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…
We drove over 700 miles yesterday, from Jacksonville Beach, Florida back home in Virginia. We left around 8 am and arrived home just before 7 pm. It was a bit jarring going from three weeks in the warm Florida air to return to temperatures in the 20s and 30s and snow on the ground. You…
I managed to pre-schedule three weeks worth of posts covering our entire vacation–except this one. I am writing this on Friday evening, after spending a full day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and the driving nearly 3 hours north to Jacksonville Beach where we are spending the night. Tomorrow (or today, as you read this) we…
On our last day in southwestern Florida before heading across Alligator Alley for the east coast, Kelly decided to take the kids for a boat ride in the lake here. I’ve been coming down to Florida with Kelly since 2007 and we’ve never taken a boat ride in the lake, but it was on her…
In addition to teaching me (almost) everything I know about science, Isaac Asimov taught me that essay collections are poison at the box office. He then went on to become the exception that proved the rule by publishing scores of essays collections. Prior to reading Asimov’s essays, my general perception of the form was that…
Until recently, I had only vague notions of who Gore Vidal was. Mostly, I thought of him as an actor because of his appearance as Professor Pitkannan in the 1994 film With Honors. A while back, I picked up the audio book version of Gore Vidal’s massive United States: Essays 1952-1992. At the time, I…
Unintentionally, I have found myself building a collection of printed t-shirts, one or two of which I wear almost daily these days. I’d like to say this is due in part to the pandemic, and the fact that I work from home. The truth is, I worked mostly from home before the pandemic, and was…
Recently we began occasionally lighting candles in the house. Over the year, we’ve accumulated candles, mostly as gifts I think, and they’ve sat dormant for years. It started with a scented candle at the dinner table one evening. I can’t even recall what the reason was for lighting the candle in the first place, but…