Category: Life
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Step on into the light
Recently, for one reason or another, I have found myself attending AlAnon meetings. For the uneducated (of whom I’m envious), AlAnon is not Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), but is a separate, albeit closely-related support group for friends or family members who have had their lives affected by alcoholism. So AA is for the alcoholic, and AlAnon is for the people that the alcoholic has affected. Really, they should have come up with a better name for it, because whereas AA stands for something, AlAnon does not, even though it sounds like it should. Confusingly, the same word – AlAnon – is… Read more
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Yet you know there is no answer fit
Attorneys (lawyers to you ‘foreigners’ on the wrong side of the Atlantic) have always had a bad rap. They are often portrayed as amoral shysters just out to milk whoever they can for whatever they can. And having witnessed them in close range recently (thanks to my ongoing and increasingly-acrimonious divorce), the reality is even worse. Divorce in the U.S. is a strange thing. And considering that the most recent statistics claim that a full 50% of marriages end in divorce, they certainly make you jump through some hoops to get one. Firstly, you can’t really get a divorce without… Read more
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Rental Case
Last summer I was fortunate enough to be sent on a six-week trip to Europe, courtesy of the project I was working on. Well, I would have considered myself fortunate were it not for the facts that (1) this was Rotterdam – not known for being one of the beauty-capitals of the world, and (2) I spent almost every waking hour in a warehouse stacked to the rafters with automotive oil and other specialty lubricants (and not the fun kind, either…). I’d been over to Rotterdam a couple of times before, and had spent several years living in Brussels (one… Read more
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Blowing Chunks
I was in a workshop on training recently, delivering a session on curriculum development for my new project. Typically, because I’d joined the project late (having been tied up on my previous project, which refused to free me up), the existing project team had tried to do this bottom-up, by deciding on what they were going to teach (by way of defining the learning objects to be developed) before deciding who they were going to train or what they needed to be taught. So I was now trying to retro-fit a more structured, classical approach to curriculum development onto what… Read more
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Keep On Truckin’
A couple of weeks ago I was at Reliant Stadium for a football game. This weekend I was back at the same venue for an entirely different type of ‘sporting’ event – a monster truck rally. This is actually my fourth or fifth, but I hasten to add that it has always been for the benefit of the kids. Honest. The two boys have both been into monster trucks, but this time it was Freya who seemed most keen on going. Must be the Texan in her blood (she was born here…). Last time I was here we were bussed… Read more