We’ve Got Mail

Here is the first piece of mail received at our new address. It’s not the first piece to be addressed to us there: the county, which is an amorphous conglomeration of people and departments of somewhat underwhelming efficiency, sent two sewer bills to us at Riverwalk, but they don’t seem to have ever been delivered […]

Travels With TL: My Way or the Trollway

The first time I flew to Wisconsin, to meet Lynn, I started in the middle of the state and went north, and everything was flat and dotted with evergreens. For every subsequent trip, to visit Lynn’s family, we flew into Madison, in southern Wisconsin, where the topography is far more varied than I expected. As […]

The Reluctant Traveler

Today, on what should be our National Day of Travel, I am going to reveal another of my closely-held, SpongeBob-type secrets: Secretly, I’m not much of a traveler. It’s true. This is one of several things, like cooking and cheese, that everyone is supposed to embrace, and I just don’t. I have done some traveling, […]

Please Stand By

I have been a blogger now for 13 whole days, so I figured this would be a good time to provide an experiential update. Once upon a time I had a website. In fact, that’s how I met Lynn, and that can be a story for another day. But my friend and then co-worker Fred […]

The Concrete Status of Cement

Look at what I found on the internet, compliments of the Concrete Contractors Association of Greater Chicago: “Although the terms cement and concrete often are used interchangeably, cement is actually an ingredient of concrete. Concrete is basically a mixture of aggregates and paste. The aggregates are sand and gravel or crushed stone; the paste is […]

Those Were the Days

I handed this picture to a college student last week. We were at an annual dinner hosted by Western State — sorry, Western Colorado University — to bring scholarship recipients and donors together. One of those scholarships is in my dad’s name, and it goes to a history major. So I gave a copy of […]

Power to the People

If you had asked me even yesterday if I thought our house-building project was on track to get concrete today, I would have replied with an emphatic NO. And then last night this arrived in my inbox from our contractor Dusty: “Electric conduit is installed and inspected and back filled. Footers are done and inspected. […]

Y? Because We Like You

My friend Linda has an abiding love. I imagine many of us do, but maybe we don’t wear it on our sleeves as obviously. I mean, people know I like SpongeBob (close friends know I like Patrick best), but that’s a relationship that only extends back to 1999, and while I own Many Things SpongeBob, […]

Welcome to the Jungle

Somewhere early in our relationship, I gave Lynn a little Norfolk pine. I don’t recall it, although I think Lynn does; she’s not here to recount it for me. She has already gone to work, four hours before I’ll go. Anyway, if it’s an exciting story I’ll tell you about it later, but suffice it […]

Gone Fishin’

Yesterday was kind of a disappointing day. Lynn goes past the lot twice a day on her way to work in the metropolis of Almont (which turns out to be more thriving than I would have imagined, at least at the Post Office), and then she and Oz usually take their evening constitutional around Riverwalk. […]