Image by mpclemens via Flickr Advice is a funny thing. It is often sought, often misheard, often rejected, often obnoxious, and often invaluable. This is all at the same time, mind you. Whenever I am asked to give advice, I know that there is very little chance that the changes …
A man that I trust and respect once told me that we always go from specific to general in our heads, but we want to go from the general to the specific in our lives. He was speaking about the process of creating something new, but I think it applies …
Image via Wikipedia The easy answer is that we would like to turn something out of nothing. While many of us are not in the entrepreneurial field, that is the one thing that we all quest after. It is the need to turn a problem into a solution using nothing but you …
My brothers played hockey. Smelly, cold, and rough and tumble. They had early ice times and late night games. They played from mighty mites on up through peewees and then in high school too. Hockey made sense to them in a way that it never did for me. I used …
Image via Wikipedia I sometimes have a hard time relating to those who have never played bumper pool. While most people don’t come right out and say it, there is a look in their eye that questions the very notion of another type of pool game. In this look they …
For the past month I have been trying to figure out an elegant way of having an entire audience all tweet to the same account using text messaging on their phones. While I can think of a good number of reasons to want to do this, my main concern was …
Image by slambo_42 via Flickr You never know if you can fit underneath a metal folding chair until you try. I used to sing really loud just about any time I got the chance. Ask my childhood neighbors about my lawn mowing falsetto or headphone isolation. I really didn’t have …
Image via Wikipedia My grandmother owned a mountain. Well, maybe not the entire mountain, but in the middle of Ohio, it is about the closest thing to a mountain as there is. And near the top of it, my grandfather built a huge farmhouse. He built it in two stages, …
Image via Wikipedia I had never dressed up for Halloween until I became a teacher. It just wasn’t something we did in my family. But, when I became a middle school teacher, it was definitely an expectation. So, I was Peter Pan and Poneyboy a couple of times and it …
Image via Wikipedia Study hall was where I honed my skills as a bully. And since I was weaker and less socially adept than almost everyone, my bullying was relegated to a single individual, Bryan. Now, I didn’t beat him up or call him names. I just pestered him. In …