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What’s going on in my life
I don’t know how long outdoor grills are supposed to last, but we’ve retired one charcoal kettle grill and one gas grill since moving into this house in 1998, and are some years into our second set. The charcoal grill, a Weber, is holding up well, but the gas grill, also a Weber, is giving up the […]
I guess I’m going to have to learn about the cloud. I know, in general, about cloud computing, which is related to the cloud but not exactly the same thing. With cloud computing, instead of paying for and installing software on your own PC you can access similar software online, often for free, and prepare documents and spreadsheets […]
Ugh, relatives in the heartland. Again. I unfriend out & out racists when they reveal themselves on Facebook, unless they’re kin (I did unfriend a nephew, but it was over animal cruelty). In the wake of Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson and the protests that followed, some of my relatives have started sharing white supremacist chain letters and […]
That’s our old squadron-mate Crumer, whose memorial service Donna and I recently attended in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Crumer, as you can tell from the photo (click to see it larger), flew in Vietnam … two back to back one-year tours, the first as an F-4 GIB (guy in back), the second as a front-seater. I […]
Whenever black Americans take to the streets over police brutality and killings, racist email forwards follow. Over the past week I’ve gotten two, both claiming the media ignores black on white crime out of political correctness. What world do these people live in? Since when has the press ignored black on white crime? I think […]
Don’t go there. I hear that all the time. Over the weekend I read that Tony Stewart, a well-known NASCAR driver, ran over and killed another driver at a racetrack in upstate New York. I was a car racing fan until my mid-20s, when I went to a stock car race in Enid, Oklahoma. A couple of laps into […]
When I tell visitors about the Pima Air & Space Museum’s F-14 Tomcat, I always work in a few words about women in military aviation. The Tomcat seems like the right place to introduce the topic: first because the US Navy, along with the US Army, led the way in training woman aviators in 1974, a full two years before […]
Both hummingbird chicks have flown away. The bicycle hook nest is empty. A friend told me new chicks sometimes come back to the nest at first. We observed that with one of the chicks from an earlier hummingbird nest in June. I remember thinking, “Surely that bird should have learned to fly by now,” and then right before my […]