There are two empty houses on my street. One neighbor died a few months ago. The second neighbor moved in to her son’s home because she is no longer capable of living alone due to health issues. Both houses have been unoccupied for a while. Over the past few months, I’ve seen family members visit…
(Don’t) Take Me To Church
In her book “We Of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (And Maybe You Should Too)” Kate Cohen writes about atheism, her secular Jewish upbringing, and her decision to gradually reveal her atheism to others. As an atheist myself, who doesn’t proselytize my beliefs nor even often mention them, I found her stories…
Basketball Doesn’t Make You Tall
My online swimming coach has a video on YouTube titled (in click-bait fashion), “What swimming will do to your body”. In the video, he shows pictures of male and female olympic swimmers with fabulous bodies that are muscular, ripped, and toned without an ounce of fat. He then goes on to explain that the average…
I Won
I was listening to a podcast last week about the grind and hustle involved with building a business. The speakers worked hard (and got lucky) and as a result, had made millions from their businesses while attaining a modest level of fame and accolades. They had already attained success and were expanding their businesses. As…
Plausible But Wrong
Even though I’ve been retired for 5 years, I am still interested in technology and business. So it’s probably no surprise that I’ve been following AI. I’ve messed around with various free AI systems – mostly ChatGPT and it’s competitors and found them to be more hype than anything else currently. This week, I tested…
No New Car
I take my car to the dealer for its annual inspection for the past 5 years because the dealer gives me free oil changes for life. In addition to the mandatory annual NC state inspection and oil change, I have them rotate the tires, do alignments and perform other routine Honda maintenance. Each year, I…
Lame-ification
In general, my default practice is to only load essential apps that I use regularly on my phone. I don’t want to provide data about my location, internet habits, app usage or any other private data to app providers and their “trusted partners”. So for me, that means I’ll never install Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and…
Sex, Drugs & Social Media
In recent years there’s been a lot of ranting about the “negative effects of social media on children” from media pundits, politicians, tech journalists, sociologists, authors, teachers and anyone else with (ironically) a social media account. Something all of these opiners have in common is that they are old. Like old people of every generation,…
The Right Crowd
In a post last week, I wrote about the wrong crowd. This week, I was thinking about the people who make up my community of loose connections. These are people who I interact with on a regular basis – some everyday, some weekly and some monthly. These people are all admirable. They are kind, conscientious…
Monastic Appeal
In Michael Easter’s book, “The Scarcity Brain” he writes about the Our Lady Of Guadalupe Monastery in New Mexico and spending several days with the monks who live and work there. These monks live according to the Rule of St. Benedict, which proscribes a life focused on work and prayer for this isolated, self-sustaining monastery….