Posts in the "adventures" category - Chris Hardie

I have this problem with impulsiveness. On Sunday, Carrie and I were sitting in the park, soaking up some of the first real sun of the season, and we reflected on how nice it would be to grill out that night. Stating what I thought was a minor detail, I noted that we did not, in fact, possess a grill. No problem! The Modern American Way dictates that even though it's 6 PM on a Sunday evening, one should still be able to go from soup to nuts, no grill in sight to happily grilling out, with just...

I was actually looking forward to working late tonight. I had a client who'd asked me to do some work on a project related to some software I maintain. Because it's software I maintain outside of my usual duties at my company, I charge an hourly rate directly to the client, instead of going through Summersault. But even more than the higher pay, I was really looking forward to the particular problem space. The client sells real estate forms over the web, and maintains his order information in a database...

The boy, trying to ignore the reoccurring dull pain in his left side, brought his hands together in front of his face, and held them there, barely touching. He moved his index fingers together and smiled at the brief moment before they touched, when each seemed to gently reach out to the other, attracting and pulling and melting into the moment of contact. The girl, several hundred miles away and an hour from the nearest hospital, dropped her shovel and fell back into the sand screaming in terror...

It seemed to be all my friend Eppie could remember about her father's death: the Ten minutes right before it. She had watched him die for months and had grieved for years afterward but the climax of the "event" as she remembered it was never the moment of death itself, but the Ten minutes beforehand. It always seemed odd to me that Ten minutes of life would mean more than the life lost, but the wistful stare in Eppie's eyes when we talked about it brought me closer to understanding. You see, in those...