The opening line to a Miranda Lambert song goes like this, “I know they say, ‘you can’t go home again.’” But I think I just did. Over the holidays, I finally tackled a project that has been on my do-it-when-I-have-time list since Beta videos were being sold at Tower Records. The project involved transferring about a million family videos onto DVDs. It wasn’t that hard to do but I had never found the time, at least not with all the episodes of Storage Wars and The Office I had to keep up with. Now I must admit, I’ve never been a big fan of home movies. I think my aversion goes back to my …

So, we’re smack dab in the middle of the Christmas season. And even though I don’t know what “smack dab” means, I do know that this is one of the busiest times of the year. In fact, it seems that my holiday to-do list will never get to-done. Thanksgiving was easy. Fight the traffic. Eat some food. Go home. It was all about managing my caloric intake and tolerating dysfunctional relatives. It was pretty simple. Christmas, on the other hand, is a bit more complicated. We’ve got gifts to buy, a house to decorate, food to cook, and for me, the dreaded letter to write. Every year, many of us …

Fashion wise, I’ve never been GQ material. In fact, truth be told, I've never even read GQ. I was a Sears’ guy growing up and then moved up to JC Penny when I hit college. I would never turn Heidi Klum's head, unless that is, I turned her head away because of my fashion senselessness. I've been told that I owned a leisure suit in high school and wore it to the homecoming dance. I have no recollection of this. What’s even worse, the jacket of my leisure suit apparently did not even match the pants. My outfit had thrift shop written all over it. And yet, in my Appalachian community, I fit right…

One of my favorite Joan Rivers’ lines, was years ago when she made fun of Elizabeth Taylor’s weight gain. Joan said that Elizabeth Taylor would put something in the microwave and stand there yelling, “Hurry up! Hurry Up!” Today, this doesn’t seem so unusual because we live in an instant download world but back then, the relatively new microwave ovens were surprisingly fast. The humor came from thinking that anyone would want their food cooked faster. Today, as someone once said, if we miss one section of a revolving door, our entire day is shot. Why is it that we have so much trouble waiting…

Have you noticed how much it cost to stay in a nice hotel these days? I bought a house for less. Seriously. If you add up the daily rate for a moderately priced hotel room, such as a Hilton or a Marriott, the 30-day total would be more than twice my monthly mortgage payment. That doesn’t seem quite right. And what’s worse, the room rate is not really the room rate. It’s the room rate less the service fees, the gratuities and the stick-it-to-you-when-you-leave charges. For example, a few weeks ago, I was staying in a moderately priced hotel and ordered room service. Between you and me, the …

There’s an old joke about a man who said that he thought his wife wanted to move to Florida because she was always referring to the sun and the beach (I’ll give you a minute to let that sink in). I love vacations. I love looking at the ocean. I hate the sun and the beach. You see, I’m very pale. In fact, I’m almost clear. So when it comes to the sun, I’m not a candidate for bronzebeachbody.com. During the summer months, I cover myself with SPF 1450 to avoid burning to avoid getting skin cancer to avoid dying to avoid missing all the fun I’ll have as a pale old man. I was born with pasty skin …

In a short 13 months, my son will fly the coop and continue his academic career outside the home, hopefully, at a college of his choice. Tomorrow, our country will celebrate its independence from British Rule. I couldn’t help but notice the similarities between the intent of the original colonies and that of my son. In anticipation of his departure, I prepared this document which will dissolve the traditional parental relationship in hopes of a new and more independent collegiate one for him, hopefully with a 3.5 GPA or higher.   In Herndon, August 2012The Unanimous Declaration of the United …

Later this month, my wife and I will celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. According to today’s standards, our marital longevity is somewhat unusual. I believe that makes me an expert on the subject and I’d like to share my wedded wisdom with you. So, for your matrimonial reading pleasure, I offer you... The 25 Things I have Learned from A Quarter Century of Marriage*(*To the Same Person) 1.    When your father-in-law gives you a ride to the airport after the wedding and says, “Have fun on your honeymoon,” he’s thinking about a different kind of fun than you are. 2.    If you’re still in …

International travel intimidates me. As comedian Steve Martin once said, other countries “have a different word for everything.”  I’m always afraid I’ll find myself in a foreign land needing a bathroom or surgery to replace a kidney where no one speaks English. Is it too much to ask for other countries to adopt English as their primary language? I don’t think so. It’s the American way. And on top of language issue, it’s hard to find a decent hamburger outside the U.S. I recently traveled to a conference in Holland, which by the way, is actually called The Netherlands. I had no idea. In fact, …

I love sports. But I don’t LOVE sports. By that, I mean I enjoy them but I’m not consumed by them.  In fact, I’ve participated in my share of highly competitive sports. I played one year of junior varsity basketball in high school averaging an intense 20 seconds per game and putting up an impressive .2 points per game. I also ran track for two years. My events were the high hurdles and the high jump. Unfortunately, I was low. At five feet, three inches tall, I was routinely high jumping the hurdles and hurling into the high jump bar. The high jump event started at five feet, one inch, by the …

Soon, my son will take the SAT Reasoning Test in preparation for the college application process. You may remember this as the Scholastic Aptitude Test or the Scholastic Assessment Test. In case you’ve been living under a rock, or you’re Charlie Sheen, the SAT is pretty much the required test for college admission. And these days, you have to score really, really, really well on the SAT’s to get into a good university. My son needed a little help with the reading comprehension portion so we enrolled him in an SAT Prep Course as a way to help him hone his skills before the big test. Growing up…

If you’re over 50 and you have not yet had a colonoscopy, pick up the phone and schedule one right now. There’s no reason to avoid it. Unless, of course, you object to purging your entire digestive system and then letting a doctor, who by the way chose to focus on patients’ hind quarters for a living, insert a small (and by small I mean huge) video camera up inside you to see if he can find a polyp or two. Then, you may prefer to schedule a root canal without anesthesia instead. But, colonoscopies do save lives. So I suggest you get over your rectaphobia, bend over and just do it. Knowing the…

In less than a week, I become eligible for my first AARP card. The American Association of Retired Persons, as it was originally called, bestows this honor on those of us 50 years and older. Yes, I'll be 50. I can almost hear you gasp in disbelief. Or perhaps it's just gas. I have friends who declare that they'll never join AARP because they don't think they're that old. I think they're missing the point. AARP is about so much more than getting old or retiring. It's about advocating for an aging society. It's about resources for those who need support. And most importantly it's about …

It's that time of year again when the air is abuzz with the sights and sounds of the holidays. Trees are cut down, shoppers go in debt, and a family of four can eat more in a single sitting than most third world countries consume in a year. It just warms your heart. Before I go on, I offer this disclaimer. I'm Christian. Presbyterian, to be more specific. One of God's frozen people as it were. So, my perspective is slightly biased—even though a personal opinion is biased by the very nature of its being a personal opinion. The bottom line is, I do not claim to be an expert in other faiths or …

It's been nearly a year but the memory still haunts me. I watched my daughter walk away from the car fully expecting her to turn back, at least once, to wave goodbye. She never did. She just kept moving. And then with one quick step, she disappeared behind a building.  The realization of the situation was excruciating. My daughter had chosen to leave home because she wanted to live somewhere else. Our lives would never be the same. You see, my too-young-for-the-real-world baby girl had gone to college. How could we have allowed this to happen? I cursed the 4.0 grade point average, the high …