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Yes, and...

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Have you ever heard of the concept of "Yes, and..."? It comes from the world of improv comedy. The idea is that when you are performing an improvised scene, you never disagree with any premise put forward by anyone else. You always go along with it and see where it takes you. That's the "yes" part. The "and" part is where you contribute something of your own, adding to the previous suggestion. It's about collaboration, exploration, creativity, and keeping an open mind. It can lead to all kinds of interesting places. Can I share my one and only improv experience with you? While doing this project back in 2014, I attended an improv comedy fundraising event, and got called up on stage. Here's an email I wrote to a friend at the time: So last night we were sitting there watching improv when I get called up on stage to participate. But rather than just rearranging someone's limbs or providing sound effects for a scene, they actu...
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Year of the Hurricanes

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This has been the Year of the Hurricanes, both literal and figurative. At the beginning of this year, we were hosting a mother and daughter who were relocating from Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, and just recently we had a near miss of our own with Hurricane Florence. The mother-daughter duo stayed with us for about two months, and we did our best to get them set up with a new life here. Their story and ours actually made the local news: As for Florence, we were lucky enough to avoid too much damage, though we did lose one tree in our yard, and there was some flooding in our neighborhood and around town. But having avoided the worst of it, two of my boys and I volunteered with Operation Airdrop, an all-volunteer grass-roots effort to deliver needed supplies to our local airport, where volunteer pilots load them into small planes and fly them directly to the worst-hit areas. Many of the coastal towns and cities were cut off by record floodwaters, creating a very difficult...
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