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Tax-time thoughts, 2019 edition
It looks like we didn’t get crushed by taxes this year, even if we did owe money to the IRS. That’s nice, since we skipped the one step we were supposed to take to avoid an April 15 financial hit. I...
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Six weeks in a row of travel
When I unlocked the front door on our darkened porch Thursday night–and, as if by magic, the power came back on–six consecutive weeks of travel went into the books. It all seemed like a reasonable idea...
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Ballparks I’ve visited: 17 and counting
Spending Monday through Friday in New York to attend a couple of conferences brought a couple of benefits a little afield of work: catching up with old friends and crossing another ballpark off my...
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What to expect from me on Twitter
A few years ago, the sci-fi author John Scalzi decided to write an explanation of how he uses Twitter, then pinned a tweet linking to that post to his profile so anybody thinking of following him could...
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Three years in thrall to Duolingo
Hace tres años, comencé a aprender español con la aplicación Duolingo. Pero todavía no soy bilingüe. Lo siento! The fact that I had to double-check the prior sentences with Google Translate should say...
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Three decades of D.C., or how I learned to stop worrying and love the District
This Wednesday, classes began again at Georgetown University–which was my reminder that 30 years prior, I arrived in D.C. for my own new-student-orientation exercise. And somehow, I never got around to...
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Flying on September 11
NEW ORLEANS–I marked Sept. 11 this year by getting on a plane. That wasn’t my first such observance. This year’s flight brought me here for the Online News Association’s conference. In prior years,...
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A World Series title comes home to Washington
World Series celebrations were things for other cities. That’s what I knew for a fact during the long twilight years when the city I chose didn’t have a baseball team. The next 14 years–first salted...
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Is it even Thanksgiving if you don’t travel?
For the first time more than three decades, I didn’t have to travel anywhere for Thanksgiving–my brother and his family and my mom came to our house this year. So what did I do with all the time I...
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It’s not the most wonderful week of the year
It’s after 7 p.m. on the Saturday before Christmas, and I wrapped up my workweek and checked off the last major Christmas chores barely an hour ago. Unfortunately, this is not a departure from my...
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This weak excuse for a winter
All this month, Facebook has been reminding me of the epic blizzards that hit D.C. a decade ago–as if I needed more reasons to feel cranky about Facebook. Where February of 2010 saw D.C. get whomped...
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Home sick instead of homesick
Me at this time last week, after realizing the extent of the gap opened in my schedule by MWC’s cancelation: Oh, great, I can finally take a day off to visit a museum or a gallery! Life: LOL, nope....
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Work-from-home advice from a work-from-home regular
My occupational routine of working from home is suddenly in fashion for the dreadful reason of a global pandemic. Employers ranging from Google to the federal government to the Washington Post have...
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Housework when nobody leaves the house: The dishes are never done
We’re now wrapping up two weeks of staying at home together as a family. It feels more like a month, and I mostly blame the dishwasher for that. I’m no stranger to housework after almost nine years of...
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Plaguebeard status
It’s now been four weeks since I last shaved, which means I’ve completed the dubious facial-hair accomplishment of having to wash my beard after meals. And here I thought I’d adopted the...
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Return to flight
For the first time in almost nine years, Americans began a journey to space from Florida instead of Kazakhstan. SpaceX’s successful launch Saturday afternoon of NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug...
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Protests, vicariously
Donald Trump’s administration began with American cities packed with protesters, and today–150 days before Election Day–their streets are again overflowing with people exercising their First Amendment...
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The wrong kind of endless summer
Today is Aug. 22, and I need to look at the lock screen of my phone more than usual to confirm that fact. Months after the novel-coronavirus pandemic’s swift demolition of my business-travel schedule,...
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Same t-shirt, different day
Wednesday was like Sunday for one unlikely reason: I wore the same t-shirt both days without a wash day in between. The same situation applies to today, except I don’t remember which day I had put...
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I, cat herder
Sunday will mark our fourth month in the cat-American demographic. Adopting a cat is only one of the many unanticipated consequences of pandemic life, but no other has left the same dent in my...
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