Last week I wrote while riding the Amtrak train home from Milwaukee, today it’s from row 15 on a Southwest Airlines flight, headed home from a wet but fun-packed weekend in Alexandria, Virginia. The flight to DC was a little trying—the turbulence was constant, and bad enough that the flight attendants couldn’t bring passengers the […]

Greetings from Milwaukee, where Beth, Whitney, and I have just boarded Amtrak’s Hiawatha, which will begin rolling toward Chicago any minute now. We had a good visit with our son Gus at his group home in Wisconsin in a town called Watertown. The home is operated by Bethesda Lutheran Services, and it houses eight  people, […]

After a rugged spring—or the absence of a spring, more accurately—we’ve had a wonderfully mild summer here by Lake Michigan. Until a couple days ago, anyway, when the steam bath arrived. But it’ll be gone in a day or two, and not long after, summer will be gone, too. How does this happen? Wasn’t it […]

 I have mostly sworn off TV news. Every once in awhile I’ll watch a local newscast but am always disappointed that there’s very little local reporting about stuff that matters. The producers never miss a chance to run some freakish footage—violence, animal antics, etc.—from San Diego, Florida, wherever. And national cable news is a […]

I was treated to a whole bunch of this. Our trip to Mendocino, California, occupied us so fully and so well that I’m only just now writing this post today (Monday) on a 737 flying home. Only last Wednesday we were on a 737 to San Francisco. On our flight out, a young man with long blonde […]