Published Works

Earlier in the year, an editor of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine and I traded correspondence about being an early retiree (or more precisely, an early semi-retiree since I do work on occasion), and some of those discussions were incorporated into their April 2007 article entitled, “Keep More Cash!” Here are a couple of downloadable excerpts: car tips (PDF, 415 KB), travel tidbits (PDF, 415 KB), and tracking spending.

The first explains why I sold Lina — my beloved 2000 BMW Z3 — many years ago and obtained Elaina in her place. The saving estimates quoted in the Kiplinger’s article are conservative (I think the actual figures may be closer to $15,000 when opportunity cost and servicing is taken into account). It was just one tiny piece of the early retirement puzzle.

It’s kind of hard to believe, but I almost had dismissed the opportunity for this super Panamanian adventure completely out of hand.

“It’s just a hike,” I rationalized to Tori en route from David to Boquete, “and I can go hiking at any time. So why pay money to go hiking?”

Thankfully, she set me straight right away. “I’m really surprised you don’t want to do it,” she protested. “I thought for sure you would want to hike the highest summit in the country?” Continue reading »

It was only a few minutes after we had just crawled into an air-blown dome tent when a Discovery Science Center Planetarium man started quizzing us on the names of constellations projected onto the tent’s ceiling.

“Ursa Major and Ursa Minor!” exclaimed one know-it-all kid who, apparently, was correct.

“That one’s Orion,” said a girl behind me. Soon I was hearing other seven-year-olds yelling out names such as Taurus and Subaru that were familiar to me as cars but not as stars.

“Hmmm,” I observed to my friend Josh sitting next to me, “these kids are a lot smarter than me…”

Indeed, on this last day of 2006, I was being both educated and entertained, courtesy of downtown Fort Collins. Continue reading »

My essay entitled “Waving Cyclist Finds Friendliness in Fort Collins” was printed in NEXTnc — a weekly publication of Northern Colorado — today. You can download a copy of the article here (PDF, 722 kB). Warning: it says some unflattering things about Stockton, California, where I grew up, which was not meant to be unkind, just stating the facts! :)

An article of mine entitled “How To Prepare For (And Run) An Interesting Marathon” was published in the July/August edition of Colorado Runner Magazine. Download a copy of the article here (PDF, 0.99 MB). It demonstrates that one does not need to run a gazillion miles to successfully complete a marathon. Well, sort of…