I REALIZE A GOOD PERCENTAGE OF US count our daily blessings, at least the people I hang out with do. Being thankful for the gifts given in our life is a darn good position to express. It takes some mental horsepower to bring this into your life. I work at these necessa...

FLY FISHING HAD PASSED ME BY MOST MY LIFE. But late this fall, after reading a couple books and watching an Orvis video, I was inspired to seriously begin considering this most revered approach to catching fish.

This newer focus came after a lifetime of angling episodes...

THE FAMILIAR A&W SIGN at the corner of M-22 and M-115 in the port city of Frankfort served as a beacon last week when it seemed to lure me in for a late lunch.

How fun this was going to be.

My rather spontaneous decision to pull into the parking lot brought back youthfu...

MY BLOG IS EVOLVING. I will focus this next year on creating essays about the amazing region I live in.

My expanding interests have facilitated this change - a blessing delivered to me so I could capture my storytelling as a writer/humorous, golfer, and Realtor®. My th...

I’M VISITING STARBUCK'S FIRST CORPORATE STORE IN TRAVERSE CITY. The place just opened to great fanfare and is it ever packed. Its interior landscape and staging are very well done. But my real issue today, I cannot get a connection to the internet on my laptop. It seem...

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO GET A HAIRCUT for well over two weeks. I’ve stuck my head in the barber shop several times only to discover two or three guys waiting patiently for Nick, my village’s only barber.

I am of the belief that “wait” is what broke the wagon, a saying that...

I WAS STUNG BY A BEE LAST WEEK when I was deadheading a flowering plant in my girlfriend’s garden. I haven’t been stung in years. While it was annoying, and quite a surprise, it didn’t hurt as much as I remembered from my younger days. I guess bees still do not like to...

FALL IS THE START OF SOUP SEASON and I'm suggesting three soups that remind me of this wonderful time of the year. They are:

1. Butternut Squash Soup

2. Smoked Fish & Corn Chowder

3. Carrot Ginger Soup

I’ll place three little pieces of paper in a hat with these n...

THE LADY BELLOWED THAT SHE'D BEEN COMING to NW Michigan for thirty years after I tried recommending shops for her to visit in greater Benzie and Leelanau counties. Implied in our rather feisty exchange - she hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck. People can be like t...

HOW CAN IT BE MID-SEPTEMBER and I haven't even thrown a line in the water? This thought entered my mind as I read Hemingway’s story about his rather bazaar characters fishing a mountain stream in the Basque Region of Spain portrayed with such clarity in his epic novel,...