The granddaughters are on their way home and the hilltop has gotten quiet. I’m never sure these days what is normal and what is not. Currently the weather feels pretty normal for early August. North County San Diego (including this hilltop) in August typically runs with highs around 82–87°F, lows near 60–63°F. In the slightly higher elevation/mesa areas like Hidden Meadows (~1,175–1,500 ft with this hilltop at 1,630) typically runs a few degrees cooler than…
Kabuki is a traditional form of Japanese theater that dates back to the early 1600s, known for its highly stylized performances, elaborate costumes and makeup, and dramatic staging. To begin with, there is an all-male cast where even female roles are played by men (onnagata), a tradition that emerged after women were banned from performing in the early 1600s. There is striking makeup (kumadori) with bold, colorful face paint that conveys a character’s nature (red…
Today is August 1 and we begin our march to the end of another summer. It’s our last day with our granddaughters before I take them to the airport for their return flight home to Brooklyn. We are all on short time now. For over a year since I defeated my edema by, among other things, wearing compression socks almost every minute of every day, I have been wearing long pants rather than shorts. Boys…
Today we spent the day on Catalina Island, a place we have been to several times, most recently earlier this year with some neighbors. As familiar to us as Catalina is, we were pleasantly surprised this time at what a nice day we had. It started with perfect weather that was neither oppressively hot nor rainy and cool, but rather perfectly sunny and warm, but not hot. The last time Kim and I came, we…
Das Boot is a 1981 German war film directed by Wolfgang Petersen, based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s semi-autobiographical novel about a U-boat crew during WWII. It’s known for being told almost entirely from the German sailors’ perspective aboard U-96, capturing the claustrophobia and tedium of submarine warfare punctuated by shear terror. It’s widely considered one of the greatest war films ever made, and one of the most technically demanding productions of its era (the interior U-boat…
I’m not entirely sure why the world works this way for us, but we seem to have a front half and a back half of the year. They are broken up by the month of July, which is our month with out family out here on the hilltop. The front half tends to be about planning some distant trip. The last few years have been, starting in 2023, Egypt/Jordan, Southeast Asia, Patagonia, and this year,…
I learned a new word this morning, vibecoding. Vibecoding is building software by describing what you want in plain English and letting an AI engine generate the code, rather than writing it line by line yourself. Some programmer coined the term in early 2025, and it’s since become mainstream enough to be the Collins Dictionary’s 2025 Word of the Year (how did I miss that?). How it works is that you describe the feature or…
There are so many things to worry about in the world at any time. As to the biggest existential threats at the moment, experts generally rank the biggest risks as, first and foremost, nuclear war. This risk that had us doing drills hiding under our desks sixty-five years ago is still the most immediate way civilization could end quickly, especially with tensions around Russia/Ukraine, and flashpoints in East Asia and South Asia….and now, the Middle…
I will write this story and plan to publish it on Monday morning. That’s when we will be bouncing along on the 5 in a van on our way to the Royal Caribbean Terminal in San Pedro. That ride should take about two hours, so we should get there by about 11am, right on time for our special early boarding privilege (we apparently bought some package for preferential boarding and full internet usage that allows…
There is a line from a favorite movie that has always stuck in my mind. The movie is The Way written and directed by Emilio Esteves and starred in by his father, Martin Sheen. “The Way” follows Tom Avery, a California ophthalmologist who travels to France after learning his adult son Daniel died in a storm while walking the Camino de Santiago, the historic pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Rather than simply bringing…