In early April, I was in Springfield, Illinois, to spend time with family and we saw the home of Abraham Lincoln and the various Lincoln-related things there. One surprising fact I learned is that Lincoln wrote to his old law partner, William Herndon, and told Herndon that after his presidency, he wanted to return to… Read More »
Well, I’m back up to running a 10-minute mile. I was able to run a 10-minute mile consistently back before I left for Ecuador in December. But once I got into the high altitudes of Ecuador’s mountains, I didn’t have the energy I did in Ohio. Here in Ohio, I’m about 850 feet/260 meters above… Read More »
I’ve been back in Ohio for a little more than two weeks now. Some observations: I was surprised that we didn’t get customs declaration forms to fill out on the airplane. I did get questioned by a Customs and Border Protection agent, but I didn’t have to fill out any form declaring what I’d purchased… Read More »
Nothing really big going on here, but wanted to share some photos. One interesting thing I’ve learned recently is that Latin America also uses the style manual of the American Psychological Association for many academic papers. A lot of the APA manual has to do with how to use English, which obviously doesn’t apply for… Read More »
I got a message this afternoon from someone concerned about my safety, so just letting everyone know that this week’s deadly landslide in Ecuador is nowhere near me. The landslide is in Quito, the capital of Ecuador. I am in Cuenca, which is nearly 200 miles (about 300 km) south of Quito. I am safe… Read More »
An interesting thing about Cuenca’s historic center is the ceramic street signs. Apparently they’re not all that old; they were put up in the 1990s. One person posting on Facebook said they are the work of famed ceramic artist Eduardo Vega. I’m not entirely sure that this is accurate, though; they don’t look to me… Read More »
Temperatures in Cuenca never get really hot or really cold. It can get as low as the 40s (Fahrenheit) at night, or into the 70s during the day, but the temperatures are mild enough that homes typically don’t have any heating or cooling, not even fans. You might open or close windows, but that’s it.… Read More »
Back in the 1950s, my dad was studying for his master’s degree at the University of Kansas. One day, he got a letter from his mother in New York. He didn’t think anything of it, since getting personal correspondence in the mail was commonplace back then, so he waited until evening to open it. She… Read More »
Things are going pretty well for me. I started Spanish classes on Monday, Jan. 3, and I’m making progress. Nowhere near as quickly as I’d like, mind you, but progress is still good. One thing I hadn’t thought of before this trip is that there’s a big non-pandemic difference between my current Spanish study and… Read More »
I started a new weekly newspaper called The Elizabethtown Advocate in 2010 after quitting my job in the Philadelphia bureau of The Associated Press. I had long been interested in running my own newspaper. Elizabethtown was a town of 12,000 people about 75 miles west of Philadelphia and it had lost its longtime paper, the… Read More »