I feel for people who have ongoing family drama, trauma from which they have a hard time recovering, or just general toxicity in blood relationships. When I was growing up, I thought I might be destined for some of that. My parents went through multiple marriages before finding t … | Continue reading
One of my favorite husband duties is serving as the crew for my wife's ultrarunning adventures. An ultramarathon is any footrace longer than the conventional marathon distance of 26.2 miles. For all practical purposes, the shortest ultras are usually 50Ks, and the upper distance … | Continue reading
The prison where I worked in my twenties was classified as medium custody. The inmates incarcerated there were all felons, but they either had sentences under ten years or had spent enough time in maximum or close custody without disciplinary infractions to earn a promotion to a … | Continue reading
Back in the days before cable and satellite television, before the Internet and before VHS and DVD players, programming for children was sparse. Kids don't have jobs and disposable income and advertising to them wasn't a winning bet most of the time so most of what broadcast TV p … | Continue reading
Like any sane person in the modern age, I try my best to curate an online experience that doesn't stress me out, bore me or waste my time. Thankfully most of the web sites where I spend my precious leisure time have all the tools I need to do that, not that I am that picky. On Ma … | Continue reading
Although I made my bones as an activist campaigning against the war in Iraq and I actively discourage young people from enlisting if they have other choices (and they always do), I am not a true pacifist. I count myself as a supporter of the people who end up in the military. I f … | Continue reading
One of the ways that I'm fortunate is that I enjoy simple pleasures the most. I have no need for elaborate, constant, and expensive variety to be satisfied. It's not that I don't enjoy an occasional adventure—I do. It's just that I am very happy to have a nice time in my own home … | Continue reading
If you and I are even on a road trip together and things get quiet in the car and you ask me what I'm thinking about and I answer "Nothing," let me tell you right now, that will be a lie. I am always thinking about something. As long as I have been cognizant, I have had a busy mi … | Continue reading
When a doctor has a lousy cold and therefore the sniffles, a cough, and watery eyes, people find great humor in trotting out the old saw "Physician, heal thyself." I don't know who said it first, but he was kind of a jerk, don't you think? People find it hilarious to think of the … | Continue reading
I've never been a big fan of the pressure to "Know your why." I'm not into buzzwords and pop psychology and I definitely don't like being put on the spot. I'm still at a loss to articulate why I've done some of the most difficult and incomprehensible things in my life other than … | Continue reading
I found serving in the peace time army of the 1980s to consist of periods of intense boredom followed by hard and stressful work, rinse and repeat, The best duty I ever had was at Ft. Hood (now Ft. Cavazos) in Texas. For a period of five months, I was assigned to headquarters com … | Continue reading
I moved to my hometown, Fayetteville, NC, in November of 1979 when I was in the ninth grade, then the final year of junior high school. I've lived here or close to here with a couple of short exceptions ever since. At the same time there have been tremendous changes in some areas … | Continue reading
According to Apple, my laptop weighs only 2.7 lbs., but it is mighty. My favorite place to use it is while sitting on my couch in the living room of the house where I have lived since 1996. I like it best when Wonder Woman is also on the couch with the iPad that is her weapon of … | Continue reading
I'm looking forward to the annual release of new operating systems for my Apple gear in a couple of days. I don't have extra computers and phones lying around like some folks do, so I avoid installing beta editions of the software on my devices, content to following along in the … | Continue reading
I am a bit conflicted when it comes to the subject of work and having a work ethic. On one hand, I live in the least unionized state in America and retired from a career as a state employee where we were forbidden by law from engaging in collective bargaining, a law that was crea … | Continue reading
September is Suicide Prevention Month, and the IndyWeb Carnival theme is "Power Underneath Despair." We are asked to share stories about times in our lives when we managed to come back from low points. This is contribution. As someone who has dealt with chronic depression since t … | Continue reading
When I bought my first computer in 1993, they cost about 50% more for an entry-level machine than they cost now without adjusting for inflation. It was a lot of money. At the time, I was working two jobs through a temp agency, unloading trucks for Burger King during the day and w … | Continue reading
As a kid, I was sensitive and unhappy about several things, mainly my name. My full name on my birth certificate is Louis Kimbal Plummer. The Louis is from a high school classmate of my parents, ostensibly my Godfather, although I'm not really sure what that even means. He and my … | Continue reading
My oldest daughter is a certified registered nurse anesthetist, a former NICU nurse, a business owner helping people with medication resistant depression, the mother of two and has been happily married for 18 years. She is a success by every definition of the word. She figured ou … | Continue reading
If you use clickbait headlines like the one I used for this blog post, you might get a lot of Internet points. You might also get a lot of mockery and derision and not much respect. Where ever I go on the social web, I have to ask myself what my purpose is. There are ways of mani … | Continue reading
One of the joys of watching athletes at work is the relative ease with which they play their sport. Mankind got together at one point, and we collectively agreed that a certain set of skills was valuable: running fast, throwing and catching balls, knocking other people down, skat … | Continue reading
Few things will make time pass as fast as it does when I am trying to solve an intractable computer problem. Without going too deep in the weeds, tonight I found out that my version of Hombrew, a program manager of sorts on Macs was an unupdated relic that I'd imported when I bou … | Continue reading
My wife and I knew within a week of seeing each other that we would eventually get married. I had an adjustment to make though. In all my previous relationships, I'd been the biggest breadwinner in the family. This time that wouldn't be the case. I was a public-school employee, a … | Continue reading
I am genetically blessed with a good memory. I was born with it and I've done absolutely nothing special to cultivate it, other than to stuff it full of facts that I can pull out during games of Trivial Pursuit or at random times to surprise Wonder Woman. My mother saved a book s … | Continue reading
Technology is so powerful and ubiquitous in the modern world that I often get the (false) feeling that we, as in mankind, are in control of everything, bending the world to our will and controlling our environment. Of course, all it takes is a bit of severe weather to disabuse me … | Continue reading
I am deeply and hopelessly in love and there's not much I can do about it. Luckily, the object of my affection is my wife of eleven years. Whenever we are separated, regardless for how long, I unconsciously begin a countdown in my mind until I see her again, even it it's just fro … | Continue reading
Since I started blogging in January, I've invested time in several different communities, starting with OMG.LOL, followed by Microblog, Scribbles, r/MacApps, r/Obsidian, BearBlog, 500.social and the Blaugust Discord. The most personal of these are the Mastodon community around OM … | Continue reading
When we got to my son's house yesterday, he explained to me that one of his dogs wasn't feeling well. Osa, a 13-year-old lab/pit mix had a swollen stomach and was moving around very gingerly. Her condition had not changed by this morning and he elected to take he to the emergency … | Continue reading
I spent the day traveling and then tooling around a city much hipper than my own, and in the process had the occasion to observe and form judgments on a number of people, all favorable. I didn't come upon a single disagreeable human all day. I tend to overlook that type as much a … | Continue reading
My mother-in-law recently turned 80. We had a birthday party for her with all her kids, lots of her grandkids and great-grandkids and even family who flew in from out of state. Like my own Mom, she is a regular reader of this blog and sometimes comments. Today she read a recent p … | Continue reading
In a couple of days Wonder Woman will be dropping me off at the airport so I can fly to Austin for a four-day visit with my son who has now lived there longer than he did in his co-called hometown. No one likes to fly, so I won't belly ache too much about how much that part will … | Continue reading
I enjoy a good ball game or race or just about any athletic event really, as long as I am not surrounded by crazy people or subjected to people who are way too serious about it. I'm at a place in my life where I have watched all the commercials that I am ever going to watch, so s … | Continue reading
Photo by Wonder Woman People in the first world take having fun very seriously. We sure spend enough money on it. Some kinds of fun are pricing themselves out of the middle-class range. Tickets and all that goes with them (parking, food, souvenirs) to major league sports and top- … | Continue reading
If I have one favorite thing in the whole world to think about, it's me. Left to my own devices, I am definitely my own favorite thing to contemplate. I'm constantly evaluating whether I feel good enough and if not, what I can do to rectify that situation. Do I need a snack? Mayb … | Continue reading
I spend a lot of time thinking about blogging; about my own blog and those of the people I read regularly and the ones I discover as I explore. Every once in a while I discover a real gem where someone's efforts are all at once entertaining, thought provoking, inspiring and origi … | Continue reading
I've written before about how I've had a gratitude practice for a long time, nothing too elaborate, just three bullet points in my journal each night. I'm often grateful for some of life's little comforts over and over again, things like a good meal I didn't have to cook or an es … | Continue reading
I have two brothers and a sister. The older of my brothers, Todd was born in 1966. My sister, Mitzi came along in 1968 and our youngest brother, Matt, was born to my Dad and his second wife in 1974 and grew up apart from us in southern (or lower) Alabama. The rest of us grew up i … | Continue reading
My definition of pride is caring about what other people think of me and for the most part I don't. That's a bold statement and I don't mean for it to be. I definitely care about how people treat me and that's often tied into their opinion so I'm not being an absolutist. Some thi … | Continue reading
I remember when I went to my first progressive political gathering at age 35. It was a conference of some sort, but the exact purpose of the event is lost in memory. There were different sessions that we could go to on environmental justice, voting rights, political economy and s … | Continue reading
Today was the first day of classes at the university where I work in IT support. That means campus was full of people who needed help in a variety of ways. The second anyone ventured outside of their office, they's be accosted by an innocent freshman or newly hired professor who … | Continue reading
I'm going to tell a 19-year-old story with a current day tie in. I want to speak to political purity tests and the folks who don't like Donald Trump but have issues with Harris-Walz. For not condemning the Democratic ticket, I've been called a Zionist (as a slur) online by someon … | Continue reading
I do as much as I can to escape advertising. I only watch streaming television, and whatever the ad-free version of a service costs, that's what I am paying. The majority of my web surfing is done on the Indy Web, where ads are rare, and in any event, I run about four kinds of ad … | Continue reading
I'm committed to blogging. It's something I do every day. i don't wait for a good mood. I don't wait for inspiration. I just sit down and make it happen. That might not sound joyful, but it truly is. Each night i go to bed with the satisfaction of completing an important daily go … | Continue reading
My grandson on the first day of kindergarten This is the time of year where every other social media post is of kids going back to school, whether it's the first day of kindergarten like our youngest grandson or the first day of college like one of our older ones. This brings bac … | Continue reading
For the past 100 days I have been posting s series of street portraits I took over a one-year period a while back. In every case, I managed to talk to my subject, sometimes for quite a long time. I got their names at a minimum and then whatever else came up in an organic conversa … | Continue reading
I found out a couple of days ago that one of the people I communicate with regularly on Mastodon, a fellow by the name of Jim Mitchell (@jimmitchell@mastodon.social) was the creator of an app I used to use back in the day called YASU, Yet Another System Utility. I was fairly surp … | Continue reading
My habit is to blog daily about something technical, something not technical, a link to a topic to share and a picture of the day. This means that my idea wheels start spinning when I get up in the morning. Sometimes they spin all day without gaining much traction and I have to r … | Continue reading
I got a late night text from my son this weekend. He told me he'd really like to get together soon and asked if I'd consider a trip to Austin, TX where he lives. When Wonder Woman woke up the next morning, I told her my thoughts on dates and it turns out she can't make the trip w … | Continue reading