People don’t tell jokes anymore. At least, not the people I am around. Perhaps it is a sign of the times. I’ve heard stand-up comics complain that it is difficult to tell jokes in the current atmosphere, as someone is bound to be offended. I’m not sure that’s true. People are offended if the joke…
For those who don’t follow along on Twitter or my Facebook page, I post a link to “retro post” once-a-day, selecting from one of the thousands of posts I’ve written here on the blog over the last 15+ years. Here are the retro posts for this week. My general rule is not to link to anything I’ve written…
It is Christmas and I am taking it easy today, but I didn’t want to leave you all without a post, and I didn’t want to break my streak of (now) 359 consecutive days of posting here on the blog this year. So what follows are two list. The first is a list of the…
I took a walk this afternoon because it is such a beautiful Christmas Eve day. As I write this everyone is scrambling about the house to get ready for mass. Mass starts at 4 pm. The church is 10 minutes away. But we leave the house at 2:45 in order to get street parking (easier…
When I think about my favorite Christmas memories there are three that come to mind. Two are from early childhood and one is more recent. As kids we celebrated most of our Christmases at my grandparents’ house. They lived about an hour’s drive north of us. Their modest 2-bedroom apartment was not large, but as…
I have always wanted to be a writer. Going through a box of old papers, I found stories I wrote for classes in 1st and 2nd grade on that gray newsprint that kids use to learn to write in cursive. In third grade, I remember writing a story for social studies, about 2 friends who…
I have simple criteria for a good vacation: if I lose track of the day of the week, it is a sign of a good vacation. Usually, this begins to happen later in the vacation, but this time, it happened yesterday, a Tuesday. I know now that yesterday was Tuesday but I was completely lost…
With the end of the year just about 10 days away, I thought a roundup of my favorite apps, tools, and gadgets of 2021 was in order. I’ve done these roundups before (see, for example 2013 and 2014) and it can be fun to look back at the old ones and see how the state…
Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. What does it mean to associate a note with time? For me, it is simply a way of capturing where that note fits into a timeline of events. I find this useful for two reasons:…
All my life, problems seem easier to solve at night. When I was a kid and something was bothering me, or there was some change I wanted to make in my life, I’d lay in bed in the middle of the night thinking of ways to solve the problem. It always seemed easier at night.…