The Crotchety Old Man

Category: Changing Times

  • Best Pants of All Time

    Next to Philip Potter — the man at the center of the holiday series — Harold Clarkson is the character from my novels readers comment on the most. Harold plays a supporting role in After Christmas Eve and Happy Independence Day. His fans are especially impressed with his fashion sensibility. Because of Harold, readers often ask where I…

  • Guilty Pleasure: Home Renovation Shows

    Until Trading Spaces caught my attention, I didn’t watch home improvement shows. Paige Davis, the host, was absolutely adorable. The show’s stable of designers worked miracles overnight on a limited budget, with notable exceptions, most by designer Hildi Santo-Tomas. While You Were Out was good too, mostly because of hunky Evan Farmer. After Paige and Evan left, I quit watching…

  • Social Network Fatigue

    Once upon a time, the only social networking options were snail-mail, rotary dial telephones, and face-to-face. Travel costs and long distance telephone charges made letters the preferred means for keeping up with out-of-town friends and family. When not in class or hanging out with local friends, I spent hours on the telephone talking with them. Yeah.…

  • Real Time

    Time is my master. I’m a slave to the clock and my calendar. Whether I go to work or get the day off, my schedule is full from the time I get up until I go to bed. The time change twice a year totally rocks my world. Smartphones, computer displays, and cable boxes are arbiters…

  • Life After Fifty

    My mother is the baby of eight, and my father was one of the later arrivals among ten children. Throw in the folks they married and the children the respective couples had together, and I grew up around an awful lot of people with widely varied views about what makes for a good life. All influenced…

  • The Nature of Change

    I’ve kept a personal journal since 1979. Writing in my journal is a hobby of sorts — a place to express myself without worrying my words will offend or hurt someone else. Believe it or not, the entries — while documenting my particular style of crazy — are repetitious, pedestrian, and boring. Writing stuff down helps me figure out what…

  • My Clean House

    Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, points out in an interview I heard on NPR that the housewives and homemakers of the sixties have morphed into today’s stay-at-home moms. The emphasis has changed from keeping house to parenting. Staying home with the kids has become a luxury. Whether…

  • Ten Things I Never Do Anymore

    Change is a fact of life. No, I don’t mean nickels, dimes, and quarters. I’m talking about things being different than they were before, largely as a result of progress. Thinking about changes in my own life, I came up with ten things I don’t do anymore — some thanks to progress, others due to…

  • The Secret Lives of 20th Century Gays

    Thanks so much to pals Julie Lynn Hayes and M.A. Church for organizing The Power of Love blog tour. Click here for links to all the participating blogs. All the authors are giving something away, so you’ll want to visit all of the participating blogs to see what to do for a chance to win free…

  • Fake-umentaries

    I like documentaries, perhaps because learning something makes me feel less guilty about watching television. When I was a kid, my favorite show was Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins, though in retrospect, I may have had a crush on his assistant. I looked forward to a new National Geographic special as much…