Miscellaneous

It was a beautiful spring day in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I had been cooped up in meetings in a hotel the entire day. I was tired. I was bored. I needed to get out of that hotel. I needed some fresh air, so I decided to go for a walk and enjoy the pleasantness of…

I was in a meeting recently with several colleagues, all skillful, talented, and successful in their own right. One of them brought up a professional challenge and my friend Lori replied, “Oh, I’m good at that.”    Just a simple statement of competency. We started to talk about how refreshing it was to hear someone…

It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in May of 2005. I awakened from a nap with a jolt and immediately started arguing with myself. A little voice inside my head was telling me that I needed to go back to school and get a PhD. I immediately told this voice that there was no way…

First light. Such a beautiful time for a walk along the Colorado River. The autumn chill in the air felt delicious after the long, hot summer. I was excited as I pulled on my boots, jacket and knit beanie, then slipped out of the tiny cabin we had rented for the weekend.   Later in…

As a small boy I watched my grandfather shear his sheep. I can still see him grabbing a sheep and setting it down on its hind end with its four legs sticking straight out so he could shear its head, belly, legs, and back. He quickly bundled the wool and threw it up to someone…

One lovely autumn day my little brothers and their friends were having a glorious time in our backyard. We had a huge horse chestnut tree out there and they were raking leaves into piles, then running and jumping into them.    The way I heard the story later, it wasn’t long before they started looking…

Looking through some of my father’s memorabilia, I found a journal he wrote as a young man living in California. I hadn’t known that he ever kept a journal, but in it I found the poem below. It is quite a famous poem written by Walter D. Wintle sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century.…