Stirrings from the empty nest

It was Father's Day today and the tributes to dads across social media can make a lesser mortal believe he could never be a halfway de...

Photo: Nate Ryan A few years ago, when Meniere's Disease was leaving me in desperate shape and a doctor in Woodbury had pronounced th...

It'll take some time before I'm able to write properly about my penultimate day in the radio business, which culminated with a 2 1/2...

Last week I made public that I'm done with the business of radio, and my mother in law didn't recognize my wife when she showed u...

This week I found some of my old favorite pictures that were taken in the film-era and started digitizing them. Not surprisingly, it brought...

Old people tell young people all the time that life is short and passes fast and young people don't believe it. It's been that way...

Back when my two sons were very young (10 or 11 or so), I shared a pair of season tickets to the Minnesota Timberwolves with some people a...

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...