Category Archives: Uncategorized

Back by popular demand: oak rain barrels from Sustainable Community Solutions!

After a two-year hiatus, I’ve decided to make and sell rain barrels again this summer. (My primary motivation: the prospect of four more years of college tuition payments, including the coming overlap year with both of my kids in college. As Ludwig van Beethoven famously said, “The amount of money one needs is terrifying”…)
My [...]

A new chapter in life

When I last walked out of an office where I was employed in a full-time permanent job, Hilary Clinton had just been appointed to a high-level Administration position–heading husband Bill’s health care reform initiative in 1993. Since then, I’ve done a lot of interesting things: I was a full-time, stay-at-home dad with my two young [...]

Nordic ski opportunities galore

Winter lovers, rejoice: there’s a lot of great nordic (cross-country) ski activity over the next few weekends.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s (Saturday, January 31, Carleton College Upper Arb) Nordic Ski Fest, the annual fund-raiser for the Northfield High School Nordic Ski Team. Coach Dan Kust (at right) has done tremendous work with the ski team [...]

Preparing for spring

One of the joys of January is poring over seed catalogs as they arrive with their promises of beautiful, bounteous yields of homegrown produce. I love to sit by the woodstove on a frigid winter’s evening and contemplate the potential merits of varieties of veggies and herbs I have not grown before versus tried and [...]

Looking for a leader, part II: the times, they are a-changing

On February 3, 2008 I blogged (“Looking for a leader”) about my family’s overwhelmingly positive experience at the previous day’s Obama rally at the Target Center in Minneapolis:
“I’ve made my choice among the presidential candidates. I was 99% behind Barack Obama before yesterday (with 1% still considering support for Hillary Clinton, who I would also [...]