Category Archives: personal

Fi Fight

personal, shopping Leave a comment

There are some industries where poor customer service is practically expected, and the notion of having a good experience with a company is all but laughable. Cable television providers are kind of the classic example of this, and although living in Toledo most of my life meant dealing with a local company rather than the big national cable providers, the said company in Toledo is a putrid puddle of acidic excrement that has helped me empathize with people who constantly struggle with big-name cable providers.…

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Boxed In

food, personal, shopping Leave a comment

The difficulties of eating well  on a budget in America are legion. I remember going to a grocery store a few years ago to buy a couple of good-sized red delicious apples, only to find that each of them cost over a dollar apiece. Working with college students like I do, I’m always mindful of the “ramen lifestyle” many of them fall into, and ever since theafternoon I bought those apples, I’ve always found myself making ramen-based calculations whenever I shop for produce, trying to…

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Glass City-Eyed

mom, personal, toledo Leave a comment

Eight days from today will mark the first anniversary of my departure from Toledo. Very early that morning, before the sun was even close to rising, a friend  drove me from her house, where I’d been staying for a few months, to Detroit Metropolitan Airport. It wasn’t the first time I’d been to that airport — I’d gone there before with family members who were flying, and even to help pick up a traditional Japanese music ensemble that was hired to perform in the greater…

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Blah to the Future

mom, personal, shopping Leave a comment

I made sure that Mom was one of the first people to own an Amazon Echo when they first came out a few years ago. Her vision had been steadily deteriorating for a long time, and I knew that the convenience of her being able to play music by simple voice commands would be more than worth the purchase price by itself.  Being able to ask for things like weather forecasts and other basic information was a bonus, and the bits of personality that Amazon…

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Going On, Ongoing

mom, personal Leave a comment

Two years ago today, when Mom passed away, the world didn’t end. It just felt like it did to me. About eight and a half years earlier, on the day that my father died, I drove Mom home from the hospital. Neither of us cried after we got the news, probably because we knew that we had to be strong for each other at that moment. Mom broke later that afternoon when a Girl Scout, bringing the cookies that my father had ordered for us,…

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