As mentioned last week this week I was on the road helping my friend Ryan move from Ohio to California. Our travel looked like this ( Read more... )

Over the years I've been on any number of long road trips. Not including childhood trips, this list of notable trips looks somewhat like this:

1. In 2008, my sister and I moved her to Alaska by driving her from Atlanta to Tacoma, roughly 2800 miles.

2. In 2010, my sister and I drove her back from Alaska. I was with her through Cleveland, or ( Read more... )

I may not have a sabbatical this year, but I've still fortunate enough to have 28 days of vacation, and I aim to use most of it to go to cool places and visit cool people. I've even got a huge pile of frequent flier miles to help defray costs. I've got some very tentative plans that I'm throwing out there ( Read more... )

To paraphrase George Mallory, I read long books because they are there.Way back in 2009 I resolved to read more classic books, and I have knocked few quite a few of them in the last six years. However, the biggest one of them all, War & Peace, was still out there.

For some reason, War & Peace was lodged firmly in my mind because of a Peanuts TV ( Read more... )

My company rolled out a sabbatical plan in November of 2013, in which any employee with at least eight years tenure in the company is eligible for 4 contiguous weeks of extra vacation. As I hit my 13 year anniversary in May, I am more than eligible ( Read more... )

When I wrote up my 2014 baseball year in review I said I was going to try for three parks in 2015. I have now purchased my plane tickets and have solid dates for those park visits. Even better, the games I'll be seeing at these parks will cover all four of the teams that I have never seen in person. On top of that I'll get to visit several friends ( Read more... )

For the first four months and change of the season the Oakland A's looked like a team of destiny as they charged to the best record in baseball. They were so good that they gutted their farm system for even better players. They were, in gambling parlance, all in. Naturally, for the rest of the season every goddamn thing that could wrong did go ( Read more... )

Thanks to the wonder of auto-post, as this goes up I am at the airport embarking on my first trip of 2014. Frankly, it's going to be hard to top 2013, when I took more plane flights than in any other single prior year of my life. Actually, it may have been more flights than in any two other years of my life ( Read more... )

My big Midwestern baseball road trip went off without a hitch. I knocked two ballparks off the list when I saw games at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City and New Busch Stadium in St. Louis. I also got to Wrigley Field again. It's still the prettiest place in baseball (with one possible exception), and I'm glad I saw it again before they do the (much ( Read more... )

As I previously mentioned, I am planning a big baseball road trip this summer. It won't hit quite as many parks as last year, but it will cover a lot more miles and will let me move two states from partial to full creditAs it turns out, the team schedules in early August were so perfect for what I wanted to do that I'm pretty much definitely going ( Read more... )