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Category Archives: The way we were

Road trip

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

This building is in Alleghany County near Sparta. I’m not sure if it was a church or a school. My sister and I made a little road trip to Ashe County yesterday to go to a funeral. It was the perfect day for a road trip — sky busy with heavy, fast-moving clouds, pleasant temperatures, […]

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Got a revolution?

Friday, May 27, 2011

Jefferson Airplane, Woodstock 1969: Got to Revolution I am dumbfounded at the passivity of today’s young people, particularly recent college graduates. If they got any education at all for the money they spent on a college education, then they ought to be able to see that they are among the designated losers in an already […]

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The Internet as it used to be

Saturday, May 14, 2011

Warning: This is a nerd post! People sometimes ask me how long I’ve been on the Internet. I’ve been on the Internet since the mid-1980s. Then when people ask me what the Internet was like back then, I find the question almost impossible to answer. It’s simply too geeky for most people to want to […]

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Typewriters rule!

Monday, November 15, 2010

Before computers came along, no possession was more important to me than my typewriter. I have been fascinated with typewriters — or anything with keyboards, really — for my entire life. I got my first typewriter when I was about 10 years old. My father even had an old touch-typing textbook, so I taught myself […]

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Jane Austen

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Why have we had a Jane Austen revival? Why do we remain fascinated with 200-year-old novels in which nothing much happens but drawing-room conversations and emotional detective work by women to figure out the intentions of men? Partly, I’m sure, the answer to that is the BBC. We can’t get enough of those BBC costume […]

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Blum's Almanac

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Recently, while talking with a neighbor who has been gardening in this area for a long time, I asked him how he decides when to plant particular things. His response: “I use the almanac.” I didn’t even ask him which almanac, because I just assumed that he meant Blum’s Almanac. Blum’s Almanac is published in […]

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Rolling back the clock … if only for a summer

Monday, August 30, 2010

Ken Ilgunas with the chickens, June 2010 Summer is over. Ken went back to school yesterday. One of the disappointments of getting older is that most young people care so little about how the world used to be, or whether in some ways it might have been better. I have often said that I will […]

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Crippled collie?

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Gladys and me, circa 1989, Winston-Salem, NC. Photo by Gavin Geoffrey Dillard I don’t think I’ve ever explained on this blog the meaning of my domain name, crippledcollie.com. There once was a crippled collie. Her name was Gladys. She was born, as I recall, in 1981. She was active, athletic, extremely sweet, and not the […]

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Recovered photos

Saturday, April 17, 2010

The motherboard of a 12-year-old computer: somewhere you don’t want to go What if your computer crashed today and couldn’t be restarted? What would you lose? There is no costless way to back up your computer. Probably the easiest and least expensive plan is to periodically burn CDs or data DVDs of files you don’t […]

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The family cow

Sunday, February 21, 2010

My grandmother Mary Lillian Bowman Dalton with one of her cows, c. 1925, Laurel Fork, Virginia Yesterday while walking back from the mailbox, I was admiring one of my neighbors’ pastures. It has a good fence and a thick stand of grass ready to turn lush as soon as spring arrives. I realized that, in […]

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