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…
Saying Hello I’ve probably said this in so many ways that I’ve become quite predictable. I have a relatively easy time saying goodbye to places. That comes from my lifetime of moving, first as a trailing child and eventually as an adult with a roving eye and more than a modicum of wanderlust. But saying goodbye to places is always much easier than saying goodbye to people for sure. I’ve been pretty fortunate in my…
Thursdays Suck I suspect that many people, probably the same ones who invented Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF), have felt that Mondays are the day of the week that sucks the most. Needless to say, this likely has mostly to do with the need to go back to work or school come Monday, and the fact that that represents an obligation rather than a desire. There are plenty of songs and accolades to Saturday and…
Aye, There’s the Rub Shakespeare has Hamlet say, “To sleep, perchance to dream, aye, there’s the rub…”. It is part of the great “to be or not to be” soliloquy and I have a new take on the whole affair. Hamlet was very troubled, to say the least, and was contemplating death by suicide. I love life and am way too much of a chicken to ever come within a mile of that contemplation, but…
In the Den I am home after five weeks away. We arrived home yesterday afternoon with enough time to unpack our car and generally shake off the physical issues of our 8,000 mile cross-country extravaganza. I drove every one of those miles and remind Kim of that every time I want her to do something for me. I think after 24 hours, I have run that line of reasoning into the ground and will have…
Rich in Real Life One of our favorite movies is the 2007 RomCom with Steve Carrel, Juliet Binoche, and Dane Cook called Dan in Real Life. It is directed by Peter Hedges, who is a bit of an obscure director who is perhaps better known as a writer of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio) and the screenplay for About a Boy, which is another favorite of mine. We are sitting around…
Hearst Castle I first saw Hearst Castle in 1981 with my father and my first wife, Mary. We were going from his place in Marina del Rey on the beach up to his country estate in the San Joaquin Valley, specifically Visalia. It wasn’t so very much out of the way and it gave us the chance to taste Anderson’s Pea Soup and stay st the Madonna Inn. But it was San Simeon that really…
On Capitalism I am once again finding myself at Capitalism’s front doorstep as it seems to be assaulting my senses as I prepare the next term’s syllabus for my business ethics course. Technically the course is titled Law, Policy and Ethics and I am being sure to add more connective tissue between the three subjects rather than have this be a philosophy course on the etymology of ethics in business. When I launch my thinking…