Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and fill-in-the-blank greetings.  It’s a nice season, whether you’re celebrating one of the major religious holidays or just enjoying time with family and friends for the sake of, well, spending time with family and friends.   I was not planning on posting a Christmas post, but then I came across a [...] Read more »

  I’m sure like many people, I feel fairly overwhelmed day-to-day with all the things that need to be done.  I had attempted to manage this (twice) by implementing Getting Things Done by David Allen, with initial success but little long-term progress.  I’ve recently plateaued out on my second implementation and I’m again searching for [...] Read more »

I may not do many more of these roundups – I’m not sure how much value you, as readers, get out of them.  I do read a lot of interesting stuff on the internet but it’s easy to get overwhelmed, and so I don’t know if I’m doing more harm than good by adding a [...] Read more »

  I was looking through some old photos and found some I took on a weekend trip to the Russian countryside with some of my friends back in the mid-9os.  We drove out to a village in the Golden Circle outside of Moscow – the ancient town of Suzdal – rented some rooms in an [...] Read more »

The phone rang, and my stomach clenched when I heard her voice. “Daddy? I want to go home,” said my 8-year-old daughter, Arden. Two hours earlier, I dropped Arden and her two siblings off at their new school in a squat building in a forest of Soviet-era apartment blocks on Krasnoarmeyskaya (Red Army) Street in [...] Read more »

Happy Labor Day.  It’s one of the most pointless holidays we have now, the celebration of labor in an increasingly labor-unfriendly economy; much like Thanksgiving, it’s been transformed into a celebration of consumerism through sales and quick vacations.  I’m as much a participant as I am a critic, so I don’t consider myself above it [...] Read more »