I had a random flashback just now to an unpleasant memory. From late 1995 to May of 1998, I worked for a franchised computer software training firm in the Triangle region of North Carolina (Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill). We offered the kind of instructor-led classroom instruction that you sent your office staff to in order to learn how to… Read More »
Parenthetically, I’m on a caffeine fast. I started on Sunday and am most of the way through a week and am doing pretty well. This will be the second time I’ve tried weaning myself completely off caffeine. The last time I tried was a decade or more ago when I tried going cold turkey at the beginning of… Read More »
After all these years, I have an explanation for why I absolutely can’t stand listening to someone eat an apple. It’s misophonia — and apparently the loathing of hearing someone eat an apple is one of the most common expressions of the syndrome. Not all crunching sounds drive me up a wall. There’s just something about the crunch… Read More »
I enjoy travel. I mean, I’d pretty much have to, or it wouldn’t make much sense for me to work as a trainer who travels all over the USA two thirds (if not more) of each year, right? But even though I take pleasure in memories of places I’ve been, I spend as least as much time fantasizing… Read More »
Carole and I tied the knot on a sultry North Carolina afternoon just shy of 22 years ago — September 13, 1997. That date was picked because: it was the night of a full moon and we thought that was romantic in some strange way it was a week before my 30th birthday and I was semi-determined to… Read More »
Today I got a call from “Google” letting me know that my Google Business account might not be Verified. Gasp! Carole had mentioned having gotten quite a few answering machine messages from someone at Google about our “Google Business” account. I had no idea what Google wanted, but supposed it might be an annual re-verification that our phone… Read More »
I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains just outside Blacksburg, Virginia, the son of a Virginia Tech physics professor and a librarian. Our house was outside town on a 23-acre hilly piece of land that had started out as pasture and that we’d allowed to grow up into woods. We didn’t really have neighbors in the traditional… Read More »
Athens, Georgia in the 1980s was known for being a hotbed of alternative music. The B-52s hailed from Athens. REM was from Athens. A host of other, lesser-known but well respected bands came from Athens. You could go to your choice of clubs around town, the best-known being the 40 Watt, and hear up and coming bands (and… Read More »
[spacer height=”20px”]Our local independent weekly newspaper has a column called “WTF” that attempts to answer questions about local weirdness (e.g. “what the heck is that weird building down on the southern end of Dorset Street?”). This week’s WTF question was “WTF: Why Are Some People Called for Jury Duty While Others Never Are?” I’m 51 and have never… Read More »
[spacer height=”20px”]I’m like many of my peers in having a “wide net” that sweeps in all manner of trivia, facts, obscure details, and what-have-you and stores it away against a time when said knowledge will randomly come in handy. If you’re reading this and you know me, you probably have a pretty wide net as well. The people I… Read More »