A thousand set of eyeballs stare at me. Two stare at her.
My words inspire laughter, hers tears.
When I’m done, I’m rewarded with a standing ovation. She’s rewarded with silence.
I hear: “Good job. Well done. Thank you.”
She hears: a ticking clock, a baby rustling, a lullaby singing.
Everyone wants to know what my wife, Annie, thinks of all my adventures and if she wants to come along. She doesn’t. We’re different like that.
I’ve been away for the past week and I miss Annie, who recently became a stay-at-home mom, and our kids. I can’t wait to pick up my daughter, Harper, and twirl…
“Yee-haw, yee-haw, yippie-yi-yo, Texas here I come.” Harper singing one of her favorite songs from Backyardigans and it just happens to be where I’m heading this morning.
She calls the hat her “cowboy hat” and she just has to wear it when she’s riding her Fischer Price horse she calls “old paint.” I think my little cowpoke needs a real cowboy hat. I’ll have to find her one in Texas. …
I grabbed a coffee and a meat pie. I brushed off the huckster trying to convince me to patronize his peep show. I had been traveling all over Australia for the past two months, and I was taking the morning off from sight-seeing and beach-going. I went to the newsstand in Sydney’s King’s Cross district and grabbed the morning paper.
It was September 12th, 2001 in Australia. Sitting on the stoop in front of that newsstand, the world changed; I never felt more American.
My Two Weeks Without Wolf Blitzer
For the past two weeks I haven’t flipped to CNN or Fox News once. I haven’t read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. As part of the Go Glocal Project I…
President Obama, with his American Job Act, isn’t the only one focusing on job creation. Below J. Brandon of Ascent Douglas – a movement to bring outdoor apparel manufacturing into Douglas County Nevada – offers some interesting insights into how one community is trying to create jobs.
What’s in a job? For every $1 of sales related to manufacturing, there is a $1.40 return throughout the U.S. economy. This is opposed to overseas manufacturing in which for every $1 of sales there is a 58-cent output.
###
Where are you a local?
I live in Gardnerville, in Douglas County, Nevada. I’ve also lived in Silicon Valley, the Pacific Northwest, Las Vegas, and as a child, very briefly…
If you buy this piece of crap, a percentage of the proceeds will go to helping orphaned puppies achieve their dreams of catching rainbows.
How much will go there and how will you know if I follow through with this? You can trust me. I’m a guy that loves orphaned puppies; how could you NOT trust me?
Shopping Greifportunities
This is my biggest beef with social entrepreneurs. Most of the time there is a complete lack of transparency and accountability.
The Colbert Report did a bit on “Shopping Greifportunities” last night with a focus on 9/11 stuff. You can buy 9/11 shoes, merlot, a chessboard with firefighters and police officers going at it, and even a dog collar (in dog years the tragedy was only 1 ½…
Ten years ago I was in Australia and had no idea about the tragedies that hit my homeland until I read about them in a newspaper on September 12th.
In honor of the 10th anniversary, Team, Red, White, and Blue — a patriotic bunch with a running problem — is hosting a memorial run. They had Justin Ahrens and Rule29, the designers of my site, design an awesome logo for the event. It’s one of the coolest logos I’ve seen commemorating the events of 9.11.
Each of the past few semesters I get a host of emails from a class in Germany which is reading “Where Am I Wearing?” I doubt that you’re up for listening to me blab for 38 minutes, but if you are…have at it.
Also, I apologize for my breath. I recorded this first thing in the morning on Labor Day.
McGraw-Hill Research Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that one of the differences between the United States and countries with high-performing school systems was: “The teaching profession in the U.S. does not have the same high status as it once did, nor does it compare with the status teachers enjoy in the world’s best-performing economies.”
The report highlights two examples of this diminished status:
• “According to a 2005 National Education Association report, nearly 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years teaching; they cite poor working conditions and low pay as the chief reason.”
• “High school…
We enrolled Harper at a daycare/preschool associated with Ball State University. (Yep, she’s in college at the age of 2.) Two weeks ago I attended the school’s orientation for parents while Annie was at home with the kids.
The director of the program asked that all the parents introduce themselves, and share an interesting tidbit about their child. I was sitting in the front row on a seat that was about 6″ off the ground — like a giant sitting in munchkin land. She called on me first.
“I’m Kelsey Timmeran. My daughter’s name is Harper. She’s two…” and this is where I needed to say something interesting about Harper. I don’t like intro situations like this. In fact, sometimes my…
I’m on stage. She’s putting the kids to bed.
