Why I Oughta...

Hard to put away all the Christmas stuff without a few glitches, right?  This year, we lost a number of our vintage glass ball Christmas ornaments.  Most of them were common ones - just a single color.  But a few of them were these more interesting ones - with writing/stripes/what-have-you on them.   I posted some photos of a good haul that we picked up at an Estate Sale in Elmhurst back in 2016 , but I don't think the one in the photo (below) was from that group.  That same year (2016), I bought another set of vintage glass ornaments (in these nice cardboard storage boxes) and *those* blue ones were some of the ones that shattered this year.   One of the things that I'm trying hard to focus on in 2022 is the notion of 'stuff'.  I read this post from Jason Kottke that references a Wired piece from Paul Ford titled:  A Grand Unifying Theory of Buying Stuff .  After reading those posts - the line about not 'buying stuff for my stuff' stuck with me.  It also made

Today marks the beginning of my 40th trip around the Sun and as such, it seems like an appropriate time to ponder the state of the blog.  Yeah...I'm a blogger.  And have been so for more than 14 years.  I have the archives to prove it !  I started with the JoinCross Blog and then RhodesSchool and have been settled in here at "Why I oughta" on my personal domain for more than a decade.  And now with more than 3,000 individual posts, I've left behind quite a bit of digital and personal brick-a-brack over the years - especially with a handful of recent one-post-per-day-every-day years.  I'm on track to keep up the one-post-per-day for 2018, too. Like a lot of you guys, I've read a bunch of the 'is blogging dead' pieces like this one, but a few have stuck out and I feel are worth sharing to talk about the place of a personal blog in the face of publishing platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Instagram what-have-you.  Now...I'm on Facebook a

I took the advice of Jason Kottke and took the plunge to obtain a few sets of solar eclipse glasses on Amazon while they were in stock.  With the kids, we opted for plastic glasses.  Are you guys not geeked about what we have in store?  I have a vivid memory of using a pinhole box when I was a kid in elementary school, so I'm excited to see what my kids think about the whole experience. I have to think that the media is going to whip this into a frenzy, so get your glasses before they're gone.  Make sure you check 'delivery estimates' on Amazon or else you'll end up with a pair that might or might not arrive in time.  Or..who knows?  Maybe these kind of glasses are going to turn into August's version of fidget spinners and they'll be at the checkout counter of every Walgreens and CVS location around the area? I took Jason's advice and ordered early.  He's been very thoughtful (and is excited) about the event, so go read the whole post over t

Last week, Tim Brey posted a piece on his blog titled "Still Blogging in 2017" that was shared by Jason Kottke on his own blog . That's how I came across Tim's original post.  Isn't that how blogs *used* to work, right?  You'd read something in your feed reader that referenced someone else's blog/post and you stumbled upon them.  Liked it?  Usually, I grabbed a subscription to their feed and kept up on them. I'm not one to pine for the 'good old days' (or, maybe I am?), but that little blog-to-blog transaction (about blogging!) struck me. I read both of them and figured that it warranted comment or two here on my *own* blog.  I've been doing these daily diary entries on objects, experiences and occurrences in my life for the past few years after picking blogging back up 2010.  For a few years (2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016), I've been able to publish *something* everyday here on " Why I Oughta... " (which, is what I used t