I could tell Luke, our then-four-year-old neighbor, was trying to work out something by the intent, scrunched-up look on his face. He and his sister, nine-year-old Delilah, loved to come to our new house in Bend because it had three…
We recently visited relatives Grace and Mason, who live an adventurous life in Big Sky, Montana with their dogs Pippi and Birdie. Pippi is a high energy, small size dog. When Grace and Mason stayed with us in Bend during a…
We were in Ossiach, Austria, getting ready to leave for another day of hiking the Alpe Adria Trail. We were staying at the CMA Carinthian Music Academy, housed in an ancient monastery. I forget the particulars, if there was some confusion as…
One of the phrases I grew weary of hearing during the early days of the pandemic was “Out of an abundance of caution…”. I understand that when exercising judgement, it’s appropriate to consider all the information available, the source and…
A friend (two different friends, actually) forwarded an article from the September issue of the Atlantic titled “How America got Mean.” The author, David Brooks says he’s been obsessed with two questions for the last 8 years: Why have Americans become so…
I read an article long ago, which I have not been successful in locating again since, that (as I remember it at least) described a few reasons why when we run into people we know, it’s not as statistically improbable…
We have ‘small world’ experiences all the time, to a degree that seems statistically improbable to our friends, especially for a couple of introverts. Even for us, one weekend in Portland a few years ago was a very concentrated slug of…
[Guest post by John Potter] Photos courtesy of Damsel in Distress. All the reputable wilderness checklists include having a contingency plan, and wilderness training generally includes how to use one (e.g., make one, share it with the group, etc.). Everyone…
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, also known as Bacon’s Law, is a parlor game that became popular in the 1990s when, in an interview with a magazine, then-prolific actor Kevin Bacon mentioned that he had “worked with everybody in Hollywood or…
Our middle son Derek was born severely disabled in 1987. Seventeen years ago, he died on Mother’s Day in 2007, right before what would have been his 20th birthday. With the recent Mother’s Day, I paused to reflect on the lessons I gained…
