October 25, 2017 Being the parent of a tween girl, I’ve written more than once about the travails of managing P’s diet of screentime. First here, and then here. A few weeks ago, when faced with the surly attitude that seems to happen when she’s OD-ed on too much electronics, we took away the iPhone…
September 24, 2017 Like most of the U.S. (of a certain age anyway), I’m slogging my way through Ken Burns’ Vietnam on PBS. Since I was a youngster back then, it’s been educational to fill in the blanks of my memory on the War that Won’t Go Away. I’ve been relearning the terms “Viet Minh,” …
Tomorrow is the Tulsa Area United Way’s 26th Day of Caring: a chance for more than 5,000 volunteers to fan out across the Tulsa area to work on approx. 350 community service projects. It’s kind of a big deal — Tulsa has one of the oldest and largest Days of Caring in the country, which…
August 25, 2017 Okay: you can say I told you so. Since July 5th this year I’ve been “on call” with the US District Court, Northern District of Oklahoma. Every Friday after 5:00 pm (all Summer) my ritual has been to log on to their eJuror site to see if I had to report the…
Last week, my daughter participated in the Tulsa STEM Alliance’s “Code of their Own” camp, at the Tulsa City-County Library downtown. Sidebar: if you’ve not ventured down to the new remodeled library yet, you owe it to yourself to visit. I used to spend a lot of time there doing research on the 3rd floor,…
We all have competing demands for our time and resources. After the basics of food, shelter and education for our families we’re involved in things to better our world — volunteering and giving to nonprofits and/or to our church. In this way we can all “do good” in our community in ways big and small.…
April 3, 2017 Back in December I wrote a post about our experiences with OurPact, a lovely program to control screen time on iPads, iPhones, and Android devices. You can read about it here. Now I’m back to tell you our thoughts about the newest version: OurPact Premium. The changes are big enough that it…
January 27, 2017 Many of you know that my Dad, Gergely “Greg” Szabo, came to the US in 1957 via the Hungarian Revolution. He died in 1994. When I was kid, my Dad told me a “sanitized” version of his part in the uprising, which now, no matter how much more of the truth I know,…
January 3, 2017 For those of you who know me/us well, you know that we’re generally homebodies…particularly in 2016, when (1) our home was for sale, (2) we had to find a rental in the Jenks district, and (3) we had to move/clean/prep our old house for the rental market when time ran out this…
I’ve asked this question back over Thanksgiving weekend on Facebook: Parents: Over the long holiday we’ve fully implemented the OurPact app to control/curtail screen time for Pi. Anyone else using it? Any advice on achieving a happy middle ground between total block and total open? And I thought I’d expand this into a blog post to…