He Knew He Was Right

I knew that a sizable earthquake hit Colorado this morning, and that it was considered unusual. I never, though, got around to reading about it or finding it on TV or online. In fact, I mostly forgot about it by this afternoon. So, there I was, plugging away with work at my computer desk. I didn't remember starting it, but at some point early this afternoon I leaned back for a really good stretch. Really, really good. I felt a little shaking, and thought it was just me until realizing that things around me were rattling. I straightened up from my stretch, and the same items continued to rattle. As I didn't hear a helicopter, or the usual home-rattling suspects, I suspected a small earthquake. Remembering that this iPad features a pretty nice earthquake app (QuakeWatch), I ran over to it to see if the app registered anything, or might have info on the Colorado quake. --   Magnitude: 5.8 Location: Virginia Time: Tue, Aug 23, 2011 1:51:04 PM EDT GMT: Tue, Aug 23, 2011 17:5...

When one of my friends stopped by my place a few months ago, he looked at my CD rack and said something like, "Dude, what is this, the 90s?" He didn't take notice of any of the collection, let alone the beautiful construction of the rack. No, just that a CD collection is considered outdated. That rack is a woodworking project I did with my Dad, constructed from oak, ending with a nice 10-shelf housing, with each shelf holding 100 disks. There's also room for cassettes, as a bunch survived each move I've made. I had peaked at about 250 back in the late 80s, when I made the switch to CD. The ones I had left were double stacked on the bottom shelf, out of view, and perhaps saved me the ignominy of a "Dude, what is this, the 80s" retort. I liked cassettes. You could purchase them by the album, or record your own songs on to them. They were great for the car. They didn't scratch easily like CDs, and could be changed while driving without ever taking you...

A couple of my blog posts have been extracted and recrafted (chopped down) for posting here from a much larger travel log I started compiling about six years. The moose tales from last year come to mind first. When a friend mentioned that she was going to Prince Edward Island last week, I felt compelled to tell her of my misadventure when traveling there in 1997. So, here is another extraction from that log that I thought worth sharing... ...[From Newfoundland] the ferry ride back to Nova Scotia was without incident. Prince Edward Island was my next destination. Prior to the spring of 1997, the only way to get to PEI in a car was via one of two north–south running ferries—one on the east side of the island that connected with Nova Scotia, and one on the west side that connected with New Brunswick. A bridge, however, had been recently constructed, and was replacing the west-side ferry, much to the chagrin of the ferrymen who were losing their jobs, and some residents of the...