Casey's Just Sayin'

Oh, here's a story. You know we all have a bunch of passwords, right? Well, every few months I change mine, especially since getting a rather threatening message from a would-be criminal who basically told me he had so many millions of passwords, chances were he had one of mine or my family's. Very unsettling. So I change my passwords a lot. And I have about 30 of them. And since I know that one of a crook's methods of getting into my stuff is to find my password on a less secure site (say a forum board) and try that password on a more secure site (say a bank), I use different passwords. Last night I got the idea that I would write them all down and put them some place safe. The thought was that if something happened to me, My Love would be able to get into all my junk and retrieve stuff, shut things down, etc., etc. A little morbid, maybe, but it seemed brilliant at the time. If you know me, you may guess what's coming next. Yep. I promptly lost the pa...

I have a hard time knowing where to start this story.   My daughter's mom, my ex-wife, passed away three years ago this March. My daughter, who is now twenty-four, has been hit heartbreakingly hard by this loss.   When she died, we put all of her worldly possessions in a storage unit temporarily. As these things often do, temporarily turned in to just under three years and only now is the storage unit nearly empty of what was a household and lifetime of the profoundly sentimental and the utterly mundane.   Last Friday, my daughter was going through one of her mom's many boxes and found a letter she had written. It was addressed to my daughter and was written just shy of five months before her mom passed. The powerful words answered some of my daughter's questions about her mom's passing, affirmed the love they shared and supported the decisions my daughter has made since she lost her mom. It was devastating and cathartic at the same time. That Sunday w...

This is my first experience with Mr. Howey's work read via recommendation from a trusted friend. I'm not, per se, a great fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, although Wind-Up Girl was fantastic. So I approached this story with a hint of trepidation. In short, it was excellent. The setting is extremely well-drawn, details fed to the reader carefully and meaningfully over time. The story is complex and involves different points of view, micro and macro influences, short and long-term histories. The cast is vast, varied, deep and fully-developed. And I guarantee you don't know what's going to happen next. I will say that reading this as five separate stories would be deeply frustrating, as the so-called endings of each section are not so much cliff-hanger as cliff, not to mention they are way too short individually to be satisfying. The way this needs to be read is right here, as one great novel. Posted with Blogsy

Resolutions aside, here's a brief summary of what went down in December and where I'm at now in writing and, well, everything.   I want to start by saying that this year, especially, we all have a very strong common reason to appreciate every glimmer of good in our lives. This post is not about that tragedy. But before I talk about my little tiny life, I want to say for the record I sincerely believe we all owe it to humanness itself to remember and appreciate.   Negatives:   1) We almost ran out of gas getting the Christmas Tree at George's in Paynes Creek. But we didn't. 2) My sister's home in the country is our traditional Christmas Eve location and this year she decided to drive her family to Idaho to spend it with my brother and his family. So we tried to bring that Christmas Eve magic to our house, but it didn't turn out. The picture above is my brother's house. Can you really blame her? 3) The place where we've purchased our ...

What do radio promotions and blogging have in common?   A lot... maybe.   Many who read this know that in a previous life I was in radio. I spent twelve years playing in that sandbox before jumping in to the related field of commercial banking. (see - sarcasm)   I know, it's weird.   Radio is a highly reactive industry, meaning the content must be associated to what is going on in the world. I remember sitting in promotions meetings at the end of the year, literally going through the calendar and marking local events and holidays. "So, are we going to do the Freedom Rocks concert for 106X this year? We need a beer permit for the park and let's order some promotional balloons."   "We're kicking around the idea of doing an Easter Egg Hunt on K-Shasta where we hide eggs all over town and give away grown up easter baskets to the finders. We'll give clues on the air."   "Where's our booth going to be for Oldies 105 for Kool April Nights? L...

So I've lived in the same home now for almost 13 years. One things that length of time means - aside from buying a house for cheap, a few years later thinking it's worth way more than I paid for it, then a few years after that realizing it's not - is that I have gotten to know the stores in our neighborhood. This is a Google pic of my Circle K This is an actual Google pic of THE Circle K Specifically I'm thinking about the Circle K convenience store, which is reachable from my house in about thirty seconds by vehicle and five minutes or so by foot.   I've spent a lot of money at this store. The gas isn't the cheapest in town, but it's by far the most convenient for me.   The beer is more expensive than the grocery store (also nearby), but it's just easier to pull in and grab a sixer on the way home.   The coffee they serve in the morning is not great, but there is a lot of it and I can grab a cup on my way to work in seconds.   Then there are the Ga...

  I was one of the first to purchase and use an iPad. I couldn't wait to get one, was overjoyed when I did get one and loved it so much I even had a contest to name it.   That was 2 1/2 years and three generations ago, if you count them as iPad, iPad 2, New iPad and iPad with Retina Display, four if you include the iPad Mini.   So, is Padrick getting old?   Let's see what I've got now.   External: Padrick certainly has some small dents and scratch marks on the back casing. But for me, that's like the bed of my pickup. It just means it's well used. And even though I've never purchased a screen cover for it, the screen appears flawless. I should note that I've dropped Padrick many times and about half of those times the landing was not soft.   There's No Camera: I can't take photos with it, which I suppose is a negative, although when I see people trying to take pictures with their iPad, I'm a little embarrassed for them. It looks silly. The two ...