RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY MEAT SMOKER OBSESSION, I happened upon a new obsession that has eaten up my minutes, mind, and motivation. Hopefully, it doesn’t eat up my money. I’m talking about that age-old recreation: Texas hold’em poker. I walked backward into this one. I was sitting in my yard, watching my meat […]

THIS IS A SMOKER UPDATE. I’ve reached a milestone. I’ve learned to control my temperature. Old Smoky has been in place in my backyard since November and working beautifully. This week I want to share my evolution as an amateur pit master to aid others who may have plans to purchase their own 450-pound offset […]

I’M STRUGGLING WITH A MORAL DILEMMA. Perhaps it’s just a humanitarian dilemma, but I’m struggling nonetheless. First, know this: we are patiently and eagerly awaiting our cat Frankie’s inevitable demise. He’s in good health, he’s just old and losing his mind. He’s always been a backyard cat, though we used to let him inside a […]

IMAGINE RUBE GOLDBERG CARRYING HIS INVENTION through a China shop and tripping over bull dung into a freshly laid row of dominos, falling in all directions, arms akimbo, crashing everything as the dominos topple. OK, perhaps it wasn’t that bad, but a lot of things broke around my house this month. It was a chain […]

SANTA TOSSED HIS HAT OVER HIS ANTLER COAT RACK and sat in his reindeer-skin recliner. He was holding a heavy mail bag. This was his first Dear Santa delivery of 2014, and he always liked to be alone when he opened it. He was ever curious to find who the first child would be. Whose […]

IT’S CHRISTMAS SEASON AGAIN. Perhaps I should dig up one of my other 29 Christmas columns, shuffle the words around a bit, and rerun it. Who would know? If you’re out there, I want to meet you if you’ve been with me that long. I’ll buy you an unsweetened tea, hot or cold, your call. […]

PEOPLE KEEP ASKING ME, “What are you going to do when you retire in June?” Along with that they want to know, “What’s on your bucket list?” I tease a lot and make up silly things on the fly, but mostly I’m honest when I say, “I don’t want to know.” My bucket list is […]

IF I HAVE TO REMEMBER ONE MORE PASSWORD my brain is going to explode. I suffer from the plight of the ancients. It used to be that you could use the word Bob as a password. Whatever you typed, that was your password. Xo. Then hackers helped us improve our network security by stealing stuff. […]

SOMETIMES COLUMN TOPICS ARE HARD TO DREDGE UP. Other times they are dropped in my lap. This week is a lap dropper. I’m assigning my students a fall essay this week as one of the Common Core mandates. As I don’t like to assign essays and projects I haven’t also done myself, I feel compelled […]

THIS IS A COLUMN I’VE BEEN EAGER TO WRITE. I finally bought a smoker and got it set up in my backyard. After reading two books, visiting numerous websites, studying multiple vendors and various models, I settled on going whole hog and having Garnet in Vallejo at gstackspits.com weld me a custom offset-firebox model of […]