Month: January 2017
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Trains and Ports
The port of Oakland is building (or has built) this new rail yard across from our building, and when I sit on the couch to write, I always look at the trains and it reminds me nostalgically of Indiana, which had what used to be the biggest rail yard in the midwest. It used to…
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Distant summers
I realized the other day that the summer I fictionalized for my first book Summer Rain was twenty-five years ago. This should make me feel very old, except that it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago. I was twenty-one then, and in my mind, I’m the same person as I was then, but I…
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46
I turn 46 today. I was thinking about a very vivid birthday memory I’ve probably written about several times. I turned 23 in college, in 1994, on the tail end of a bad case of pneumonia that had me out for the month of January. I was pretty much better by the 20th, but I…
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New iPad
Thanks to a generous gift card from Sarah for my birthday, I ended up at the Apple Store, upgrading my iPad again. I was really on the fence about upgrading at all, because there’s a rumor they will be updating in March, but there’s another rumor that there’s a massive 10nm chip shortage that’s going…
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Dead Mall: Hilltop Mall, Richmond, CA
There’s a cruel irony in the fact that I’m now at the age where I need to old-man walk every day as per doctor’s orders, and I’d go to a mall and do the mall walking thing every day, but malls are all dying or dead. That — and the weather — is what brought…
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LiveJournal
In the quest to find some better way of doing all of this, I started thinking about LiveJournal. (I actually have been thinking about a lot of the mid-00s web stuff I used to use, because sitting on FaceBook all day is probably a dead end, or I feel that I’m not reading or writing…
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V/A
Various items of note: First, I made the last payment on my car. Toyota sent me a bunch of paperwork, and then a free-and-clear title came from the state. This is a 2014 Prius C that I got almost exactly three years ago. I stretched out the three-year loan because they gave me 0% financing,…
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asides
There used to be the concept in WordPress of an “aside” post, which was a small post with no title and a slightly different format. I guess the guts of it are still there, but there’s no formatting for it in my theme, and I’m sure if I used it, it would break something. I…
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2016
I hate these posts. I hate January 1 and everything about it: the new year/new me shit, the pressure to change yourself into something else overnight, and the fear of taking a brand new, unscratched and unblemished year and driving it into the ditch by eating 16,000 calories of Burger King for lunch. I did…