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When your life moves as fast as mine does, your food has to often move pretty fast too. As in those drive-thru orders at fast food restaurants. Now, I know the menu pretty well, and this particular day my order was pretty predictable, including my drink, which was usually an iced tea.
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Patty's true love, Tom, was coming to visit in a few days. She was excited, but not excited enough to clean her room of course. See, Tom lives in Ohio. Patty's a friend of ours who lived down the street from us in New Jersey. All week long Mom had gotten on to Patty for not cleaning her room, at least so she could find the floor.
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I was going through the all too frequent ritual of standing by an airport luggage carousel waiting for Big Bertha. (No, that's not someone I was traveling with. That's what I've named my suitcase because we've spent so much time together.) And suddenly the monotony was broken for all of us by this really cute scene. Here comes one of those luggage carts that look sort of like a big grocery cart without the big basket. Pushing it was this very little boy, barely able to walk and about one-fourth the size of the cart.
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Back in the good old days my wife and I would go camping with our kids when they were young. We did some camping after they were grown up too. But it was actually easier without the kids. You know the routine. We'd get the three little Hutchcrafts ready for bed, make sure no bears were going to eat them during the night, and then we would snap all the snaps and tuck them into their sleeping bags, tied up all the flaps and zipped all the zippers on the tent door. Finally, able to settle into our sleeping bags, having found the most comfortable piece of ground underneath that we could.
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The longer I drive on given days the heavier my eyelids get. Like 99% of the men in the world, I like to do the driving. And once in a while I drive past my primetime alertness shall we say. That's when my wife starts to think of things to keep me awake longer, like turning on the radio.
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Some 16 million people saw Christopher Jones' skydive on YouTube. He bails out of the plane. Everything's going great...until the seizure. After four years of being seizure-free, he was cleared to jump.
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I know about tornadoes. We had one go through our backyard when I was a kid. And then we moved to the East Coast, so I also got the opportunity to get acquainted with hurricanes. But there's one natural disaster I don't know too much about, and that's just fine - earthquakes! What I do know, I've learned from people who have been through them. Like Mike, for example, the man in the seat next to me on a long airplane flight. He had lived in Northridge, California until recently. You might remember that was the epicenter of a major earthquake in 1994.
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When our oldest son was little he started a hobby that really helped him pay his way through college eventually - collecting baseball cards. He was doing pretty well collecting, when he asked me to start taking him to these shows on the baseball circuit. One summer I was scheduled to speak at Ocean City, New Jersey, and he wanted to go down a day early so we could catch the last day of this huge card show. He walked into a large hall with all the money the little guy could have saved from recent chores and allowances.
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At one time our offices were on the third floor of an old factory building. There were a lot of stairs, and they had a pretty steep pitch. One of our team members dropped by one day with her beautiful four-month-old daughter, Katie. Mom was tired. And needless to say, the child wasn't able to climb up the stairs to the third floor on her own. Sometimes adults could barely make it. Mom needed to carry Katie in her arms the whole way. The sight of her carrying her daughter? I hate to say it was almost amusing. Mom was out of breath as she tried to recover. But not Katie! No, she was all cute and wide-eyed. She's not sweating; she's not panting. No, she's totally relaxed, totally cool. Of course she didn't have to do any of the work.
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When I was a kid, someone came up with a new idea for entertainment. No, not hieroglyphics! It's called 3-D movies. They've actually made a comeback in recent years and they might even be more popular than they were back then. Back then, we put on these cardboard sunglasses. Boy, what a fashion statement! Now they are at least plastic. And just like then, things begin walking toward the screen, and then they walk right out of the screen and they walk practically into your face. Of course, when you take those glasses off, it's just a flat old screen again. But when you have those glasses on, you see things you otherwise would never have seen.
