This Is Drivel

Category: hobby

  • Playing Trains

    Today is Play With Your Toy Trains Day all across this great nation of ours. I hope you were sprawled across the living room floor piecing together track and crashing choo-choos into one another a la Gomez Addams, or in your attic adding another building to the sprawling iron road empire you’ve been steadily assembling… Read.

  • Truman – Finished!

    , , , , ,

    I finished it! It’s been about three weeks and almost a thousand pages after I started, and I am honestly sorry it’s over. I think I can say this is the best biography of anybody by anybody I’ve ever read. Maybe I’m biased a bit by the fact that I’m a huge fan of David… Read.

  • Dancing Fools

    I’m torn: I’ve got less than 120 pages left and then I’m finished with David McCullough’s Truman. I should be upstairs on the sofa finishing it off right now, but I couldn’t let the night pass without banging out some drivel. So here you go: Dance night tonight. It’s been at least two months since… Read.

  • Pound Sand

    I was almost supernaturally compelled to write to Grant and Martha, the hosts of A Way With Words, after I heard a listener who spoke Swahili call in to ask why people say “slept like a log” because, obviously, logs don’t sleep much. He was calling as much to find out the origin of the… Read.

  • The Keys to Love

    , , , ,

    I came within seconds of buying another old typewriter I found at the thrift store today. Not the one in the picture. That one was way too expensive. They were asking so much that I got the feeling it would still be there next week at a greatly reduced price, even though I don’t know… Read.

  • Truman by McCullough

    , , , , ,

    I’m two-hundred pages into the biography of Harry Truman by David McCullough. My Darling B gave it to me for Christmas after I spent months trolling the aisles of every used book store in town, looking for it. Now that I have a copy, I notice that there are three on the shelves at Saint… Read.

  • Dark Side of the Moon

    , , , ,

    I just finished reading Dark Side of the Moon, a book about Nasa’s lunar landing project. I feel it is safe to say that author Gerard DeGroot, a science writer from Scotland, is no friend of America’s manned space program, or any other country’s. Time out: What, by the way, is a shorthand way to… Read.

  • Show and Tell

    , , , , , , ,

    Aaron, one of my coworkers, was showing me how to approve course work for continuing education. That’s what I do now; I’m one of the two continuing education specialists in my unit at the Department of Regulation and Licensing, so I’d better know how to do this at least a little better than the guy… Read.

  • Lazy Sunday

    ,

    Here it is, my last day before I start my new day job and how do I spend it? I cut up a bunch of lumber, because that’s what guys do. Not sure how much is enough to qualify as a bunch. I cut up a few odds and ends to make some doodads and… Read.

  • Man Buys IBM for Three Dollars. Film At Eleven.

    I can’t believe my good luck: I am now the ecstatically proud owner of an IBM Selectric II. And I paid just a little over three dollars for it! How does this even happen? Well, just like this: I found it on the bottom shelf in the electronics section of a Goodwill store here in… Read.

photo of the author and the author's best friend