In the twenty-plus years I’ve been keeping this journal I have posted 6,420 times. I’m currently using 50 categories and 133 tags (down from ~200). On more than one occasion I’ve mentioned my interest in taxonomy (“An ordered arrangement of groups or categories.”), and I’m in the middle of a major over-haul.
For years I’ve included a little sidebar widget showing my categories but I’d be very surprised if anyone but yours truly ever uses it. Just too long for that tiny space so I’ve created a CATEGORIES page with some buckets into which I’ve grouped the categories.
Monthly Archives: September 2025
Silly Willy
My buddy John continues to unearth treasures from our youth. I think I would have been in the sixth grade in 1959 when our school produced a little musical called The King’s Christmas Carol. Not sure why but I was cast in the role of Silly Willy, the court jester. My only memory is the costume my mom made from a girl’s gym suit. She also came up with some slippers featuring long, curled toes with a tiny bell. Continue reading
Barb & Co. Rock Destin
Awareness: 10 key points from ChatGPT
Last night I had an interesting conversation that centered on awareness. I can’t express how rare that is. I found myself referring to my forty-plus blog posts as a repository of all my thoughts on the topic, knowing that nobody is going read those posts. So I uploaded the posts to ChatGPT and asked for ten key take-aways (PDF).
“Would you like to have these in an essay format that could be posted to your blog?”, asked ChatGPT. The resulting essay so accurately captures my thinking on this topic I’ve decided share it here. Everything below was written by ChatGPT:
Bliss
Birthday Party (1956)
The mother of my friend John was a dedicated scrapbooker. I believe this photo actually appeared in the local newspaper (it was that kind of small town). It was taken at John’s birthday party, probably 1957.
Top row, R-L: Chris Jones, Otis Mitchell, Joe Browning, Jim Blankenship, unknown, David Covey, Steve Watson
Bottom row, R-L: Jim Robison, John Robison, Steve Mays, Terry Hunter, unknown, Jane Robison
You need to be bored
“He’d never wanted kids”
“He’d never wanted kids. Outside of priority boarding on an airline, he couldn’t see the upside to them. They took over your life and filled you with terror and weariness and people acted like having one was a blessed event and talked about them in the reverent tones they once reserved for gods. When it came down to it, though, you had to remember that all those assholes cutting you off in traffic and walking the streets and shouting in bars and turning their music up too loud and mugging you and raping you and selling you lemon cars—-all those assholes were just children who’d aged. No miracle. Nothing sacred in that.”
—Mystic River (Dennis Lehane)
My brother went to Hanoi and all I got was this T-shirt
My younger brother Blane lives only five hours away but somehow we let five years pass since seeing each other. COVID was responsible for a couple of those, his schedule and inertia accounted for the rest.
When he sat down in “Barb’s chair,” Riley immediately crawled up in his lap. She does this whenever Barb sits down but –try as I might– I’ve never been able to coax her up in my lap. Sigh.
Robison Family Photos
My friend John’s brother Jim passed away earlier this year and left a number of flash drives with family photos that Jim had scanned (ScanCafe) from family photos lovingly maintained by their mother, Betty Jane. There are 851 photos in this first album (with several more to come)
The screenshot below is an example of this treasure trove. I made John listen to my spiel on get-them-in-the-cloud-and-let-the-Universe-take-it-from-there. I find these fascinating as-is, with no information about the photos.
