Fast Food Goes Fast

Usually when I come home with juicy gossip, Lynn listens without interruption, then informs me she heard that days ago and forgot to mention it to me. I don’t know how she expects to get anywhere with an air of indifference like that. But she always knows ahead of me because she generally spends a […]

Wild Kingdom

If you’re an American of a certain age — say, about mine — chances are good you remember sitting with your family in front of the television watching Marlin Perkins host Wild Kingdom. “Reality TV” was decades away, so this was I guess documentary as Mr. Perkins paraded an endless supply of exotic animals in […]

Could I Have This Dance?

It was the most graceless proposal anyone could imagine. When my friend Loren planned to propose, he took his girlfriend to the place where they first kissed. Kara’s husband-to-be arranged everything ahead of time with one of the Fourth-of-July balloonists. But when I asked Lynn to marry me, she was stretched out in her recliner […]

Update

I am at home, where Oz and I have been banished. He did have a close encounter, perhaps of the second kind, and so did Lynn, as all her co-workers pointed out to her. I tried; I left Oz outside and was only in long enough to leave my backpack, but that one little bag […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]