Double Vision: A Personal History

• Personal Essay • 4 Comments

I am lying in a hospital bed inside the staging area of a busy surgery center in Scottsdale, Arizona. It is early in the morning, and yet there is a thrum of activity all around us. I watch comfortable-looking sneakers stream by under the privacy curtain at the foot of the bed. Lisa holds my left hand, the one without the IV. I am no stranger to hospitals, but until now, I’ve been the one in the visitor’s chair. I take deep breaths, but my heart thumps like a piston in my chest. Fight or flight.

A nurse comes in to check my vitals.

“Oh, you’re nervous, aren’t you?” She asks as she removes the blood pressure cuff from my arm. I’m still thinking about that two-page surgery consent form I signed.

An anesthesiologist joins the nurse, and they chat about the heavy traffic this morning. I wonder what I can say to stop all this, to get back in the car and get the hell out of here, but before I can think of a good enough reason, Lisa is kissing me and wishing me luck, and I am wheeled away into surgery.

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My Year of Reading in 2025

• Reading • 2 Comments

I read 40 books in 2025, down from 53 books in 2024. We spent five months in Manhattan this spring and summer, swapping reading for exploring the city. It was a good trade.

My reading was split evenly between fiction and non-fiction, with a particular emphasis during the year on the history of Nazi Germany.

I read much more on Kindle in 2025. Spending five months away from my cozy home library drove most of this, though, as I get older, I appreciate more and more the ability to dial up the font size at night.

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Mornings in New York

• Personal Essay, Travel • 6 Comments

We emerge from the air-conditioned lobby of our apartment building on this warm August morning, pulled along by two anxious dogs. The humidity slips over and around us like a sweaty embrace. The faint scent of garbage, flowering shrubs, and dog urine hangs in the still air.

We look both ways for other dogs before descending the steps, alert to the bedlam an encounter here at the edge of their estate would create. To the east, Madison Avenue, and, a few blocks further, the subway station at Lexington that will take us almost anywhere we want to go. To the west, Fifth Avenue and Central Park.

This is one of New York’s most affluent neighborhoods, where a basic apartment on this street fetches $4 million. We could never afford to live here, but we can scrape together the rent for a season.

We walk toward the park along the quiet street of brownstones and high-rise apartments. We arrived too late to catch the spring blossoms of the Callery pear trees that line the street, but we are thankful for their shade and greenery. Uniformed doormen wave as we pass. We slip across the street to avoid a lady with two high-strung Poodles.

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Where We Were Meant to Be

• Family, Personal Essay • 30 Comments

We are walking through Central Park on a beautiful May morning, two lovebirds, married these many years. It’s our third day in Manhattan, and it feels as though the city has opened its arms wide and hugged us. Everywhere we look is green and lush. We pass a bakery nestled deep inside the park and decide to return tomorrow for a coffee and treats.

We emerge from the meadows and winding paths to the thrum and bustle of the Upper West Side. We walk up Broadway looking for a stationery store that sells my kind of notebooks and the art supplies she needs for an upcoming drawing class. The store is nearby, and I’m scanning both the businesses along the street and the map on my phone.

Without warning, Lisa stops. She points to a store sign and speaks a series of numbers. A SEPHORA sign comes out as 8-4-3-5. The neon TD Bank sign is another string of numbers. I look at her closely to see if she’s joking. She’s not.

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Not Exactly Traveling Light

• Personal Essay, Travel • 4 Comments

We arrive in New York City in less than a week for our five-month adventure. Normally, we would fly from Phoenix, but because of the dogs, we must make the cross-country drive.

The idea behind this trip has been percolating for decades. When I retired, I wanted to travel and see the world, but not in a conventional way. I didn’t want to see ten countries in two weeks. That’s an exhausting vacation, not travel, and definitely not a pilgrimage. No. I wanted to immerse myself in a place as a local. Rent a furnished flat in Madrid for three months with just a Kindle, a traveler’s notebook, and a good pair of walking shoes.

The problem started with the Ford Expedition I rented for the drive. I chose a large vehicle because I wanted room for the dogs and anything we might bring. But now, as I survey the suitcases and eight loaded boxes of clothing and gear, I know I have forgotten my ideal of traveling light.

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Keep a Book Journal with Day One and Apple Shortcuts

• Reading • 14 Comments

One of the easiest ways to get more out of the books you read is to keep a journal. When you take notes, you’re not just passively reading; you’re reshaping the material in your own words, deepening your comprehension and the connections in your brain. These notes become a record you can revisit to refresh your memory and make recall easier.

I’ve used Day One as my journal for years, but I only recently discovered how well it works to keep my notes and favorite passages from my reading.

Day One is a leading journaling app for the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and most recently for Windows. Journals are protected from prying eyes using secure end-to-end encryption. Prompts and suggestions help remove writer’s block about what to share. The app makes it simple to create an entry from a photo, from your Apple Watch, from a location you visited, and many other ways that remove the friction from keeping a journal. I liked Day One so much that I transcribed a dozen old paper journals to have a complete digital record of my life in the app.

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These Vagabond Shoes

• Personal Essay, Travel • 6 Comments

We are sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park in the Flatiron District. Buildings encircle this urban oasis, framed by a blue New York sky. It is our last day in the city, and we have been walking all morning. Small dogs in fancy coats trot by us with their owners. The din of the city is somehow a comfort, like ocean surf. The temperature hovers around 30 degrees Fahrenheit, yet I feel warm in the sunlight, layered as I am in cold weather gear. Lisa sits beside me, taking it all in.

“Would you ever think of moving here permanently?” I ask. It’s a common question we pose when we travel.

“Oh, yeah,” she says without any hesitation. “I’ve always been a city girl.” Her face glows in the chilly air.

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Reflections on Reading The Story of Civilization

• Reading • 12 Comments

This month, I finished a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume opus considered one of the finest narratives of world history ever written.

Durant published the first volume in 1935 when he had just turned 50. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Will and Ariel, his spouse and co-author, published the final volume in 1975, a culmination of forty years of writing and scholarship. No author’s body of work has even come close to the scope and duration of this epic history set. Excluding reference notes, the text spans ten thousand pages, covering human civilization from the earliest recorded history through Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall. …

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Elevate Your Online Reading with Matter

• Reading, Technology • 4 Comments

I love the idea of a read-it-later app. The premise is simple: Save articles and blog posts that arise throughout the day with a single tap and read them later when you have the time. This way, you stay focused and never worry about misplacing or forgetting an important article.

A good read-it-later app can transform almost any web article into a clean, ad-free format with a consistent layout and font. It organizes newsletter subscriptions without clogging email inboxes. The best ones allow highlighting and annotations that carry over to popular note-taking apps.

The biggest problem with read-it-later apps is that saving articles is too easy. All those well-intentioned essays and posts languish in your queue, unread. You feel guilty about not reading them, so you archive everything and start over, only to repeat the process. And, maybe even worse, you end up reading the wrong articles.

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Why Blogs Matter

• Technology, Writing • 17 Comments

This blog had its tenth birthday last July, and I forgot to celebrate.

I had no idea what I was doing when I shared that first essay in 2014. Since then, I’ve written about a hundred more posts. Each is now swirling around the ether, a faint signal in the noise for those who share an interest in keeping a journal, or reading great books, or managing finances on a Mac, or taking better notes. Or being a better father, or living aboard a boat, or suffering an unimaginable loss.

An odd assortment, I know.

Readers from sixty countries have visited my blog. I have corresponded with dozens of people with questions or comments about what I’ve written. I’ve also become friends with other bloggers who care deeply about many of the same things. It’s a marvel of the internet age that we have this medium to find each other, rare and valuable needles in an unending hayloft.

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Celebrating Three Years of Sobriety

• Personal Essay • 10 Comments

I passed my third anniversary of giving up alcohol today. I thought I would share some background on this milestone and why I decided to stop drinking.

I have a long history with alcohol.  Maybe it’s the genetics mapped deep in my Irish blood or an inheritance from longstanding tradition, but alcoholism runs in the family, near and far. I can’t think of a time in my life that wasn’t steeped in the rituals of drinking. 

I met the love of my life in a dive bar. Most of my proudest accomplishments and favorite moments were punctuated with a celebration beer or glass of wine. An early love of Hemingway surely contributed to an interweaving of my very identity with alcohol. If I closed my eyes and pictured my true self in my natural element, it was cozied up to a dimly lit bar with a whiskey on the rocks in a brown, brown study.

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Thank Your Teachers

• Personal Essay • Leave a Comment

I came across a journal entry I wrote on this day ten years ago. I was reflecting on the people in my life who made a difference in how things have turned out for me. I realized that many of these people couldn’t possibly know the impact they had on me and the countless others they helped.

I kept thinking about this one community college professor who did more than anyone to inspire me to pursue a college degree. I thought about how sad it would be if he never knew the difference he made. So, after a quick search online, I found him. I wrote him an email. I introduced myself and told him a few stories about how he had challenged and inspired me, how he had helped me forge a path to the person I am today.

And he wrote back:

I wish I could tell you what a joy it was to receive your message today. I had been to a “Lives of Commitment” breakfast, and – since I’m just about to retire from teaching – I was in my office thinking about how a person ‘makes a difference.’ Then – voila! – your message comes up on my screen. Thank you.

I went to class and told my students to write to their teachers. I told them that a letter like that can really make an impact in a person’s life. I told them about your letter.

If you have someone who’s made a difference in your life, like a special teacher, write them an email. Tell them a story about how they helped you. It doesn’t have to be long. Just say thank you. And then do everything you can to pay that help forward.

How A Hidden Feature in Bear Changed the Way I Review Notes

• Technology, Writing • 9 Comments

This is the second of what might become a series of posts about how I use the Bear app to improve how I leverage notes in my reading and thinking. This is not a topic that will interest many, but writing a blog offers its indulgences. Unless your interests lie in the nerdier aspects of note-taking systems, you can safely skip this one.

If you told me a year ago that I’d write a blog post about the power of Apple widgets, I wouldn’t have believed you. But here I am—writing a blog post about Apple widgets.

You might be asking, what are you even talking about? What are widgets? Apple introduced these quirky appendages in 2020 as a way to present information from apps on the home screen of your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. The most popular widgets provide information about weather, stocks, and news. My reaction back then was decidedly ho-hum. Why would I want to clutter the precious real estate of my iPhone screen when I could just open the app?

A particular kind of widget in Bear 2 finally convinced me of their value.

In January, I switched from Craft to Bear 2 for my reading and knowledge notes. I shared why I chose Bear in this post. The switch went so well that I soon brought over my journal from Day One and my writing from Ulysses. For the past four months, almost everything I’ve written has started and ended in Bear.

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The End of Private Libraries

• Reading • 10 Comments

There seem to be two kinds of people on this earth—those who love books and everyone else. The bookish have always been far outnumbered, and the gap must be widening in this age of endless digital entertainment. I count myself among the proud minority, but a book, of all things, has brought into question my lifelong practice of keeping a private library.

A recent acquisition illustrates the issue.

“Didn’t you just read this on your Kindle,” Lisa asks me as she flips through the book I’ve brought home.

I dislike direct questioning about my book-buying habits. It feels like the pointed inquiries on medical questionnaires about alcohol consumption.

“Yeah, but I liked it so much I wanted the hard copy,” I tell her.

The fact is, I will likely never read this book, even though I did enjoy it. I bought the book because I like having a visual, tangible record of the time this book and I spent together. I like scanning my shelves and seeing proof of a rich reading life. I like the way a roomful of books makes me feel about myself. Besides, I tell myself, there are worse ways to spend money.

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Bear 2 for Writing and Thinking

• Technology, Writing • 29 Comments

For the past six weeks, I’ve been evaluating an app to replace Craft for my reading notes.  This post shares the reasons I’m moving away from Craft and why Bear 2 might be the best app around for writing and thinking on the Mac and iPad.

Craft and the Value of Connected Notes

I use Craft to capture the notes, quotes, and wisdom I’ve gleaned from reading and studying.  Before Craft, these notes languished in the margins of books or notecards stuffed in a file box.  In three years with Craft, I have written almost four hundred reading notes linked to several hundred dedicated theme notes, creating what is unfortunately called in personal knowledge management circles a “second brain.” 

The lofty promises of automatic insights from smart note-taking tools are mostly overblown.  I still resort to notecards or a paper notebook when I’m forced to really concentrate. A digital tool does solve the issue of near-instant retrieval, though, and there is goodness in gathering notes together in a trusted system. 

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Reading The Story of Civilization

• Reading • 12 Comments

In the spring of last year, I started reading The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This is no quick undertaking. Spanning eleven volumes and 10,000 pages, it will take me the rest of this year to finish.

The first volume was published in 1935 when Durant had just turned 50. He published the final volume forty years later. Midway through these decades of writing, Will’s wife Ariel became a co-author and active collaborator in this epic undertaking. Together, they read an average of five hundred books as research for each published volume.

The Story of Civilization is regarded as one of the most compelling narratives of world history ever written. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Goodreads currently gives these books a 4.4 out of 5. Such a high rating is rare, which indicates how readers truly admire the series. Essayist Jamie Todd Rubin chose these as the sole books to take along to his proverbial desert island, which was all the prompting I needed to start this adventure.

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My Two Journals

• Writing • 8 Comments

I surprised myself a little over a year ago by writing in a paper journal every morning. The surprise wasn’t that I was keeping a journal but that I was doing it by hand. I had been using the Day One journaling app to record my private thoughts for over a decade. But this was no ordinary year. After suffering an immeasurable loss, I yearned for the comfort that sometimes only flows from pen and paper.

Yet what’s even more surprising is that this was no momentary whim. I’ve kept up this daily habit of scribbling in a notebook in the morning and typing in Day One at night for over a year now. And I think I’ve pieced together why, for me, the combination of analog and digital writing has developed into the best possible journaling experience. …

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Quicken Classic for Mac – A Long-time User Review

• Money, Technology • 58 Comments

I’ve used some version of Quicken for 35 years. That puts me in a stodgy demographic that manages money in a certain “this is how I’ve always done it” way. For the uninitiated, Quicken is a personal finance software program that helps manage your checkbook and credit cards, pay your bills, keep to a budget, and track investments. It’s available on Windows and Mac, though there are differences in capabilities between the two. There are companion apps for iPhone and iPad, but they feel like afterthoughts, lacking key functionality of the desktop software. Quicken Classic is sold as an annual subscription across three offerings: Deluxe, Premier, and the recently released Business and Personal edition.

Seven years ago, I switched from Quicken Premier for Windows to the less capable Mac version. I’ve written previous blog posts about using Quicken on the Mac: in early 2018 when I switched and follow-on updates in 2019 and 2020. In large part, I was critical of the Mac version of the software, particularly its inability to export investment data.

In the intervening four years since my last post, Quicken has improved in many ways, including the ability to export all its data, including investments, to Quicken for Windows. With this critical functionality in place, I thought it was time to provide an updated and favorable review of the Mac version of Quicken and how I rely on it to manage almost every aspect of my financial life.

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