Colin Dullaghan

In an effort to make your visit to this site more rewarding and practical, I’m offering this helpful household hint:
Take a moment to drill little indentions in the top of the doorframe around your closet. It’s an inconspicuous location, so no one except giants or roving insects will ever see it, and you’ll find [...]

During lunch just now I heard myself explaining why it’s okay to do bad work. Actually, not just okay: honorable.
The rationale, if I heard it right, was that there is no higher pursuit than keeping one’s word, and that the paramount importance of this must never be forgotten. Therefore, if you’re in a situation [...]

My pants today are this heavy gray wool, which isn’t all that scratchy but is awfully crisp-looking and features the neatest, most precise seams I’ve ever noticed while pulling on pants. They (the seams) seem to be constructed of heavy thread, even, making the net experience not much like wearing conventional pants at all. It’s [...]

I’m not a vegan or anything, but does anybody else have issues with leather gloves?
Problem: human hands, while dexterous and capable, lack protection from the elements and from the sometimes abrasive tasks that are requested of them.
Solution: kill and flay creatures with more durable hides than ours, then fashion snug little five-sectioned bags [...]

«rustling of newspaper, quiet typing»
“So Colin, did you read about this?”
“Read about what, Tom?”
“It says here that prisoners in jails are all getting flu shots.”
“Yeah?”
“Well I just think it’s funny, that criminals can get flu shots while people who need them can’t get them. Kate, did you hear about this?”
“Yeah, I think I saw something [...]

(I don’t know if this sprang from my sudden remembering of the show The Wonder Years or what)
I think I had wonder years. I never called them that, of course, but I distinctly remember wondering what was at the end of the creek that ran through my back yard. I wondered how fast I could [...]

Following an exasperating discussion Saturday night with people actually living in the world, Penelope and I decided to start watching tv again. This is the topic for her post at her site today, and I loved her comparison of broadcast entertainment to an unending tidal wave. The moment I threaded the little cable connector into [...]

There is a skull-shaped outline on the front of my motorcycle, a 4″ x 4″ discoloration where the plastic is greener than it should be, reminding me every time I walk up to the bike that I’ve got to come up with something to replace the sticker I peeled off of there when I got [...]

You don’t get many opportunities to summarize a moment in your life, and this isn’t really one of them, so I’ve decided to just force it.
Right now, my life, and my thoughts, consist of (in no particular order except the order in which I think of them, which, yes, is actually an order too):
Netflix [...]

Have I said how much I love running in the backyard with my dog in the evenings? It’s a lot. It’s almost worth me going to work (and him slumping in the windowsill all day), letting the minutes of the day pile up like pebbles on our chests, just so we can zoom across the [...]

“I’d rather be home grouting my fireplace.”
-T. Dreesen, 3:45 p.m., 10.11.04

This morning I was standing on a wooden platform, staring into a metal tank of fish at Jungle Jim’s, this huge grocery store outside Cincinnati. It was sad, for me. The crowd of fish floated there, drifting slowly around the center as the filtration system pumped in saltwater, and the water was clear enough that [...]

For the first few months after moving into our first house, Penelope and I did little besides work on it, and in retrospect I see that the place didn’t really need much work. Thank goodness we’re slow, broke and ineffectual, or we really would have screwed the place up.
There is an interesting division of [...]

MODERATOR: Senator Kerry, if elected, how would you decrease the chances of the U.S. being hit by another 9/11-type terrorist attack?
KERRY: I would not take my eye off of the goal: Osama bin Laden. Unfortunately, he escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora. We had him surrounded. But we didn’t use American forces, the best trained in the [...]