Tag: Personal Stories
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Life Adventures: Personal or Political? (with pictures!)
Mary and I have had a delightful season of campervanning this year, with me writing as we travel and her learning to play the violin (see pictures!). We’ve made trips to see family in Pennsylvania and Utah, a 40th anniversary excursion to explore geology and attend the WorldCon in WA, and now we are on…
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40th Anniversary Adventures in the Campervan!
Mary and I are off on another adventure, this one for our 40th anniversary together! Our primary objective is to explore the Channeled Scablands, a spectacular geology feature of Washington State formed when a glacial ice dam broke in Montana and spilled a million billion gallons of water across the landscape of Washington toward the…
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Wishing for Something to Give Away
There is always some impetus that drives or beckons a person to do what they do. For some people, that might be hunger, literal or metaphorical. For others it might be attention, or influence, or power. For some, perhaps wealth or comfort of living. Me? I have always hoped to give something away that others…
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Time in Minnesota
Isn’t time interesting? We don’t really know what time is or where it comes from, but, as we grow older, we start to feel its irreversibility. What’s more, we humans love to write and read stories that play with time, perhaps more commonly than any other science-fictiony idea. Mary and I encountered time on our…
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Finding Truth in a Post-Truth, Fake-News World—Part 3, the case of the uneatable sandwich
As promised in my last post, I am going to tell another true story, one that considers how narrative can sometime bias observation, and how we have to apply reason even when we think we have observations! Again, I first published this story as a Tweet Storm back in 2021. Narrative is a big part…
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Finding Truth in a Post-Truth, Fake-News World—Part 2, the case of the invisible monster
As promised in my previous post, I’m going to tell a story about the trickiness of observation and how my 5-year old daughter saw through a clever but deceptive narrative that I told to exercise her powers of reason! I first published this on X (then Twitter) as my very first Tweet Storm—a series of…
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Hills of Tennessee
Despite our misadventures last year with the rear door of our van, we are on our way again this year to visit my son Fenner and his wife Janna in Florida over Christmas! We are very excited, leaving home at temperature below zero and moving toward lows in the fifties and even sixties! As we…
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Campervan Road Adventures!
Adventure means more than hiking past rocky outcrops, visiting old haunts, and seeing family! Adventure means stumbling into challenging circumstances! We were in Florida to help our son move into his new apartment in Orlando for his new job with Lockheed-Martin when the lock failed on the rear doors of our van! We could not…
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Campervan Adventures in Old Haunts!
When my wife and I were “courting” way back in graduate school days in Tennessee, we took a trip to Fall Creek Falls on the Cumberland Plateau and hiked through the woods through a steady rain, boasting to each other about which of us had the better raincoat (learning how to share life challenges together!)…