The worst part of a vacation is returning home. The worst part about where we live is that there are no good routes home. Having recently spent seven days on a road trip, driving blue highways and visiting more rural areas, coming back to a major metropolitan area like ours is a drag. There are…
Not long ago, I came across Ryan Holiday’s notecard system for remembering, organizing, and using everything he reads. It was instantly appealing to me, the way that reading about John Gadd’s journals changed the way I did my own journals back in 2017. You can read about Ryan’s methods at length, but the gist of…
There is an old joke that I usually find amusing: If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what is an empty desk a sign of? I tend to prefer less clutter, but my default appears to be mild clutter. At times, however, things get out of hand and my desk becomes…
Yesterday, I made a plea for something to read. I’d been floundering and unable to figure out what I wanted to read next. Readers came to my rescue with a number of recommendations. Ultimately, I went with Drew’s suggestion of The British Are Coming by Rick Atkinson. I read Atkinson’s books on World War II…
There is a meme I have seen floating around the flotsam and jetsam of the Internet that goes like this: For an American on vacation, I did pretty good. I didn’t check my email or Teams messages for the entire 10 days of my vacation. Of course, I was not “away camping for the summer,”…
I am in the midst of a reading drought. Nothing I try seems to stick. I just finished reading Stephen King’s Billy Summers (more to say about that in a future post) and over the last several days have started and stalled on half a dozen books, including: The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant,…
A big part of our recent road trip vacation took us through central New York. Over a period of two days, we drove from Albany, where we visited friends, to Niagara Falls. On the way, we stopped in several places, the first of which was Cooperstown, New York, home of the National Baseball Hall of…
Packing for our recent road trip vacation, I grabbed a blank Field Notes notebook and tossed it into my backpack. I had only halfway filled my current Field Notes notebook, but I tend to jot down a lot more random stuff on the road than when I am at home and I don’t want to…