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Summer Jobs
LAKE MACBRIDE— Trish Nelson will be taking the summer off from editing Blog for Iowa, and I’ll be filling in. There is a small stipend, and the work will give me a chance to develop ideas around the...
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Friday in Iowa: Newspapers
When I agreed to fill in as the summer, weekday editor of Blog for Iowa, the decline of newspapers, and substantial changes in corporate media was on my short list of topics to cover. As I drove to...
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Rain Came
LAKE MACBRIDE— It rained on plans to work in the garden and yard. So now, the long lawn will wait until the next dry, sunny day; weeds are getting respite from being chopped; and the garage is clean...
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Mise en Place
LAKE MACBRIDE— The Harvard Business Review wrote about the application of mise en place to daily planning. While most of us are not professional chefs, laying out the ingredients of a day and...
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Dreaming of Zakuski
LAKE MACBRIDE— In a perfect world, friends would come over and we’d share vodka, zakuski and conversation for an evening. Even though we have a bottle of Stolichnaya Vodka purchased in the 1980s in the...
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Summer Thunderstorm
LAKE MACBRIDE— Rain was brewing when I went outside early this morning. One could sense it in the warm, electrified air. It came and poured two inches in the garden cart left outside to get washed out....
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Allure on the Prairie
LAKE MACBRIDE— The allure of imagination is a writer’s arena. It can be a saving grace, enabling us to survive in a world gone mad. It can be a distraction from existential realities that beckon for...
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Drawing from a Spring
LAKE MACBRIDE— Possessed of a large frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex, I spend way to much time intellectualizing life instead of living it. This is not new, nor is it peculiar to me. It’s the human...
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Friday In Iowa – Writing In Public
“I’ve been reading the paper lately,” said Kevin Samek to the Solon City Council on Aug. 6 during the citizens speak agenda item. “I’m a little concerned about the north sewer trunk.” Samek had been...
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Life Minus Television
LAKE MACBRIDE— It has been a while, more than a year, since the television has been turned on with any regularity. I fired up the tubes to view President Obama’s address to the nation on the campaign...
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Rainy Writer’s Day
LAKE MACBRIDE— Intermittent rain fell throughout yesterday. Fallen leaves were dampened, and for a while, runoff flowed in the ditch. Apples clung to the tree, waiting another day to be picked. We...
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Meeting at the Cemetery
BIG GROVE TOWNSHIP— There was trouble last night at the cemetery, the first such trouble since I was elected township trustee. It had to do with who could be buried in whose plot, and the trustee who...
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Newspaper
LAKE MACBRIDE— It’s been a dubious endeavor. After discontinuing our subscription to the daily (except Sunday) newspaper years ago, I began freelancing for them. Feeling a need to subscribe again, I...
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Night Storm
LAKE MACBRIDE— Just before running my mobile phone through the washing machine, I searched the Internet for Hyemeyohsts Storm. There were a few search results— what little information there was full of...
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On Our Own 2014 Review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. The meaning of these statistics is unclear, except to say that I am thankful for people who read my writing in this...
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Writing Into the New Year
Writing is about finding an audience. The prospects for any writer to develop a multitude of readers is slight and we take what we can get. Suffice it that in time of social media some will follow, but...
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Snow Fell
Snow fell as I drove home on Mehaffey Bridge Road through the lakes—a crystalline, sparkling snow. The wind blew as the sky darkened with imminent nightfall. I had turned the radio off. I passed a...
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Full Moon
Friday is my Monday as I embark on a substantial project to write several articles for the newspaper before the county seat makes a mass exodus for spring break. The paper expects to be shorthanded, so...
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Writing and King Richard III
As an English major the re-interment of King Richard III last Thursday seems more than a British peccadillo. The estimated £2.5 million spent on the re-interment could well have fed the poor, sheltered...
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Daily Writing
The habit of daily writing is important, but not for reasons one might think. Writing is part inspiration and part craftsmanship. Daily writing helps with the latter more than then former and comes a...
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