Mountain Views News, Sierra Madre Edition [Pasadena] Saturday, August 11, 2018

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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

BUSINESS NEWS & TRENDS

Mountain Views-News Saturday, August 11, 2018 

Jeff’s Book Pics By Jeff Brown

FAMILY MATTERS By Marc Garlett


DO YOUR HOMEWORK 
TO ENSURE YOUR KIDS 
ARE PROPERLY CARED 
FOR NO MATTER WHAT 
HAPPENS

It’s back-to-school time again, and when it comes 
to estate planning YOU may have homework to 
do. As a parent, your most critical—and often 
overlooked—task is to select and legally document 
guardians for your minor children. Guardians 
are people legally named to care for your 
children in the event of your death or incapacity. 
If you haven’t done that yet, you should 
immediately do so – or come to one of our 
“Guardian Naming Workshops” and get it done 
there. Information on our next workshop can be 
found at garlettlaw.com, or call the Sierra Madre 
Library at (626) 355 - 7186.

 Don’t think just because you’ve named 
godparents or have grandparents living nearby 
that’s enough. You must name guardians in a 
legal document, or risk creating conflict and 
a long, expensive court process for your loved 
ones—all of which can be so easily avoided.

Covering all your bases

 However, naming permanent guardians is 
just one step in protecting your kids. It’s equally 
important to have someone (plus backups) with 
documented authority, who can stay with your 
children until the long-term guardians can be 
located and formally named by the court, which 
can take weeks or even months. 

 The last thing you want is for police to show 
up at your home and find your children with a 
caregiver, who doesn’t have documented or legal 
authority to stay with them and doesn’t have any 
idea how to contact someone with such authority. 
In such a case, police would have no choice but 
to call Child Protective Services.

Closing the gap

 This is a major hole in many parent’s estate 
plans, as we know you’d never want your kids in 
the care of strangers, even for a short time. To 
fix this, we’ve created a comprehensive system 
called the Kids Protection Plan®, which lets you 
name temporary guardians who have immediate 
documented authority to care for your children 
until the long-term guardians you‘ve appointed 
can be notified and get to your children.

 The Kids Protection Plan® also includes specific 
instructions that are given to everyone entrusted 
with your children’s care, explaining how to 
contact your short and long-term guardians. The 
plan also ensures everyone named by you has the 
legal documents they’d need on hand and knows 
exactly what to do if called upon. We even provide 
you with an ID card for your wallet and emergency 
instructions to post on your refrigerator, so 
the contacts and process are prominently 
available in case something happens to you.
A foolproof plan

 With the Kids Protection Plan®, you’ll name 
one permanent guardian and one temporary 
guardian, along with two or more backups, in 
case the primary isn’t available or cannot serve. 
And we instruct caregivers to NEVER CALL 
POLICE IF YOU CANNOT BE REACHED 
UNTIL ONE OF THE NAMED GUARDIANS 
ARRIVES AND IS PRESENT WITH YOUR 
CHILDREN. 

 Finally, if there’s anyone you’d never want 
raising your children, we confidentially 
document that in the plan, preventing them 
from wasting the time, energy, and assets of the 
people you do want caring for your children.

 With us as your personal family lawyer, you 
have access to the Kids Protection Plan® to 
ensure the well-being of your children no matter 
what. As your kids head back to school, do your 
homework by contacting us today.

 Dedicated to empowering your family, 
building your wealth and defining your legacy,

A local attorney and father, Marc Garlett is on a 
mission to help parents protect what they love most. 
His office is located at 55 Auburn Avenue, Sierra 
Madre, CA 91024. Schedule an appointment to 
sit down and talk about ensuring a legacy of love 
and financial security for your family by calling 
626.355.4000 or visit www.GarlettLaw.com for 
more information.

A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety 
by Donald Hall 

“Hall lived long enough to leave behind two final 
books, memento mori titled ‘Essays After Eighty’ 
(2014) and now ‘A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing 
Ninety.’ They’re up there with the best things he 
did.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times. From the 
former poet laureate of the United States, 
essays from the vantage point of very old 
age. Donald Hall lived a remarkable life 
of letters, one capped most recently by 
the New York Times bestseller Essays 
After Eighty, a “treasure” of a book in 
which he “balance’s] frankness about 
losses with humor and gratitude” 
(Washington Post). Before his passing 
in 2018, nearing ninety, Hall delivered 
this new collection of self-knowing, 
fierce, and funny essays on aging, the 
pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes 
astonishing freedoms arising from both. 
He intersperses memories of exuberant 
days—as in Paris, 1951, with a French girl 
memorably inclined to say, “I couldn’t 
care less”—with writing, visceral and 
hilarious, on what he has called the 
“unknown, unanticipated galaxy” 
of extreme old age. “Why should a 
nonagenarian hold anything back?” Hall 
answers his own question by revealing 
several vivid instances of “the worst 
thing I ever did,” and through equally 
uncensored tales of literary friendships 
spanning decades, with James Wright, 
Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and 
other luminaries. Cementing his place 
alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion 
as a generous and profound chronicler 
of loss, Hall returns to the death of his 
beloved wife, Jane Kenyon, in an essay 
as original and searing as anything he’s 
written in his extraordinary literary 
lifetime.

Loving Your Spouse When You 
Feel Like Walking Away: Real 
Help for Desperate Hearts in 
Difficult Marriages by Gary 
Chapman 

When you said, “I do”, you entered marriage 
with high hopes, dreaming it would be supremely 
happy. You never intended for it to be miserable. 
Millions of couples are struggling in desperate 
marriages. But the story doesn’t have to end there. 
Dr. Gary Chapman writes, “I believe that in every 
troubled marriage, one or both partners can take 
positive steps that have the potential for changing 
the emotional climate in their marriage.” Loving 
Your Spouse When You Feel Like Walking Away 
teaches you how to: Recognize and reject the myths 
that hold you captive. Better understand your 
spouse’s behavior. Take responsibility for your own 
thoughts, feelings, and actions. Make choices that 
can have a lasting, positive impact on 
you and your spouse. An experienced 
marriage and family counselor, Gary 
Chapman speaks to those whose spouse 
is any of the following: Irresponsible, 
A workaholic,Controlling,Uncomm
unicative.Verbally abusive, Physically 
abusive, Sexually abusive, Unfaithful, 
Addicted to alcohol or drugs, Depressed. 
Marriage has the same potential to be 
miserable as it does to be blissful. The 
book may help turn things around for 
the better.

How to be a Happier Parent: 
Raising a Family, Having a 
Life, and Loving (Almost) Every 
Minute by KJ Dell’Antonia 

An encouraging guide to helping parents 
find more happiness in their day-to-day 
family life, from the former lead editor 
of the New York Times Motherlode 
blog. In all the writing and reporting 
KJ Dell’Antonia has done on families 
over the years, one topic keeps coming 
up again and again: parents crave a 
greater sense of happiness in their daily 
lives. In this optimistic, solution-packed 
book, KJ asks: How can we change our 
family life so that it is full of the joy 
we’d always hoped for? Drawing from 
the latest research and interviews with 
families, KJ discovers that it’s possible 
to do more by doing less, and make our 
family life a refuge and pleasure, rather 
than another stress point in a hectic day. 
She focuses on nine common problem 
spots that cause parents the most grief, 
explores why they are hard, and offers 
small, doable, sometimes surprising 
steps you can take to make them better. 
Whether it’s getting everyone out 
the door on time in the morning or making sure 
chores and homework get done without another 
battle, the book shows that having a family isn’t just 
about raising great kids and churning them out at 
destination: success. It’s about experiencing joy--
real joy, the kind you look back on, look forward to, 
and live for--along the way.


All Things By Jeff Brown

EDITORIAL BY WILLIAM FALK EDITOR-IN-CHIEF THIS WEEK

This Summer forests are bursting into flame all over the 
world. More than 50 wild fires have scorched a shocked 
Sweden, some of them north of the Arctic Circle as 
temperatures have soared into the 90’s amid withering 
drought. In normally chilly Olso, the mercury climbed 
passed 86 degrees for 16 consecutive days. The Brits 
have been gobsmacked by 95 degree weather: it hit 98 in 
Montreal: and in Japan, 22,00 people were hospitalized 
when temperatures climbed to a record 106. In Arizona, 
Southern Calif., Pakistan, and India, Summer’s broiler 
has been turned up to unbearable levels, passed 110 
degrees, and people are dying. Heat, drought, and fires of 
this scale and scope are not normal or perhaps they now 
are. Climate change, says Elena Manaenkova of the World 
Meteorological Organization, “ is not a future scenario. 
It is happening now.” It is human nature to postpone 
change and sacrifice as long as possible. We don’t act, 
especially collectively, until a crises is upon us. This 
penchant for procrastination is why the national debt of 
21.3 trillion is climbing at a rate of nearly 1 trillion a year, 
and why we’re doing nothing to address the approaching 
funding shortfalls of Medicare and Social Security. 
Why deal with such unpleasantness, when we can push 
decisions off into the future? So it goes for greenhouse 
gas emissions and climate change. The evidence clearly 
shows that the planet is warming, that the jet stream and 
other wind patterns have been disrupted, that ancient 
ice is melting and seas are rising , and that weather 
extremes such as droughts, heat waves, torrential rains, 
and flooding have all become more common and more 
prolonged. And the consequences have just begun. 
But what’s most important is our comfort today, the 
next quarters GDP, and the re-election of incumbent 
politicians. Climate change? The National Debt? Social 
Security? Let our children and grandchildren deal with 
all that. We’ll be dead by then, suckers. 

Read us online at

www.mountainviewsnews.com

HEALTHY LIFESTYLES


THE MISSING PAGE

Real Life Tips from LIfe's Instruction Manual

YOGIC WISDOM - On Beauty

What makes you 
beautiful? Is it in the 
genes? Is it the way 
you smile? Beauty is 
definitely more than skin 
deep. Some might say 
that beauty shows love. 

 Individual beauty is a 
combination of factors 
both external and 
internal. External beauty is often a reflection of 
internal equanimity, but it also reflects how we take 
care of ourselves. A healthy diet positively affects 
the look of our skin, the shape of our body, how we 
feel, and how much energy we have. Diet includes 
hydration as well. Drink that water! And they don’t 
say “get your beauty sleep” for no reason. It’s true 
—sleep rejuvenates and allows the body and brain 
to re-charge, reflecting how we look and how we 
feel. Regular exercise also brings about internal and 
external beauty. It’s remarkable how great students 
look after yoga in particular - beautiful, at ease, 
flexible, strong —all the positive attributes show. 

 The landscape inside shows on the outside too. 
Our state of mind-- particularly over time-- can 
nourish or wear on us. Anger, criticism, and 
disharmony don’t bring out the love and beauty 
we need to feel our best. But the person filled with 
love, joy, and wonder comes across as strikingly 
beautiful time and time again. Find someone who’s 
at peace inside from a spiritual meditation practice 
and you will see them shining with beauty. 

 Beauty exists in our experiences too which 
includes our struggle to transform. Strength from 
adversity and courage amidst fear is a beautiful 
thing. 

 How do you become beautiful? Well, first, you 
already are. But to let it shine from the inside out, 
give yourself love through self-care. Practice yoga, 
meditate, eat well, sleep, and let go of that which 
you can’t control. 

Namaste, 

Keely Totten 

E-RYT 500, Yoga & Meditation Teacher, 

Seer of Beauty


Lori A. Harris

TRAIN YOURSELF TO TRY

What do you do when you get an idea? When something 
occurs to you that you would like and seems exciting what 
do you do? I can attribute some of my success to the voices 
in my head. I’m talking about the talks and discussions I 
had with the people that love me. My Uncle Hezekiah once 
told me, “don’t turn down a job that’s not been offered 
to you.” He said that to me decades ago, but I have never 
forgotten it. 

 The life of a child is a life of adventure. We come here 
not knowing how to do anything, but nature has wired 
us for survival, so we learn very quickly. Somethings we 
learn over time and somethings come to us as if by magic. 
We scoot, crawl, pull up, cruise from table to chair, and 
eventually, we walk. Our parents are cheering for us from 
across the room, and that feels good. As we mature, there is 
a subtle shift, most of us don’t notice it. Eventually, we get 
addicted to approval and resistant to criticism. To prosper 
we need to remember to listen to our inner wisdom. If you 
catch yourself tapping down your dreams before they can 
take root, here are five questions you can ask yourself: 

1. Does your dream give you life? Do you feel an amplified 
aliveness when you imagine yourself having achieved that 
dream? 

2. Does your dream align with your core values? If one of 
your core values is to live a healthy lifestyle, for example, 
pursuing a dream to climb Mount Everest would be in 
alignment with this core value. 

3. Is your dream going to require 
that you grow as a person? 
Will you be expected to stretch 
yourself beyond your current 
comfort zone? 

4. Will you need help from a 
higher power to achieve this 
dream? If you know every single 
thing you’ll need to do to fulfill 
that dream, the answer is no. If 
you know what you want but have no idea how you’ll get 
there, then yes, you will need help from a higher power, it 
is a worthy goal! 

5. Is there some good in your dream for others? Even if 
your dream is to meet the love of your life, there’s still good 
in that dream for others. If you’ve ever seen two people in 
love, this energetically elevates everyone else around them. 

Train yourself to ask empowering questions instead of 
saying to yourself “what if I fail?” Then, take a baby step. 
Train yourself to try. 

 

 Lori Harris is a lawyer and coach. She helps people wake 
up to life, and she’s having a workshop August 25, 2018. 
Want to learn more? Contact clientlove@loriaharris.com 
and request the details.

 
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