Category: Technology and Me

  • A New Look…?

    I’m guessing you noticed the new look to my website. I finally bit the bullet and swapped my custom design for a free template. Everything is really mess up. To be honest, I write this post wondering if it will appear on my home page. None of the previous posts do. Longtime visitors may recall…

  • Blogging

    Keeping my blog going is #2 on my list of retirement activities. Why keep blogging? Good question. My best answer is more excuse than justification. I enjoy writing. Blogging feels more constructive than journaling and is a lot easier than knocking out another novel. This blog and my reasons for keeping it have often changed.…

  • Sprinting for the Finish Line

    It’s official. After more than thirty years in academia, I’m retiring at the end of the year. The paperwork was signed, sealed, and delivered earlier this month. Now I’m sprinting for the finish line. The original plan was to keep working for at least three more years. I agreed a while back to teach two…

  • Technical Issues

    Technology surpassed my understanding years ago. I’ve been spoiled. At work, a tech support staff sets things up and fixes any problems. At home, Andy did the same thing. Since he died two years ago, I’ve been on my own for tech support — and it ain’t pretty. A box in my living room has…

  • Weird Accumulations

    I am a selective hoarder. Throughout my house are boxes, drawers, and other containers chocked full of things I’ll never use but can’t bring myself to throw away. To find out if my odd collections are universal or unique, I’m sharing them here. Beverage Containers. No event is complete without keepsake plastic cups, water bottles,…

  • My Family Tree

    Several years ago I joined Ancestry.com, and for months clicked on leaves like they were going out of style. My mistake was accepting as gospel every tidbit of information I found. The resulting family tree dates back a thousand years, but is too riddled with errors, duplicates, and other problems to be believed. I learned…

  • Back to Class

    A teaching degree wasn’t an option for me in college. The major was available, but a mountain of credit card debt prevented me from taking off work for student teaching. No big deal. There were plenty of attractive majors in the sea. Ten years later, I graduated with a B.S. in Family Studies. How I…

  • The End of Wisdom

    Change is constant, but the rate of change has reached the point where keeping up has become impossible. Once upon a time, things stayed more or less the same over the course of a lifetime. With age came experience, leading eventually, after many years, to wisdom about the ways of the world. Not anymore. The…

  • Online Shopping: Easy, Convenient & Cheap

    The internet has changed the way we shop. Big retailers are closing stores at an unprecedented rate. Shopping malls look like ghost towns. It’s hard to compete with virtual everything. Shopping is not my cup of tea. In fact, thanks to poor or non-existent service, long checkout lines, and people getting in my damn way,…

  • Surprising Results

    A paper-based system is my go-to method for record-keeping. The transition to digital files and folders has been slow. My system works. If it ain’t broke…. The complicated, time consuming, and essentially useless paper-based system I created for tracking royalties is broken. Excel would be better, but I’m spreadsheet challenged. Minions handle such things for me…