Reminding Myself Every Day It’s hard these days to not think about the good and the bad in people. The polarization of political views is inextricably caught up in a series of values that cut very deep into all of our consciousness. Regardless of which way you lean, it is clear your angle of lean has increased a great deal of late. You may not have changed your beliefs at all, but the chances are…
The Candle Melts at Both Ends When we were gone from our hilltop for five weeks, it was inevitable that there would be some things that went amiss despite all the best efforts of Handy Brad, who we paid to watch over and water things. One of the stranger things that happened while we were away took place on the patio. The first time I went into the hot tub, I went to lay my…
Water Water Everywhere Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner more than 200 years ago and it is considered one of the most famous poems in the English language. There is so very much to unpack in this poem and even its title for me. The obvious place to start is that my name is Marin and yet it was not my birth name and I am not in the least bit…
Back Up the Truck For the forty-five years of my Wall Street career the expression to “back up the truck” refers to something a guy by the name of Tom Pope said to me. Tom had grown up in the International Department of our bank in the first half of the 1970’s. That was when the domestic banking market was in its decline due to large loan losses on loans to REITs that had gone…
Stupid is as Stupid Does In 2020 we were scheduled to go to Spain and Portugal (Barcelona to Porto) for a motorcycle trip in August. Needless to say, by the middle of Spring everyone was unequivocally concerned enough about COVID to unanimously recognize the wisdom of cancelling the trip. We even went so far as to assuage our troubled motorcycling souls by tentatively planning a “post-Pandemic” trip in February to Patagonia. By the time the…
Reliving Reality As I await departure for Sedona this morning, I am watching the news, which is heavily focused on the start of the January 6th Commission, set to begin tomorrow. I was sitting right here at the kitchen counter on January 6th when I watched in horror as the insurrectionists broke through the lines and pushed into the once sacred Capitol building. I remember opening the door to the unfinished deck and yelling out…
My Worst Nightmare This morning I decided to go to the Market, our local deli, to get a breakfast burrito to share with Candice and an Asahi Bowl for Kim. When I walked in I immediately saw the glass case with the fresh donuts. There was only one person in front of me in line and I stood my respectful six feet away from him while the counter girl finished her tasks and turned to…
And the Livin’ is Easy Summertime was written in 1934 by George and Ira Gershwin with a lyrical assist from DuBose Heyward, the author of Porgy, on which the opera, Porgy and Bess is based. It is at once a jazz song and a folk song and as such may mark the beginning of the trend towards classic black music of the South. Much has been made of the use of the word “and” after…
Getting to Know You The house just South of us is now sold, neighbor Mary has moved on to her new home in Denver (we even had dinner with her in Denver a few weeks ago) and the new neighbors are in the process of moving in. Today I saw that they seemed to be around, so Kim and I wandered over through our garden trellis and introduced ourselves. Both the man and the woman…
Quick Like a Bunny When we moved to this hilltop we noticed that when we drove up High Mountain Drive, there was one house on a curve, actually one yard on a curve, where we could always count on seeing one or more rabbits running off, chased by our headlights. We came to calling the anonymous house the Bunny House. Given that it was one of the only homes up on this hill that has…