It’s that funny transitional time of the summer when every morning starts out in a cloud and we wait and see when this hilltop will break through to the sun. It always does because summer is simply not a time for rain on this hilltop. I remember when I lived in Maine for three years back in the mid-60s. I worked on the golf course each of those three summers and so I was acutely…
I keep finding reasons to think about our friend Bill (of Dulcinea and Bill). He is gradually becoming one of my heroes and it has nothing to do with the fact that he seems to like reading my blog stories. What has caused me to think and write about him again this morning is the fact that I am taking Kim off for a routine colonoscopy this morning and we have been living with the…
I have been assaulted this morning by a wave of Supreme Court decisions which have flexed the muscles of the conservative majority with 6-3 votes which have strongly favored gun rights in America and supported the Trump anti-immigration policies that are all about restricting asylum seekers from our shores and deporting specific immigrants like Haitians and Syrians who we are generically deeming undesirable by some. Given that SCOTUS is anxious to go on their summer…
Do you know the Saturday Night Live (SNL) skits with Kristen Wiig as a part of the “Lawrence Welk Show” sketch series? However connected I might have been to the “Lawrence Welk Show” in my grade school days in Wisconsin, I feel more connected to Lawrence now since our hilltop is directly above the Lawrence Welk Resort (now owned by Marriott as a timeshare) that sits adjacent to Rt. 15 between Temecula and Escondido on…
I have a friend, Kevin, who likes to swim with sharks…for real. Kevin is a manly man. He hunts, he fishes, he dives, he motorcycles (on road, but especially the hardscrabble off-road type). He keeps horses and rides in fox hunts (is that even legal?) and owns several farms where he likes to drive his heavy equipment around and move earth and shit from one place to another. On one farm he owns in northwestern…
On this past Sunday night, the night of Father’s Day, we had tickets to see the next LaJolla Playhouse play in the season’s rotation. As season ticket-holders, we see them all, and quite frankly, they do a good job of attracting good new productions that almost all feel like they have a shot of getting to the big time, even though few probably do. Our friends Dulcinea and Bill, who live in LaJolla, are also…
I have started the process of figuring out what’s what with my left hand and its loss of grip strength. The good news is that so far it hasn’t done much to impact my day-to-day life. I can ride my motorcycle all day (though I do wear anti-vibration gloves, which do help a bit). I can do all the gardening I have ever done (though lifting cactus pots by carefully gripping the plastic pot between…
In the 2004 Clive Owen movie, King Arthur, the Arthurian legend is reimagined with the knights as Sarmatian warriors, horsemen from the Eastern European/Central Asian steppes. The film’s premise is that the Sarmatians were conquered by Rome and their sons were conscripted to serve Rome by defending Hadrian’s Wall in England. This represents an alternative historical theory to the romantic medieval French version based on the quest for le Saint-Graal…the Holy Grail. While the Holy…
On Wall Street in the era when more and more work was being done on the trading floor on the computers, all sorts of new problems arose that required us to make adjustments. I was working on the trading desk in 1982/83 when Apples and PC started coming into the mainstream. Prior to that there were computers, but they were either mainframes in some remote location of mini-computers located on a different floor wired into…
Ever since I moved to this hilltop, there have been two vacant lots across the street. They are generally less desirable lots than ones like ours that have ocean and Mountain View’s in every directions. They are nice suburban lots and they do get some partial views of surrounding hills, but they are simply less special, which is why they are, as yet, not built on, even though this development got launched 30 years ago.…