Betsy's Blog

  Hey, guess what? I was on TV today...for my 15 minutes of fame. What was I doing? Clapping in a virtual audience for Drew Barrymore who I have followed since ET. Why not? Are you impressed yet? Do you want to know how you can be on TV from the comfort of your own home? Well…here’s the scoop!  It started last year when my teacher friend Jamy auditioned to be in TV studio audiences. Jamy would wait in long lines just to be in a show audience. She made new friends who were like-minded and shared audition tips. Jamy was a true fan! Pre-COVID, she sat in crowded auditoriums on rickety chairs just to be in a live talk show audience. Now Jamy attends TV shows from the comfort of her own couch. Her colleagues told her about the 1iota.com website that offers a wide variety of TV studio tickets for virtual audiences. I applied for one of my favorite shows, “The Voice”, but it was during my workday. They were sold out for the later performances. My teacher friend got a ticket to “The V...

           Election day has turned into a season instead. It seems like months ago that my husband and I delivered our absentee ballots in person to an official U.S. Post Office. It was reassuring to know that our ballots were in a secure room waiting to be opened. After being overseas for many past elections, it was satisfying to fill outour ballots and physically drop them off. We voted early and made our voice known. No one can mess with our ballots, or so we thought. Now its t hree days after the Election and ballots are still being counted across the nation. Election Day was a school holiday, so we made popcorn and settled in to watch the results on TV. It slowly turned into a bad movie with scenes of long lines of unmasked voters and pickets outside the polls. There were makeshift voting tents in parking lots with long lines of people waiting to vote in our city. Then I saw on the Nightly News piles of absentee ballots sitting in our local Pos...

I’m not sure about my new decision. I am now an official member of a local gym. Why? I have been overeating, watching too much TV, and sitting around the house too much, Why are my clothes getting smaller? I think I know the answer. Why am I hungry all the time? I think I know the answer. What should I do? Well, I could do more fitness videos at home and take more hikes in local parks. I could also monitor my food intake more closely. My husband needs the routine of going to a gym. I like it too and joined the gym which only costs $10 extra monthly. I spend more than that on coffee. So I went to his gym yesterday for the first time. How did it go? Very smoothly. We followed the rules of wearing masks at all times and wiping down machines after use with provided disinfectant bottles and paper towels. We used the socially distanced treadmills with signs covering every other one. Going early in the morning really helped because there were only three other people in the huge space. The...