All posts by emmapalova

Emma Palova, born in Czech Republic, is an author, a writer, a screenwriter, a journalist, a photographer, a designer and the founder of Emma Blogs, LLC, based in Lowell, Michigan. Currently, she is working on her memoir "Greenwich Meridian" which she intends to turn into a screenplay. Palova started her blog EW Emma's Writings at http://emmaplova.com in support of the publication of her memoir in January, 2013. The blog has grown into a passion and a company that designs blogs for other people under the umbrella of Emma Blogs. Palova is a prolific online publisher open to new ideas and to new horizons. A natural innovator, Palova loves to create progressive brands into the future. Check out her inspirational post "Desert epiphany" and the authors page on About_me and on Facebook. I am looking forward to seeing you around the greater Grand Rapids area and on my blog. I am seeking an agent or a publisher for the memoir that I intend to publish for my mom Ella's 80 birthday on Aug. 23. I celebrated my fourth anniversary on the WordPress publishing platform on Jan. 15th, 2017 with more than 1,000 followers and 500 plus posts. Love always, Emma

Election 2016 unleashes the force of democracy

Election 2016  attracts voters in droves, creates tension

By Emma Palova

EW Emma’s Writings

Grand Rapids, MI – Voting in small towns of America, and everywhere else, matters.

I voted today at 11 a.m. in precinct 1 at the Vergennes Township Hall in Kent County. There were no parking spaces left, and there was a steady stream of voters.

I was voter no. 471 in what the media dub as an “unprecedented & unpredictable” election.

Both candidates Mr. Donald Trump and Mrs. Hillary Clinton stumped heavily in Michigan, which is traditionally a blue state.

Hillary (2)

 

Clinton spoke at a rally of 4,000 people at the Grand Valley State University (GVSU) on Nov.7th.

Trump held his final rally on election eve at DeVos Place in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There was a massive crowd for the event estimated at 10,000. People lined up on the bridge over the Grand River to get into the hall carrying their coolers packed with food.

donald (2)

Political pundits are calling Election 2016, a consequential election.

“This election is between division and strong leadership, the opposition is a loose cannon,” said spokesperson for Clinton’s campaign “Stronger Together.”

Trump called himself an agent of change at the Grand Rapids rally last night.

“Today is our Independence Day,” he said. “My only special interest is to you.”

What some call an insurgent candidacy, Trump made 14 campaign stops in 72 hours.

“Will this be an end to the insurgence by Trump and will Hillary be able to shatter that glass ceiling,” political analysts asked these questions.

I’ve been voting since I became an American citizen through the naturalization process at the Grand Rapids Ford Museum in 1999, along with my daughter Emma Palova Chavent, MD.

But, I’ve never been nervous about it until the eve of the election and today. Actually the anxiety sank in last week, after reading through hundreds of election-related Facebook posts.

I even received texts from my Czech friends asking about the integrity of the election.

“The Czech media favor Hillary,” wrote Ales Kobylik. “They keep this inflated bubble that there is no way that Donald Trump could win. In all respect what do you think?”

And my Czech- Canadian friend D.P. even bought a small TV, so she could follow the candidates’ campaigns and the election in the USA. That’s a big honor of our election system because D.P. does not watch TV.

“I bought that TV because of you,” she laughed.

“Really, you are that interested in our election?” I said uneasily.

“Sure, because Trump might close the borders,” D.P. said.

And now we have it all laid out in front of us after months of campaigning, rhetoric and derogatory language from both sides, the GOP and the Dems.

At one point, as the campaigning progressed throughout the summer and fall, I arrived to a fleeing conclusion that I wasn’t going to vote.

From a moral and character stand point of view, I don’t believe in either one of the candidates, Mrs. Hillary Clinton or Mr. Donald Trump.

They both have proven that they are unfit to lead this country. Mrs. Clinton’s past as the First Lady and as the Secretary, as well as having the private server and the 33,000 erased emails speak for themselves.

As for Mr. Trump, if his present roughness is any indicator of his potential future leadership skills, then the country would get the “perfect” dictator.

“Stalin or Ceausescu?” you ask.

“Take your pick, they were all the same,” I answer. “And they never quit.”

Mr. Trump would first get away with our democracy, waving his hand:

“What a nuisance,” he would say.

Much like the Mexican illegal immigrants, or any other ones for that matter.

Bouncing back to Mrs. Hillary through the eyes of my friend Sheryl G. from Iowa who posted this:

“As you go to the polls this Tuesday, do your due diligence and your homework,” she wrote.” Hillary Clinton is the first and only First Lady to come under criminal investigation while serving as First Lady. Washington and Jefferson must be rolling over in their graves.”

However, to answer Ales’ question about Mr. Trump having a chance.

In spite of the polls and other opinions, both candidates may stand very well the same chance.

But, the real horror is regardless who becomes the 45th president:

“Is this the beginning of an end of an empire?”

“Look back over the past with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.”

                                      -Marcus Aurelius

Copyright (c) 2016. Emma Blogs, LLC.  All rights reserved.

November events inspire memoir

November events fuel Greenwich Meridian © memoir

By Emma Palova

Lowell, MI- The months of November and May, with events both in the family and in the history of the Czech Republic, have inspired entire chapters in my Greenwich Meridian © memoir.

November is significant historically and spiritually worldwide. The thread of events that I track in the memoir starts with All Souls Day on Nov. 2, touches on US elections and leads up to the 27th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution on Nov. 17, a state holiday.

“We’re surrounded by death,” said Fr. Mark Peacock pointing to the shrine of the dead at the altar of St. Patrick’s Church in Parnell during mass last Sunday. “Look at the trees and the nature; but we know all will live again in the spring and in heaven.”

On All Souls Day in former Czechoslovakia, we headed out to the decorated cemeteries to remember all the dead in the family. The cemeteries glowed in the night with only the light from thousands of candles.

Spooky, you might say. But entire families gathered at the graves to reminisce and pray. Before the souls remembrance day we cleaned and polished the monuments at the gravesites.

I loved the yellow spiky asters arranged in wreaths, pots and vases.

At that time in 1989, my grandpa Josef Drabek from Vizovice was already very sick. He was transferred from the hospital in Olomouc to the Hospital of the Merciful Brothers in his hometown Vizovice.

I visited him at the hospital on regular basis. Pale, skinny and weak, grandpa could always recognize me. Stepping inside the hospital room, I already feared the next time.

One Sunday afternoon, I took him in the wheelchair to the hospital garden. The leaves on the trees were still orange and red, and there was water in the fountain and the pond. I could hear coughing and I could smell smoke.

More men congregated by the garden shed. My socialite grandpa didn’t want to join the group. As we passed by them, I could not believe my eyes. Standing or sitting in their hospital striped robes, that were hanging down from what used to be their shoulders and chest, the terminally ill men were smoking.

With shaking hands and fingers, they were holding onto what may be their last cigarette.

“Come and join us,” said one of them with a scratchy voice.

Grandpa turned his head the other way.

“You sold the ranch?” he asked me.

“Grandpa, you know I had to, so I could pay for my education before I leave,” I was crying.

Grandpa’s serious illness consumed me, so I hardly noticed that Nov. 7th has rolled around. Back in the totalitarian era from 1949 until 1989, November was the month of Czechoslovak Soviet Friendship.

It was a month of mandatory celebrations of the “Great October Socialist Revolution the military coup of 11.7. 1917 or 10.25. 1917 according to the old Russian calendar in St. Petersburg.

“Hurry up, Emma, you can’t be late for the parade,” I put a coat on my daughter and handed her the Chinese lantern. “You’ll light it when you get to the Revolutionary Boulevard.”

This time father-in-law Joseph took Emma to the parade, and I just stayed home. It was cold and dark. I was shivering from the upcoming events.

I had nothing to lose. I had my exit visa to the USA, and I had sold everything. No one could hurt me anymore by writing some bad cadre profile about me not being at the Russian Revolution celebrations.

The news magazine before movies was all about the Russian Revolution; that is about the Bolshevik movement with Trotsky and V.I. Lenin and the occupation of the Winter Palace.

My Alma Mater, the Gottwaldov Gymnasium pumped all the Russian & Soviet history into us. It was a total brainwash with weird results.

But behind the scenes, a different revolution was brewing preceded by months of unrest.

 

To be continued…..

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Copyright © 2016 Emma Blogs, LLC. All rights reserved.

Chaos of Generations

It’s getting better and better. I love “Chaos.”

Marie's avatarThe Syllabub Sea

This week’s WP Photo Challenge is Chaos.

chaos

Decades of jumble

Intertwined with memories

Generations pass.

310/366

Marie

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A Haiku on “Chaos”

I love it: a Haiku on organized chaos. Pure magic. Take a bite at this Daily Post assignment “Chaos.” You can’t go wrong with this one.

The film got stuck

I thoroughly enjoyed the Daily Post’s “Chaos” photography assignment and how different bloggers treated it including the original post by Ben Huberman.
I am fascinated by the different things that inspired our posts from wildlife, legos, movies, art to dilapidated shacks and more.
Take a bite at it in any form of creative action. You can’t go wrong with this one.
There continues to be a deep but organized chaos inside me. It’s not an oxymoron.

fatfreddysproject's avatarFreddy's Photo Project

chaos

… resulting in chaos, but I like it anyway.

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Orderly Chaos

Seems like an oxymoron? It isn’t. Just remember Dali, VanGogh or Russian painter Chaim Soutine. And I must mention one of my favorite author’s Nobel Prize winning piece of literature “100 Years of Solitude” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

This photo is in response to the Daily Post
Chaos  prompt “Chaos.”

Dressing up for
“Dress rehearsal” for “Chaos” in me.

I was inspired by Soutine’s chaotic paintings of a wild game catch and his twisted villages.

I threw my three summer dresses haphazardly on the bathroom floor along with the yellow ballerina flats that walked 10 kilometers through Paris to the Musee de l’Orangerie in the Tullerie Gardens near the Place de la Concorde.

Inside the gallery, I was flabbergasted by Soutine’s twisted chaotic paintings. The orderly chaos stayed in me.

1921_soutine_view_of_ceret
Chaim Soutine’s “View of Ceret”

The little girl Ella in the featured photo is confused in the little garden by the house not recognizing any of the plants or berries in the plot.

The left photograph shows the chaos in my EW studio, where I can find everything in its place. Next to the studio is the chaos in the nearby woods with broken tree limbs and trunks rolling in the bed of leaves.

How about the chaos in the upcoming election on Nov. 8th? There are so many different forms of chaos in the world, in nature and in the society.

Take a bite at this “Chaos” assignment. You can’t go wrong with this one. I thoroughly enjoyed how different bloggers treated this encompassing subject.

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Copyright (c) 2016 Emma Blogs, LLC. All rights reserved.

WordCamp US 2016 comes to Northeast

WordCamp comes to Northeast, brings technology evolution

Lowell, MI- Since one of my goals for 2016 was to stay up to date with technology, I would like to go to the WordCamp in Philly from Dec. 2 to Dec. 4.

First of all, the camp is close to home and I’ve never been to Philly or to a WordPress Camp. That in itself is very exciting for me.

I have recently completed a large Podcast Website project for Americas Community Voices Network (ACVN) based in Tampa, FL with founders Ronald & Donald Brookins. It was a very interesting project on the cutting edge of British developers changing under continuous development.

I finished one phase of the project during a recent stay at my daughter Emma’s house in Fixin, FR. The Internet in my studio wasn’t working half of the time, so I had to use my son-in-law Adrien’s studio overlooking the wine village.

 

The view from the window of the vineyards or the “climats” of Burgundy was awesome and inspiring.

Even though, I arrived back at home in Grand Rapids on Sept. 6  with a smashed computer screen, I still feel inspired by the stay in France. Travel has always fueled my writing, design and photography. It doesn’t matter if I go three miles east from my home to take photos in Fallasburg, Lowell or 4,000 miles to Paris, or even to visit my brother Vas Up North in Paris, MI.

Thoughts on fear in the wake of Paris attacks.
Paris from a rooftop restaurant with the view of the Eiffel Tower.

I keep my eyes open for new angles, new stories as everything changes in the flow of time. Whenever I look at the grandfather clock that says “Tempus Fugit,” I get scared. I am afraid of time. The clock was one of the first things I bought here in the USA in 1990.

Now, we don’t even need watches anymore because we have cell phones. Long before cell phones, I never had a watch. I didn’t want one. Not wearing a watch has sharpened my sense of time and dimensions.

I was comfortable using the clocks on church and cathedral towers. While hiking in Burgundy, I used the church steeples to orient myself in the “climats.”

This morning, I discovered the news about WordCamp on Facebook and I got a kick out of the fact that the after party “A Night at the Museum” will be at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

My husband Ludek and I organized “A Night at the Museum” Thanksgiving party at the Lowell Area Historical Museum in 2012. Ludek wanted to alleviate the stress on women during the holiday season.

What a great coincidence.

Last year in November, I participated in the 30 Day Content Challenge by Learn to Blog. On Day #3  I posted the following article:

“Thoughts on fear in the wake of Paris attacks.” And that was the end of my blog on Gateway Media. Some corporate brass didn’t like my thoughts.

While respecting both, my passion and fear of time, I love history. I always have. All the history, I don’t pick and choose. So, Philadelphia is the perfect location for an all time history lover and a technology user.

For more info on WordCamp go to: https://2016.us.wordcamp.org

For “Thoughts on fear” go to: https://emmapalova.com/2015/11/19/30-day-bloggigng-challenge-3/

or go to www.sentinel-standard.com/article/20151120/opinion/151129832

For Americas Community Voices Network go to: http://www.americascommunityvoicesnet.org

For Podcast Websites go to: https://podcastwebsites.com

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Copyright (c) 2016 Emma Blogs, LLC. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

All Saints Day

By Vasily Kandinsky

Reliving it with ghosts

Ghostbusters at Fallasburg

Note: The reason I put this post on my mostly Greenwich Meridian (c) memoir related content blog is because it relates to my past. My husband Ludek Pala and I met at the ZDS school in Stipa, former Czechoslovakia.

Last Saturday, after 41 years, we again sat behind the  desks inside the same school together. This time it was at the one room Fallasburg schoolhouse for a ghost hunting (EVP) Electronic Voice Phenomenon session for the Fallasburg Historical Society.

“You get me to all these weird things that I would have never gone to, if it wasn’t for you,” Ludek  said later.

“You should be grateful then,” I said. “Who else would get you into something like this?”

Speaking about a time machine…hmmmmmmmmm

“Does it exist?”

“This could become our Halloween tradition.”

Pss…photos from the EVP sessions currently not available due to ghosts. Stay tuned for the pics later.

By Emma Palova

EWEmma’s Writings

Fallasburg, MI-

“Put your cell phones in the airplane mode,” advised Edwin Lelieveld, Michigan Paranormal Alliance (MPA) team member.

It was a spooky Saturday night before Halloween at the Fallasburg historical village.

Ken Tamke
FHS President Ken Tamke during shooting footage by WZZM.

The Michigan Paranormal Alliance (MPA), the Fallasburg Historical Society (FHS) and their followers conducted a paranormal investigation inside the Fallasburg museum buildings.

“This has been two years in the making,” said Tina Siciliano Cadwallader, FHS event organizer.

Cadwallader put the first time event together as a fundraiser for the historical society.

The MPA started with an introduction inside the Fallasburg one-room schoolhouse museum. We filed in the old creaking and squeaky desks much like the students did some 150 years ago. The classroom filled up and there was standing room only.

The ghost detecting equipment such as gauss meters, temperature gauges and nitrogen goggles laid on a separate table by the old piano.

Fallasburg Historical Society
Fallasburg School museum

After 41 years, my husband Ludek Pala and I were inside the same school again. This time in the Fallasburg one room schoolhouse for some ghost hunting. Our  teachers  were the  FHS president Ken Tamke and the MPA members.  Our classmates were members of the Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) and other organizations.

And overlooking it all was the principal, that is the ghost of Ferris Miller.

The MPA team set up laser purple dot grids and EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) equipment at each location of the paranormal investigation. That is the Fallasburg one-room schoolhouse, John Wesley Fallass House and David Misner House, all of which sit on the Covered Bridge Road. An MPA team member was at each location to interpret the recordings of the EVP sessions.

We divided into three groups, each led by an FHS docent.

Ludek and I were in the BCBS group with  Tamke as docent. We walked down the Covered Bridge Road lighting our way with flashlights. We briefly paused at the Tower Farm, better known as the Tower House. We could not go inside because of its dilapidated interior.

“Two sisters lived here,” said Tamke. “At the time it was normal.”

According to Tamke  there have been reports of haunting at the Tower House.

Local resident Addie Tower Abel, who went to the one-room schoolhouse, said there has been a lot of activity.

“I know about the Tower House, I lived there. So, did my son, they saw a lot of activities,” Abel wrote on Facebook.

Lie Kotecki of MPA conducted the EVP session inside the 1842 John W. Fallass house. The temperature gauge in the middle of the completely restored living room showed 66.6 F. According to the MPA, the temperature drops when ghosts are present causing cold spots. The ghosts also give out electromagnetic fields.

“Drop the temperature if you are inside the house with us,” challenged Lie.

The temperature dropped slightly to 66.2 F.

“Did you live in this house?” she asked. “We have no bad energy.”

Tamke explained the historical facts at each paranormal investigative location aka museum building.

“The furniture was built from the lumber out of a sawmill at Fallasburg,” he said. “Orwin Douglas built the Tower House and John Waters built the David Misner House.”

Back at the schoolhouse, Rosemary Leleiveld reported various ghost encounters.

“I felt a female spirit here,” she said. “Missy or Melissa…..”

But, Tamke said it could have been the ghost of Fallasburg resident Ferris Miller, who had died within the last five years.

The next EVP session followed at the Misner House. The MPA members usually turn off the lights for the sessions.

“The atmosphere veil becomes thinner,” said Peggy Kotecki, MPA team member. “We use radio frequencies and cameras,” she said.

Jason Kotecki, IT engineer at VanAndel Institute, analyzed the EVP recording at the Misner House and reported about other findings. The MPA team conducted an investigation in Allegan.

“Have you been to the old Allegan county jail?” Jason asked.

“Not yet,” said Ludek  smiling.

“Well, we heard a giggle there,” he said.

Peggy, a nurse at Spectrum, said that sometimes she questions her sanity.

“It’s mostly a boring thing to do,” she said. “We do a lot of recordings and a lot of listening. But, you go for the whole package and you relive it.”

During the EVP session, Peggy asked questions:

“What is your name? Did you live here? Did you have children? Did they go to the schoolhouse down the road?”

The MPA does not solicit business and the paranormal alliance does not charge for their investigations.

“The purpose of the investigation is two-fold,” Rosemary Leleiveld said. “We do ghost hunting and we have ghost hunting equipment at each location. You do a ghost walk and learn more of a history of a location. The architecture draws me in.”

For more info on Fallasburg go to www.fallasburgtoday.org and www.fallasburg.org

For more info on MPA go to: www.m-p-a.org

Copyright (c) 2016 Emma Blogs, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Paranormal investigation at Fallasburg – Paranormal News

Source: Paranormal investigation at Fallasburg – Paranormal News

Source: Paranormal investigation at Fallasburg – Paranormal News