The world has heaped praise on one of the hottest new tech items out there — Apple’s iPhone. African Bushmen, who don’t even know what a phone is, are standing in line to buy one. The dead are coming back to life to take a look.

Some hail it as a device that will end global warming, detect buried treasure, give you a massage and full makeover, bring peace and riches to the world, drive your car, and, if you have the time, even make a phone call.

Me? I’m unimpressed. Yawn!

Why? It’s a phone. A very fancy, cool, hip, tricked out, full of stuff phone, but strip it down, and ultimately it’s just a tin can tied by string to another tin can.

Maybe it’s the age I am, but technology doesn’t impress me much anymore. Continue Reading »

We’re a society that loves change. Very few things totally satisfy us, so we’re always looking to take what we have and update it, modernize it, change it, improve it and generally make it, well, crappier.But I think I’ve found the one thing we can’t say that about. The one thing that has seen little if any changes over the years. I spotted it while out running the other day and stared in bemusement as it rolled by: a school bus.

Yes, a big, yellow diesel-belching school bus, filled with screaming kids that looked like an insane asylum on wheels.

It could have been a brand new bus for all I knew, but the world would never know. Modern advancements, or at least modern design, have long passed over the venerable school bus. It’s the instrument of transportation that time forgot — a throwback to yesteryear that is the only constant from one generation to the next. And I, for one, am glad.

It brings back memories. There was nothing better as a kid than a school field trip or an away soccer match in a beaten-up bus. Any time you piled in, with all its funny smells and vinyl seats marred by unexplainable stains, it was a good day.

Continue Reading »

Does anyone really care if a work shed is level? Does anyone know if it matters? I mean, come on. With all the problems we have in the world — the poverty, the war, the sickness, the Hollywood muckity-mucks running around with no underpants — does a little uneven-ess truly matter?

By uneven, I’m only talking about a good 5 or 6 inches off, in multiple angles, and directions. People stare, tilt their heads and ask, “Am I screwy or is your shed bending over to tie its shoes?”

Now, I’ve written about my shed and its problems before, so I should clarify: These aren’t the old problems — this is since I started working on it.

Some things don’t want to be fixed, and my shed is one of them.

When last I told of the great story of my work shed, the floor was rotting out, the base beams for the walls had turned to sawdust and a nudist colony of squirrels had opened up a spa in the rafters. (They, or someone else, ate a WHOLE bag of winter rye, and now instead of a floor, I have a green grass carpet from what they spilled.)

It was a mess, so I went to work. I ripped out the floor and decided to replace the beams around the base by jacking up the shed. My brother has hydraulic jacks, and I pictured myself lifting it up little by little with a few pumps, sliding new beams under there and getting out quick before it all toppled on my head.

Continue Reading »

And then it was all quiet … sort of.

It seems more and more these days, holidays roll in like hurricanes: plenty of warning, yet never enough time to prepare. Winds lash the trees. The water rises. You scramble, you bite fingernails, and you wish you had gotten out of town when the weatherman warned you.

“Why didn’t we go to Tahiti!”

But that’s also what makes the holiday so much fun — so exciting.

Mothers who come and stay for a week. Mine, even though the refrigerator had long since exceeded its carrying capacity, thought it necessary to buy loaf after loaf of bread from the Spanish Bakery, searching out any little uninhabited region of the fridge to cram it in. We never ate the bread, so I’m still not sure why she kept buying it.

The storm isn’t just a metaphor. It did actually come on Christmas morning, as you might recall, just as my mother was driving up from Tampa. All week she had watched the weather, petrified of a strong front that was threatening to bowl her over as she made her early morning run for St. Augustine.

She braved the winds and driving rain, hydroplaning at one point on backroads and dodging tornadoes she just knew were coming for her.

“What do I do if I see a tornado?” she asked the night before while preparing herself mentally for the journey. “I pull over and jump in a ditch, right?”

“No,” I told her. “It’s very simple: You just drive the other way.”

“You’re kidding? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! I think you’re supposed to drive right into the eye where it’s calm.”

She made it. Somehow, she made it.

Continue Reading »