Fender Bender on Main Street

My family and I were stopped at a traffic light (facing south) last Saturday evening when the accident took place. First, a tan SUV collided with a blue pickup. A white SUV then slid into the blue truck, while the tan SUV bounced off the blue truck and hit my black truck before coming to a stop. All of the other vehicles were, I think, traveling east and west on Main Street. I say “I think” because the whole incident unfolded in less than five seconds. As I told one of the officers on the scene, we weren’t 100% sure… (read more)

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1581 Reasons

Although I used a Commodore 64 as my primary computer for several years in the 1980s, I didn’t own all that much hardware for it. Two floppy drives, a printer, a modem and a joystick were just about all needed to keep myself entertained for more than half a decade. People occasionally ask me if I ever owned a hard drive for my Commodore 64. I didn’t, but not because I didn’t want one. The most popular hard drive for the Commodore 64 was the Lt. Kernal, which held 10MB and cost $1,000. It would have been nice to store… (read more)

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One Page at a Time

Last week, I read two books: The Sun is Also a Star and The Amityville Horror. The Sun is Also a Star was written in 2016 by Nicola Yoon. It is the story of Natasha and Daniel, two seventeen-year-olds living in New York who meet and fall in love. The Amityville Horror was written in 1977 by Jay Anton. It is the (probably not) true story of George and Kathy Lutz, two thirty-somethings living in New York who move into the world’s most haunted house. I mention them because these are the eighth and ninth books I’ve read so far… (read more)

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A Little Trove of Disks

Many years ago when I began collecting vintage computer hardware, every acquisition got me excited. Each new computer, floppy drive, and box of assorted peripherals that came into the house made me absolutely giddy. But after you’ve tested, cleaned, and aligned your hundredth floppy drive, and installed additional shelving in your garage to hold all those old CRT monitors you might need someday, the elation of “yet another” old piece of hardware begins to wane. What never gets old for me, however, is digging through other people’s software collections. A year or two ago I acquired a(nother) complete Commodore system… (read more)

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Meow Wolf: Redux

“This is new,” says Morgan moments before she opens the GE washer to reveal a portal to another dimension. The inside of the washer is filled with blue, sparkling lights. The tunnel is too small for an adult to enter, but just the right size for a curious child. As I wonder where the tunnel leads, or how it relates to “the event,” Morgan simply says “goodbye” and dives in head first. We don’t see her again for almost an hour. For the second time in two years, we returned to Meow Wolf’s House of Eternal Return in Santa Fe,… (read more)

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The Magic of Writing

The first stage magic show I remember seeing was at Oklahoma’s Frontier City. Although almost every part of the theme park has a western motif, the magic show is just a magic show. I saw the magic show multiple times over the years, each year with a new magician, and the theater was always packed. Kids loved the show because they love magic; adults loved it, I suspect, because it was one of the few places in the park that had seats and air conditioning. Each year, the magician on stage magically linked and unlinked metal rings and made rabbits… (read more)

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Apple II: Back in Business!

Just over six months ago, my Apple IIe blew up. The smoke was impressive; the smell, even more so. As I mentioned in my post from last year, and as you can see in the following picture, I paid $1.98 for this particular Apple IIe computer. The most frequently suggested solution I received was to replace the failed vintage power supply with a modern one, which runs $100. I simply couldn’t justify spending $100 to repair a computer I spent less than $2 on, so I began looking for alternative solutions. Jimmy, a co-worker who reads my blog and listens… (read more)

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Hunted

By and large I’m not a fan of reality television, but every now and then a new show grabs my attention. On Hunted, a new television show this season on CBS, nine pairs of people go on the run from a team of the country’s best hunters. Any pair that is able to avoid being captured for 28 days wins $250,000. Upon hearing the premise, I think most people’s natural reaction is, “I could do that!” I know mine was. Before you buy a month’s worth of protein bars and build yourself a nest in your attic, here are the… (read more)

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Hero

All a father wants, I think, is to be a hero in the eyes of his children. I’ve tried to do this with varying degrees of success, but this week, I think I finally succeeded. We upgraded the kids’ phone plans to unlimited data. I didn’t get my first cell phone until I was twenty-five years old, in the spring of 1999. The reason I got one is because I had recently been hit by a truck on the side of the interstate after our car broke down. Before then I had got by just fine using payphones and land… (read more)

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Saturated

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks diving into several of the “how to write” books, podcasts, and tutorials I’ve picked up and/or bookmarked over the past year. I read Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham, and Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell, and referenced Deborah Chester’s The Fantasy Fiction Formula for a novel I’m working on. I finished Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass, and read a few chapters of Stephen King’s Dance Macabre (I’ve read King’s On Writing multiple times). I started reading Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, and despite its tagline (“the last book on… (read more)

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