When you walk into the "big red barn" restaurant you feel like you are entering your friends home and their mom is sweating in the kitchen making your favorite dish. This is a "pull up a seat and hangout" kind of place with comfortable booths and tables. Whenever I visit, I prefer a booth.

In case you missed it last week, our planet has reached a milestone. After years of steady acceleration, carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in the atmosphere have hit 400 parts per million (ppm). When researchers began tracking CO₂ levels in 1958, the level was 313 ppm. Since then, that number has continuously risen. While scientists say there is nothing particularly special about 400 ppm, it serves as  psychological threshold, leaving us unable to ignore how fast CO₂, which drives global warming, is increasing on Earth.

Wow! The weather sure has turned the last week or so. It has been beautiful. Walking the puppies each night has been even more wonderful than usual. I have a couple of announcements but first I want to give you some random ideas to help get you better. Some of these things have sure helped me ...

The month of May is national Pet Cancer Awareness Month, which gives us a chance to raise a topic that can be intimidating and worrying for many pet owners.  It is important for owners to know what to look for when screening for cancers and also to know what things can be done to decrease risk factors.

Today for our series on facing fears, I spoke with Cyril Guiraud, the mastermind behind Denormalise. In addition to starting Denormalise, Cyril is a jazz musician, sailboat racer, and family man. All of these endeavors take a certain amount of bravado, so I was curious – what makes Cyril flinch? Turns out, he has self-doubts just like the rest of us. However, he has learned to turn the negative into positive and to lasso his fears so they work in his favor. Read my interview with Cyril below.

As part of our Denormalise series on facing fears, I have been reading a bit about what drives our fears and how we can overcome (or at least deal with) them. Here are a few tips I have gleaned. I hope you find them useful in facing your own fears ...