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My Dad's Garden

When I was a kid, I spent a couple of summers with my Dad in Central California in between the Central Valley and Yosemite National Park. It was rural California at its best. He and his girlfriend bought a plot of land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near a spot in the road called Cathay’s Valley. There, surrounded by dusty, rolling hills with the mountains in the backdrop, they threw their sweat, creativity and personality into building a little bungalow. I still dream of this house and all of those windows. I recall the shower in the greenhouse, the vegetarian dinners and doing dishes outside since there was no running water in the kitchen. When you entered the house, you were greeted by artwork he etched in the glass door (another etching is in the photo below). And, the smells--pine trees, native grasses, wild flowers mixed with the heat; the desert aroma I still love when I visit out West. It was central California during a major drought. There was a water well on

Sell back your old smartphone; it's worth it.

Over the weekend, I decided to finally sell my old work phone, an iPhone 5, white, 16 GB Sprint device. I had some videos and photo content on there so have been procrastinating getting the phone ready to sell. This, by the way, is one of the top reasons folks have told us in the past why they don't sell back or recycle an old phone. They don't want to lose the data on the phone. I was no exception to this. However, cloud-based storage platforms like iCloud, in my case, are (sort of) easing some of the concerns. For instance, I was confident that my photos and contacts were being saved to the cloud, but I was less confident about my videos. Therefore, I ended up moving all of the content to an external hard drive--to be on the safe side (Note: my World Series videos from October were on that phone and are more than priceless to me.) So, after about an hour of fiddling around and moving content, I was ready to "clean" the device. I had to ensure he Find My iPhone fea

All the Dogs of my Life

In honor of National Dog Day yesterday, it got me thinking about how I can trace the stages of my life via all the dogs in my life. Here goes… Sheba: The early years Sheba was ultimate rescue dog. A shepherd/collie mix that we found in a shelter in KC right before moving to the hills of Arkansas in the early ’70s. Rumor has it she climbed to the top of the pile of the litter and my brother, Chris, picked her out. She meant something different to all four of us as kids. My brothers took her squirrel hunting; I loved the hikes in the woods she would lead me on. She tolerated--but my Dad did not-the occasional dress-up days. However, she was patient and never, ever said a peep. Moreover, Sheba was brilliantly smart. She once caught a rabbit and brought it home to a wounded stray dog I was caring for at the time. She actually had empathy for the stray dog! She also traveled with us on vacations to visit my Dad both in Chicago and California. She was a protector and nice to

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