Building an Empire I have never cared that much about wealth, or at least that’s what I like to tell myself. I was raised by a mother who genuinely didn’t give the accumulation of wealth a second thought. She was born during WWI, spent her childhood in the 1920’s, came of age during the Great Depression, and spent her early adult years during WWII. Her life, as I really know it, began when she set…
As Old As I Feel It’s Mothers’ Day and it is hard not to remember that I am now at an age when my mother was well into her retirement from the UN and living in Las Vegas. When she was 68, I was 30 and had my own son. That seems like a very long time ago to me and while I’m sure my sister Barb, who lived near her all those years in…
The Age of Greed When I think of great movie soliloquies, I can’t help but think about Michael Douglas standing before a board of director’s annual meeting in his attempt to take over the company to slice and dice it into his pocket and into oblivion, and saying to the the crowd, “Greed is Good!” It is one of the most memorable lines from Oliver Stone’s quintessential and defining 1980’s classic, Wall Street. We all…
Choosing Life It has occurred to me that while I very often write about the hottest political topics of the moment, I have gone the better part of a week since the abortion topic hit our headlines in such a stark manner as it has, and I have not yet chosen to write on that topic. It is a hard topic to address, not because my views are conflicted, but because there is almost no…
Campus Life I never spent any time on a college campus until the summer of 1971 when I left high school in Rome and flew to Cleveland, Ohio to spend the summer working in the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University. My mother was friends with the Department Chair and he gave me a summer job as a research assistant, mostly coding forms on a study that the Department had conducted about he…
The Life of Leisure One of the categories of stories I post under is retirement. I chose that because for as long as I have been actively writing I have written on the subject of retirement, starting as early as the early 1990s when I was a mere forty-something. back then it was less about anticipation of retirement or longing for it. It was because I ran one of the largest retirement businesses in the…
The Return of the Dirty Feet When I moved out here to California in 2020, I assumed I would be wearing shorts year-round. It sure started out that way, but by November I was feeling like long pants were still an important part of my wardrobe. That whole time when I wore shorts, I wore Crocs on my feet every day. Over that period of time I increasingly spent my time working in the gardens.…
Unlinking LinkedIn is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. For me, that means that it really didn’t exist as much of an aid to my career, either as a source for employees or as a source for employment. These days, the business world uses LinkedIn as one of its foundational services and I imagine a goodly proportion of career-minded people use it in either direction on a daily basis. I’ve been on LinkedIn since the…
SP2201 I am in the habit of rewatching movies I have seen before, some of which I have seen many times. Yesterday, while my granddaughters were occupying the big living room TV watching Rocky and Bullwinkle (which also never gets old), I chose to watch Dirty Dancing on my iPad. The movie is set in the summer of 1963, when I was nine years old, strangely enough, the same age as my oldest granddaughter. While…
Captain America Today I stopped by the local BMW Motorcycle store in Escondido. I am planning out my upcoming rides and feel I need a few pieces of on-bike luggage. This is less about the trip we have planned to Moab in May and more about the trip In June and July back east. The plan is to take the motorcycle trailer back to Ithaca to bring back some personal effects from Homeward Bound, so…