When I was a teenager I went to Mexico and ended up marrying my wife in the state of Veracruz. I adopted Mexico and it adopted me. Over the years we have lived there off and on and know many people well.
Down the street from us lived Marcelo. His wife and two kids still live there. Marcelo was a carpenter but in our little Veracruz town there was never steady work. With two young...
I first became interested in productivity when I worked with a number of service businesses. These businesses provided some form of service; autobody repair, mechanical repair, landscaping, towing and recovery, CNC machining, etc. The basic idea was a unit of service cost so much and could be sold for so much. The more units that were produced within a given time period, the higher the...
As a child I would look in awe at the flags of the world and the flags of the United States. In the U.S. section one flag always caught my attention; partly because it had the picture of a rattlesnake on it, and partly because the words beneath read 'Don't Tread on Me'.
The reference of course was to the oppression through taxes levied by the British crown upon her disloyal colonial...
Fremont Peak State Park in San Benito County, California offers the best view of the Monterey Bay Sanctuary. 1n 1846 Fremont led an expeditionary force into what was then Mexico to survey the current state park area. At 3100 feet Gavilan Peak, or Fremont Peak as it is now called, splits the Bay in two; Santa Cruz at the northern tip and Monterey and Pacific Grove on the southern tip.
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It's happened to most of us that write and if it hasn't happened to you yet it will. It's only a factor of time and exposure.
Someone has stolen your labor intensive work and put their name on it. Or, taken your work and rearranged the paragraphs and put their name on it. Or, taken all your good ideas and reshuffled the words and put their name on it. Or any combination of the above....
When I was a teenager, I thought that adventure was going to places like Fez, Chiapas or Vancouver Island. Well, I went to those places and had adventure but over the years I learned that going thousands of miles from home to a completely alien culture and language is not the only route to adventure.
Before I was 20 I was a veteran world traveler that pushed the limits of adventure and was...
'Don't you ever say anything like that ever again,' the woman fumed, 'that's racist and we just don't appreciate such statements in front of this Board'. The Board, by the way, was a Community Development Corporation in a depressed Latino community. It could have been in any one of hundreds of similar communities in the U.S.
I had been addressing the Board laying out the problems that...
People look at us rather oddly. For some reason they cannot connect us. If you see the two of us standing apart from each other in a group you would never match up wedding rings. There probably aren't two people you know that are so different and most folks are surprised to see we've been married three and a half decades. We got married as teenagers and have stay married since.
In...
Can you imagine coaching Kobe Bryant: Are you healthy? Are you rested? Wanna play? That's it. For the rest of the players it's 'feed K the ball'.
The problem is with salary caps you can't give all your money to K because that means the other guys won't get paid very much and it might be hard to attract players that can do things like catch the ball. But there is another way; another...
I didn't personally know any of these three people. I did speak on occasion to two of them but it was never any sort of conversation; simply a statement in passing. One of them I never spoke to. Yet each in his own way taught me something that I did not know...and for that, I am grateful.
Supposedly Oscar was a college student before something snapped. Several people said his parents were...
