In Trouble
From my desk I had a clear view of the guard station in the atrium entrance to our office building. One morning a delivery man caught my eye–a delivery man with a bouquet of a dozen red roses in a white vase. Although deliveries like this were a common sight on Valentine’s Day, it was unusual […]
Large Pepperoni, but Hold the Nukes
Think about the oddest “wrong number” phone call you’ve received. I remember picking up a voice mail left by a panicked homeowner—who was looking for a plumber. I guess the “Dennis & Laurie can’t come to the phone…,” didn’t make it clear we weren’t the local Roto Rooter. I hope they didn’t drown trying to […]
The Great April Fools’ Caper
Too many people wait for leadership from the top when it is often in their own grasp. I’d like to share a story about when desperately needed leadership came from the middle. I was working for a startup that was suffering from a layoff hangover from “right sizing” many months prior. As one of my […]
The St. Patrick’s Day Brewery Tragedy
Excessive celebration on St. Patrick’s day all too often leads to tragedy. Our family has a legend about a horrible one involving my grandfather, Dick Cavanaugh. As a young lad he worked after school in a small brewery in a little town in the shadows of Mount Rainier, sweeping and running errands. Imagine this scene one […]
The Language of Coffee
It may be hard to believe, but there was a day in the not too distant past when coffee came only in black, or with cream or sugar. Several years before an upstart coffee company from Seattle planted their first outpost in New York City, Laurie and I were living in New Jersey—a land without […]
The Flavor of Manna
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 […]
Everyday is Valentine’s Day?
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 […]
The Unexpected Gift
What do you get a blind woman for Christmas when you’re on a tight budget? In one case a little creativity on the part of a friend resulted in a unique, and very touching, gift. My mother-in-law lost her sight to macular degeneration over a decade ago and we often struggle to find appropriate gifts […]
Predictably Bad
History is littered with those who made monumentally bad predictions. In 1901 Wilbur Wright told his brother, Orville, that man would not fly for fifty years.” Two years later the brothers made a mockery of Wilbur’s prediction. At Yale, a professor gave a student a “C” for his paper suggesting that you could make a […]
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