Month: February 2011
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Lego man
He dumped Lego Blocks all over the dining room table. Picking up the red, white or blue blocks one at a time, he gave each of us the same number of each size of the interlocking building blocks. We each received blocks with wheels and blocks that formed doors and windows or roof. We all…
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Entering the age of electronics
Bit by bit the electronic age sidled up alongside me, promised great and wonderful things if I would just make one little exception to my life-long refusal to allow it to dominate my home. My first 35 years, while everyone else chatted about their favorite shows, I lived without a television, content with a modest…
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Snow day, blizzard of 1978
Snow, snow, snow. Surely this year will set some kind of record as the year of the weekly snow closing schools, emptying bread shelves and producing smiling snowmen perched on posts. Reminds me of the Blizzard of 1978 that hit northern Indiana. Even in that neck of the woods with snow plows and trucks designed…
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Assembly line job
Nothing like spending eight years in college and post-graduate studies to qualify to work on an assembly line. The irony is rich. At 20, my youngest son took a temporary job working on the production line at the chicken processing plant to earn cash for college. On his 21st birthday he had no big party…
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Economic child abuse
Child abuse comes in many forms: Physical, emotional, verbal and sexual, but few talk about economic abuse. Economic abuse can be defined as ruining the victim’s credit rating or future ability to obtain credit and financial independence. One way it happens is through the misuse of a child’s Social Security number long before the child…