Living Out Loud
Living Out Loud
Lou Plummer
A blog focused on kindness, community and life experience written by one of the world's oldest Gen-Xers.
Latest Posts
I eat grits. I always have and I always will. Because they're delicious, that's why. Grits are a simple dish: ground corn, salt and a little butter, the traditional way. Sometimes folks get a little fancy and start adding cheese, chopped...
If you listen to podcasts about endurance sports, you'll hear a common theme come up among the hikers, cyclists and runners whose idea of fun is covering long distances under their own power. Many of them are recovering addicts and...
Privilege comes and privilege goes. I've had stretches in my life where I lived frugally out of necessity, not because I had a hidden virtue. Later in life, with debts paid off, we managed to save some dough for retirement. Well,...
My parents were young when I was born, only 17, but despite the relatively small time gap, we are from distinctly different generations. They've been divorced since the 70s, so their needs and circumstances, while similar, are still...
All four of my grandparents lived into my adulthood. For most of my childhood, they were close enough that we could visit them often. Even though my parents split up the year I started school, my mom stayed close to my dad's family, so...
I'm ready to grudgingly accept that the absolute market saturation of mattress retailers in America over the past 10 years isn't tied to money laundering, even though it's one of the few internet conspiracies that kind of, sort of, might...
We spend roughly one-third of our life asleep as a biological imperative. My relationship with sleep kind of tells my life story, not in dreams but in the pure mechanics of when I went to bed and when I got up. Oddly, sleep has seldom...
I worked with a guy for twenty years. I knew his three daughters by sight and watched them progress and graduate from the school system that employed their father and me. I knew this guy's wife, his father, his mom's health history. I...
My recipe for not hating myself consists of three elements: 1. Keep changing -- and by changing, I mean improving, and by improving, I don't mean "be more productive." I mean be a better person today than I was yesterday. Better means...
Age: 61 Number of Years driving: 45 Approximate number of cars owned: 13 New Cars purchased: 1 In a twist of fate so cruel it was almost unbelievable, the universe broke my beloved 2005 Camry last Saturday, the same day I wrote about a...
The first world problems have been coming at us hard the past couple of weeks. Amidst the excitement of moving into our new house we started to experience a streak of serial disappointments so consistent that it seems scripted. It...
My phone will ring some time in the next hour. It will be my Dad. He will be having a problem with his television. He will probably be pretty cross about it. He won't ask me to fix the problem. He will just blurt out "It's not doing...
I'm BackA former colleague once told me, "When you see a swimming pool, you don't dip your toe in. You do a cannonball." When I rediscovered blogging a few years ago, I started accumulating domains like bad habits. I went five hundred...
The power structure in America has a deep investment in keeping people afraid and begging for protection. We accept that roughly half our federal budget disappears into military-related spending or the interest on debts from previous...
I’m a technology enthusiast, not a business analyst, so I’m not the right person to predict what all the money pouring into AI is going to do to the economy. I consider myself an environmentalist, but I’m also skeptical that every scary...