“So what do you want to do?” Lena asks me this, and I ask her, at least once a day on the weekend, and maybe a couple of times during the week. My answer is always the same. “I want to scream.” Of course, I don’t say that, because the worst thing I can think…

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For years Lena has made fun of me for being obsessive. It was nonsense, obviously—no matter how many miniatures you have it is easier to pick the one you want at a glance if they are stored in neat and orderly rows, organized by class and race, facing front, tallest at the back. That’s just…

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Yesterday a friend of ours was taking her daughter to the eye doctor (we live close to a hospital so there are a lot of doctors in our area) and she spotted Lena and me on the porch eating lunch. She pulled over and we had a nice conversation—with us on the porch and them…

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I am an old videogamer. I owned and played the hell out of the first Pong home console, a single box with a dial on either side for your controllers, which was marketed as a date night activity. That last bit may have been a little hopeful. Today’s games are insanely fantastic by comparison. The stories,…

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After coming down out of the Tennessee mountains, Lena and I stopped off at the Biltmore Estate and visited the palace and grounds. Huge and grand and opulent beyond reason, the home is created entirely to impress visitors with the wealth of its owners, which it does well. This creates an interesting tension with the…

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In the middle of last August I was positively diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.I had been losing weight without explanation, and developed a permanent, burning thirst. After a couple weeks of constantly drinking water like a dying man in the desert, I went to the doctor. My blood sugar was 267, (100 is the normal…

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Last week saw the arrival of a bit of a crisis in our household. Several unrelated and individually easy to deal with issues collided to create a spectacular stress-bomb that blew up all over my and Lena’s home. Something had to be done. I snuck away and grabbed the phone. This was no job for…

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I am not a serious person. I crack jokes, I laugh a lot, and I tend to think most anything has a funny side. Personally I think this was a nurture rather than a nature phenomenon. My dad was a very serious (and slightly unstable) person who insisted that everyone around him treat him with just as…

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Lena and I just got back from our vacation this summer. Okay — I am still getting used to saying things like that. This whole “vacation” thing is still pretty new to me. My whole life the word vacation meant taking off a Friday and a Monday because you were throwing a big party and…

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Next month will be my forty fifth birthday. Lena says that my maturity topped out at age twelve — a number she arrived at because that is the last age (she estimates) that normal people stop thinking that peanut butter, jelly, and potato chip sandwiches are haute cuisine. Personally, I feel pretty much the same as…

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