Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    I asked Carol to take pictures of the prepacked piles of supplies she had staged throughout the house for our upcoming three-day getaway to Crystal Cove State Park. She refused, so I can’t show you how well prepared we were both for our getaway and maybe just one pile short […]

While there are some tips regarding travel that can actually help you out, here are some travel tips you DO NOT need to know.

      Someone I’ve known since childhood thought it was hilarious to share with my mother some of the stunts I’d pulled back when I was a teenager. She did not want to hear any of it. She hated him for sharing the stories, telling me once to stop bringing him around because, “I’ve got enough […]

   This past June marked fifty years since I first took off to see the world. I had 200 bucks and a copy of Arthur Fommer’s Europe on 5 Dollars a Day. That meant I had about 40 days of working capital. Somehow, I managed to stretch it into almost three years of vagabonding through […]

If you are looking for a relationship, having a good sense of humor increases your chances of getting a girlfriend/boyfriend significantly.

   One of my Friday night enjoyments is to stay up after Carol has gone to bed, crank up the volume on my headphones, pour a glass, turn off the lights in the living room and blast off with my classic rock Amazon playlist. And no, I am not drinking alone in the dark. The […]

   Carol’s 13-year-old grandson happened upon a week this summer, where he had no scheduled activities, camps or play dates. I seized the impending idleness, and challenged him to a miniature golf tournament. I figured since he had absolutely nothing better to do, he’d accept. And he did.    Over the three years we’d gotten […]

Photo Credit: Carol Madigan    My son and I possess complimentary fonts of common knowledge in a cognitively dissonant sense. Meaning, what each of us know is, in many instances, something completely unknown to the other. A good analogy might be that my font of knowledge is a mile wide but an inch deep. (Thus, […]

   Taking in some of the current Olympics (I think, anyway. They’re mostly repeats because of the time difference, so they could be showing events from any Olympics for all I know), reminded me of a period of incipient midlife crisis as expressed in feats of athleticism.    Back in the late 1980s, I sought […]

Photo credit: Pete Deutschman     One thing was clear from the beginning. There’d be no kids sitting in the back seat of cars eating cold hot dogs, while the parents up front argued who’d started the fight. Even my obliviousness to facilitating the introductions was taken for granted, and everyone knew everyone else before I […]