The Columns
Here are some columns published over the past few years. You can click on the Topic Description beneath any title to see more on that subject.
Winter Olympics, NASCAR, and Red Wings: the Perfect Valentine's Day
This weekend my wife and I are enjoying a Perfect Storm of Really Cool Stuff.
On Friday the 2010 Winter Olympics* kicked off in Vancouver, British Columbia. There was a terrific Opening Ceremony highlighted by some teams marching in with hundreds of happy skiers and skaters waving at the crowd, while other teams were made up of a single athlete carrying a flag and followed by fifteen old bald government guys.
Snow Days
As some of you know, I have a pretty cool day job at a small library. One of the best things about this job is that when the local schools shut down for bad weather, the library shuts down too.
I get Snow Days!
This means that any time there's a chance of snow on a "school night," I turn into an eight-year-old. I monitor every available weather forecast. I scan the western skies. I subscribe to a 24-hour online school closing advisory service. And then, of course, I do my "Snow Dance."
For those of you who live in Southern California, on Mars, or anywhere else Snow Days never happen, the Snow Dance is a highly personal ritual that can take many forms. My own version of the Snow Dance is performed as follows:
The Story of Carlson the Christmas Angel
Carlson was not a particularly happy Angel. You see, he wasn’t allowed to live in Heaven. He was a Guardian Angel, which meant that he had to hang around on Earth, taking care of his Client, Bob.
Now, Guardian Angel duty was about the most difficult job an Angel could have, even under the 
best of circumstances. Angels couldn’t change what their Clients said or did; they could only try to protect them from accidents. Or, more commonly, from the consequences of their actions.
Some Clients were really good people, always risking their lives to help others, and this sort of thing could keep a Guardian Angel pretty busy. Other Clients were hopelessly slow-witted or accident prone, and they needed a Guardian Angel around constantly just to keep them from getting their scarves caught in the wood chipper.
Thanksgiving On The Brink
“Of course we’ll have Thanksgiving at our house this year, Aunt Ellen! I’ll write notes to everyone and tell them!” Mom hung up the phone with a crooked smile and began to sing softly to herself;
Oh where did I leave that bottle of Scotch
The bottle of Scotch, my sweet bottle of Scotch?
Oh where did I leave that bottle of Scotch?
It’s half past nine in the morning…
Great Aunt Ellen had just explained that for the first time in a generation she and Great Uncle Charlie could not host the family's annual Thanksgiving get-together. It seems that over the weekend Great Uncle Charlie tried to repair a drain in the kitchen sink, and the federal hazmat teams will not be finished with the house until mid-January.
This news did not make Mom all that happy. The last time she was in charge of hosting a family get-together was the Christmas best remembered for the Canine Culinary Calamity in which the humans dined on canned corned beef from the Speedway while Carl the Dog and Bernie The Schnauzer feasted on the spiral-sliced ham that was forgotten at the bottom of Grandma and Grandpa’s garbage bag of gifts.
"Must prepare. Need help. Everyone coming here in a week. No time. Oh God. No time."
"Mom," shouted Todd Junior from the upstairs bathroom, "Do we have more bath towels?"
"Why Dear?"
"Because there are only nine in here, and it doesn't look like that's going to be enough to soak up all the toilet water on the floor."
Hunting Season: Rabbits 1, Hunters 0
I might be the only male resident of Michigan who is not spending these early days of November stockpiling ammunition and Slim Jims in anticipation of deer season. It’s not that I object to hunting; I just don’t care to do it. And I don’t have anything bad to say about hunters. Of course, this is partly because I make it a rule never say anything bad about people with guns.
I think most of my reluctance to blast woodland creatures goes back to when I was about twelve years old and my dad, also not a hunter, decided to take me out to shoot some rabbits. Two things made him decide to do this:
1. He had inherited a single-shot 12-gauge shotgun from his Grandfather, who had told him that it was good for rabbit hunting.
2. He believed that that we could probably figure out what to do with some rabbits if we happened to get any.
So one bright Saturday morning my dad handed me a burlap bag for “the kill” and a small red box of shotgun shells, A.K.A., “the bullets”. Then he piled me, the shotgun, and our dog, a plump little brown female mutt named Scamp, into his white Volkswagen Beetle and we headed out. Scamp kept watch with her head out the window, alertly smashing bugs with her nose and forehead.
