On Nov. 27th I had the pleasure of interviewing with Lynn Wallington, weekend host on the Spaced Out Radio show. We talked about ghosts, spirits, pets and people who communicate from spirit. It was a really engaging discussion, and people in the chat even enjoyed it!
Video: https://youtu.be/7n15pW8cNQw
It's amazing that even 234 years ago, back in 1787, Catherine the Great knew the importance of getting vaccinated against diseases. Today, in 2021, sadly 33% of U.S. residents are still not smart enough to understand that.
In 1768, Catherine became the first person in Russia to be vaccinated against smallpox, and she had her son vaccinated soon after. In 18th-century Europe, smallpox would sometimes kill off entire villages at once (infected people would die within 2 weeks). Smallpox was finally eradicated worldwide in 1980 because of vaccines. Now, Catherine The Great's letter urging vaccinations is up for Auction. Here's the story and the history:
A letter written by Russian empress Catherine the Great on April 20, 1787, stressing the importance of the smallpox vaccine to the count of Malorossiya (modern-day Ukraine), will go up for auction on Dec. 1 at MacDougall's in London, according to news reports.
That letter, previously held in an anonymous private collection, was recently displayed for the first time in Moscow and will go up for auction at MacDougall's auction house in London On Dec. 1, according to the Moscow Times.
The day after Thanksgiving we decorated the house for Christmas. Well, Tom did. Since he has a flair for design (and I have no taste), he set up the outdoor and indoor decorations. Today's blog has some of the photos of the decorations.
We bought some pine boughs and Tom laced them with lights (our first year with outside lights!) and draped them outside the den (former garage) and the front door of the house.
INSIDE TREE - Inside
we put up our pre-lit, narrow Christmas tree and Tom decided on uniform color
ornaments, so he decorated it. (Don't buy us ornaments, please... all the
ornaments are the same color).
(Tyler and Dash posed under the Christmas tree showing approval) 
History and archaeology says that the Vikings landed on Greenland and inhabited it, but the mystery of why they left has been around a long time. Now, scientists believe it is because of rapid climate change. Here's the story from Science News.
A rapidly changing climate might have brought an end to Nordic life on the island
By Freda Kreier DECEMBER 20, 2021 AT 7:00 AM
In 1721, a Norwegian missionary set sail for Greenland in the hopes of converting the Viking descendants living there to Protestantism. When he arrived, the only traces he found of the Nordic society were ruins of settlements that had been abandoned 300 years earlier.
There is no written record to explain why the Vikings left or died out. But a new simulation of Greenland’s coastline reveals that as the ice sheet covering most of the island started to expand around that time, sea levels rose drastically, researchers report December 15 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.
These shifting coastlines would have inundated grazing areas and farmland, and could have helped bring about the end of the Nordic way of life in Greenland, says Marisa Borreggine, a geophysicist at Harvard University.
Greenland was first colonized by Vikings in 985 by a group of settlers in 14 ships led by Erik the Red, who had been banished from neighboring Iceland for manslaughter. Erik and his followers settled across southern Greenland, where they and their descendants hunted for seals, grazed livestock, built churches and traded walrus ivory with European mainlanders.
The settlers arrived during what’s known as the Medieval Warm Period, when conditions across Europe and Greenland were temperate for a handful of centuries (SN: 7/24/19). But by 1350, the climate had started taking a turn for the worse with the beginning of the Little Ice Age, a period of regional cooling that lasted well into the 19th century.
Researchers have long speculated that a rapidly changing climate could have dealt a blow to Greenland’s Norse society. The island probably became much colder in the last 100 years of Norse occupation, says paleoclimatologist Boyang Zhao at Brown University in Providence, R.I, who was not involved in the new research. Lower temperatures could have made farming and raising livestock more difficult, he says.
These lower temperatures would have had another impact on Greenland: the steady expansion of the island’s ice sheet, Borreggine and colleagues say.
Though rising sea levels usually go hand in hand with ice melting from ice sheets, oceans do not rise and fall uniformly in every place, Borreggine says. Around Greenland, sea level tends to rise when the ice sheet there grows.
This is for two main reasons:
1) First, ice is heavy. The sheer weight of the ice sheet pushes the land it rests on down, meaning that as the ice sheet grows, more land is submerged.
2) Second is gravity. Being massive, ice sheets exert some gravitational pull on nearby water. This makes the seawater around Greenland tilt upward toward the ice, meaning that water closer to the coast is higher than water in the open ocean. As the ice sheet grows, that pull becomes even stronger, and sea level close to the coast rises further.
Simulating the impact of the weight of the ice and its tug on Greenland’s waters, Borreggine and their colleagues found that sea level rose enough to flood the coast by hundreds of meters in some areas. Between the time the Vikings arrived and when they left, there was “pretty intense coastal flooding, such that certain pieces of land that were connected to each other were no longer connected,” they say.
Today, some Viking sites are being inundated as a result of the overall rise in global sea level from climate change, which is being only marginally offset around Greenland by its melting ice sheet. Something similar could have happened back in the 14th and 15th centuries, destroying land that the Norse relied on for farming and grazing, Borreggine says.
“Previous theories about why Vikings left have really focused on the idea that they all died because it got really cold, and they were too dumb to adapt,” Borreggine says. But they say that archaeological digs have revealed a far more nuanced story, showing that Greenland’s Norse people did change their lifestyle by increasingly relying on seafood in the last century of their occupation.
But learning to adapt may have been too difficult in the face of an increasingly harsh landscape. The idea that rising sea levels may have been one of these challenges has merit, Zhao says, noting that the reasons why the Vikings disappeared from Greenland is nuanced.
As the climate changed, for example, these people may have also found themselves increasingly cut off from trade routes as the season for thick sea ice extended. And by the mid-14th century, the Black Plague was tearing through Europe, cutting into the Vikings’ biggest market for walrus ivory.
“Norse people came and left,” Zhao says. “But there are still a lot of unsolved questions,” including why exactly they left, he says.
The last written record of this society is a letter describing a wedding in 1408. A few years later, that couple moved to Iceland and started farming. Why the pair chose to leave is lost to history, but, as the new research suggests, sea level rise may have been part of the equation.
This is the final blog of our trip to Greece in September 2021. After we endured the 10 1/2 hour flight back from Athens to Chicago, we transferred from Chicago to Baltimore. The next day, our friend Ed (in spirit) let us know that he also made the return trip back with us. You'll read about that in today's blog. 
(Photo: Rob and Tom in the Maiandros restaurant, Athens)
There's a new podcast today from Dead Time! Rob Gutro, author and pet medium joins Katherien Lundin Clairvoyant Medium, Paranormal Investigator and Spiritual Mentor for Straight talk about the Paranormal and much more. Dead Time is the time when the spirit world connects to the human world. LISTEN: “New Episode! https://lnkd.in/gxeWf3Jv
To get Rob's books on Amazon, click here!
Tyler's 11th birthday was November 29th and we celebrated with a day of walks, snuggles, treats, naps under blankets, breakfast with eggs, and some playtime. At the end of the day, we took a family trip to nearby Petco where Tyler and Dash walked around and Tyler got to pick out some favorite treats. There was another dog in Petco, so that sent Tyler into a barking frenzy... because it's his birthday and he didn't invite the other dog. LOL. Here are some pictures from his adventure!
The Kokoni loves human interaction and is fearless despite its small size. The breed is a cheerful, smart, and loyal. They are great companion dogs. Alert, and makes a good watchdog. The Kokoni is also fast and lively so the breed needs a daily pack walks to burn mental and physical energy. 
In today's blog, we return to Delos Island to point out some of the famous highlights like the Famous Lions and Murals. You'll also learn about the still on-going Excavations
After yesterday's archeologically-heavy and history-rich blog on the Greek island of Delos, today's blog will dive into the mythology associated with the island. A Greek God and a Greek Goddess were said to be born on Delos, so today's blog will tell you about Apollo and Artemis.
WHICH GODS WERE BORN THERE? Delos is the mythological birthplace of Apollo-Sun, god of daylight, and his twin sister Artemis-Moon, goddess of night light.
Apollo had the ability to foretell future events with high level of accuracy. Among other things, Apollo is a supreme archer and thus his standard weapon is the bow and arrow. Here is an overview of the major powers of the Greek God Apollo.
Apollo, like most Greek gods, has the gift of eternal youth, which meant that, unlike mortals, he would always look young, handsome and beautiful. Apollo is immune to injury and cannot be plagued with earthy diseases. Even when he sustains an injury, it heals at a supernatural speed. Besides, Apollo also possesses super human strength.(Source: Learnodo)
Artemis was one of the most widely venerated of the Ancient Greek deities, and her temple at Ephesus was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Artemis' symbols included a bow and arrow, a quiver, and hunting knives, and the deer and the cypress were sacred to her.
For the extensive history of Artemis, visit Wikipedia.
(Photo: The Diana of Versailles, a Roman copy of a Greek sculpture by Leochares (Louvre Museum))
NEXT: Delos Island's Famous Lions, Murals and Excavations
