I'll probably write another post about my relationship with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. For those not in the know, it's, like, a self-help book that talks about… well… in the first chapter, the author, Stephen Covey1 talked about how many people would come into his office repeating the complaint that they're very, very busy and may even have the external trappings of material success but that their relationships are suffering, they feel isolated, and they never feel like their time is their own or that they're accomplishing anything that really matters to them--maybe that " find it hard to tell you 'cause find it hard to take, when people run in circles, it's a very, very mad world" as…

With this post, I'm kind of repeating some of what I said in the preface. I guess if I wanted to be professional about it, I'd write the whole series of posts and edit for clarity, which I may end up doing later anyway. I haven't delved into the genealogy, but, by oral tradition, my family immigrated to, eventually, rural southern Minnesota and northern Iowa in a United States that was then something like a third German-American from Prussia in the 1890s, when 1) the German-American community in general had been particularly interested in maintaining their…

There was a time when I was in probably my 30s that my mom was boiling chopped potatoes1, probably to make a potato salad. As is very like him, my dad took it upon himself to not only look into her pot, but also remove the potatoes and start chopping them smaller because, "They're too big! You're wasting electricity!"