And the Winner Is...
Here's a Barclay Show video podcast in which we draw the winner of an iPod Nano that I donated in hopes of encouraging more of my Barclay neighbors to register on the Barclay's website. This enables faster and cheaper communication with our 226 owners by e-mail instead of the snail. The iPod contest seems to have worked, because the number of registered usernames more than doubled, to 71. We've still got a ways to go, though. What will we give away next? A year's free subscription to The Barclay Show?
Friday, March 03, 2006
Mardi Gras in Galveston
An earnest parade with color commentary by Jeremy Liu, a fellow board member of a regional arts organization, in his case the New England Foundation for the Arts in Boston. Jeremy's day job is executive director of the Asian Community Development Corporation.
I'm posting this in a hurry, in order to get to the final session of our meeting. Enjoy the parade! Podcast is about 15 minutes:
UPDATE: Back home in Denver, I checked the podcast and found a big gap in it. I just fixed the problem and am reposting the podcast. My apologies for the technical difficulty...
I'm posting this in a hurry, in order to get to the final session of our meeting. Enjoy the parade! Podcast is about 15 minutes:
UPDATE: Back home in Denver, I checked the podcast and found a big gap in it. I just fixed the problem and am reposting the podcast. My apologies for the technical difficulty...
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Galveston Musings
When I asked the doorman here at the Tremont House hotel which way to walk to the ocean, he laughed and said it would be a long walk. But he pointed me toward the ship channel, and I set off to make a video blog, wearing my old Stetson hat from my Wyoming days that I brought specially for this trip to Texas. The regional arts organizations begin their powwow here in a few minutes.
Toward the end of my walk I met a Galvestonite named Curt who tipped me off to the existence of Lafitte's treasure. I find that Jean Lafitte went down on a ship named The Pride, possibly near Galveston. No coincidence that a pirate would go down with his treasure on a ship named Pride. This confirms my usual resolve before a meeting like this to speak only if my gathering thought refuses to honor my intention to listen more than I talk. That's the best way to find the treasure.
My SD card filled up before I could wrap up the vlog, so it ends abruptly with what I intended to say about "pod fading" added as a title. Have a great day and enjoy the show...
Toward the end of my walk I met a Galvestonite named Curt who tipped me off to the existence of Lafitte's treasure. I find that Jean Lafitte went down on a ship named The Pride, possibly near Galveston. No coincidence that a pirate would go down with his treasure on a ship named Pride. This confirms my usual resolve before a meeting like this to speak only if my gathering thought refuses to honor my intention to listen more than I talk. That's the best way to find the treasure.
My SD card filled up before I could wrap up the vlog, so it ends abruptly with what I intended to say about "pod fading" added as a title. Have a great day and enjoy the show...
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Have you ever wondered...
Today is the day 21 years ago that a friend of ours, Margo, who has since passed on, asked me, "Have you ever wondered if you're an alcoholic?" This had to be the most graceful way I've ever heard of someone inviting another person to consider AA. In a moment of blessed honesty, I said yes, I had wondered about that. Margo then shocked me by saying that she was a member of AA, and she told me how to find a meeting in 
Casper, Wyoming. I went to my first meeting the next night in a garage of someone's home, and I haven't had a drink since.
I've had two sponsors in 21 years of active involvement in AA, one in Casper and now one in Denver. My Casper sponsor showed me the way through the 12 Steps and gave me consistently good guidance. One trick he had was that any time I would call up agitated by something my wife had done or said, he would interrupt me and say, "She's right." I would reply, "How can you say that when I haven't even finished telling you what she did?" "It doesn't matter," he'd say. "She's right." And so was he. My Casper sponsor used to give me his AA coin each February 27th, the one he'd been carrying the previous year, since he sobered up a year before I did. These days he's gone electric and sends me a Hazeldon coin via e-mail. Since I can't carry this one in my pocket, I'm glad to put it on the blog.
Twenty-one years is a long time between cocktails, as a guy in my home group, Happy Trudgers, likes to say. I've never been so grateful for honest words out of my mouth as I am for the answer I gave Margo on February 27, 1985.
A note on anonymity: AA's 11th tradition states that "we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films." We can't be sure what Bill W. and the founders of AA would have thought of blogs, so I asked my current sponsor if I should worry about breaking my anonymity here. "I would worry more about the typos," he replied.
Casper, Wyoming. I went to my first meeting the next night in a garage of someone's home, and I haven't had a drink since. I've had two sponsors in 21 years of active involvement in AA, one in Casper and now one in Denver. My Casper sponsor showed me the way through the 12 Steps and gave me consistently good guidance. One trick he had was that any time I would call up agitated by something my wife had done or said, he would interrupt me and say, "She's right." I would reply, "How can you say that when I haven't even finished telling you what she did?" "It doesn't matter," he'd say. "She's right." And so was he. My Casper sponsor used to give me his AA coin each February 27th, the one he'd been carrying the previous year, since he sobered up a year before I did. These days he's gone electric and sends me a Hazeldon coin via e-mail. Since I can't carry this one in my pocket, I'm glad to put it on the blog.
Twenty-one years is a long time between cocktails, as a guy in my home group, Happy Trudgers, likes to say. I've never been so grateful for honest words out of my mouth as I am for the answer I gave Margo on February 27, 1985.
A note on anonymity: AA's 11th tradition states that "we need always maintain personal anonymity at the level of press, radio and films." We can't be sure what Bill W. and the founders of AA would have thought of blogs, so I asked my current sponsor if I should worry about breaking my anonymity here. "I would worry more about the typos," he replied.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Correction
My grandson James was born at 5:44 pm on February 21st. Both the vlog and the introductory text mention different times, each of them wrong. The Chronicles regrets the errors.
Back in Denver, I'm still savoring the existence of James and wondering how each new day of his life is going. We miss everyone in Cambridge, but not the weather there. Today we ate outside at a sunny sidewalk table at our favorite tea house. I'm cooking a couple of podcasts, but completion will have to wait until after a trip tomorrow through Wednesday to Galveston, Texas, for a meeting of the six regional arts organizations.
Sunday, February 26, 2006
