by Gene Sanders | Oct 19, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
Traveling makes me fat. Not vacation travel, where there’s mild exercise, such as paddling, hiking, or snorkeling, and more importantly, my wife, who doubles as my culinary conscience. But business travel makes me fat. There’s rarely exercise, because being ‘on the...
by Gene Sanders | Oct 5, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
Sometimes I train students in non-bulk packaging, which eventually gets around to boxes. In a parcel handling environment that involves conveyor belts and/or automated sorting, a box could end up with any surface downward, even if only temporarily. So if an inner...
by Gene Sanders | Sep 21, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
Sheepishly, I remembered my step-fathers admonition to measure twice and cut once. If I’d followed his rule, I wouldn’t be repeating what I’d just attempted to do, and wouldn’t have wasted the building materials that I’m sure weren’t free. As it was, another 2×4...
by Gene Sanders | Sep 1, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
Some things in this world I just don’t understand. When I was in elementary school, the children that wore glasses were either near-sighted or far-sighted. The glasses enabled the near-sighted to see distant objects, like billboards and traffic lights, or the glasses...
by Gene Sanders | Aug 24, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
Oh my, that doesn’t sound too good, does it? I mean, it sounds like I’m a moron overwhelmed at planning a simple, intentional crime. “Well, you big ox, you put the goods in a box, and tell the carrier you’re shipping socks or rocks.” How hard is that? But I’m not...
by Gene Sanders | Aug 10, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
No one who has heard this from a child should have any illusions about children’s brains being fully developed. They’re not, otherwise they’d recognize that the fact the car is still moving means we’re not ‘there’ yet. So, maybe, a child’s “are we there yet” just...
by Gene Sanders | Jul 27, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
I may have the world’s record for dropping out of college. Not only did I pump gas, bus tables, flip burgers, and install windows, but I also spent some time as a “sanitation engineer” during those periods before re-enrolling yet again. I probably could have gotten to...
by Gene Sanders | Jul 13, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
When I was very young I was good at math, and reassured by math. Math had one, single correct answer to every problem, and every other answer was wrong. A train leaves town at 1:00 going X speed, and at 1:30 another train leaves the same town, on the same track in the...
by Gene Sanders | Jun 28, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
Ouch, am I really that old and set in my ways that I deserve such a jab from one of my children? Oh sure, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a regulatory geek, a Dangerous Goods nerd, and if I wrote it, then I guess I’m a geek and a nerd, too. But, there’s an...
by Gene Sanders | Jun 12, 2015 | From The Porch Swing
I’m not a practicing, in-the-lab chemist, but I do have a university degree in Chemistry. More importantly, I’m a Chemistry fan. I like it. I know that water is a chemical, that almost all pesticides are “organic”, and that herbal remedies are complex mixtures of...
