One of my favorite hobbies (which I have previously discussed) is “digital archaeology.” I love finding, digitizing, archiving and sharing audio and video from the past that may not have mage the transition from analog to digital. I get great personal enjoyment from digging through old cassettes, video tapes, and even computer disks in hopes of finding something that got left behind, something that never made it to the internet and putting it there. To be fair, 95% of what I find already exists in some form. Most of the movies and television shows I find on old tapes have… (read more)

Having spent several years in high school and college working in the food industry, I can tell you first hand that fast food is never better than the moment it is prepared. Once it is baked, cooked, or assembled, fast food does nothing but get worse. I have eaten Long John Silver’s hushpuppies seconds after scooping them from a vat of boiling grease and taken bites of Grandy’s fried chicken so hot the dripping grease burned my chin, and I am telling you… there’s nothing like it. The fresher, the better. Based on the five years I spent working at… (read more)

Sometime in early December I began having severe back pain. It started in my lower back, worked its way up into my middle back, and finally settled near my kidney. The general consensus was that I might be about to pass a kidney stone, but I didn’t have any of the other traditional symptoms. A couple of handfuls of Advil a day made the pain bearable. And then, right before Christmas, the mostly dull and throbbing but occasionally stabbing pain morphed into intense back spasms. They mostly happen in the morning, when transiting from laying to sitting, and again from… (read more)

“Isn’t that how the Crocodile Hunter died?” That’s the first question I asked when Susan informed me we would be swimming with stingrays while on vacation in the Cayman Islands. Turns out it’s everyone’s first question, so let me address it right up front. Over the past 80 years, 20 people have been killed by stingrays. To put that number in perspective, in 2021 1,554 people died from falling off furniture. You are nearly 80 times more likely to die from falling off your couch than being killed by a stingray. They’re pretty safe. Our cruise ship was too large… (read more)

Jasper Mall is a 2020 documentary about a dying mall in Jasper, Alabama. The film follows Mike, the mall’s general manager, lone security guard, only custodian, and for much of the film, Jasper Mall’s sole employee. As visitors to the mall dwindle and the anchor stores are long gone, we watch vendor after vendor contemplate retirement or relocating their businesses. Through a series of vignettes we watch retired men who meet at the same courtyard table every day to play dominos, a man who sells knives and plays his electric guitar to fill the time between customers, and a young… (read more)

After nine days away, Susan and I have returned home from vacation. We spent five days cruising on the Carnival Paradise, and four days driving to and from Tampa. This time our cruise ports were the Cayman Islands and Cozumel. We’ve been to Cozumel multiple times, but this was was our first time to the Grand Cayman Island. In Cozumel we returned to our favorite resort (Mr. Sancho’s) and on Grand Cayman Island we went on an excursion that involved interacting with stingrays. I’ll be writing more about both of those excursions later this week. The Carnival Princess is the… (read more)

In the early 2000s I got my first GPS device. To be clear it was not one of those small, cute GPS units that attached to the windshield with a suction cup. It was a device that connected to a laptop with a serial cable (this was pre-USB). The maps were stored on a CD-ROM. I balanced my laptop on my truck’s center console and used a power inverter to power the whole mess. And while it worked, I knew at the time that it was a bit of a Frankenstein solution. I had the same feeling when I took… (read more)

Before I can talk about these shoes and how important they were to me, I have to first talk about shirts. Around the time I graduated high school I discovered “cool” t-shirts. In college I purchased an Edward Scissorhands shirt and a yellow shirt with a black zig-zagging line that resembled Charlie Brown’s. One of my favorites was a white shirt with a can of Spam on the front. (This was a couple of years before the term would become associated with email; I just liked Spam!) Within a few years, that fun went away. I outgrew XL t-shirts, and… (read more)

2023 was a year of change, a year of success, and a year of fun. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights! In 2023 our family unit saw a couple of big changes. In January, after many months of no updates, Susan’s medical retirement from the FAA was abruptly approved. After more than 25 years of federal service, she was given 24 hours to remove her belongings and wrap up the dozens of projects she was overseeing. Once the shock wore off, Susan began pouring her newfound free time into lipedema awareness and her new shoe company, LegsLikeMine.… (read more)

For the past eight years I have been tracking every movie, documentary, and television show I’ve watched. I didn’t do as good of a job in 2023 of writing everything down as I have in past years, so I’ll need to be more mindful of doing that next year. The two categories of movies that rarely get captured are films I end up watching on television while flipping channels, and films I only partially watch. This list is more about movies I sat down to intentionally watch and not things I happened to catch, especially in regards to television shows.… (read more)