A number of years ago I was driving to work and listening to NPR when I heard a piece about the psychology behind (and stress we create for ourselves by) putting off relatively simple, but perhaps tedious, tasks. The speaker was a professor at a university. He was, by all accounts, perfectly capable of handling…
Hunker Down – I Have a Spreadsheet for That
Every once in a while, life’s various complications (finances, relationships, or how to spend the day, week, month or year) all feel like they could be answered with a calculator and a few decent formulas. First you compound the interest then run a cost-benefit analysis between taking a loan and investing in high-yield dividend stocks,…
Sights and Sounds
When I lived in Memphis and took long walks along the Mississippi, I had a lot of time to think. On a good day, I would get in two walks – one in the morning and one just around sunset. The morning ones were long and contemplative – the best of those being times when…
Sigh
Yesterday, the day after the election, I started to write a long post about the election. I couldn’t get it right. Like many Americans, I was feeling anxious, sad, resigned, and worn out. To some degree, I still am. Record numbers of people have turned out to vote, and the talking heads on TV are…
Indecision
Nobody told my cat about setting the clocks back. He usually likes to wake me up sometime between 4:30 and 5:30, which of course meant 3:30 and 4:30 today (he chose 3:30). I avoided getting up for as long as I could, but after he walked over me about a dozen times and gave me…
Cloudy with a Chance of Clouds
It’s dark right now. We’ll set the clocks back an hour this weekend (I just got sidetracked reading about daylight savings and standard time – fun fact: most of Arizona doesn’t observe it…). As the days have been getting shorter, there have been fewer hours of sunlight. Here in State College, sunlight is a term…
More News at 11….
I begin this post wanting to justify the long silences between blog posts. I feel guilty – partially to those of you who, with some regularity, read what I have to say, but mostly to myself. Life gets busy. That should be an acceptable enough excuse. But for the past year, I’ve been trying to…
Out of Practice, Out of Routine
The last two weeks have been a whirlwind, and I’m not sure where to begin. There were several times this past week I had wanted to write about what it felt like to leave a city and people I had gotten attached to. I had wanted to write about what felt like another premature ending…
Walking Through O’hare
Today is my first real non-road trip COVID travel experience. I’m flying from State College, PA to Memphis, TN with a substantial layover in Chicago. I’m writing this from the Chili’s To Go in Chicago… and various other spots in the airport. I spent the last two days driving from Memphis to State College (with…
A Small Victory Against Time
It’s been a few days since I’ve written anything… I suspect I’ll have more, and possibly longer, breaks. A year ago, I struggled to build a consistent schedule. I was starting a new job, moving from Pennsylvania to Memphis, and just trying to adjust to starting over. I’ve read in a few places that it’s…
And Now For Something Completely Different
I started to write last night but fell asleep with the laptop in bed and the lights on. I really hadn’t written much other than “today was my first day in my new position as the Executive Director at the United Way of Blair County.” I like to begin blog posts with short-ish declarative statements….