A Presidential Joint Statement

Ninety percent of the time it does not matter whether more than ten people read my blog. Friends look at it, and the effort put toward submitting a weekly entry is excellent writing practice. Those two not insignificant benefits are enough to keep me going....

A Statuary Graveyard

In last week’s blog I mentioned an outer suburb of Taipei called Taoyuan. When I lived in Taiwan during the early 1990s, Taoyuan was home to the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport. Today the same airport is called the Taoyuan International Airport. Chiang...

Our Financial Advisor

Last week Manyu and I met with Cody, our financial advisor. We’ve had someone overseeing my retirement account since I started working at UW-La Crosse in 1993, but it still feels odd for me to say I even have a financial advisor. What would the twenty-eight year old...

Merrill

Every August my mom’s side of the family holds a family reunion in Merrill, Wisconsin. I attend maybe one gathering in three, but hadn’t gone since COVID. Manyu and I went this year, and Clare joined us from Madison. I was born in Merrill, but my family moved away...

Accidents Waiting to Happen

A month ago I wrote a blog about a bicycle accident I had. The scrapes and bruises from that mishap had almost healed when I had to climb into a tree to cut out a big branch that had broken off in a storm. I did not fall out of the tree, nor did I fall off the ladder,...
Steven Simpson