I bought a house!

Built in 1941 in Richmond, CA. My first home purchase!

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Noo shooz!

New shoes! Mardi shoes on sale and the last pair of Pan socks. John Fluevog brings delightful whimsy to our feet!

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(see my LEGO instagram at @billwardsbrickpile for all

posted here by accident) Today we got a pair of gifts to go under yesterday’s Christmas tree of the LEGO City Advent calendar … See blog for my reviews each day for this adventcalendar

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Thanks to Kelly-Moore Paints and 3M for providing free N95 masks!

Get yours while they last. The air quality in the Bay Area is so terrible due to the Camp Fire … We need rain!

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New hairdo for mom

Took Mom out of the convalescent home for a new hairdo and a visit to the Santa Cruz wharf today.

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Let’s build!

Let’s build! What’s in your brickpile? See my LEGO stuff at brickpile.com

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Moving pages to Brickpile

Prompted by the imminent shutdown of brickshelf.com I am moving all my LEGO entries from this site to my LEGO blog, brickpile.com. Although I copied all my photos from this site onto flickr.com some time ago, I never updated the blog entries to use those images until now. Since I’m updating them, I might as well move them to the LEGO blog. As I move each entry there, I will add rewrite rules to this site so that when anyone tries to visit the old location it will be redirected to the new one.

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New Blog for LEGO, and Changes Are Afoot

I’ve started a new blog just for my LEGO®-related posts. You can find it at www.brickpile.com. I post new entries there at least once a week, which is a lot more often than I ever did here.

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Get a Gmail Invite

By now you’ve probably heard of gmail, Google’s new mail service. It’s in a “beta test” mode which means they won’t let just anyone sign up. But people who have accounts are issued a few invitations they can give out, so it spreads by word of mouth.

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My Online History

This is a time capsule – written in 2003 to describe how my online life had evolved up to that point. Looking back in 2026, it all feels like ancient history.

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The Tupperware Guy

Yes, you didn’t misread that – I used to sell Tupperware. I was “The Tupperware Guy.”

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My Commodore History

When I was in 4th grade (1980-81; age 9), our elementary school got its very first computer – a Commodore PET with 32K of RAM, named Rudy (for the salesperson who sold it to our school). It was a PET 2001 computer, but it had a “real” keyboard, rather than the so-called “chicklet” keyboard. It ran BASIC 2.0 and used an external cassette drive to load software. But I wasn’t in that class.

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A Life of Sailing

I’ve sailed all my life. My parents owned a sailboat since before I was born. When I was a kid we would take cruises to Monterey or Moss Landing (really the only one-day destinations from Santa Cruz) for a weekend, and occasional day-sails. I’ve always dreamed of sailing off into the sunset, but I don’t think I have the guts to do it…

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