So we have a global health crisis on our hands. The COVID-19 virus has eluded even our harshest attempts at containment, and there’s no prospect of either a preventative or treatment, other than for associated diagnoses such as pneumonia.

With an unknown number of infectious but asymptomatic carriers wandering around, Inna and I have taken the ( Read more... )

After sixteen years of vipassana meditation practice, I’ve heard a sizable swath of the dhamma. So it’s not very often that I run into something new: an idea that provides an exciting ah-ha satori moment of discovery, which happened so often when the teachings were new to me. So it’s a precious surprise when I find a new nugget of wisdom.

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The long-delayed writeup of last March’s weeklong excursion to Raleigh/Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina. Added here more to complete our set of scouting reports than to provide anything of interest to readers.
Thu March 14: Travel

We left on the warmest early spring day Pittsburgh had seen thus far in 2019, although we still passed snow in the ( Read more... )

With the end of cycling’s high season, I was free to spend a week with Inna checking out Portland. Not the familiar largest city in Maine, where I lived for eight years, but its namesake, the largest city in the state of Oregon.

Although we’d both visited before, neither of us had experienced much of the city itself. My 2004 visit was based an ( Read more... )

A while back, I came across an article entitled “These are the bad things about early retirement that no one talks about” (sic).

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Two years after I wrote a couple posts about money- The Ghost of Munny Past and The Ghost of Munny Present-an astonishing discovery has prompted me to finally complete the cycle.

But before I get to the meat, how have the past two years gone?

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New meditators often struggle with the idea of sitting still. One of the inevitable first questions asked at a beginners’ sitting is whether one must remain 100% perfectly still, or whether it’s okay to shift, scratch, and so forth.

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It’s not every day one gets cited in the financial press (even if it’s only obliquely).

I have a long history as a data geek. As a high school kid, I spent hours researching and creating lists of physical and mental diseases as reference material for roleplaying games.

In college, I pored over lists and dictionaries en route to creating a 45,000- ( Read more... )

If brevity is the soul of wit, I’m surely both soulless and witless, because I find it impossible to write a travelogue of anything less than “War and Peace” proportions. Let’s see if I can tighten up the tale of our recent week in Boulder and Denver...

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With a tall pile of empty cardboard boxes after a household shopping spree, I decided to manifest a little creativity.

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