If you grew up in Milwaukee, Independence Day hit different. There was a stretch when Milwaukee owned the Fourth of July. Milwaukee has always been, simultaneously, both a small big city and big small city. Nothing captured this spirit quite…
My eighth grade was a bit … bumpy. And, before you ask, yes – that is exactly how cool I was in eighth grade!
Researching ancestry is a humbling hobby. You soon realize that you’re part of a community that started well before you and will continue well after you, with every ancestor contributing a tiny moment into the whole. Those moments, in toto,…
I had a modest, handshake relationship with the World Trade Center Towers. I would occasionally go there for work in the 80s. My company was based out of New Jersey, and we had customers at One World Trade Center. I…
* Apologies to James Thurber Villiam origin story The first feeling when you put up a bird feeder is that moment of zen from watching the birds flit in and out. The second is the vitriolic disdain for the semi-feral…
It is 1903. Arthur Kenney, with his wife Margaret and their two sons, buys two tracts of land in Mellen, Wisconsin. They’ll build a house on one and subsistence farm the other. Arthur will try his luck as a saloon…
What happened the year I turned eighteen? Well … not much It was the summer after my senior year of high school at a party with way too much alcohol and way too many eighteen-year-olds. People were out drinking in…
My university experience was very liberal arts. Not liberal art as in a philosophy major but liberal arts as in no particular thought of future employment. I started out as a math major and added physics when my advisor coincidentally…
I was late to the bicycle. As a little, little kid I was more than happy with my dad’s depression era coaster. I’d roll it up to the top of our block, generate some speed going downhill, jump on and…
Four Months in Beijing. By 1999 I had sixteen years in as a software developer and I was tired. I had been studying Mandarin off and on for a decade and had finagled a modest scholarship to attend the Beijing…
