Handbill Handout

High 80s and sunny. I used to do pictures on this thing so why not do one again.

Mid 80's, cloudy and humid.  Storms are coming. Did you hear about the new corduroy pillow craze?  It's making headlines.

High 70s and cloudy. I've never seen Game of Thrones.

Mid 70's and partly sunny. Air conditioning exists in Europe.  Sort of.  It's more of a notion, an idea, a rumor.  In my recent travels  I was fortunate that the weather was mild, mid 60s to mid 70s most days and even dipping into the 50s at night on the cooler days.  See I'm a cold room kind of guy when it comes to sleep.  A room gets to be above say, 70 degrees and I have a hard time sleeping.  The good news here is that unlike some of my other habits and lifestyle choices I'm on the right side of science with this one . In the parts of Europe that I've been (a fair amount actually) the locals are mystified by the American need for things to be cold.  The air conditioning in a lot of places is barely a whisper of slightly cool air even when the fan level is cranked to the max.  Water in restaurants?  Room temperature unless you ask for ice and as soon as you do you'll be pegged as an American if your accent didn't give it away already.  The better ho

Mid 60s and cloudy. Back in the late-mid 20th century (well, what do you call the 1970s?  Is it the late 20th century or the middle?  Let's go with the late part of the middle) people used to get together after vacations, shut off the lights and watch slide shows of their adventures.  I'm not talking about Powerpoint here, I'm talking about  slide shows in their original meaning.  Slides were small translucent photographs that you dropped into a projector, in the case of my family a fancy carousel slide projector and that machine shined (shone?) a light through the translucent photograph and a magnifying glass creating a giant image of the photograph on a screen or wall. This was, I suppose, social media decades before social media and emphasis on the social because some folks would not only have their family gather round to watch the slide show but would have friends over as well.  There would be cigarettes and drinks, maybe some snacks and everyone reacting to pictur

68 and cloudy.  Rained earlier. In that hopeful post-travel phase right now.  You know the one.  It's the one where you come back from a couple weeks where you went somewhere else and did other things (it doesn't really matter where you went or what you did for the purposes of this phenomenon) and you think you're going to do things differently once you're home.  The travel has changed you, made you grow a little.  Taught you something.  Maybe even made you a new person if the trip was particularly eventful or memorable. Then you come home, sit in the same stupid traffic and go back to the same workplace grind and all your habits are there, waiting for you like expectant hungry children.   Reminding you that no, real life is not what you experience during travel, it;'s what goes on during the long grey grinding everyday unremembered nothing that makes up the overwhelming amount of time that we spend here.  You're still the same guy or gal you always were and

High 70s and sunny. Busy weekend getting ready to go places.

High 70s and sunny after a downpour earlier. I'm sure today's date is some kind of numerological whatsis or other but I don't really give a shit.

Mid 70s and mostly sunny.  Rain is supposed to be on the way. A woman at my office was going on about how Alexa is a lifesaver for her.  She's a new mom and "you just can't understand how great it is to have a hands-free device when you have a kid".  I mentioned the fact that the device was probably recording reams of data (assuming you can record a ream since that's normally a measure of paper) for Amazon to sell but she was undeterred.  I guess I can relate, just look at how much free information we all give away on social media just to avoid talking to our friends and family or sending letters or cards for occasions?  So much easier to type "Happy birthday" on a timeline than it is to send a card or make a phone call.  Cheaper too. To be sure I'm not an old fuddy-duddy sorehead about this stuff.  I'm just as guilty as hundreds of millions of other people of hiding in plain sight on social media in exchange for avoiding the tiring interacti

Mid 80's and mostly sunny. I've had the same paper clip holder for a very long time.  Probably as long as I've been working in the building in which I currently work which is since about the turn of the century.  Turn of the century meant something different when I was younger of course which is something you don't think about when you experience it.  I wonder if Jefferson used the phrase on two different centuries or if Ty Cobb did or even the Babe.  Anyway, the paper clip holder is round, 6 centimeters high and also 6 centimeters across the top though the hole that the paper clips come out of is only about 2 1/2 centimeters in diameter.  There's a magnet surrounding the 2 1/2 centimeter hole that grabs the clips and holds them there for your ease of selection.  Clever!  The clips are loaded by removing a cap on the bottom of the holder that's 5 1/2 centimeters in diameter and black.  The top is also black but the middle of the holder is clear so you can

Just about 80 and humid following a brief downpour.  Supposed to get to the mid 80s later. I have no longstanding connection to this particular American holiday.  As an occasional student of world history I find patriotism inherently dangerous and divisive. "Hurrah for us we're #1" is the next door neighbor to "We are the master race let's round up the inferior people and eliminate them".  Any real student of American history (or someone of Native or African descent) knows that the latter has happened here though the first thought Americans are trained to have of that second statement is about 20th century Germany.  So it goes. I forget who said it but I believe the statement "a person can be kind and smart but people are dumb and dangerous" is absolutely true. So yeah, no flag waving here despite (or perhaps also because of) a lifelong family attachment to the military through parents, in-laws, siblings and nephews.  I suspect having viewed

Mid 80s at 11pm local time.   Yuck. My father in law found a bunch of old pictures while looking for something else and brought them to us today.   Some people really like looking at old pictures and if social media is any indicator some people would be happier just living in the past.   Neither of those apply to me.  Quite the opposite in fact.   After the first couple of pictures I started to feel overwhelmed with an oppressive sense of doom.   I saw so many dead loved ones captured in poses and also snared in moments of candor and all I wanted to do was warn them about what horrors were coming for them.   The pictures of my parents at ages younger than mine were especially difficult as I tried to imagine what they were thinking,  what they were hoping for the future at that point. Knowing how badly things would go for them made it incredibly painful to see them as their younger selves.  I wish I could say that I turned it into some kind of lesson or put a positive spin on it but t