Categories
Home improvement

Let there be light

I don’t know much about electricity.
I know it exists. I know it is necessary to watch Sportscenter on my TV in the mornings. And I know that if you touch an exposed wire of a light fixture that you thought was turned off at the breaker but wasn’t, it hurts. Bad.

Categories
Family

The harrowing ordeal of computerlessness

Centuries from now, it is my hope that people of the future, when faced with adversity and challenges in life, will say what will surely become a reassuring phrase for the millennia: “May I overcome my challenge just as Mike Gibbons did.”

Categories
Food

The slow march of the extreme couponer

I am all for folks saving money with coupons. Big fan. Do it myself on occasion.
Every once in a while I will throw down a coupon for a dollar off some choice lunch meat or perhaps, if I am feeling crazy, laundry detergent.

Categories
Family

Story Time with a big ol’ head wound

It’s really a pretty standard mantra of my life, as I am sure it is for you: Before reading to a group of kids, make your best effort to conceal your fresh head wounds.

Just me? OK, then.

This latest turn of fun occurred when I was heading to read to a group of kids at Story Time at Hopelands. I have read several times over the past few years and always have a good time engaging the kids and, hopefully, instilling a love of books at an early age.

Categories
Adventures Family

Guinness World Record, here we come!

Waiting our turns at Knock Out. World record, here we come!
Waiting our turns at Knock Out. World record, here we come!

I suppose the world will just have to treat me a little more special now that I can introduce myself as “Mike Gibbons, Guinness World Record Holder.”

Categories
Adventures Family

The awesome world of trampolining

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Ladies and gentlemen, mankind has outdone itself again.

Forget space travel and organ transplants and As Seen On TV products. Those are yesterday’s news. I have experienced humanity’s latest great achievement, and it included me hitting a kid in the face with a rubber ball while bouncing on a trampoline.

Categories
Uncategorized

Iceolation. How to stay positive about the 2014 ice storm.

Stay positive. That’s what I’m going to. I’m going to stay positive.

As we dig out from under the devastating ice storm of last week, I have decided I will focus on the good things that came from the past week. So to that end:

Categories
Childhood Family Uncategorized

Why? Why? Why? Kids and the neverending questions…

If you recall the John Candy classic movie “Uncle Buck,” there is a scene in which Macauly Culkin’s Miles character rapid fires questions to his newly met uncle:

Miles has nothing on my son. Parker is 10. If there were a book entitled, “Every Question You Could Ever Conceivably Ask,” he would have more questions than that.

Categories
Uncategorized

That was fun, winter! Now go away.

snow1
Great job, Mother Nature! Now pack up and head north where you belong.

So the snow has come (yay!) and gone (double yay!). The South has survived, and I feel the need to reflect on The Great Big Super Duper Amazingly Fantastic Snow Storm Event of 2014 (I like that better than the one-word names).

Categories
Family Food

Plan well, eat well

We are at our usual halfway point of starting out the New Year sticking to a weekly family menu.

Each year, we do our collective household New Year’s resolution that, during the week, we will eat healthy, eat at home and shop wisely. (We can schedule in a restaurant or a guilty-pleasure meal on the weekends. For what it’s worth, my son and I both share the same favorite guilty-pleasure meal – gas station hot dog. You say it’s awful? I say it’s awfully delicious!)