When you’re under 20, you think you’d rather commit suicide than get old, partly because you can’t imagine how you’re going to cope with loo...

Ernie had his own take on the Utah road trip I wrote about in the previous blog entry. He saw things from an artist’s point of view. This po...

You don’t need to read Jack Kerouac to know that road trips can change your life. In August 2008, a road trip changed mine. But here’s the ...

This is for Robert C., whose pal in Mesa, Arizona is getting ready to try fall gardening ventures. I’ve learned a handy trick for sowing see...

When the bean counters at the brick & mortar retail giants look at data in order to decide what customer service protocol ought to be, t...

When I was a kid, Phoenix had not expanded to the size it is today; my house was near the edge of town. The fields that stretched to the Wes...

I have proof positive that NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC warps young minds, causing kids to grow up to be explorers, adventurers, world travelers, and...

This time of year, my garden always turns into a jungle, and it’s my own fault. I know I’m living in the desert, I know 90% of my plants sho...

I’m not sure when it happened, I can’t even remember when I bought my first hummingbird feeder, but somehow I became the servant of a tiny, ...

Before I came to work for my current employer, I worked for the Department of Corrections. I was an officer at a minimum security facility i...

Funny how doing things wrong (or in this case, semi-wrong) can lead to a discovery. I bought some tomato plants this year, against my bette...

The brick & mortar business where I work has made me sign a document stating that if I talk about them online, I can be fired, so I won’...

When I was about 8, I got caught in a really big lie, one so ridiculous there’s no way anyone would possibly have believed it – except me. I...

At the risk of incurring the scorn of blogmasters and literary critics, the wrath of REALLY powerful talk-show hosts, the ire of authors of ...

Here’s another awkward question people ask me: "Why did you change pen names so often?" And once again, I get a lot of blank stare...

As a writer, one of the toughest questions I have to answer is, “Why didn’t you write a sequel to . . . ?” It’s not that I don’t have an ans...