For some, these are the final hours of summer. It’s 10:13pm. Across the state hundreds of children are splayed out on their bedroom carpets, organizing their school materials into stacks, laying out the next day’s outfit, and then laying it out again.
For me the first day of school always required about the same preparation as [...]

On the evening of February 1, 1988, a man sat down for dinner in San Bernadino, CA. He ordered steak, the house special, and turned his face toward the book in his lap.
“The morning of September 29, 1781, dawned gray and overcast, with tendrils of damp mist swelling over the flat countryside surrounding the [...]

Driving home in abnormally dense traffic yesterday, a thought occurred to me: this traffic is the work of the devil himself. No other force could connive such a fist-clenching, lung-clogging, ear-drumming inconvenience. No other force except, of course, The Minnesota State Fair.
It has been my privilege and my crucible to have lived within walking [...]

I should be typing this with my elbows, since my forearms are paste. It’s not that the keys are too small; they’re too close together. It’s a design flaw. You ought to be able to type with the appendage of your choice.
My forearms are sore because I went rock climbing with my brother yesterday. Rock [...]

When I was in third grade at Brimhall Elementary School in Roseville, a rare and amazing thing happened: the school decided to install a completely new playground. What’s more, they wanted the kids’ help designing it.
This was, in my case, literally a dream come true. I don’t know about other kids, but the amount of [...]

Busy weekend, figuring out how to fit a three-person wardrobe (two for her, one for me) in a one person bedroom. That involved, sadly, a second trip in a week to Ikea. But I did get a nice 75 cent hot dog, topped with lingenberries.
This time, though, we made it through in under 30 minutes, [...]

Part 2: Competition
I don’t know when the idea came up. I don’t know how. Perhaps it was whispered in the back of the room. Maybe it was written on an unusual fortune cookie. Wherever it came from, it was soon accepted as fact.
There was to be a Tex Mex Challenge. Anyone could compete. The goal: [...]

Sometimes the days are so short and so long, they feel like rubber bands; stretching and shrinking in the same direction.
Lately my days are like that, and it doesn’t make good fodder for the typewriter…eh, keyboard. I could write about a busy day at work in which I shifted the position of my posterior [...]

NPR has been running a series on creative spaces; the environments authors, actors, musicians and others find most conducive to creativity. Last week was writer Daniel Silva, who holes himself up in a basement room no one is allowed to enter. No one, except NPR and its millions of listeners.
This week was Felicia Rashad, the [...]

I’ve never seen Michael Phelps, the 19-year-old Olympic swimmer favored to win a half-dozen medals this month in Athens, but from what I’ve heard, I picture him as some kind of otter. Long arms, big hands, wide shoulders, short stumpy legs, and a nice, glossy coat of fur.
But really, I don’t think I need [...]