Who I Met Today

Everyone has a story – Collecting & sharing interesting info, life lessons, & fun things to see & do from the wonderful people in our world

Posts by Pamela Lamp

Pamela Lamp

Gianni Raffaelli – An Artisan in Florence

Daily dose of gelato in hand, I meander through the back alleys and narrow streets of Florence’s Oltrarno quarter.  A few blocks from the Arno River, away from tourists and crowds,  lies a quiet neighborhood of Florentine artists.   Peering into the artisan workshops and studios, you discover a rich part of Florence’s culture and history.  Bookbinders, silversmiths, paper marblers, sculptors, marble craftsmen, perfume makers, potters, shoemakers, metal workers.  Some of these craftspersons apprenticed under a master or studied with an instructor.    Many are members of artisan families,  and the skills and practices were handed down through the generations.

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Adam Schallau – Grand Canyon and Southwest Photographer

Adam Schallau greeted me with more cheeriness than I could muster at 4:45 AM. “You get up and moving and a story unfolds,” he smiled. As we headed down dark trails to a ledge a mile above the Colorado River,  I realized how much I would learn from one of the Southwest’s premier landscape photographers. I watched Adam track the moon and the clouds, and he saw changes in the

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Passion for Golf + Business Savvy = Apparel Collection

“You have no chance of scoring if you don’t take the shot.”  Operating on the premise that you have to start somewhere, Victoria Kopyar almost seems to welcome mistakes and problems.  Known as someone who relishes the chance to reimagine or reinvent, Victoria “jumped in with both hands and feet” to improve the look of her golf game. Growing up in Ohio, Victoria loved pretty clothes and couldn’t always afford

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Eat Me Ice Cream – Rochester, NY

Concord grape ice cream, topped with a homemade and torched cinnamon marshmallow sauce, nestled between two homemade, and very special,  graham crackers

Sweet corn ice cream, spread with a black currant jam, on savory jalapeño corn meal cookies

Fresh mint ice cream, covered with a velvety mixture of white chocolate and crunchy wasabi peas, sandwiched between two extraordinary sugar cookies

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Something New and Different

You can’t just be you.  You have to double yourself. You have to read books on subjects you know nothing about. You have to travel to places you never thought of traveling. You have to meet every kind of person and endlessly stretch what you know.

    -Mary Wells Lawrence, 88, advertising executive and first female CEO of a NYSE company

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Designing Jewelry Leads to Helping Widows in India

Susan McVicker and Katie Gilliam describe their chance meeting as a God thing.  With a mother-daughter age difference, they both marvel at the timing of their worlds coming together and the adventure that unfolded.  Susan says she “couldn’t possibly have imagined that her art would someday help women on the other side of the world.”  Four years ago Susan came across a dilapidated shoe box filled with her late grandfather’s

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The Green Bag Ladies

Around the world, we discard one million plastic bags every single minute. We use, on the average,  a bag for 25 minutes, and it takes 100-500 years for the bag to decompose. Our plastic trash, disposed of on land, flows from streams to rivers to the oceans. An ocean gyre is a system of ocean and wind  currents, swirling like a whirlpool. The trash is drawn into the calm center

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Salvador Dali Museum – St. Petersburg, FL

A taxi driver once asked Salvador Dali, the quirky Surrealist painter,  “What drugs do you take?  I want them!”  Dali responded “I don’t take drugs – I AM the drug!”   

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What Do You Do?

My kids are grown and on their own, and I don’t have a job. 

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Our Marriage Notebook – Dates With A Little Red Book

A few years ago, I gave my husband a simple and inexpensive valentine – a small, red notebook. Inside the front cover, I wrote a message to my sweetheart.   I proposed, with this notebook in hand,  we sit down a few times a year and talk about our marriage.   My concept was to document our hopes and dreams for the coming months and what we’d like to work

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