Gather ’round, children, and let me tell you about the days of old. If you’re in your mid-20s or younger, you probably don’t remember life before the internet. Those of us in our thirties, forties and beyond remember the world of catalogs. Other than the Thanksgiving Day parade, nothing else marked the beginning of the holiday season more than the arrival of 500 bound pages featuring photos of every toy you could imagine. Sears, Montgomery Ward, J.C. Penny, and other large department stores couldn’t wait to get their thick catalogs into the hands of children, who would flip through the… (read more)

When I was a kid, I absolutely loved joke books. I loved reading jokes and telling them to my friends, although I usually forgot them almost as quickly as I read them. Morgan likes reading and telling jokes too, and although she normally gets them from websites and phone apps, when I ran across this book of jokes I just had to pick it up for her. First of all, it’s the “ultimate” joke book. If you’re only going to own one, it might as well be the ultimate one, right? Also on the cover, the book guarantees laughs for… (read more)

At the beginning of each graduate course I’ve taken over the past three semesters, students are expected to introduce themselves to their fellow classmates. The format varies slightly, but key bits of information always include giving your name, what your undergraduate degree was in, and where you earned it. This seems like it would be simple information to provide, but I get tripped up every single time. Let’s just say I didn’t take the express train to get where I am today. I first attended college at Redlands Community College. I started in the fall of 1991 (right after graduating… (read more)

Tuesday night after class, a few of my classmates and I left campus and walked to a nearby bar. The bar has half-a-dozen flat-screen televisions mounted over the bar, making it well-suited for watching sporting events. Normally the televisions display multiple football, baseball, and basketball games, but last night they were all tuned in to the 2016 presidential election. In a booth not far from the bar, six of us gathered to watch the results of the election. It would be more poetic to say I was drinking because I had some inkling as to how the election would turn… (read more)

Halloween tip-toed in through the front door and left out the back without saying goodbye. The Halloween decorations (stored in plastic tubs up in the attic throughout the year) made it as far as the garage floor this year, where they remain. Both kids (with Susan’s help) made rather than bought their costumes this year. Morgan dressed up as the Joker as he appeared in The Dark Night. She and Susan put together a costume, and Morgan did her own makeup. Mason dressed up as a cockroach. He found the costume online for $85; Susan sewed a reasonable replica for… (read more)

Last week I bought some new stickers for my laptop. Thirty seconds after I finished applying them I spilled a large glass of lemonade down into my keyboard. I dried the keyboard off with a towel and things seemed fine for a while,but when I turned on my laptop later that evening, 1/4 of the keys were stuck in capital mode and 1/4 were completely stuck. But, hey — I’m a tech guy! How hard can it be to pop off the keyboard and clean it? Turns out, pretty hard. The instructions started with removing a dozen screws, then the… (read more)

The reason most interviews “work” is because, in most cases, both sides need (or at least want) them to work. Usually the person doing the interview has an article to publish and a deadline to meet, and the person being interviewed typically has something to say. An interview is like a dance, and when both partners are of equal skill, the dance may be graceful. Things don’t always work out that way. Sometimes, one partner may be a better dancer than the other. In some cases it is up to the person performing the interview to coax answers out of… (read more)