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It’s Showtime

07 Aug 2017 by KRAG

We have houseguests staying with us this week, which naturally reminded me of the time my girlfriend’s parents came to dinner.

Let me ‘splain.

As part of her new business, my wife is hosting a retreat for some of her colleagues. They are staying with us for the week, during which they’ll all confab and meditate and plan and strategize and bond as a team.

Since my direct involvement is neither required nor particularly useful, I offered to do two things:

  1. Do the cooking and washing up.
  2. Otherwise stay out of the way.

Regular readers know that I am an unabashed omnivore; my recipes are almost always omnivorous or “omnivore adjacent.” Knowing that, you can imagine my reaction when, after planning menus and making shopping lists, I learned that one of our guests is gluten-free and another is vegan:

DON’T PANIC

Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture, Food | Tagged , , , , , | 6 Comments »

No Traditions Here

24 Jul 2017 by KRAG

This coming weekend, my wife and I will celebrate our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary. Ours has been a good marriage which, despite our many flaws and foibles, despite our misjudgments both large and small, has been a source of strength and comfort to us both.

Oddly, though, we don’t have any traditions for celebrating our wedding anniversary. That’s not to say that we are tradition-averse; far from it. Continue Reading »

Posted in Culture | Tagged , , | 2 Comments »

It Doesn’t Take Much

21 Jul 2017 by KRAG

summer’s iron hand
beats me with light
with heat
my mind winces
whipped dog shying
hiding in darkened corners

then, for a few hours
clouds bring respite
moisture’s brief touch
salves my skin
saves my soul

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Atodaso

13 Jul 2017 by KRAG

Just because I wasn’t writing, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t writing.

I know to some it seems like I’ve been procrastinating, putting off actually breaking through my years-long writer’s block, but it hasn’t been all “Mañana, baby.”

In fact, in the past month, I did a lot of writing. No words written, but a lot of writing, nonetheless.

It began with re-reading one of my older books, and culminated (well, so far) over this past weekend when I had a revelation about my difficulty getting to Page One. Continue Reading »

Posted in Writing | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments »

Old Man Gamer: Horizon Zero Dawn

06 Jul 2017 by KRAG

My holiday weekend was less than stellar, mostly because I was on-call and got several alerts on several nights during the wee hours. Grrr.

However, it was not without some good. One of the high points was a new game: Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games) which is available for the PS4 (currently on sale for about $40).

HZD is an open world, third-person POV, quest-structured game along the lines of the Far Cry or Elder Scrolls, but in my opinion HZD is far and away superior to those others and primarily for one single reason: the writing. Continue Reading »

Posted in Hi Tech | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Brick by Brick

22 Jun 2017 by KRAG

Typing. Deleting. More typing. More deleting. MOAR typing. Delete delete delete. Delete it all. Every last word, comma, and period.

That was yesterday.

I was working on an essay for this blog and … it wasn’t going well. I was working on a topic that had been rolling around in my head for a month. All my arguments and counterarguments were lined up. I even had a catchy title … well, I thought it was a catchy title, until I googled it and found a hundred thousand other uses of it (including one by Garrison Keillor, which I discovered in a moment that was both uplifting and depressing).

Anyway, for hours I wrote and deleted in precisely equal measure, and in the end I was left with the same blank page I’d started with.

At which point I stopped and wondered: why was I having so much trouble?

The answer was obvious: I had no passion for the topic.

Not anymore, anyway.

Oh, when the idea first struck me, I was all fired up and ready to unleash my staggering intellect upon the world. See my reasoning and despair! But now, a month later, things have changed. Not externally. The premise still stands, the argument still works, and I can find no flaw in my logic, but internally … I just don’t care about it anymore.

This is not a bad thing. Continue Reading »

Posted in Creativity, Writing | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

Retro Fingerplay

15 Jun 2017 by KRAG

While I’m working on something more meaty, here’s a bit of fun.

Like most people my age, I learned to type on a manual typewriter, an old Smith-Corona, to be precise. It was heavy — damned heavy — and came in its own nearly-as-heavy hard-sided case. It had a black-and-red ribbon that always got twisted, the keys continually got hooked onto one another, and after typing up an evening’s homework, my forearms ached from the physical exertion of pressing down the keys. That’s no exaggeration; it took some oomph to make those levers thwack with enough force to register through to the carbon copy.

What’s a carbon copy, you ask? Well, it’s a … nope, I don’t have time or space to explain it all. Continue Reading »

Posted in Creativity, Hi Tech, Low Tech | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments »

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