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Oliver!
For what you are about to receiveMay the lord make you truly thankful. from the lyrics of Oliver! from the musical Oliver! Last night, we went to see John Oliver perform standup comedy at the MGM Music Hall at Fenway. We used to watch The Daily Show pretty religiously back when Jon Stewart (cousin Jon, […]
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Ireland
TL;DR — we vacationed in Belfast and Dublin for six days. The day after the tournament was over, we took a lovely express bus to a regional airport, and took a smallish plane, for a shortish time, to travel to Belfast. (When was the last time you got to walk out on the tarmac to […]
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The Ultimate Trip to England
You may be sensing a theme here in my titles. This time, we have followed Clara to Merry Olde England to watch her play in the WFDF World Under-24 Championships in Nottingham. Each (interested) country fields up to three teams — a Women’s (W) team, a Mixed (X) team, and an Open (O) team. The […]
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The Ultimate Road Trip
Well, we finally did it. Susan and I managed to get to watch Clara play in this year’s USA Ultimate Collegiate Championships. Her Northeastern University team, the Valkyries, have played at nationals 3 of the 5 years she’s been there, and of course, there were no nationals (or much of anything else) in 2020 and […]
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Design for Serviceability
About an hour into a brief, twenty-four hour getaway, I received a not quite panicked call from my mom, letting me know that her microwave (a Panasonic NN-SN733W, bought in August 2015) wasn’t working. She uses the microwave all the time, for heating up water to make tea, and even making a good percentage of […]
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Another of My Favorite Things
Maybe this is a series? Growing up, my parents had a 14 speed blender — I think it was a Hamilton Beach. Each of the speeds had a name — things like blend, whip, puree, mix, etc. I think it had 7 buttons for the speeds, and a “High/Low” range switch that selected one of […]
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Objet d’art
Not everyone is likely to agree with my assessment of this particular artifact, but in my opinion it is a paragon of industrial design. Perhaps nobody loved the Bell System at the time, but the gear they made (which they owned, and you rented) was made to last for decades, which this example certainly has. […]
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More on Music… (not moron music)
Early in my life, my exposure to music was almost exclusively classical music and opera. At home, we had a semi-portable stereo phonograph, and a kitchen radio. The record collection was, with the exception of a handful of children’s records, classical and opera. The kitchen radio mostly played news from the local NPR station, but […]
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The Blizzard of ’22
Late on Friday evening, 28 January 2022, it began to snow, and it snowed for about 22 hours straight. By the time I walked the dog around 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, there were a few inches in some spots, but a lot was bare, owing to the winds. The bulk of the snow came during […]
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These Are a Few of my Favorite Things
ok — one of my favorite things. It’s my old Garmin eTrex! A friend’s son is going to be working at Garmin for the summer, and I was reminiscing about my long history with their products. This was my first — the original eTrex. I can still remember going to a MacWorld exhibition back in […]
Mind over Matter: Stuff I cared about at the time