• January 3, 2017 For those of you who know me/us well, you know that we’re generally homebodies…particularly in 2016, when (1) our home was for sale, (2) we had to find a rental in the Jenks district, and (3) we had to move/clean/prep our old house for the rental market when time ran out this…

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  • I’ve asked this question back over Thanksgiving weekend on Facebook: Parents: Over the long holiday we’ve fully implemented the OurPact app to control/curtail screen time for Pi. Anyone else using it? Any advice on achieving a happy middle ground between total block and total open? And I thought I’d expand this into a blog post to…

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  • Back in the Summer I sat with a visitor at my church, the adult chaperone of 15 Iraqi high school students who were touring parts of the U.S., learning about the various career choices that might be available to them.  After visiting Vermont, and then Oklahoma, they went to Washington D.C. before heading back to their school…

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  • Living in Tulsa recently has brought me face-to-face with how quickly we revert to the herd mentality, particularly when we find ourselves in an information-poor environment.  With amazing speed we will tacitly accept “truth” from very tenuous sources, and spread it around like manure to feed and grow further mania. I’m speaking of course about…

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  • 08/30/2016: Since I’m all about lowering one’s energy consumption (within reason), our rent home came with a lovely mercury-filled “slider” thermostat, circa 1995.  For our first month it seems the thing was a blunt instrument — running way too much and keeping us dashing back and forth to raise or lower it.  PSO tells me…

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  • Permit me a momentary rant, which may anger some folks… If you’re healthy, and not an invalid…don’t have a Doctor’s note or in other ways not able to walk briskly for a half hour at a time…then you should mow your own lawn. You’ve heard of the “broken windows” theory?  Which states essentially that a…

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  • Last week we completed (mostly) our move from our house of 15+ years to a new rental in South Tulsa.  Too many reasons to go into detail as to why — the thing I’m talking about now is DESIGN and how when it’s absent, you notice it. Background:  our house in Midtown Tulsa was built…

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  • Stories abound about ways in which the Internet has been a disruptor to business and the status quo.  Back in the early 90s I got to witness the carnage and bloodshed firsthand at the University of Tulsa. As I said in the About…History is written by the victors, and the folks who were the high…

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  • One of my interests is architecture and urban design, so allow me to introduce you to two little books by Witold Rybczynski… Between Home: A Short History of an Idea and City Life, you can’t go wrong. If you’re like me and love older homes and former streetcar neighborhoods, Home will explain much about why we…

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  • With apologies to the late, great Prince…RIP. You’ve all heard the hype and bluster about the Cloud.  As a term, I smirk about it being a “new” concept:  the AT&T reps who used to call on me at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oklahoma were using it in 2000.  It’s old telco jargon that’s now…

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