Category: Uncategorized

There was a lot of doomsday talk about the “Y2K bug,” but what it really amounted to was a lot of overtime work for software professionals fixing antiquated code to handle dates after 2000. With some savings built up, we started to think about our next house.

Our rusty but still functional 1986 Cavalier finally bit the dust when someone ran into it at an intersection, so we went shopping for a new car. We had in mind a light blue Intrigue, but a test drive revealed that its brakes had problems, so we ended up buying a silver one instead. The…

Although we mostly felt comfortable in our starter house, one of its drawbacks was a lack of storage space. A tool chest as a Father’s Day gift remedied some of the problem. Adding a second piece on top made more room as the tool collection expanded. It has been very useful over the years!

Our daughter became totally obsessed with gymnastics after learning about the sport through an introductory program at her preschool. All she wanted to do was gymnastics! Well, that and get a puppy. We decided gymnastics would be easier.

With our son in kindergarten and our daughter in preschool, the baby years were no more! Our home computer (which at that time was running Windows 3.1) got plenty of use for educational games and storybooks. The Internet and mobile phones hadn’t quite arrived in everyday life yet, but they were not far away.

Just before her second birthday, our daughter informed us that she wanted a bicycle—a real one like the big kids had. Although we weren’t sure if they made bicycles that small, we did manage to find a tiny pink bicycle in time for her birthday (she was very fond of pink at that age) along…

When we visited the dealership in November to buy a new family car, we brought the kids with us. We found a good deal on a red Pontiac Bonneville. Our 1-year-old daughter—who was not only talking by then, but quite opinionated—made her displeasure known when she toddled over to a black convertible, put her little…

A Valentine’s Day gift of chocolate roses for the wife ended up being shared, as a consequence of not being able to eat much chocolate during a second pregnancy. But it was a nice thoughtful gift anyway, as well as a symbol of our expectations that all would go well and things would be “coming…

We knew that our son was destined to be an engineer when, not long after his first birthday, he used a plastic toy screwdriver to take the bottom pin out of the front-door hinges. Evidently he wanted to go out to play, and wasn’t happy about being locked inside with a double-sided deadbolt. We nabbed…

Not long before our first child was born, we saw a clever magazine ad that showed a home computer on one side and a baby on the other, compared and contrasted; the baby required constant service, while the computer worked reliably. The computer had a price shown at the bottom of the page. As for…