• D’s Notes

    I’ve been doing some blog maintenance lately, going back and adding tags to all of my nearly 3500 posts. After two weeks of work, I’m about two-thirds of the way complete. I’m not really sure why I decided to do this. Tags are hard. I tried to use them years ago and gave up because I was never sure how…

  • Protecting Your Mailbox

    A very busy week around here, so not sure if I’ll get any more proper posts up until after the holiday weekend. I did run across this article this morning and it’s how I’ve been spending the last 30 minutes or so. If you’re sick of your mailbox being filled up with credit card offers, insurance spiels, and other unsolicited…

  • Wednesday Quickie

    It’s been a busy week. Our spring break begins on Friday and there is much to be done to prepare. Lots of errands, laundry, organizing, taking kids to appointments, prepping the house, etc. Much of my free time has also been taken up by trying to finish a show I’ve been watching that will disappear from Hulu next week. It…

  • Freak of the Week

    It’s been awhile since I’ve had a run-in with a local freak, for lack of a better term. You know them: the random, semi-crazy appearing/acting people who engage you in conversation without an invitation. My favorite such encounter was sometime in the mid–90s at a Dillons in Lawrence, KS with one of that city’s most notable weirdos. I was attempting…

  • Weekend Notes

    Moving a little slow this Monday morning. We had several of S’s high school friends and their families over yesterday and the gathering ran rather late for a Sunday. Then I woke up at about 1:15 with one of those terrible, mid-summer “The AC is running but I’m still too hot to sleep” things that kept me restless for the…

  • Summer of Freedom

    I realized yesterday that this has been, and should continue to be, a pretty boring summer. Sure, we’ve had a few gatherings to take advantage of the pool and the new pool house. We’re trying to schedule a few more but as kids get older, it gets harder and harder to pin a group of families down to a single…

  • Hoaxes and the Search for “Truth”

    Remember the 2002 film Catch Me If You Can? Leonardo DiCaprio starred as Frank W. Abagnale Jr., a man who fooled people into thinking he was an airline pilot, among other things, to live a jet-setting, check-forging, stewardess-banging life. The movie was wonderful, as I recall. It had just the right breezy tone to fit the times it was set…

  • Fun With Travel

    This was a delightful read. Since it happened in 1977, seems legit. If you could even try to pull it off today – and seems like there’s too much technology to make it possible – I don’t think anyone would believe you. Also, 17 beers a day does not seem ideal. The bizarre tale of the world’s last lost tourist,…

  • More Zen

    I’ve spent a lot of time messing with this little tool, which shows you how any shape you draw would float if it were an iceberg. Iceberger Go head, fuck around with it for a bit. It’s fun to discover shapes that flip over to find their most buoyant position.

  • Eleven Minutes of Zen

    Normally when I see videos like the one I share below, I’ll watch a few minutes and then move on to something else. But I was absolutely mesmerized by this video of a boat traveling the waterways that connect Rotterdam to Amsterdam and watched the whole thing. Multiple times. I have a medical procedure coming up that I’ve already attempted…