Call it due diligence...Okay, my work is close to a Walmart so I went there on my lunch hour. I got into the mood by getting a quarter pounder from the in store McDonald's, read a copy of US Magazine to find out why the Bachelor dumped Melissa Rycroft, then went to find Ford County, John Grisham's short story collection 16.99. The store was pretty busy, but I was the only person in the book section there.It was in a shelf marked best sellers which was dominated by a huge quantity of copies ... Read Full Story

I’ve been reading a lot of Haruki Murakami lately and enjoying it. I’m also worried that it’s starting to affect my regular life. As I’ve mentioned, I write fiction some times when I’m not blogging. Judging from the last few months, I must have been writing a lot of fiction :}. I certainly haven’t been blogging. Anyway, a couple months ago I was looking to see what the deadline for the University of Iowa’s Short Story Collection competition happened to be this year. I’d entered the year... Read Full Story

My story Tears for the River God was nominated by Grey Sparrow Journal for a Pushcart prize. I'd like to thank both Diane Smith (the founder of the journal) and Sue Haigh the fiction editor for that edition. Read Full Story

Two weeks ago, a work friend gave me two tickets for the Giants-Rockies game. It turned out to be an important late season game, the first in many years in San Francisco. After blowing a three run lead in the fourteenth inning last Monday to fall four games behind in the wild card race to the Rockies, the Giants had gotten within a game by going 4-1 at home. I invited a friend who got me to my last major league game three years ago to see the A’s and we were all set to watch Matt Cain, arg... Read Full Story

Last Sunday, Belle, our four year old Sheltie, was hit by our new neighbor’s truck late at night. The dog was walking across the street and apparently the neighbor didn’t see her. My wife was very attached to Belle at least partly because our youngest left for college back East about a year ago. To note the passing of our dog, she put up a white wooden cross in a flower pot near the front of our driveway. It’s not a large cross. She made it from strips of leftover floor molding from our ... Read Full Story

Ever since I first fell for the Sonic Impact t-amp, I've been intrigued about the prospects of a higher-powered Class D amp. As most people who follow these things know, Tripath went under a couple years ago, but they made higher-power chips. Sonic-Impact was promising one a couple years ago as was Mark Schifter's av-123, X-electronics. It's just that both turned out to be vaporware. Kingrex has also marketed an amplifier based on the Tripath 2022, a higher-powered chip, but I still haven... Read Full Story

I talked to my mother on my way home from work on Friday night and my stepdad and she were doing well. At 8:00 pm, she left a message saying that he’d had a stroke and that she was on the way to the hospital. We called my stepsisters, etc. They made it to the hospital okay and he did indeed have a stroke. They had caught it early, partly because he was able to tell my mother that he felt one coming on. 911 was right on time and the emergency room gave him an anti-coagulant to break up th... Read Full Story

Since we started saying President Obama, there’s been widespread sentiment that “race” as issue in American may be in our cultural rear window. For instance, a number of my progressive friends supported the firemen in the New Haven firefighter’s case, Ricci v. De Stefano simply because they supported the virtually inarguable position that at some point America needs to be a country where decisions are based on merit and not skin color. As a number of folk have pointed out, President Obama h... Read Full Story

We went to San Diego for a memorial service for my wife’s older brother this week. He had served in the Coast Guard in the early seventies so my wife and her sisters arranged to have his ashes placed at a military cemetery that overlooks the harbor. I never got many chances to talk to my brother in law. He just wasn’t much of a talker, so I knew very little about his world which consisted of selling military surplus items and working swap meets. Other than that, he was a very good uncle wh... Read Full Story

Because of confusion about times, I missed the ferry to Angel Island from Tiburon that had my mother and stepfather and their group of seniors from Sacramento on it. I left a message on my mother's cell phone, then realized that the Island might not have cell phone coverage. That and my mother is forgetting things like her cell phone from time to time. Angel Island's not very big, a few square miles. I think the majority of people who come there go to hike, bike, or picnic, but for more than ... Read Full Story