The Great Outdoors This morning I am sitting at the top of Palomar Mountain at a wooden picnic table in the shade of a massive (8-10 foot diameter trunk) spreading California cedar tree that is purported to be 400 years old. Actually, that tree is off to the side and cordoned off and I’m sitting in a picnic area that is situated between three of its brothers who are probably no more than 350 years…
A Failure to Communicate We all know the line from Cool Hand Luke when the warden or the southern chain gang colony, Strother Martin says in his slow and deliberate southern drawl to Paul Newman (Luke), George Kennedy (Dragline) and the rest of the inmates (which include such future cinematic greats as Dennis Hooper and Ralph Waite), “You see, what we have here is a failure to communicate…”. The emphasis is placed on the word…
Moonshot In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I am quite fixated when it comes to moon themes around this hilltop. It all springs from my favorite movie, Moonstruck, which suited me as a name for this house those ten plus years ago when we bought it. I have never looked back since and the moon hits just keep on coming. I looked up the word moon in reference to the 1,437 stories I…
It’s a Dutch Door Life I just saw a piece from the Atlantic that caught my eye. It is called The HGTV-ification of America and it’s opening salvo is “You can’t escape gray floors”. As I read that, I looked down at the gray luxury vinyl floors under my feet in our office. We had originally put in two shades of gray (not quite the fifty that pop culture demanded) when we renovated our kitchen…
My Wannabe Socialist Friends? Twenty-seven years ago I started a motorcycle club with a few pals. I had gone on a solo motorcycle walkabout through the canyons of Southern Utah in 1994 when I turned 40 and had been inspired to make that an annual ritual. The first year I could only get one guy to go with me. He was a lawyer and a bit of a henpecked husband (his wife didn’t like him…
The Last Straw Not so long ago I wrote about my travails with AT&T and Verizon and the extremely annoying process of trying to cancel services I do not use and have not used for a while. I termed it a death throw for these telecom behemoths when they must resort to unscrupulous tactics to try to drain the last few drops out of the cow they have been milking dry. I thought that was…
Rounders If you haven’t seen the movie, Rounders, and you enjoy an occasional game of poker with friends, you really must find a way to see the movie. It was made in 1998, so it has more or less modern production value and yet its got the patina of age that makes it a classic. There are other great poker movies like Molly’s Game, The Cincinnati Kid, and Maverick, but almost everyone agrees that Rounders…
Maybe Elon is Right Elon is a strange name. Google tells me it is the 950th most common boy’s name at this point with some 234 baby boys (and 5 baby girls) getting christened with that name last year. It is both a Biblical Hebrew name meaning Oak Tree and an African name meaning Spirit (technically, the individual that God loves). It’s not just God, we all gotta love Elon. If you absolutely have to…
The Cost of Joy It was Alfred Lord Tennyson who said in his short poem In Memoriam to A.H.H. (His Cambridge pal Arthur Henry Hallam) in 1849: I envy not in any moods The captive void of noble rage, The linnet born within the cage,That never knew the summer woods. I envy not the beast that takes His licence in the field of time, Unfettered by the sense of crime,To whom a conscience never wakes.…
Rock On Tomorrow I finally get to test out my new rock climbing wall, which I have dubbed, MoonstruckPurna in honor of all those vast Himalayan peaks that I will never get close enough to see, much less to climb. I have the means to include Nepal in my travel itinerary, but, quite frankly, the altitude scares me off and I prefer to get my mountain climbing kicks vicariously and from a distance. I love…