Why You and Your Kids Should Read Charlotte Perkins Gilman

By Ben |

When I was in school, I frequently asked my parents for recommendations of what to read for book reports. They had an extensive collection of classic speculative fiction, so I read famous titles including The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis; The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells; Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell; The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein.

Lessons from our first electric road trip

By Ben |

The weekend of November 5, 2021, Jessie and I made our first overnight trip in our 2018 Nissan Leaf SV. The car has a theoretical range of about 120 miles, but the highway route from Omaha to Topeka is 162 miles. There's a rapid charger in Auburn, Nebraska, and we figured if we were lucky we could make just one stop, but if we ran short of range, there were a couple other, slower chargers we could visit. Here's what we learned:

Ben's 2009 Facebook quips

By admin |

I joined Facebook in 2008, but it wasn't until 2009 that I recognized its potential as an audience for my sense of humor. I've been looking through my old posts just in case I leave the platform in the future. One of the main lessons I've learned is that I used to get sick a lot more often when I wasn't sheltering from a pandemic! Most of the articles I linked to are now 404, sadly.

Here are some of my posts from 2009 that I still think are funny or insightful:

The Green Door

By admin |

By the summer of 2012, I was having a lot of brain fog and fatigue from what would turn out to be a gluten intolerance. Not knowing that's what it was, I just seemed to be slipping more and more away from being the productive, reliable Web developer I had been when we moved to Emporia in 2008. I was able to get my act together enough to do home energy audits, most of the time, but I had let all of my freelance Web clients go because I couldn't promise to meet their deadlines.