Sainthood via ferry commuting?

We’ve all heard the phrase “the patience of a saint.” Today I came one step closer to sainthood! I commute ~18 miles by ferry to Seattle daily, about 2 hours round-trip on the water. This is a mostly stellar commute — I can’t complain about wi-fi, wine, the views or the occasional pod of Orcas [...]

What do you do for a living?

Remember Free to Be You and Me by Marlo Thomas And Friends, which opens with children in groovy 70′s garb (Coke bottle glasses!) riding carousel horses that jump off, galloping beyond the park into a wide-open cartoon landscape? My parents had the record (as well as multiple Bill Gaither Trio albums, which we won’t talk about). Under duress, I could probably recite [...]

Experimentation and experience points.

If you’ve ever played games like The Sims or World of Warcraft (or, if you want to go old school, Dungeons & Dragons), you understand the concept of experience points. I previously mentioned it supposedly takes 10,000 hours to master any given skill. What can be misleading is that in The Sims* you can rack up [...]

Great expectations

“I’m not going to tell the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember it.” (Great Expectations, the movie.) I have a fondness for the 1998 film version of Great Expectations, starring Ethan Hawke, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert DeNiro and the awesome Anne Bancroft. It could be the gorgeous sets, particularly the eccentric [...]

Patience, grasshopper.

My brother and I used to ‘walk the rice paper’ when we were young. According to Kung Fu, once you could walk the rice paper without tearing it then you would be a ninja rock star. Or something like that. We would carefully lay down 15 feet of of typing paper sheets and gingerly walk across [...]

Battle!

Today, this week, My lifetime has been an exercise in choosing battles, with mixed results. Yesterday was full of choices, as always. My day started with an unpleasant email from a co-worker who was irrationally angry at something beyond my control. One of those emails that starts with “Not to beat a dead horse but….(let’s commence with the [...]

The lovely, incomparable Dr. B.

Summer quarter 2011, I was fortunate enough to have had as my professor the glorious Barbara Mossberg, poet-in-residence in Pacific Grove, CA, president emeritus something-or-other at Goddard College, and general charismatic, creative, flamboyant, lover of nature, life and people and all-around inspiration. In a short 10 weeks, she exposed me to a ridiculous amount of [...]