My Portfolio

On the road…again! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Glass Half Full? Half Empty?     Life holds more than a few mysteries.  We can plainly see a water glass that is half full/half empty, but the question is, which is it?  Some people...

  On the road…again! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Unbelievable Tales   Isaac Azimov wrote more than 500 books.  In his fruitful career, he also managed to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry.  So, when a colleague at the car rental company said that...

On the road...again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Muscle Man   Upon waking, the Footloose Forester often contemplates if and how he will start a chronicle story from his mélange of snippet memories of his life On the road…again!!!    As serendipity would...

On the road…again! Afghanistan to Zambia Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek L is for Lesotho   Three days on horseback is just enough time to get the point that not everywhere in Lesotho can be reached by road. Pretty sure that a tank could reach most of the...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Quantitative Analysis, Qualitative Analysis, Critical Analysis   Chemistry is fascinating but it is hard.  A chem major earns respect for the mere fact of choosing a field that contains as much mystery, uncertainty, and challenge as...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Doing Wheelies in Lion Habitat   One vivid memory that never got a good jump start into a tasty chronicle took place in the Aberdares Region of Kenya over 25 years ago.  The long...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Don’t Believe Everything You Read, Even in the Dictionary   On the general theme of words matter, today’s chronicle is a short essay on why readers should not rely on everything they read as being...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Courts-Martial   Anyone who has spent time in military service has rich, if unorganized mental files of their time in uniform.  Truth be known, those whose one or two-term enlistments are just as likely to...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek    More Cryptic Coordinate Numbers    Little did he know that a hand-held GPS reading during Episode #10 of Breaking Bad would lead to a converging coincidence in the art of storytelling.  The starring protagonist in...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek     Playing Bumper Cars Around The Moon   It was a bright moon-lit night and the Footloose Forester could hardly look away as he approached the side door to his basement apartment in Auburn, California.  He was probably...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Mystery Mango   It should not take an archeological discovery for the world to share the identity of one of the most delicious fruits to ever grow on a tree.  A still-mysterious mango variety from...

  On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Eidetic Episodes and Hard-Wiring in the Brain   The link between the word eidetic and the concept of hardwiring in the brain is a marriage of understanding of why humans remember some things and...

  On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Floyd Was A Tie Hacker    Charles Kuralt and Bob Simons had a few things in common.  Both were writers who gained their inspiration in places far from the office.  They did not tell...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Mango is my Last Name, Ataulfo is my First Name   This week marked the arrival of a welcome trend in advertising. Inasmuch as the Footloose Forester is suspicious of many of the deceptions in marketing techniques, the new...

On the road…again! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Major-Colonel   One aspect of being a contractor in service to US Government agencies was the overall accommodation we were given to housing, the use of post exchanges and government-operated transportation, and other services.  That...

On the road…again! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek    The Gulf Between Subjectivity and Objectivity There is no line between subjectivity and objectivity.  There is a gulf.  People often speak out with the pretension of authority in their voice, a loud din of force...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Searching for the Right Ingress   One of the frustrations that we all share in our lives is our personal limitation on how to broach a subject, how to open a conversation, how to respond,...

On the road…again!!! Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek   Forests as Picture Puzzles   Open a picture puzzle box that shows the picture of a green coniferous forest on the outside, and every adolescent and adult in the family will discover an unsorted pile...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek  Lake Tahoe, Silver Dollars, and Piñon Pine   Those halcyon days working as a consultant forester in California in the 1960s salted the memory banks of the Footloose Forester with many, many fond reveries of adventures.  Some jobs were...

Essays, Stories, Adventures, Dreams Chronicles of a Footloose Forester By Dick Pellek    My Camel is Named Uunt   As Father George Westwater told it, when President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Bashir, the camel driver, what his camel’s name was… well.  Bashir was on camera, sitting atop a camel as the...