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By John Toth The Bulletin My Duolingo icon is not happy. It will send me a reminder email shortly with the heading, “Nobody ignores me for long.” I have been doing language lessons on Duolingo for several years. I use the free version and muddle through the ads because I am too cheap to use the paid version. While the ads are a small nuisance, along with the daily reminders, they are a minor trade-off for the benefits that come with learning or refreshing a language and givin

By John Toth The Bulletin I sat on the shores of Lake Ossipee one warm summer night and discussed with a couple of my friends what we thought it would be like when we get old. Under the New Hampshire moonlight, we came up with some scenarios based on what we had been doing in our young lifetime. When my turn came to talk, my prediction was less than spectacular. “I’ll still be writing,” I said. “I’m going to write until I die.” We were in high school, working summer jobs at a

By John Toth The Bulletin What are the chances of anyone in Brazoria County enjoying a late-summer beach outing, wading in the Gulf waters and being attacked by a shark? I know you have not been staying up nights worrying about this, as you shouldn’t. Brazoria County beaches are among the safest along the Texas coastline when it comes to shark-related encounters. You may be worried about strong currents along some sections of the county’s 17 miles of beachfront. You may disli

By John Toth The Bulletin I love to cruise, but I want to do it on an affordable budget. I don’t want to come back to port and be financially drained. I’m going to share with you in this column how I have a lot of fun cruising while keeping the cost down. Sharon, The Bulletin’s travel editor, and I have taken eight cruises so far and plan to take many more. In my humble opinion, it is the best way to relax and enjoy a vacation from the time we board a ship, to the sad morning

By John Toth The Bulletin I haven’t been dreading it, but I was also not looking forward to my annual visit to the doctor to make sure that all my vitals are still in the “alive and well” category. Sharon - my partner in The Bulletin and my life - decided to get our annual wellness visits at the same time to save a little gas and do some shopping afterwards. Sharon’s doctor was on one side of the clinic, and mine was on the other, which required that we go to separate waiting

By John Toth The Bulletin When I was a teenager in the 1970s, at the urging of a friend, I smoked a cigarette - or at least I tried. I was just puffing on the cigarette like it was a cigar. He encouraged me to inhale because, as he said, “that’s how it’s done. Otherwise, you’re just wasting it.” I did, and immediately I started coughing my lungs out. I couldn’t stop. It took several minutes for me to be able to breathe again normally. “That happens at first. You’ll get used t

By John Toth The Bulletin Thirty-two years ago this week, Sharon and I published the first Bulletin. It was eight tabloid pages, black and white. We didn’t know how long we’d last in the then-crowded Brazoria County newspaper market. Before we took on this endeavor, I worked 12 years for the Houston Chronicle covering Brazoria County and adjacent areas. I lived in the county and reported on events happening here. Sharon, the Bulletin’s co-publisher, was free-lancing for the C

By John Toth The Bulletin My former editor, Mary Moody, called me in 1995, five months after I quit the Houston Chronicle. “Did you get that weekly paper publishing bug out of your system yet?” she asked. “Why are you asking,” I asked back. “Because I have to fill your position, and I thought you’d like to come back,” she replied. I was honored. Mary and I didn’t always see eye to eye, although we managed to resolve our differences and became friends again – and again. I had

By John Toth The Bulletin You all know that summer is my favorite time of the year, no matter how hot it gets. I probably like the heat more than many others around here, which is why we are going to help some of our readers to cool off. If you’re reading this column, you have already seen our Page 1 promotion for free tickets to Moody Gardens’ Palm Beach Water Park in Galveston. We are giving away a bunch of tickets to help you get through the summer heat for at least one da

Many keep returning for the same reason I returned to my summer job as a student By John Toth The Bulletin When I was working in a summer camp in my high school and college years, leaving at the end of the summer was not a happy occasion. It meant leaving behind a very comfortable and simple existence and all the friends I made throughout the summer. I had no choice. I had to go back home and start the fall semester. Departing my world for the previous two months was not easy

By John Toth The Bulletin I always wanted to own a nail gun but never really had a good excuse to buy one - until now. There is a large workshed next to the Bulletin Hideaway, which has not been getting all that much attention. It has been something like “out of sight, out of mind,” even though it was not all that much out of sight. It was more like, out of mind. Recently, I noticed that this huge, overbuilt structure that serves the sole purpose of putting in there what was

By John Toth The Bulletin My mother had her poker face on as the border guard entered the train cabin and said, “papers, please.” The train just left Budapest, Hungary, where I was born and lived for the first 10 years of my life. We were poor, but all of Hungary was poor. The country became part of the Soviet Union’s bloc of countries over which it maintained control. My mother saw no future in raising her only son there. At the time, the situation seemed hopeless to her. Sh