I spent a lot of time playing youth sports as a kid. For baseball alone ( Read more... )

For as far back as I can remember, one of my family's pleasant little idiosyncrasies was the group hug, wherein my parents, sister and I would gather in a circle and share a big hug. This has continued on to the present day, typically before we head our separate ways after a visit. M and other extended family members have been pulled in as well ( Read more... )

I celebrated 16 years in my house by paying off the mortgage. To my surprise, if you look at all the places I have lived, my house is now the one that I've lived in the longest.

In second place is my primary childhood home in North Dakota, which my parents moved out of in 2018 after just shy of 34 years of residence. I personally lived there ( Read more... )

The first memory I have of paying attention to professional sports was in the fourth grade. I've read that most people become sports fans because of their parents, but my baseball obsession certainly did not come from my parents. My father was happy to play catch with me in the backyard, but that's as far as his interest in baseball went, and that ( Read more... )

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with pretty much any topic related to aviation and space. One way this manifested was that I read a ton of (auto)biographies and histories about WW2 fighter pilots, which is a much larger genre than you'd think. Inside this genre, my particular focus interest was the American Volunteer Group (aka, the Flying Tigers) ( Read more... )

At some point last weekend when my sister's family was visiting, I looked down and saw that my nephew was on the floor playing with my father's keychain, and for one brief moment I was a little kid again ( Read more... )

At some point in my childhood my father borrowed somebody's fancy stereo to dub three LPs on to cassette for road trips. I'm pretty sure that this happened in North Dakota, and I recall that we got our first stereo that had the LP->Cassette capability when I was in fifth grade,so this would have been around 2nd grade or so. This resulted in three ( Read more... )

In the time between our wedding and the arrival of our daughter, M and I got all our responsible adult paperwork done. This included wills, assorted powers of attorney for various situations, a trust in the dire situation that we both predecease Birdie while she's a child and all sorts of other things that seemed helpful to have in place if an ( Read more... )

If my ER summary was an epilogue to my summary posts about my scars, strains and breaks and concussions, this listing of all my surgeries is a coda. Or if you prefer, a false ending, Return of the King style. Honestly, it's a short list ( Read more... )

As an epilogue of sorts to my summary posts about my scars, strains and breaks and concussions, here's the list of all the ER visits I can recall in my life.

1. Scar #1 was the only time I got stitches, and I'm assuming that those stitches were at an ER in Butte, Montana ( Read more... )