Look to the Goal, and Stay out of the Ditch

Posted by on Dec 20, 2014 | No Comments
Look to the Goal, and Stay out of the Ditch

I took a motorcycle class to get re-certified and learned an important principle that goes way beyond riding two wheelers. The instructor emphasized over and over in both the classroom and on the course that when you’re making a turn you want to look through the turn—look where you’re going—and not at the obstacle near […]

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A Gift for Making Friends

Posted by on Oct 1, 2013 | No Comments

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”  Ralph Waldo Emerson Why do some people have a knack at connecting with others? Over the last several decades my wife and I had a chance to observe one person who had this gift—my mother-in-law, Patti Scarrah. Patti started to go blind over a decade […]

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How Did You Meet Your Mate?

Posted by on Sep 20, 2012 | No Comments

My wife and I taught a marriage preparation class where our favorite icebreaker question was, “How did you meet your future spouse?” Common answers were, “Through friends,” “In a bar,” or, “We were classmates.” But the answer from one couple, which I’ll share later, has always stood out in my mind as the story to […]

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The Flavor of Manna

Posted by on Mar 8, 2012 | No Comments

Help sometimes comes from unlikely places. One friend told me about being down to crumbs in the pantry when an anonymous grocery gift card arrived in the mail. Last week I was scouting a remote area for a snow shoeing trip when I came across a fireman whose truck battery had died and was able to […]

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Everyday is Valentine’s Day?

Posted by on Feb 14, 2012 | No Comments

Ten months after Laurie and I started dating we had our first Valentine’s Day together. We were both freshman at the University of Washington and commuted together to the campus. During a break between classes she presented me with a card to celebrate the occasion. Like a typical clueless college boy, I had neglected to […]

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Felix Navidad

Posted by on Dec 6, 2011 | No Comments

If you’re curious about our tradition of “delegating” our annual Christmas letter to the family pet check out the post  A Canine Christmas Card. For many years Dennis and Laurie have had a family pet pen their annual Christmas letter. But Rascal passed away at the ripe old age of 107 last February and they’ve […]

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The Strength of a Story

Posted by on Aug 30, 2011 | No Comments

This article originally printed in the July 2011 issue of Toastmasters Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Toastmasters International. My ship was on the reef, snapped in two like a dry stick; I was face down in the boxing ring and the referee was about to count “Ten.” In short, my speech was bombing – big time. […]

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A Little Respect, Please

Posted by on Jul 5, 2011 | No Comments

Jim Riggleman quit his dream job because he was “disrespected.” Riggleman was the manager of the Washington Nationals baseball franchise. He took the last place Nationals from division cellar dwellers to contenders. Just after winning 11 of 12 games (including a sweep of my Seattle Mariners) he resigned. For the last two years he’s been […]

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The Big Story

Posted by on Jun 29, 2011 | No Comments

I’ve neglected my story telling blog recently because I’ve been working on a bigger story, a longer one, a novel about 95,000 words long. I recently entered my manuscript into a contest for unpublished fiction writers. I was optimistic because an earlier version of the same story had placed third in an international on-line contest and […]

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A Little Faith

Posted by on Mar 14, 2011 | No Comments

Lorenzo Romar is known as a man of faith in many realms—but there was a time on the cusp of his career when it appeared that his faith was ill founded. Romar is the coach of the University of Washington men’s basketball team. This season his team started off ranked first in the conference but […]

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