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By Ben, 22 January, 2021

Malone Motors

Immediately after graduating from high school in 1994, I worked for a summer at Malone Motors, a Cadillac dealer in Bartlesville, as a "gopher," doing odd jobs in the service department. It was an odd choice of job for an honors student bound for a liberal arts college, but it was what I could find with no real work experience and no real expectation that anyone should want to hire me.

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  • work history
By admin, 17 January, 2021

Newyearsletter 2021

Here is our annual letter covering the events of 2020 in words and pictures! (PDF, 2.0MB)

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  • newyearsletter
By Ben, 14 January, 2021

Heritage Manor

In the summer of 1993, I had no luck finding a summer job (partly due to having no idea what I was doing) and instead spent the summer volunteering at a local nursing home. It was a very rewarding experience that helped me to grow in a variety of ways. Here are some of my reflections on what I learned:

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  • work history
By admin, 29 December, 2020

Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla (Robot Version)

Back in 1998, I wrote a parody of the Schoolhouse Rock song about pronouns by Bob Dorough and Kathy Mandary. Since I didn't have access to the original at the time, it's a very loose parody. But my friend Rich Brown liked it and put it up on his Web site, where Jessie found it when she googled my name after we were first introduced online.

By Ben, 23 June, 2020

Second Wind: How Bicycling around North America Changed my Life

In 2004, I sold my possessions and hit the road on my bicycle for a 10 month, 7,000 mile solo bicycle trip, going south for the winter and returning north in the spring. Five years after I completed the trip, I wrote a series of ten essays, each on a subject where my perspective had changed due to the trip. I've revised the essays each five years after that, so they've now been revised twice and are in the form of a Google doc that can be downloaded or printed for easier reading.

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  • Wheeled Migration
By Ben, 1 January, 2020

Newyearsletter 2020

For posterity, here's our annual newsletter from January, 2020.

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  • newyearsletter
By Ben, 27 October, 2019

Why Harry Potter Fans Should Read the Arithmancer Series

Update: All three books in the series are now available as audiobooks on YouTube, or you can download them as a torrent<

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  • reviews
By Ben, 11 July, 2019

We moved to Benson!

front of our new houseLast time I wrote, almost a year ago now, we had sold our house in Emporia, Kansas and were moving to Omaha, Nebraska. We lived in an apartment in the Dundee neighborhood for 10 months (from the end of August through the end of June), bought a house in the Benson neighborhood at the end of May, and as of yesterday we have finally moved the last of our stuff out of storage. I feel like our unusual move needs some explanation.

By admin, 27 January, 2019

The Plumbers' Waltz (Super Mario Bros theme in 3/4 time)

This is a waltz arrangement of the Super Mario Bros theme song. Although I can play the melody notes, I'm only providing the accompaniment chords at this time. Each chord shown below represents a full measure of three beats (or two beats, if you're playing it the traditional way).

Tags

  • Autoharp
By Ben, 17 January, 2019

Minnehaha Creek, June 2004

In a silent auction I won a day trip with experienced canoeist Dave Juncker down Minnehaha Creek from its headwaters through the Minneapolis suburbs. It was a wonderful experience! Here are my photos from the day.

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  • photos

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All content of this site is copyright © Ben and Jessie Stallings. Please do not use without permission.

"Blue Boat Home" is the name of a UU hymn by Peter Mayer, about how we are all travelers on the Earth. We have his permission and blessing to use the name for this site.