Light Bulb Quest
It’s almost Christmas already! Compared with the previous two years, this year’s winter holiday season (‘peak’) seems to have flown past! Any other time of the year, the UPS warehouse where I work is largely empty after all the package cars drive away with their loads. By contrast, all through peak, piles of packages are […]
Thanksgiving two years ago I shared my thoughts about what I was thankful for as a new package car driver for United Parcel Service. Then last year I observed Thanksgiving with a reflection on how the supply chain is really a global chain of human (inter)activity bringing our purchases all the way to our front […]
Happy November! I see the day after Halloween as the first day of the holiday season. Time to start enjoying Christmas music again! Recently I gave five simple reasons why I love being a UPS driver. Since then I’ve thought of a few others, including this one: I make people happy, all day, every day. […]
In the U.S. over my lifetime, Labor Day has served chiefly as a three-day weekend bracketing the ending of summer break from the beginning of the school year. I myself never gave much thought to the holiday until I started researching its origins. All across the country, all throughout the industrial era, the history of […]
For the past several months the eyes of the world have been on Ukraine. In a modern David-versus-Goliath scenario, Russia’s military has met tougher-than-expected resistance from scrappy Ukrainian forces – the entire Ukrainian population, really. Outmanned and outgunned, Ukrainians have nevertheless shown themselves fierce defenders of their homeland against the invading aggressors. What was supposed […]
A while back I shared about some of the things I’d had to let go of, amidst the professional and personal losses of the past few years. In some very real ways my life is harder now than it had been before. But I didn’t share out of any sense of bitterness, disappointment, frustration, or […]
I could be wrong. I feel like it happens to everyone, but maybe I’m the only one. And I feel like it’s happened to me more than once, but one incident in particular stands out. I was in high school at the time. One day, a member of my daily ‘lunch bunch’ carelessly tossed their […]
In my last post I was feeling pretty good. I’d returned to training for a marathon after a long hiatus, and I believed my new(-ish) job as a UPS driver was helping me train stronger than ever before. Since I’d been setting new records in my training runs of various distances, I flew to Denver […]
If you’ve been following this blog since the beginning, you’ll know that I used to run regularly. When I lost my dream job I’d been running outdoors year-round for more than ten years. Runner isn’t one of my identities. I picked up running in my 30s as a reasonably convenient and inexpensive way to try […]
Just before Covid shut the whole world down, I’d made a trip to Houston where my son Judson was living at the time. It was my first visit so he was showing me all the sights around town. One of Houston’s points of interest is the Johnson Space Center. I’m not a full-on space nerd […]