2026 August Archive - Thought Wheel

🎙️ Remarkable World Commentary Episode #107: Interview with Ann Chiappetta, Author, Poet and President of Friends in Art | By Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA | Courtesy of the PWD Media Co-op
https://donnajodhan.com/rwc-08-24-2026/
In this moving episode of Remarkable World Commentary, Donna J. Jodhan, LLB, ACSP, MBA speaks with author, poet and Friends in Art president Ann Chiappetta about a life rebuilt three times over. Ann describes being diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in 1993 at 28, while expecting her first child, losing her job, her acrylic furniture design career, and for a while her sense of herself, and the “angels” who pulled her back: her ophthalmologist, her rehab counselor, and eventually writing itself, which she calls a catharsis for everything she could not say about going blind. She talks about the ten years she spent delivering the Building Bridges disability awareness program to children in kindergarten through second grade, and the payoff of overhearing a child in a supermarket teach their own parent not to touch a guide dog.
The second half turns to work and craft. Ann recounts her nine years as a readjustment counselor with combat veterans at the White Plains Vet Center, where not being able to see her clients made them disclose sooner, and where a federal system’s inaccessible tools kept her permanently catching up, and the three-year fight simply to sit her licensing exam with accommodations, a fight she won and an exam she then failed twice before deciding she had given it enough. Donna, mid-fight with CompTIA and Pearson over her own cybersecurity certification, tells her plainly: “I totally understand what you’re telling me.” They close on independent publishing, the screen-reader barriers that nearly killed Ann’s first book Upwelling, how she writes by ear with text-to-speech, and her advice to anyone adjusting to sight loss, don’t give up, fight the good fight, and ask for help, including mental health help.

Tomato Day

Today was tomato day. What do I mean by that? Well, we’re putting up our own tomatoes for the winter time now that we can do it. We’ve wanted to do it for over 20 years, but we lived in an apartment and never had access to either the space, time or to the vegetables themselves.

It’s wonderful to live here and have a farm share nearby. We ordered a case of plum tomatoes and they didn’t disappoint. It weighed over 25 pounds. I got an extra huge stock pot a few years ago and I use it to put up the tomatoes. I spend the morning dicing them and cutting out some stems and blemishes and then I diced them up even more and put them in the pot and set them to simmering. JERRY has his part two. He’s the muscle of course. But he also does the hand blending in our stick blender in the pot and he does a really good job getting everything nice and smooth.

What do I actually put in the pot with the tomatoes? It’s good you ask. I use some fresh herbs, some dried herbs, usually basil, oregano, and thyme. I also use sea salt, a lot of garlic, both granulated and fresh and tomato paste. I try to use as little as salt as possible, but it just doesn’t taste the same without some salt. I also put in some black pepper and maybe later on I’ll add a little bit more salt or pepper depending on how it goes.

The pot sits there for hours and hours and hours and just simmers. Six hours is the minimum. Hopefully by tomorrow morning, it’ll be cooled down enough for me to start putting it away and getting it into the freezer. I use those quart sized Chinese soup containers that Chinese food restaurants put their wonton soup in. I get them on Amazon. I get them 10 at a time and they seem to do well and they don’t seem to mind being frozen. I found that many of the storage bags that said they can tolerate deep freezing usually can’t they become brittle and then they break on the ends like in the corners. It compromises the taste of the tomatoes.

What else do I do in the garden ? What does our garden have this year?

Jerry and our handy guy, John, loaded a bunch of high quality topsoil into our garden beds. Last year the soil we purchased was poor quality and our poor outcome was due to this cheaper soil. The garden meds are doing great. We have four different kinds of peppers: Italian dessert peppers, banana, bell, and sweet Jalapeno. We grew four different kinds of tomatoes: beefsteak, San Marzano, cherry and an indeterminate twice the size of cherry tomatoes. We have potatoes, carrots, patty pan squash, and bush beans. This year we’re trying strawberries, blueberries, and a three-year currant bush. It means the bush won’t be viable for at least two seasons.

We’re also trying watermelon but we’re not too sure how they’re gonna do because I don’t know if we have the right atmosphere for them. The birds also peck at them.

As for my herbs we are currently growing lemon balm, catnip, chives, basil, oregano, dill, Italian, parsley, rosemary, and thyme, hoping to expand the lovage we planted but it seems difficult to start. lovage seems to be a slow and sluggish type of herb though it’s wonderfully celery like and it’s really great in salads and soups. It’s very tasty so that’s it for What’s in our freezer? The freezer now has frozen beans, frozen corn, frozen, diced peppers and tomatoes plus it’s gonna have the tomato sauce and hopefully we’ll get to the farm butcher at some point and have some grass fed beef, chicken and pork in there as well.