• The Bandwagon

    I’ve been promising this post for nearly two months. Time to share it, I guess. As promised, here is my accounting of how I would evaluate each major league franchise were the Royals ever contracted/moved away from Kansas City and I was in the market for a new team. There are several factors that would go into selecting a new…

  • A Quickie

    More firsts over the weekend. M. and C. each caught their first fish. Both snagged a blue gill off a dock with a little help from a friend of ours. I didn’t have my camera or phone with me, but I can assure you they were thiiiiiiiiis big! Actually, they were quite small but that didn’t make their joy any…

  • Stuff

    First, yes, another visual change to the blog. If you’ve been checking in during the late evenings over the past week, you may have noticed various changes on each visit. I continued to tweak my initial choice of theme on Squarespace 6. Instead of getting more pleased with my choices, I liked it less and less. So I explored the…

  • Off They Go

    The alarm went off at 6:20. Ten minutes later I was up and rousing the girls. They stumbled downstairs, shoveled some breakfast in, and made their lunch requests. We brushed teeth, put on uniforms, and fixed hair. We loaded backpacks and grabbed bags of school supplies. And then we were off. The 2012-13 school year has begun. The morning went…

  • All Hail Liberated Man

    Finally, a tribute to some real American heroes: the men who stay home with their children. “I sort of take things upon myself,” said Mr. Griffioen, whose family has added a son and moved to Detroit. “I don’t go to the store to buy my kids toys. I make them toys. I do woodworking, leatherworking. I learned all sorts of…

  • London Calling

    Another summer Olympics has come-and-gone. These were good ones, I think, although if you’re a loyal reader of the blog and this was your only connection to the games, you wouldn’t know it. In both 2004 and 2008, I wrote extensively throughout the games. This time around, for a variety of reasons, I didn’t do any immediate posts after important…

  • Seriously, Again?

    A quick note about the new look. No major changes for you, the loyal reader, to worry about. Squarespace, the service I’ve been on since early this year, just released the newest version of their platform. Version 6 brings in a bunch of new technologies, most of which can be lumped under the term ‘responsive web design’. Basically what that…

  • The Cloud’s Fatal Flaw (For Now)

    This is a frightening story. Mat Honan, a technology writer, had his iCloud, Google, Twitter, and Amazon accounts hijacked, and in turn, his iPhone, iPad, and MacBook remotely wiped, destroying years of data he had not backed up. He was lucky, though, in that the hackers were only interested in having some fun rather than running amok with his financial…

  • 67 Hours

    From the time I left my house Friday morning until I returned very late Sunday night, I spent approximately 67 hours in, or traveling to-and-from, Kansas City. The obligatory run down of the weekend’s events. I landed at 7:30 Friday morning. Having been up since 4:45 Eastern, I drove straight to The Roasterie to grab some coffee and enjoy the…

  • First Taste

    I couldn’t wait any longer, so last night I cracked open my first bottle of my first batch of beer. While I found it lacking in a few areas, I am reasonably pleased with how the B. Brewery’s first beer, Naismith Nut Brown Ale, turned out. My first concern, as I mentioned last week, was that I had presented too much…