• Retro Posts, Week of 12/26/2021

    01 Jan 2022 » 1 min read about retro-posts

    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…

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  • My Best Reads of 2021

    01 Jan 2022 » 7 min read about lists, Reading & Books

    Now that 2022 has arrived, I can safely post my Best Reads of 2021. I get annoyed by the early birds who post their “best reads” list beginning in November. They may be trying to drum up sales for the holiday season, but they leave out potentially great books that come out in December. For…

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  • Goal Met: 365 Consecutive Days of Blog Posts in 2021

    31 Dec 2021 » 1 min read about Blog & Site Meta

    Well, I did it! Back on January 1, I set a goal of trying to post every day in 2021, after letting things slack off for several years prior. With this morning’s post, I have met that goal. Including this post, I wrote 454 blog posts totaling 293,000 words. Given that there are 365 days…

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  • I’ll Take Ham on 5 and Hold the Mail

    31 Dec 2021 » 3 min read

    I was a naive kid and believed a lot of what I saw and heard. For instance, at a young age I was introduced to the Post Office Creed: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers.” I was certain that our mail would never fail to be delivered. I’d…

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  • Walking In the Spiderwebs

    30 Dec 2021 » 2 min read

    Yesterday (as I write this), I managed to ruin the homes of at least a dozen spiders on my morning walk. Over the course of two miles, I encountered what seemed to be an endless array of these webs. This has never happened before on this particular walk, and while I feel somewhat guilty about…

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  • The Forgettable iPhone

    30 Dec 2021 » 3 min read

    Project manager that I am, I had a long and detailed checklist of things I had to do to prepare for our holiday vacation. Looking at the Reminders app, I see that I had 10 sections broken into 67 tasks. The last items were checked off as I sat in the car preparing to drive…

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  • My Favorite Voices of 2021

    29 Dec 2021 » 3 min read

    Every year I find writers whose voices stand out among the many things I read online. This year, some of these voices are familiar, and some of them are new, but the following list contains five writers whose work I have really enjoyed throughout the year. Joanna Castle Miller Joanna was a member of my…

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  • Practically Paperless with Obsidian, Episode 12: What Goes Paperless?

    28 Dec 2021 » 5 min read

    Welcome to my blog series, “Practically Paperless with Obsidian.” For an overview of this series, please see Episode 0: Series Overview. One of the biggest challenges of going practically paperless is deciding what goes paperless. It is easy to know what stays on paper. I’ve tried journaling in Obsidian, for instance, and I just prefer paper.…

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  • R.I.P. Edward O. Wilson

    27 Dec 2021 » 1 min read

    At breakfast this morning I learned that E. O. Wilson had died. He was 92 years old. I was a fan of Wilson’s writing and in the last several years, read 4 of his books, including Letters to a Young Scientist, which I thought was fantastic, his memoir, Naturalist, a recent collection Tales from the…

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  • On the Road with Stoker and Ebert

    27 Dec 2021 » 5 min read

    A little over a week ago we hit the road for our holiday vacation. All of the preparations were done. At 7 am, as planning, I pulled the car out of our driveway for the 560 mile drive to our hotel on the I-95 corridor in Savannah, Georgia. We have been doing these holiday road…

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