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It’s always a little shocking when your best friend turns on you. Look, I know (intellectually) my car isn’t alive. But my yellow Volkswagon beetle (with its black bee’s-knees fender plates) is known about town. I’ve driven it for a decade now. People see it, they recognize it. There is even a miniature of it (with bee’s-knees) on the train club layout. It harks back to my college days, to my first rattle-trap beetle (also yellow). I crossed the country in that car, slept in it, lived in it. Perched on its fender, I had my first kiss. I might […]

Our train club, a non-profit fellowship organization, has been broken into five times. We know who did it. There is a nest of thieves infamous in that neighborhood – the neighbors told us about them. On the third break in, the K-9 unit went right to their door. They all bonded out the next day. The ringleader, a 35-year-old bag-of-shit, has three other B&Es he’s currently bonded out of. We’ve gotten a look at his rap sheet – its almost a novella. We’ve added motion detectors to the club and strengthened the weakpoints. We’ve also removed anything of value – […]

I knew how the commander at Pearl Harbor felt that fateful morning in December when my auxiliary hard drive crashed. I loved my first laptop and, as memory cost dropped, bought an auxiliary drive to hang off it, my “back up”. But let’s face it, the laptop was like a thimble, the aux drive a bucket. I’d couldn’t have a one-to-one data ratio. Furthermore, there was stuff I didn’t want to carry around day-to-day on the portable. So into this basket went all my eggs: photos, freelance work, model railroad reference information, everything. And then, after years of storing things, […]

Stopped at a light, the rising sun glimmering the frost-blasted foliage around me. I mirror-glanced the driver behind me through wisps of steamy exhaust. Oriental, female, high cheekbones, a slender noble face. Her hair was parted back and collected behind her narrow neck, glimmering earrings clasped to shell-like ears, as beautiful as a geisha. And she was doing something that, as both a motorist and cyclist, really torques me. She was applying mascara. But how beautiful. One tiny hand clasped the steering wheel with a gentle dove-like touch, her fingers poised in a tidy little line. Her other hand, raised, her […]

Sat by the pond at lunch and slogged through the ongoing ReTyrement rewrite. Got to the point where we see the hero at work in a wineshop (that serves food) in 330BC. He’s humping over the fire, turning the spitted goat, checking the bread on the metal plate… Something in my mind went clunk! I checked this online. Don’t know why I didn’t realize this (nor did any of my editing readers realize this) but you absolutely have to bake bread in an oven. Now, there were little ovens, even portable ovens, back then and you could shove bread in […]