Read Part 1 first: How Are You Going, Australia Day? A couple years ago we spent three weeks in Australia criss-crossing the Eastern coast as we stopped in on multiple friends who had returned from Shanghai. If I had been a kid in school assigned to write a report on my vacation, I would have […]
January 30, 2012
How are you going? That’s Australian for ‘How are you doing?’ If you didn’t know how to answer that question before my explanation, then you share something in common with my wife who responded, “I don’t know how to answer that,” the first time she was greeted by her now best friend. How could I […]
January 27, 2012
The Fonz and Optimist Prime spent the evening at a dinner party with some of their friends. Actually, the party was described as a movie night, but I prefer to think this was a cover for their higher-brow plans to discuss this month’s New Yorker and the finer points of tying a cravat. Hopefully once […]
January 26, 2012
The end of January is fast approaching and it’s time to measure the progress of your new year’s resolutions and make a list of people who heard you proudly proclaim those ambitious goals on New Year’s Eve–so you can be sure and avoid them. Or if avoidance isn’t your forte, either because you’re humble enough […]
January 25, 2012
The Fonz and Optimist Prime are always making up new games. They spend hours and hours discussing the rules, coloring and cutting out game boards and game pieces, telling their dad this will be the greatest game ever, and arguing over which one of them contributed 51% or more to the idea and deserves to […]
January 21, 2012
On Wednesday Optimist Prime took a vow of silence. He was reading a book about a girl with disabilities who couldn’t speak and he wanted to understand what that was like. I wonder if the girl in the story had a little brother like The Fonz who begged her to talk the entire time. If […]
January 20, 2012
In last Saturday’s post I shared the story of The Fonz returning from Christmas break and discovering a new Italian girl enrolled in the second grade. Her addition to the second grade seemed to coincide with The Fonz asking me a lot of questions about girls and what age people start dating. I explained the […]
January 19, 2012
You’re probably familiar with the story of the cruise ship crashing into rocks near the coast of a small Italian village. The captain has drawn fire for apparently deviating from the planned course in an attempt to come closer to shore, possibly to try and give a friend high-five while passing. The comedy of errors […]
January 18, 2012
You’ve probably read about Wikipedia, Craigslist, and Google blacking out services today to bring attention to legislation they say may adversely affect their mission to distract people from doing any real work. After reading Wikipedia’s explanation of the SOPA and PIPA legislation, I still wasn’t sure which hyper-irrational side of the story to believe, but […]
January 17, 2012
I had intended to post yesterday, but after the Green Bay Packers painful playoff loss, I was too busy feeling sorry for myself. Not even the three compliments I received yesterday on my vacation tan managed to cheer me up. To be honest, that did cheer me up a little. I do look pretty tan. […]
January 14, 2012
Our ten-year-old son, Optimist Prime, doesn’t get near as many mentions as The Fonz because he’s probably the most polite, positive person I know and rarely does me the favor of getting in trouble to provide material for this blog. This week a teacher told my wife he had approached Optimist Prime and told him, […]
January 31, 2012
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