was working with showed me some of the local hot spots and made mention of how many of those buildings and businesses were for sale, because the business owners were planning to retire. Along with these storefronts a slew of beautiful, reasonably sized homes were also on the market.

Then John Prine’s song “Spanish Pipedream” got stuck in my head and has been echoing…

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The older I get the more I think about what we leave behind and I’m not just talking about material objects. What kind of wisdom are we leaving behind and what kind of stories, traditions and pearls of wisdom can we collect from our elders before it’s too late?

I learned the art of scherenschnitte through a grant from the NDCA called “The folk art and traditional art apprenticeship program.” The intent of the grant is to keep the tradition of these arts alive. I learned…

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There’s something to be said about the art of listening. Effective communication is like playing a game of catch, you need to bounce the conversation ball back and forth to keep it going. I never was one much for sports-ball but I’m in the communications field and that’s about as close as I get. Plus conversation doesn’t really require a lot of coordination so we’re golden. In a day and age where we can publish our opinion by the minute and pick and choose the causes and…

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According to Greek mythology Hades is to blame for the Earth’s mournful state of winter. The story involves Persephone the goddess of nature and Hades the god of the underworld in a classic caper of obsession, abduction, and Stockholm syndrome. Hades had become obsessed with Persephone and captured her as she was picking flowers by the river and hanging out with some river nymphs of questionable repute. According to the tale, she fell through a fissure in the earth and Hades himself…

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