New Ride: 2017 Ford Flex

“I’m bored. You wanna go buy a car today?” “Okay.” Okay, so it didn’t happen exactly like that, but it was pretty close. The Ford Flex has been on my radar ever since I sold my Scion XB a few years ago. After I got the Subaru WRX STi, owning a Flex went on the back burner. When I sold the Subaru a couple of months ago, I put the money in the bank and it’s been sitting there ever since, waiting for the right car to pop up. The Flex comes in a variety of colors and trim levels,… (read more)

What I Watched and Read in 2017

For the second year in a row, I maintained a list of everything I watched and read throughout the entire year. While you are welcome to read the entire list, I thought I would go back through the list and make some observations. MOVIES According to my list, I watched 125 movies in 2017. Of those, 20 were movies I had seen before (those are the titles that appear in italics on the list). I didn’t list any movies I didn’t watch from start to finish, and surely forgot to enter some, so the actual number is likely higher. Still,… (read more)

Star Wednesday: Christmas Figurines

Most of my Star Wars figure are on display year round. I rarely shuffle them around; where they sit is where they sit. The one exception to this are my Star Wars holiday figurines. I can’t recall many examples of Star Wars characters being used out of context (save for M&M’s line of Star Wars figures), so it’s a little odd to see Yoda and R2-D2 wearing Santa hats — especially since, as we all know, they don’t even celebrate Christmas. They celebrate Life Day. The Yoda figure in this picture is based on a 1981 painting by Ralph McQuarrie,… (read more)

The Protector of Christmas

I suppose when you do anything 44 times, the magic starts to wear off. When you’re a kid, everything about Christmas is exciting. The lights, the songs, the cookies and candy canes, the presents, the television specials, the rituals… everything is so new and exhilarating. I was the kid who laid in bed every year the night before Christmas with his stomach in knots, staring at the clock for hours at a time and watching the minutes tick by, one by one, until it was time to wake up and see what Santa had brought. Nothing was more exciting to… (read more)

The Last Jedi Family

(This post is spoiler free and does not discuss the plot of The Last Jedi.) Last Thursday at 9:30 p.m., a time when most kids are winding down and preparing for bed, ours were with us at Penn Square Mall, waiting for the 10 p.m. showing of Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi to begin. Roughly 30 minutes of trailers, combined with a run time of 152 minutes (the longest Star Wars film to date), put us back in the parking lot around 1 a.m., and back home half an hour after that. On a school night. Except for the… (read more)

Happy Birthday, Mason (Next Mile Ahead)

Five minutes after Mason was born, I had emailed pictures of him to my coworkers and my family. That was quite a feat sixteen years ago, back in 2001. First I had to transfer the pictures from my digital camera to my laptop using a special cable. Next I had to resize the pictures, because emailing pictures 1MB in size was unheard of. Then I had to connect my laptop to a spare phone jack in the hospital room, and dial up to connect to the internet. While the pictures uploaded, I killed time playing my brand new Gameboy Advance.… (read more)

Another Semester in the Books

Sunday, while Susan and the kids were at the mall finishing up some Christmas shopping, I submitted my final paper of the year, bringing the end to another semester of school. This semester I “only” took six credit hours in the form of three classes, compared to the spring semester when I took 10 credit hours. I still wonder how I managed to pull that off. This semester I took Autobiography in Adult Education, Independent Study (essay/short story writing), and Project, in which I wrote 40,000 words of a novel. Last spring I finally hit that magical 2:1 ratio by… (read more)

Star Wednesday: R2D2 Ceramic Bank

I told myself I wasn’t going to buy any Star Wars collectibles in 2017 and for the most part I haven’t. Then, last week, I saw this for sale at Dollar General and caved. This R2 unit is, in fact, a ceramic piggy bank. It’s all one piece, so there’s no articulation. His legs don’t move and his head doesn’t swivel. He just stands there at attention, waiting to accept your spare change. In the 1970s pottery and ceramics were all the rage, which led to a lot of bootleg Star Wars items. Garage sales were full of misshapen Vaders,… (read more)

Cold Bones

The high yesterday afternoon was 74 degrees. Right now at 6 a.m. it’s 38, but the weatherman says it feels closer to 30. “It’s going to be cold on the motorcycle this morning,” I say. “Sure you don’t want to ride the bus to school?” I’m not sure he answered me with anything but a look. The Fonz does not ride the bus to school. I can’t remember exactly when or why — that happens a lot these days — but I rode a motorcycle to school during the winter of either my junior or senior year. Maybe it was… (read more)

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