Month: September 2017

  • What the Hill

    My wife keeps signing me up for running races. I guess she wants some company during her crazy pursuits. It seems harmless enough so I join her even if I’d rather be doing something less competitive. Those are the kinds of compromises one makes to keep peace in the house, and we’ve been together a…

  • Fire

    It seemed like wildfires burned all across the American West this summer, each one worse than the other. A fire in Montana burned so long and so intensely that many nearby towns experience perpetual nightfall for days. Amazingly, the fires of 2017 stripped an area as big as the state of Maryland. For the European…

  • Out of Season

    A strange sight confounded my older son as we walked through a warren of shops near the Santa Fe Plaza during our recent New Mexico trip. He spotted a year-round Christmas store. It didn’t register on my mind until he pointed it out, I guess because I’d seen plenty of them before. Although, as I…

  • Even More Spooky

    It served me right for trying to guess what might please the Twelve Mile Circle audience. Longtime readers know that I’ve never been able to do that in the past even after all these years of trying. I probably should have waited until closer to Halloween. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this series — the exact locations…

  • More Spooky

    Twelve Mile Circle examined several infamous places in Spooky. I came up with a long list of possibilities to review although I had room for only a bare few in that first attempt. That led me to the conclusion that I should write another installment. There’s no sense wasting any more time so let’s get…

  • Spooky

    A lot of tangential articles began to appear on social media recently, tying-in with the hype around the latest film adaption of Stephen King’s “It.” One article I noticed included a list of his major works, from the early days of his writing career to the present. It included “The Shining,” and rightly so; a…

  • Smallest Country on Two Oceans

    While I researched the Smallest Multiple Time Zone Countries I noticed that a small corner of Chile actually abutted the Atlantic Ocean. Thousands of kilometres of its coastline hugged the Pacific Ocean and that one tiny little corner curved and extended far enough to reach the Atlantic. I enjoyed that meaningless anomaly for some unknown…

  • Smallest Multiple Time Zone Countries

    Sometimes I come up with a simple question and I think I’ll get, and even want, a simple answer. Writing these Twelve Mile Circle articles is a lot easier when I’m able to come to a conclusion quickly. Then I can move on with my weekend. Other times the story gets a lot more complicated,…