A Skunk By Any Other Name

The one time, since he came to live with us, that Oz ran into a skunk, he did so with all the panache one might expect of a dog: full-bore, nose-first right under the skunk’s tail. He did this while out in the darkness of early morning with Lynn. This is what you need to […]

A Little Instruction

Sometimes it pays to read. Actually, I think most of the time it pays to do this, whether you’re reading for pleasure or the betterment of your mind. (I’m sure reading this blog pays off handsomely for all of you.) One place where I find it often pays to read, although I am in the […]

The Grass is Greener

Above: the front yard is looking pretty green, except for the completely barren berm (and Lynn’s unplanted garden in the foreground). The east side of the house , except for the swath near the house where the sprinkler doesn’t go, also looks promising, but the large expanse in back and along the west looks like […]

Some Parts are Better Than Others

You know — this may be a bit profound — as we go through life we get older. And as we get older, the factory warranty appears to expire on some of our parts. Sometimes we worry about this; sometimes our doctors worry about it for us. I went to my annual check-up a […]

Walking the Riverwalk

Riverwalk Estates, where Lynn and I now live, was a failed development, as I used to mention often but haven’t brought it up in oh, say five minutes. Two local couples, with day jobs in fields different than turning agrarian fields into real estate, conceived and started this “luxury” development surrounded by public pathways and […]

Other People’s Money

I had an employee once who was a member of the ever-evolving booster club at the high school. At that time, the volunteers had a system: after events, one of them took the locked cash box home, while another took the key. My employee thought it was a good system, and allowed as how if […]

The Beast Within

We have a giant beast in our garage. Actually, we have several, one of them an extremely noisy commercial freezer, but most of them have lived in our garage for a long time and are thus familiar. This is a new beast, stealthy and possibly seductive but so far not unfriendly. At the design end, […]

Little League Parents, Big League Trouble

It turns out, after I detailed several of the injuries I witnessed at the middle school football games on Thursday, that I missed a second possible concussion. I missed it because the kid went off the field under his own power, but his coach told Mary (the athletic director) that he was wobbling “like a […]

First-World Problem

I don’t usually run into Hugo Ferchau nearly as much as it sounds like when reading this blog. I can go months without seeing him, but for whatever reason I have been running into him a lot these days. Like the other day, and he wanted to know how it was going. “I ate too […]

Footing the Bill

Maybe you noticed: no Beans yesterday. I was trying very hard — and still failing — to get to work on time, only to turn around and come home for a large chunk of the day (house stuff and Skype lunch), followed by 45 minutes at work, followed by football. There definitely won’t be Beans […]