For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, I’ve starting thinking about taking flying lessons when the pandemic is over. My primary concern is that flying is not an inexpensive hobby. I’ve read that one should expect to spend about $10,000 getting a private pilot’s license, and a friend of mine said that flying regularly once you have a license is likely to cost a similar amount each year. . . .
Category: Personal
Writing Postcards to Get Out the Vote
As I’ve mentioned, I volunteered on a Democratic congressional campaign in 2018 to help the Democratic Party win a majority in the House. This year I’ve struggled with what I could do to support Biden’s campaign. . . .
Our Remarkable Neighborhood
I live in one of the most neighborly neighborhoods I’ve ever known. It consists of 63 homes on two intersecting streets in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Jennifer and I moved here in 2014 because we liked the house; we didn’t know anything about the neighborhood. But whenever we were outdoors during our first few days here, someone would come by, introduce themselves and welcome us. They never failed to declare what a great neighborhood it was. Everyone was so nice that at one point I confessed to Jennifer that I was waiting for the other shoe to drop — I was afraid we might have moved to Stepford. . . .
Watering Flowers During a Pandemic
Before the coronavirus shut things down, Jennifer was a volunteer with the Trenton Circus Squad, driving kids to and from an after-school program at the Roebling Wire Works building in Trenton and helping to provide adult supervision. The pandemic temporarily closed off that opportunity, and Jennifer also lost her retirement gig at McCarter Theatre when performances were halted indefinitely. So when a friend in town told us about a volunteer opportunity that did not involve congregating with groups of other people, we signed right up. . . .
Condiment Man
I’ve always been someone for whom condiments are important. I like mustard and relish on my hot dog, ketchup and mayonnaise on my hamburger. I butter my toast, put duck sauce on my egg roll, and half & half in my coffee. I slice a banana on my cereal, put salsa on my nachos, and sprinkle grated Parmesan on my pasta. . . .
Is News Consumption Bad For You?
One of the themes that both pundits and ordinary people expound on these days is the way that following the news can be stressful. There’s so much bad news, and there are so many outlets that will dish it up for as many of your waking hours as you’re willing to spend consuming it. But I’ve read a couple of things recently that go a bit further: suggestions that overconsumption of news is detrimental to your mental health and bad for your grip on reality. . . .
Streaming Services
We’ve all read about the “cable cutters” who have dropped their expensive cable TV subscriptions in favor of an ala carte collection of streaming services that gives them access to the programs they want without paying for stuff they don’t.
Jennifer and I find ourselves in the more expensive category of having signed up for various streaming services while retaining our cable subscription. . . .
Hearing Aids – Part 2
I wrote yesterday about my decision at the beginning of this year to get hearing aids. When I was trying them out before ordering them, my audiologist, Ryan Matoon, said that he had configured the hearing aids to provide only an 80% correction of my hearing loss because most people found that experiencing a full correction right away was hard to take. Fully hearing all the sounds one hasn’t previously been hearing can be distracting if not overwhelming. . . .
Hearing Aids – Part 1
In January I became one of the approximately 5 million people in the U.S. who wear hearing aids. For at least 15 years prior to that I was one of about 24 million Americans who the NIH says would benefit from hearing aids but don’t have them.
Both of my parents and my brother developed significant hearing loss years ago, and the first evidence that I also had a hearing problem came when I started having trouble understanding two people in my life. . . .
Reading the New York Times Out Loud
Years ago I read a column by the New York Times columnist Russel Baker in which he described a typical day. It started with sitting up in bed with a cup of coffee reading the Times. I was immediately envious, so I started going to bed earlier each night so that I’d have time to read the Times in the morning before getting ready for work…