Category: Life

On the other hand, Standard Insurance Company has misplaced several thousand dollars of mine, dollars which are supposed to be in my 401(k) account. Thousands of dollars. Missing since early November, actually. Their response? “There’s nothing we can do for you right now. We’ll call you back sometime next week.” (This was last Friday. Can [...]

2. I traveled from here (Portland, Oregon) as far east as Estonia and Lithuania without leaving the ground. Unless you count water as leaving the ground. This is a side effect of my rapacious fear of flying, something that might make my 5-things list if it weren’t so well-known already. Specifically, I took an Amtrak [...]

There’s this thing circulating on the Internets where you’re supposed to blog about 5 things about yourself that others just might not know. Then you’re supposed to peg 5 of your friends to do the same. My friend Cameron nabbed me. So I’m going to do my best. However, as I started writing my #1 [...]

From my new house, I can, and do, walk to work now. Normally this is a calming 14-minute walk. This morning I felt like I was on some fated, miserable sub-arctic expedition. The wind is blowing, the rain plopping down, the temperature hovering meanly a few degrees above freezing. I made the mistake of wearing [...]

Don’t break now, right when I’m trying to get into the groove again, silly Nike+ iPod thingy which I like so much! Right now, when I visit nikeplus.com from the link in my iTunes, the page says: This page contains the following errors:error on line 3 at column 6: XML declaration allowed only at the [...]

Dubai’s Future ‘iPad’ I first started noticing after looking at the photos in this month’s National Geographic article* about the city, or emirate, technically. A decade ago it was a relatively bleak and beige grid of low buildings, now it has a giant hotel that looks like a sail, entire archipelagoes of man-made islands (think [...]

To honor the late president Gerald Ford, our nation has shut down post offices. This is a nice nod and all, but it’s been three days since I got any mail (no mail Sunday because it was Sunday, no mail yesterday because it was New Year’s) and I’m absolutely itching for some new Netflix movies.

My good friend Matt Gray is a teacher in Kettering, England. He put this rather wacky bit together for a school assembly. He’s the guy in the red shirt (well, for most of the film).

This week’s day-to-day wine for me is one from Great Wine Buys’ mixed case, a dense, peppery and slightly wild number from Minervois, an AOC in France’s Languedoc region (southern France). This wine is 60% carignan, a racy, gamy grape of the country wines of southern France and parts of Spain, which is often maligned [...]

Since we lost Pointy this summer (sad) we’ve been thinking about adopting another kitty to keep Simon occupied. Simon is a special cat. He’s both doglike and catlike, with the energy of a 2-year-old child. For 10 days after we moved into our new house, we never saw him sleep. He follows us from room [...]