Adventures In Busing.

It’s Been A Minute.

Author: January 1, 2026 10 Comments

So a few things have changed since we moved, and by “a few things” I mean, of course, almost everything. We’re now out in the country, though I still commute to Nashville on a regular basis. We’re mostly surrounded by trees. There’s a high ridge behind our house and just beyond it there are train tracks. Hearing the regular sound of train whistles is really a nice thing. We looked at several places together but none seemed quite right: the house was too small or the yard was too small. One had everything we wanted but also one thing we didn’t want: a front yard with the road running right through it. It also had half a dozen RVs parked in far side of the front yard. If we’d picked that place I would have kept one and turned it into a writing studio, but that wasn’t a sufficient to compensate for the miniscule backyard or my concerns about how our dogs would react to the neighbor’s chickens. Or how the neighbor’s chickens would react to our dogs since they seemed to have free run of the backyard. 

We looked at another house that had everything we wanted, including a nice shed I could easily turn into a writing studio, and also, just a few houses away, there was a graveyard–something I didn’t know I wanted but was really great–but it would also have meant an hour and a half drive to work. I don’t mind driving but I knew that doing it three hours a day at least four days a week I’d really come to hate it.

Then one Friday morning my wife and our amazing realtor–name available on request–decided to go look at a place that had a little more acreage than we were looking for but seemed promising. And then she called me and said, “I need you to leave work now.” And just like that we found the place. It had almost everything we wanted, including some space where I’ll eventually put a writing studio, and even some fun little surprises lurking in the drawers.

Our realtor, who really is amazing, made the whole process as smooth and easy as selling a place where we’d lived for more than three decades and buying an entirely new home could be. Then she took us out for a nice lunch and I said, hey, if I’d known this was part of the deal I would have sold our house years ago.

First, though, we’d have to move and while we did quite a lot of that ourselves–including one harrowing night drive with the CRV packed full of boxes–we had to rely on professionals for the big stuff. So let me introduce you to the moving crew:

Skip: The first to arrive in a small moving truck that pulled into our driveway ten minutes ahead of the scheduled appointment time. Skinny as a toothpick. Carrying a vape in one hand and a phone in the other. The first thing he said when he got out was, “Sorry we’re late. We got lost. The other truck will be here in ten minutes.” It would take the other, larger, truck half an hour to arrive.

Alex: Arrived with Skip but sat in the truck for ten minutes while Skip surveyed the scene. Skinny as a toothpick. Climbed on top of the moving truck and stayed there until the other truck arrived.

Derek: First off the second truck. Skinny as a toothpick. Bright, chatty, and very funny. At one point, after he’d carried five bookcases by himself, he and I chatted about the time he got poison ivy at basketball camp and told me he was so covered in calamine lotion “I was boppin’ around the court like a brown and pink lollipop.” While I laughed awkwardly he gracefully carried out a box that weighed more than he did.

Anson: Skinny as a toothpick. Carried boxes out so quietly and smoothly he might have gone completely unnoticed if he hadn’t been the only member of the crew with sleeve tattoos.

Jerry: Skinny as a toothpick. Frowned a lot. Borrowed Skip’s vape then proceeded to carry the refrigerator out by himself.

Josh: Carried a bottle of Gatorade in one hand and nothing heavier than twenty pounds in the other hand. Followed Jerry the entire time, talking non-stop. From what I could hear he knows more about Bauhaus the band and Bauhaus the design school than any human being should.

Rowan: Looked like he lifts weights professionally. Was 6’2″–and that’s the width of his chest. Needed help carrying a coffee table.

Of course moving was just the start. It would be followed by unpacking that, well, if you’ve ever moved, you know still isn’t complete, and also a lot of “Where is the…?” followed by “In a box somewhere.” Then there would be getting to know the neighbors, but that’s another story.

 

Adventures In Busing., Hail & Farewell., Not Non-Fiction, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Weekly Essay

Moving Right Along.

Author: March 28, 2025 3 Comments

So my wife and I have been considering moving for various reasons. It would be a big change and it occurs to me that, unlike most people I know, I feel like I’ve been in one place most of my life. I’ve traveled halfway around the world and somehow ended up back in the city where I was born. My family moved when I was just four, and though I have very vivid, and happy, memories of the first house we lived in, moving wasn’t scary or traumatic. It was fun and exciting. Then I went off to college, which wasn’t exactly moving—just transferring some of my stuff—then got married and, well, settled down. My wife and I have lived in the same house for as long as we’ve been together. That’s because we’ve been happy with the place, and still are, mostly, but around us things are changing. We had neighbors who moved out and their house sat empty for a month or so, then one morning I went to work and when I came home in the afternoon there was a pile of brick and broken wood and glass and shingles where their house had been. It’s a scene that’s played out up and down our street: as houses get sold they get knocked down and are replaced with oversized McMansions. So, to paraphrase Billy Joel, if that’s movin’ up then we’re movin’ out.

We can’t just pick up and move, though, so we’ve been looking at some different houses, which has been fun. With every place I think, what would our lives be like here? I thought it would be easy but just one day of visiting various potential domiciles disabused me of that notion. At least one of the advantages of moving now is we can look at houses online without having to actually visit them which makes it easy to narrow the search, though several looked great on a screen but, when seen in person, looked like their photos had been retouched, airbrushed, and finally replaced with a picture of another house.

The first house was perfect and had everything we wanted—if it were knocked over on its side, since the design was tall and narrow. The hallway to the bedrooms wasn’t big enough for two people to pass. The bedrooms themselves were spacious, if, like Spider-Man, we could stick to the walls. At least there was a nice big yard to make up for the lack of interior space and the week-old-salmon-colored cabinets could always be repainted.

The next house was perfect and had everything we wanted and several things we didn’t, including a giant crater about fifty feet from the front door that looked like someone had started digging a spot for an Olympic-sized hot tub and then forgot about it. At least there was a nice big yard. The only problem was the road that ran right through the middle of it. On the other side of the road, in what would be the rest of our yard, there were several abandoned camper vans. My wife said that if we picked that place we’d make hauling those away a condition of closing the sale. I thought we could keep one. I’d turn it into a studio space and name it “Beethoven”, but we decided to pass on the place entirely.

The next house was perfect and had everything we wanted and then some. It had a nice big backyard with a shed and woods and a deck built around a tree with a couple of chairs for sitting. There was even a graveyard just a few doors down which I thought would be really convenient if it became the place where we spend the rest of our lives. Unfortunately the commute to work would be two hours every day and that’s at least an hour more than I want to spend driving.

The next house was perfect and had everything we wanted if we were looking for a staircase so steep it was like climbing into an M.C. Escher print. The amazing thing about it is from the outside it looked almost identical to the house of a friend of mine, even down to its position on a cul-de-sac, and, aside from the vertical stairs, had very similar floorplan. Years earlier he bought a car that matched ours, since he liked it so much, and it tickled me to think I could tell him we were moving into his house’s twin. It also had a nice big backyard, though the downside was it was all downside, the whole house overlooking a gully.

So we decided we’d continue searching, and a week later while I was at work my wife called to say she thought she’d found one that had everything we wanted, but we decided we’d look at it together to see what it didn’t.

Adventures In Busing., Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault, The Weekly Essay

Something In The Air.

Author: March 25, 2025 1 Comment

Spring is in the air which means it’s allergy season. Lately I’ve been hit with paroxysms of coughing, and while “paroxysm” is a great Scrabble word it’s not a fun thing to have coming up out of my lungs. For most of my life I was happy I didn’t seem to be allergic to anything. And I really mean anything. I once fell in a patch of poison ivy, not deliberately, and rolled over, because I didn’t realize it was poison ivy and if I had I would have done my best to get vertical without any superfluous motion, but I came out of the experience literally without a scratch. Before I got cancer it was easy to fill out medical forms, at least when I got to the question, “Are you allergic to anything?” I could always dash off a quick “No” and move on. Now I hesitate over the question but there isn’t a check-box for “I don’t know and I’m terrified of finding out!”

I know it’s an allergy to, well, something because other than the coughing and the occasional sneeze I feel fine. Colds, the flu, and other actual diseases would have other symptoms. I’d at least feel tired and achy. In fact I’m lucky that my reaction whatever I’m allergic to that’s in the air right now isn’t that bad. I think of allergies as our bodies overreacting to something that’s basically harmless—that might even be beneficial. Peanuts and shrimp are good for most of us but I also have friends for whom peanuts and shrimp are lethal, which is why when we go out to eat I skip the pad thai.

Then it occurred to me that my wife and I have been doing some spring cleaning. Mostly I’ve been trying to reduce my book collection to a manageable size. Well, more manageable. Well, I’ve stopped trying to pack half the Library of Congress into our house. Librarians call it “weeding”–pulling duplicates and other books that, for whatever reason, are no longer necessary. It’s prompted some hard decisions. Obviously I don’t need two identical translations of Sir Gawain & The Green Knight–but do I need two? Well, one is a verse translation and the other is prose…In addition to the hard questions it’s also brought out some dust and that could be what’s caused the coughing. 

I also remembered that I used to have a coworker who coughed all day every day. It wasn’t loud—just a steady drumbeat of low level expectoration. And it wasn’t hard to guess that her cubicle being right under a perpetually dusty air vent might have had something to do with it. Office changes have put me not quite under it but close to it. Which may be why the one thing that seems to stop the coughing is going outside—ironically the one thing that triggers allergies in a lot of other people.

 

Adventures In Busing.

Lucky Day.

Author: March 17, 2025 2 Comments

In recent years St. Patrick’s Day has become controversial because of a maligned and often caricatured minority. I’m referring, of course, to leprechauns. Reviled, mistreated, and still all too frequently portrayed as happy little figures sitting on toadstools smoking pipes even though increasingly they’re switching to e-cigarettes the leprechaun is still the object of prejudice and misconceptions. Many of us, in fact, have passed by or even worked alongside leprechauns, often without realizing it. In the interests of time I’ll just be addressing a few of the most common misconceptions here.

The first is the ancient belief that leprechauns are mischievous, even dangerous creatures. Stories of leprechauns luring travelers into bogs or inflicting injuries on those passing through wooded areas go back as far as the 8th century, but sociologists now agree that such behavior is not characteristic of leprechauns, and is, in fact, quite rare. While there may be some basis in truth for these stories it’s widely accepted that destructive behavior was the act of a minority among leprechauns who, feeling marginalized from the culture as a whole, acted out in anti-social ways. Unfortunately this misconception has been perpetuated and reinforced by stories that are still told to children, as well as in movies, such as the 1993 film Leprechaun, its many sequels including 2000’s Leprechaun in the Hood, and, of course, the 1980 Al Pacino movie Cruising.

There is also a less common misconception of leprechauns as helpful. There are stories of leprechauns discreetly doing farm work, including harvesting, milking cows, and repairing small machinery. Again there may be some basis for these stories, but not all leprechauns enjoy the outdoors or are suited for farm work. Many prefer to work in offices, or seek employment in fields such as shoemaking. This is, of course, not to say that all leprechauns are adept at working with footwear, but many did find this to be an accepted trade. It’s believed this originated from leprechauns making shoes for fairies who, being generally more accepted, would be asked by more common folk where they got such amazing stilettoes. Working as cobblers proved to be profitable even when leprechauns were subject to such fierce discrimination that they were kept out of most cities and towns and had to form their own exclusive villages, commonly known as leprechaulonies.

Stories of farmers rewarding helpful leprechauns with suits of clothes, only to find that the leprechauns considered this an insult and would disappear, may also have some basis in truth, mainly because you can’t expect a leprechaun to wear that coat with those pants, especially after Labor Day.

Finally we come to the most common and persistent belief about leprechauns: that they are hoarders of massive quantities of gold which they keep in pots at the end of rainbows. This belief has been so pervasive that attempts have been made to lure leprechauns with artificial rainbows by everyone from Sir Isaac Newton to the manager of the band Pink Floyd. As a belief it was understandable at a time when people regarded meteorological phenomena as magical, unlike now when it’s understood that rainbows are caused by the refraction of sunlight through water droplets suspended in dragon farts. Because rainbows rarely have ends that reach the ground it’s still not understood how exactly leprechauns could have kept their alleged pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, in spite of several theories advanced by folklorists and experiments attempting to hang pots of gold from rainbows using balloons. A frequently repeated tale is that a leprechaun, when caught, may be forced to give up the location of his pot of gold, but only if the person who caught him keeps his eyes fixed on the leprechaun. In stories of this type the leprechaun often escapes capture by telling the person who caught him that there’s a fierce beast or the Chrysler building just over his shoulder. Folklorists believe that there is some truth in this, but only to the extent that leprechauns seem to have invented the “made you look” joke. Also it’s now known that leprechauns are not inherently wealthy. While there are some who have enjoyed success—the heir to the Lucky Charms fortune, for instance, or Mickey Rooney—leprechauns are no more likely to be wealthy than the general population.

That concludes the lecture for today. In preparation for next week read pages 126-153, when we will be discussing genetic mutation and its potential for altering reality. Our lab work will involve real four-leaf clovers, but I’d better not catch any of you wishing for a better grade.

Adventures In Busing., Not Non-Fiction, Submitted For Your Approval.

Passing Through Uranus.

Author: March 13, 2025 1 Comment

Source: Wikipedia

On March 13th, 1781 the composer, musician, and amateur astronomer William Herschel looked through his telescope and realized what he’d initially thought was a comet was, in fact, a previously unknown planet. It was the first planet discovered in modern times and, after a lot of discussion, would eventually be named Uranus, after the primordial Greek god of the sky. Although it had been observed since ancient times it was so distant and so difficult to see it was assumed to be a star. The discovery that it was a planet is why I think Uranus deserves special recognition.

When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 1986 astronomers were unimpressed and thought it was a pretty boring planet. Since then interest in Uranus has picked up. Seasonal changes and wind speeds of 560 miles per hour have been found on Uranus. Its temperature of -200 degrees Celsius means Uranus is a very, very cold place. Until very recently it was thought to be the only gas giant that didn’t emit detectable heat. Now it’s been determined that it does emit heat, though less than Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. It also remains unusual for its axial tilt of 98 degrees, making Uranus the most lopsided planet in the solar system.

If space travel advances Uranus may someday also be very important as a launching point for missions leaving the solar system. The large quantities of methane in Uranus may even be a source of fuel, if we can tap into it. It’s fourteen times more massive than Earth so Uranus has a very intense gravitational pull. It’s also not easy to get there. Even traveling at the speed of light it would take an Earth ship almost two and a half hours to get to Uranus.

More terrestrially there’s the town of Uranus, Missouri, a small stopping point for tourists along the historic Route 66, where you can visit the Fudge Factory And General Store, and where, the mayor tells me, they have a special celebration every March 13th.

This is why I think Uranus Day is an event we can all get behind.

Source: Uranus Fudge Factory

Adventures In Busing., Happy Birthday., Keep Looking Up, Ramble With Me., Submitted For Your Approval., The Vault

Morning Light.

Author: March 10, 2025 2 Comments

The change to Daylight Saving Time this weekend meant that for the first time in months I left for work in the dark. Because my morning commute takes me almost due east there were a few days when I was driving right into the sun. Maybe that’s why this morning I was so conscious of the artificial lights I passed, still aglow in the rising dawn. If there’s an advantage to the time change it’s that it makes me more aware, although I may be unusual in that. While waiting at a red light I saw two guys in the middle of the cross street standing by a white pickup truck; there was a dark blue pickup truck right behind it. The blue pickup’s front was touching the white one’s back fender. They were both laughing about it and before the light changed they pulled into a parking lot, presumably to exchange insurance information, though from my vantage point I couldn’t see any damage.

It’s strange that I’d see an accident on my way to work. For one thing I don’t see many accidents anyway, and I’m grateful for that. But also at least one study has found that there’s a drop in accidents following the spring change to Daylight Savings Time, with an increase in the fall.

Seeing a small fender bender made me even more conscious of the road ahead as I drove into the dawn, streetlights winking out and lights still on in businesses and apartments dimming as I got closer to work, the sun still not over the horizon after I parked and walked across the roof of the parking garage.

Adventures In Busing., Quick Takes., Ramble With Me.

I Feel Like A Dip.

Author: March 4, 2025 3 Comments

Bobbie’s Dairy Dip is open again. It closes every November and the owners used to put up a sign that said, “Closed for the season. Reason? Freezin’!” Maybe they stopped because they didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that they were closed, but I liked that sign. There was something bittersweet about it, knowing that, like migratory birds or hibernating animals, the ice cream stand was gone but would return with warmer weather. Well, it’s still not exactly warm. They reopened on a very chilly March 1st and when I passed by I didn’t feel like waiting in the very long line for a caramel milkshake, or even their special black bean and avocado burgers, though one of those would have been a nice way to warm up.

When I was a kid we didn’t eat ice cream in the winter. I don’t think it was ever explicitly stated, and there was no specific reason for it other than no one in my family seemed inclined to combine frozen weather with frozen food. There wasn’t even a specific time period; my mother just stopped buying ice cream once the cold weather settled in. I was aware of it but didn’t really think about why until I was visiting an aunt one January and she scooped up a couple of bowls of mint chocolate chip.

“We’re having ice cream in winter?” I asked. I wasn’t objecting—quite the opposite, really. It was just a very minor part of my worldview being, well, not shaken, but slightly altered. The aunt laughed and said, “Any time is time for ice cream.”

She was, and still is, right, of course, but there’s also something special about a place like Bobbie’s Dairy Dip only being there part of the year. The anticipation makes their ice cream so much sweeter.

Now I wish I had stopped and gotten a caramel milkshake. And I’m going to the next time I go by there. I won’t even wait for the weather to warm up.

Adventures In Busing.

You Don’t Have To Be Crazy To Work Here.

Author: February 25, 2025 7 Comments

One of the nice things about a new coworker is they can remind me of things I’d forgotten or that I just take for granted but should still appreciate. The other day a new coworker dropped by my cubicle to ask a work question but instead asked something much more important: “Why do you have a big ball of string?”

It’s the last remnant of when I worked in the mailroom. Packages, especially from overseas, sometimes came in wrapped up in string and I started saving it because you never know when you might need some string. I also had hopes it might one day rival the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota but I moved on to other jobs. Even though I still dropped in to check on the mailroom occasionally the number of packages, especially those tied with string, declined. I still kept the ball of string but I’ve had it so long I’d completely forgotten about it until the new coworker asked about it.

I couldn’t there, though. I had to share the one time I actually used the ball of string for something. Several years earlier another coworker, now long gone, dropped by my cubicle to ask a work question but instead asked something much more important: “Hey, do you think you have enough string to reach the ground floor?”

Do not underestimate the value of questions like this. The office is on the 7th floor so the distance to the ground is approximately seventy feet. I’d never measured the string but this would give us a good idea how much I had. At the time the office windows opened—they’ve since been sealed for safety reasons and to make temperature regulation easier. The coworker had a pink stuffed hippo and we decided to use it as a weight. Unfortunately I’d forgotten to tie the last piece of string to the rest and, as I was lowering it, the hippo and about a foot of string took a sudden tumble to the ground.

We took the elevator to the first floor and pulled the hippo out of the bushes.

Back on the seventh floor we decided to make another try but this time with a pencil—something we wouldn’t mind sacrificing. As it was descending past the sixth floor, which is a parking garage and also smoker’s lounge, a hand shot out and grabbed the pencil.

“Hello? Hello? Who’s up there? Who’s doing this?”

For someone taking a smoke break they sounded unusually edgy. I started pulling on the string but they wouldn’t let go. My coworker quickly grabbed a pair of scissors and we sacrificed a few feet of string.

It wasn’t necessary to share all of this, of course, but I feel it was important to give my new coworker a sense of what they could expect from me.

Here’s a detailed illustration of where all this occurred:

Adventures In Busing.

Ripple Effect.

Author: February 18, 2025 5 Comments

We’re under a winter storm threat, with snow and prolonged freezing temperatures expected, and even though the skies are partly sunny right now the warning is already disrupting my schedule for the week ahead because we could get as much as three inches of snow. I know that sounds funny to people in places that are used to snow and, to be fair, Nashville does get enough snow that we should be used to it by now. Also there are a lot of people who’ve moved here from other places and they should have brought their snow experience with them. I even asked a coworker who’d moved here from Cleveland—Ohio, not Tennessee—how people in her hometown dealt with heavy snow.

“Oh, we know exactly what to do,” she said. “When there’s really heavy snow we stay home.”

That’s wise advice and with telecommuting it’s a lot easier to do that and still get work done, although a part of me misses the days when my wife and I had a vehicle with four-wheel drive and there were snow days when I’d be the only person in the office.

The downside of this winter weather warning is that I’d spent the last two weeks juggling multiple schedules so I could give a tour of where I work to some new employees. I really enjoy giving tours and of course they can happen at any time but I hate having to flood people with meeting requests that then get cancelled followed by new requests.

As my wife was reading off the specifics of the storm warning there was this note at the end: “Mosquito impact is expected to be minimal.”

So there is a bright side to it.

Adventures In Busing.

Out To Lunch.

Author: February 11, 2025 3 Comments

A coworker asked me where I went for lunch every day and then immediately apologized because she realized that, well, that’s an invasive question. She was just curious because every day at noon I pass by her cubicle with my journal. Not that I have anything to hide but I’d never ask someone where they go because they might have their reasons for wanting to keep that information private. I don’t know if anyone else is like me but when I’m off the clock I want to get as far away from work as possible, and when I’ve gone to lunch with people I work with I try to steer the conversations to pretty much anything but work. I have the advantage of working on a college campus and even when classes are in session there are a lot of empty classrooms or just lounge spaces where I can hide out for half an hour. I’ve worked in office buildings out in the middle of nowhere and felt trapped during lunch because there wasn’t anywhere to go. There was a break room and a dining area with vending machines but if I wanted to get out and walk, go somewhere truly away from work, my options were the parking lot or, just beyond that, the interstate.

It’s really funny to me that, as is the case with a lot of older college campuses, there are lots of buildings that have old exteriors but they’ve been renovated from the inside, usually over years, sometimes over decades, and that’s created some mazelike interiors with rooms I think even people who work in those buildings forget are there. One of these days one of those buildings may be knocked down entirely and they’ll find a grizzled old professor behind a wall, still diligently working away at a monograph on Phoenician etymology.

Anyway, without really thinking about it I started telling the coworker that some days I’d walk a few buildings over to one that has a nice lounge area and an outdoor patio that no one else seems to know about since it was only added during a renovation that happened about five years ago. It wasn’t until I was on my way there that I realized I’d given away a valuable secret and now I need to find a new place to get away. Maybe there’s a space next to that professor’s office.

Adventures In Busing.