As I wrapped up my work yesterday, I looked around my home office and flashed back to my home office 30 years earlier. My “office” back then was a desk in a small one-bedroom Studio City apartment, with a single 3-shelf bookcase. Today, my office is a room off the living room, a former sun…
Seventeen years ago, I experience my first cicada spring. The loud insects emerged from their 17 year hibernation and were everywhere. I’d never seen squirrels so fat as I did that summer of 2004. Some talented friends of mine, collectively known as Revolver Films, made short films and entered those films into local film contests.…
One of the nice things about having this blog for the last 16 years is that when I reflect on things from, say, ten years ago, I can link to what I wrote about those events. As it happens, the Little Miss turned ten years old today. Hard to believe it has been ten years…
This week was so busy that I completely missed that July 27 was my 100th day caffeine free. I gave up caffeine back on April 18, 2021. This isn’t the first time I’ve given it up (I gave it up for 7 years from 2003-2010), but I think it is the furthest I’ve gotten since.…
We are having a quiet Memorial Day weekend this year. The weather turned sour Friday. after having temperatures in the upper 80s and low 90s, they plummeted into the upper 40s and low 50s. Rain followed, and made for a damp and dreary Saturday. The rain has stayed away for much of today, but the…
I am taking the day off from the blog today. We had guests this weekend and it was so much fun to hang out with people again. Now that they have headed home, and things are quiet, I’m just going to sit here, reading my book, and enjoy the afterglow of a really fun weekend.…
We are in peak cicada season here in northern Virginia. Wandering outside, there is a sound in the background that sounds like the distant warbling of a car alarm. It is, in fact, the cicada’s song. I captured a video outside the house this morning where you can hear it behind the sound of the…
A few nights ago, trying to figure out what to read next, I landed on some audio recordings of Harlan Ellison stories. These were all stories I’d read before, but they came with these off-the-cuff (so it seemed) commentaries by Ellison. They were great, and for an hour or so, while I lay in the…
Over the weekend we rolled out a software system that my and my team have been working on for 14 months. Today, it is running, and being used (successfully, so far) and I am just basking in the good feelings I have about the whole process and the system we’ve put together. For the first…
Two weeks ago, I lamented how I missed ordering the 2021 Field Notes work station calendar, until it was too late, and they were all gone. Over on Facebook, my friend Kevin pointed out that a Canadian stationary store, Noteworthy, had them in stock. I ordered one immediately (I was sure I’d be too late),…
It was cold here today, the temperature down into the 20s when I woke up this morning. So I built up a fire in the fireplace, and planned to spend my day sitting in close proximity to the fire, reading, and not doing much else. To that end, I was mostly successful. I finished reading…
In an effort to watch movies I’ve never seen, and to avoid making decisions, I wrote myself a little script the other day called movienite I grabbed a list of 600+ movies under the TCM Channel on HBO Max. I randomized1 the list and created 2 text files: movienite.txt and watched.txt. I wrote a little…