Author: Jim Santos
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Time to Grow Up
This is our second holiday season celebrated under the shadow of COVID-19, and I’ve been seeing some common themes pop up on social media revolving around family get-togethers between vaccinated and unvaccinated kinfolk. If you have browsed through Facebook or Twitter the last few weeks, you know what I mean. It seems there is always…
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Strip-Mining Classics for Profit
I just finished watching the most recent episode of the long-anticipated Wheel of Time on Amazon, and felt compelled to write about it. I also will get into another long-awaited series, Foundation on AppleTV. I suppose I should say “spoiler alert!” because I will mention some plot points without giving too much away, but in truth, the main issue…
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Finding My Voice
There are some old TV commercials for Reeses’ Peanut Butter Cups that are variations on a basic theme. One person is eating peanut butter, another is eating chocolate. Through a lucky mishap, they stumble into each other and one exclaims, “Hey, you got chocolate on my peanut butter!” The other retorts with “You got peanut…
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Rising Up To Leaven
Inspired by our trip to San Francisco and the wonderful sourdough bread they have there, I decided to take advantage of our being home for the next few weeks to do something I’ve always meant to try – create my own sourdough starter. If you are not familiar with this, the starter is used instead…
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Lesson Re-Learned
If you have read any of my books or short stories on travel, you know that Rita and I normally eschew the guided tours, preferring instead to discover and explore on our own and at our own pace. In fact, one of my recent posts was about the joy of finding someplace unexpected. It is not…
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COVID-19 and Travel
Rita and I just returned from our trip to San Francisco, and we had a wonderful time. I wrote one article while we were still there, and I promise there are more to come. Today however, I want to take a moment to write something about the infectious elephant in the room, Covid-19. As I’ve mentioned…
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The Simple Joys of Travel
For the past week we have been in San Francisco, California, enjoying the first real travel event since our trip to the Galápagos back in August of 2019. Sure, we took some driving trips here and there, but this was the first trip that involved air travel and was dedicated to just exploring someplace new. I’ll…
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Hoping to Travel Again
I have what’s called a Smart Folder setup in iPhoto that sorts photos by month from the previous thirteen years. The photos for whatever month we are currently in then displays as the screen saver on our living room TV. I know that makes me kind of geeky, but really it’s a nice trip down…
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Hate and Anger on Facebook
Phone the neighbors, wake the kids, it’s time for another Facebook Rant! Actually, this time it is more of a screed about Facebook users, and the larger issue of the increase in hate, anger, and general incivility over the past four or five years. I’ve always said, if you have nothing nice to say, say…
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Delta and the Delta Variant
There’s no doubt that the biggest adjustment we have made to our lives in these Days of Wine and Covid has been cutting out air travel. We’ve been together now over 12 years, and in the first ten of those years we must have been on more than 80 different flights to various destinations. In…
