Good Friday 2018, Day 0    Christmas Eve 2020, Day 1,000 I live within the Driftless Area, a region of southwestern Wisconsin that also includes parts of Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois. The region escaped the flattening effects of retreating glaciers during the last ice age and is characterized by steeply forested hills and deeply carved … Continue reading By the Numbers

Apropos for Holy Week, at least from my vantage point, is a story I submitted after receiving a life-giving bone marrow transplant. Coincidentally, my transplant took place on Good Friday (2018), a day that Christians around the world focus on the gospel’s good news in anticipation of the joy of Easter. Amidst current COVID-19 events, … Continue reading A Healer’s Touch

I  liked Dennis. Not only my client, he became my friend. Honest, upfront, and fair, I never wondered what he thought about the quality of our services. He lived his life by a series of self-generated maxims – some humorous, some serious, all pithy and exactly on point. One helped soften the blow when our … Continue reading Solving Problems…and Making Things Fit!

"...we boarded the bus early every morning and spent our days walking the rows, braving heat, humidity, and occasional rainy days and mud. Cancellations were cheered, though rare; Corwin's definition of "rain" was different from mine!" - A Few More Miles:  Seed Development All of us whined about Corwin. One particularly rainy day, the bus … Continue reading The Corwin Story

The master boatbuilder George Yeoman Pocock, quietly watching the boys as they propelled his wooden creations, understood the mechanics of a flawless rowing stroke – catch, drive, release, and recovery.

I should have expected it, as I grew up in Eldora, a rural Iowa farming community. Still, I was disappointed gazing out an Iowa State dorm window and seeing nothing but cornfields, from street to distant horizon.

Faz, an upper-level leader with a nationally respected structural engineering firm, had dozens of major projects to his credit and a doctorate in structural engineering (in the A/E consulting industry, Ph.D.’s are few and far between).