Dear Graduate, Have you ever looked back and thought to yourself, "if I only knew then what I know now.” Or how about this one, when I was about 15 or 16, my Mom & Dad were just not very smart people but by the time I reached my mid-20s, I was quite surprised how smart they had ...

My mom had “mom”-isms, pearls of wisdom meant for instruction which she readily applied to my many moments of idiocies — wasted axioms of truth on me. One of the “mom”-isms was when I was scowling, she quipped, “Be careful, Mike, or your face will freeze like that!” Or her ...

I don't know it to be true, but I like to think that when I was just a chunky little baby, my big sister, just a kid herself, flipped me the bird, and I returned the favor. The Unholy Middle Finger, The Bird, The One Hand Salute, all of these are just synonyms for a single finger on the ...

I never thought I would be voluntarily writing, let alone someone publishing my work. I never applied myself in high school, I was much more concerned with running in circles and soaring over the top of a band with my instrument of choice, the trumpet. Some may know I took a gap year and ...

There are universal questions we all have. Is there a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow? In golf, what is an albatross? Is it possible to NOT encounter a detour in Iowa during the summer? What exactly is the difference between jelly and jam? And who actually decided to be the first ...

I was out and about this past weekend, and I met someone new. Now, this isn't odd in itself as I do not know the world's population over; however, the conversation that transpired is what was truly the oddity. In fact, it was one thing that the person said in particular that has stuck with ...

Being an impatient kid, my mother often said, “Mike, keep your shirt on!” This didn’t compel me to wait, but it gave me an idea about gifts for my uncle, Archie. At Christmastime and birthdays, I started buying him gifts of dress shirts, because I didn’t know what to get him! He ...

If you've ventured around Toledo for any sort of time or frankly just haven't been spending your days under a rock, then you'll have heard of, or at least seen, our Mayor Brian Sokol. A six foot man usually cruising around town in his massive black pickup, Sokol has been the Mayor of Toledo ...

Finally, the opportunity to relieve all those little and mild irritations that bug us so much. Pet Peeves! Those actions of others that just simply annoy us, (er, I mean, me). Now to be fair, they're not like "root canal" sufferings but just those tiny little disturbances that get on that ...

What’s fascinating about ladders is that you can make them out of anything and into anything! My neighbor in Newton leaned his ladder against his two-story house for years. When he sold the house, the new neighbors leaned their ladder against the house for several more years! The more ...