01.12.2025

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The day I met Marta, I was needy, blind and needy. It was one weekend after a breakup where my girlfriend, Teri, left me. Worse, she left me to be with another woman.
We had agreed to meet for lunch on the boardwalk in Venice beach. She arrived with Janice. I knew Janice, she lived in the same apartment complex as my girlfriend, Teri.
They were laughing and having lots of fun as they walked towards the restaurant where I was waiting.
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30.11.2025

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We moved, my daughter and I. We loaded up the a U-Haul ourselves. Everything was going great. We unloaded everything at the new house and returned the truck to the dealership in our newly adopted hometown.
But then my daughter fell face-first from a few feet up from the back of the truck with an arm full of moving blankets. You know, the kind that are used to protect furniture. She was carrying the blankets to their U-Haul office so that the dealer could count them.
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26.11.2025

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The first couple of lines of the early 1960s upbeat song "If You Wanna Be Happy" by Jimmy Soul, had been running through mind for the last few days since Sydney moved out, at my request. I've had three long term relationships - all with beautiful young women. The first beauty was lazy but spent us into serious debt. She didn't take care of our kids.
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25.11.2025

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"Knock knock"
It wasn't the set up to a lame joke. It was real knocking on my apartment door. I paused the movie I was watching and got up off the couch to walk across the room to that white wooden door. "Who the hell is it..." Looking out the peephole, I saw someone I did not expect. It was a woman, young, 1 year younger than me. Wavy, black, shoulder length, sharp brown eyes, tan skin, a prominent nose that could belong to an Italian or a "Middle-Easterner".
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25.11.2025

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I am an engineer, an entrepreneur and a businessman with considerable experience. By the tail end of the dot.com frenzy, I learned enough about business during that heady time to know that as soon as a small company is profitable, those profits turn into growth and growth turns into interest from large companies wanting to break into certain markets. That interest means they want to buy. The margins for small businesses aren't large in most cases, so people make real money by selling the company before it gets too large.
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24.11.2025

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It was my girlfriend, Emma's birthday. She'd hit twenty a few months before I did, and her folks had let her invite as many people as she wanted. I'm sure the unspoken terms of the agreement included not inviting me. They'd looked none too impressed when I'd shown up, glowering at myself and their daughter in turn before they headed off to hide in some distant wing of their giant house.
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22.11.2025

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Each year I travel to the convention at Hay on Wye. It's a small town near Monmouth in Wales that has the most amazing river close by where in my teens and early twenties I used to canoe. Now I go to this sleepy area for its once a year awakening where book sellers, buyers and authors come to share tales, ply their trade or just browse and pick up the atmosphere.
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20.11.2025

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"God I need a cigarette!" I gasped as I collapsed, exhausted, at the top of the small mountain my team had just hiked up in the Lake District.
"You're supposed to be setting us a good example." Khalid laughed as he flopped down next to me quickly followed by his two schoolmates.
"Fu...To Hell with that!" I laughed, "I deserve one after a walk like that."
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20.11.2025

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This story has been buried deep inside of me for a long time. I remember all of it very well, almost like it was last week. I've reminisced and re-lived it all many times over the years. Much of it is quite fun to remember. Some of it is bittersweet. Some of it is painful still.
When I was out of college and in my early twenties I got a job selling radio advertising in a suburban/rural area, and although new to the region, I became successful in a fairly short time.
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17.11.2025

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"Bugger it," Colin muttered as he knocked a pile of notes on to the floor. He had been working at the computer on a tutorial paper for most of the morning and had stood up to have a stretch.
He knelt down and started to reassemble the notes when he spotted a book among the tangle of wires at the back of computer that at some time must have fallen down the back of the desk. He picked it up, looked at it, and realised that it was a book he had borrowed from his friend Damien at least a couple of months ago and had been forgotten.
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