When an organization whose Board you’re on schedules its annual conference in Las Vegas, you sign up for the tax-deductible vacation. When you find out an artist you’ve loved for 35+ years has a very rare live performance at the same time, you go early and make it a weekend […]
Ever since watching “Miracle on 34th Street” as a child, I’ve wondered what it’d be like to experience New York City at Christmas. Seeing Buddy the Elf and Kevin McAllister do it in 2003 and 1992 (respectively) only heightened such desire, so when I learned there was a workers’ comp […]
About 15 years ago, I bought a house with a yard and made friends with my neighbors, and it took just under a week to realize they all had dogs and bonded on Friday nights in our cul-de-sac having drinks and watching their dogs run and play together while I […]
We pulled into Montgomery, Alabama at the Rosa Parks Library and Museum at 11am on Saturday; a few minutes later, the five of us plus my mother-in-law were inside a city bus simulator traveling through history. We walked through the attached museum and then drove over to the Alabama Department […]
This year, my annual workers’ compensation law conference was held at the Jekyll Island Convention Center instead of its usual location on Saint Simons Island, but since we’re more familiar with the latter location, we opted to stay there and just let me drive a bit farther to my conference […]
I awoke the Monday after Fathers Day to this Facebook message from one of our Tokyo karate instructors: Did you feel the earthquake? Are you okay? My nightmare from our first night in Japan had come true. Luckily, we’d missed it by a day, as it occurred near Osaka, and […]
We boarded our Kyoto Shinkansen train at 7 Sunday morning and arrived in Hiroshima just after 9. My bride had told me a few days prior that we’d be spending Fathers Day at Hiroshima, somewhat apologetically, but that’s how the itinerary had fit together, and was that okay? Who was […]
*Thanks to Hanes for sponsoring this post* Colorado has 4 distinctly awesome national parks. I saw 3/4 of them in 1987 when my folks drove my brother and me from Nashville in a two-toned ’83 Suburban, and I’ve wanted to go back with my own family and explore the diverse […]
We were on the Shinkansen bullet train before 8am on Saturday and walked up to Himeji Castle at 9:30am. I checked in on Swarm and saw that there are free guided tours in English that are excellent, and I’d no sooner declared that we should find out how to get […]
Friday morning about 9:45am, we set off from our AirBnB and discovered a place called Cafe Green Door in a residential area, just a couple blocks from our home, which was a nice change from the previous days’ meats on a stick for breakfast. We had eggs and coffee […]