Cooling Off Sometimes things are easy. Two days ago, our northern air conditioner went on the fritz. That is the older half of our AC system in the house and if measured in BTU strength, it is also the smaller half of the system. I’m not sure that is a wise configuration, given the importance of AC to comfortable sleeping, but I inherited and retrofitted the HVAC and Hot Water systems in this house and…
Going to the Dogs When we were young, we would sometimes be forced to tell our friends that we had to go because our mothers were expecting us for some reason or other. Then as we got more independent and older, but were still mostly dependent on others, we used our schoolwork or perhaps our new work situation to create an excuse for why we all needed to run off before the festivities were completed.…
School Daze It’s early August and despite my every effort to the contrary, I cannot make myself into Rod Stewart. My Freshman Fall at Cornell was heavily dominated by Rod’s rendition of Maggie May, which came out in July, 1971 on his Reason to Believe album. You may recall that for him it was “late September and I really should be back at school…” Well, for me at age 68, it is a case that…
Weekend at Moonstruck We are coming up on the first weekend of August and we are completely unscheduled for the next three days. While we are by no means social butterflies, we usually do have activities of some sort planned for the weekends. Sometimes it is only a dinner or a movie, but our usual go-to’s are out-of-pocket. Sister Kathy is trying to get out of her COVID bout, but can’t seem to get a…
The Presumption of Aging I have never been one to have a fear of getting older. In fact, whenever I am asked my age, I always state a number one year beyond my present age. Right now I am 68 and when asked, I say I am 69. This might be due to the fact that I always had a bit of a baby face and liked to think of myself as older, and it…
The Sanctity of Pain There is and has been for some time, a debate about the value of pain. I think we all understand that physiologically, pain serves as a useful mechanism for the body in that it signals damage to varying degrees and acts as a warning flag that something serious needs to be attended to. Pain as a bodily wake-up call is something we all appreciate. That is not where the debate generally…
Losing My Grip I am increasingly feeling like an observer of the world as it rushes past rather than an active participant. Some of that feeling is inevitable as I get further and further out of the mainstream. I am still actively trying to remain relevant and I do that by keeping up on the news and engaging friends in lively debate when the topics are not too controversial or the people involved are not…
Pizza, Pizza It’s taken us three years of living out here on this hillside, all the while under the cloud of a Global Pandemic that restricted services, restricted business operations, mandated masks, gave us CDC guidelines to live by and generally made us all wary of interfacing with anyone we absolutely did not have to interact with. Starting this summer, we seem to have finally broken through to forming some local friendships in our neighborhood.…
Dopesick Kim and I have become addicted to the Hulu series about OxyContin and the Sackler family’s creation of the opioid epidemic in the world over the past twenty-five years. That series is called Dopesick and that term represents the feeling an addict of OxyContin (and any other strong prescription opioid) gets when they are strung out and in desperate need of their next fix. This story fits nicely with our having just listened to…
Swimming Upstream One of my prized possessions from my mother is an odd poem in a silly little gilded frame that goes: Most any poor old fish can float And drift along and dream: But it takes a regular LIVE ONE To swim against the stream It is attributed to a Maurine Hathaway, a woman nicknamed The Poetess of the Pines. She was one of the contributors of these little ditties to a guy by…