It’s that time of the year when my working life eats me alive for a couple weeks and occupies the limited space in my head, which means I’m left with not-so-deep thoughts: Here in Chicago I’m happy that we might have a real race for mayor now that Rahm Emanuel has announced he will not […]

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 […]