Pick up a pen, start writing

My heroes are writers. I’ve come to realize this in recent years, probably in some small part because of my experiences with this blog. It will be five years next month that I took the plunge and started collecting my thoughts and stories in one place. And I wish I had started it earlier than

Beauty with a side of thought

Last night, I was watching my older daughter’s play at an outdoor venue in the suburbs. The previous two shows had been cancelled because of rain (such are the perils of outdoor performance), and it looked questionable whether last night’s show would meet with the same fate. But the huge puffy clouds in the sky

That old musty cheese

Over the past few months, I’ve found great insights in the writings of Thoreau. I pick up an old copy of Walden when I can, and after a few paragraphs I’ve usually found something worth reflecting upon. And so it was today, when I found this pearl buried in Chapter 5: Society is commonly too

The fall of day

The title for this post comes from a drawing by William Rimmer. It was the inspiration for the Swan Song Records logo, and was the sort of thing that I read about once and never forgot. It’s funny what sticks with you and what doesn’t. As I get older, my appreciation for sunsets gets ever

A word count milestone

Early in the process of creating and maintaining this blog, I made a decision to keep tabs on how much writing I actually did. I started keeping an Excel file, and every time a new post is added here I record four things: The number of the post, the date it was first published, the