Stirrings from the empty nest

Sixty-eight years ago tomorrow, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, three days after it dropped one on Hiroshima. The da...

The construction crew arrived today to take out the old blacktop driveway that I have been trying to nurse through another season for the la...

I accept as a casualty of my age that I am more prone to believing that elements of our cultural past have lessons for our cultural present,...

Sometimes, I think I'm too risk-averse to be a pilot. For the past six weeks, I've been planning a trip to Arizona with my younges...

It's funny how the news can take you back to being 8 years old again. This is the picture-of-the-day for the storm that's hammered...

Rex Trailer died last night , and that probably doesn't mean much to people in Minnesota, but I can tell you this: Every kid had a Rex...

When I first decided to build an airplane 11 years ago, the intention was that I could use it to visit my kids away at college at some godf...

On Friday evening, I passed the 40-hour mark of Phase I flight testing in N614EF, the plane I built over an 11-year period. That means it wo...

(Written via the "day job" blog) An intangible benefit of writing the NewsCut blog and some other blogs I pen are the connection...

These are some words I've written for my brother's funeral on Saturday: I’m a big fan of reading obits in the newspaper. There’s ...

My brother, Michael Lee Collins, passed away Friday night. His life was a testament to the luck of birth and something the "I made my ...

It is an inspiring revelation, I think, that at the (nearly) 58 year-old-mark, I'm still capable of having the best Friday night ever. O...

The more I worked with my oldest son at the company I've worked for for nearly 20 years, the more I understand why my father, against al...

Today is Jose Cardenal's birthday. He might be the person who made it possible for me to check an item off my "bucket list," ...

If we are not careful and paying attention, we can let the professional weatherpeople lead us down the path of meteorological despair. ...

It's impossible to watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade each year without thinking back to two years I wish I could do over.  Th...

Yesterday, Netflix announced that it will begin to offer a lower-priced package for people who would rather stream movies than get a DVD in...

Today is my oldest son, Sean's, 25th birthday and just as I did on #21 and #23 , I'm about to embarrass him again. Because I have ...

During much of last night's Buddy Guy concert at the State Theater in Minneapolis, I kept thinking how I could get my kids to one of his...

Welcome. You've just been sucked into clicking on a link because of a pretty misleading headline that included a big name. I feel dirt...