Bearing Witness Tonight my niece’s husband and two children came over for dinner. We haven’t seen them all year thanks to concerns about their kids’ and our COVID vulnerability (their kids have CF and we have old age). It all came off without any hitches and their daughter Mila was able to test out our new Moonstruck Madness games area. She pretty much played all the available games; mini-golf, bocce, disc golf, horseshoes and cornhole.…
On Art and Effort My friend Steve just posted a piece he titled In Praise of Talent, and it was about his experiences and reactions to the arts of writing and photography, particularly as they relate to the journalistic endeavors he has pursued through his life. He expressed annoyance at attribution to the tools of the trade (particularly in photography, since I doubt anyone would ever accuse a writer of having used his pencil, pen,…
My Aching Back About ten days ago I was going into my hot tub in the middle of the afternoon. That was when the weather was particularly hot and I was using the spa to cool off. Heat is such a relative thing. In the middle of winter, ninety degrees in a hot tub feels almost cold and you need to crank it up to 100 to be soothed. But in the summer, ninety degrees…
The Bridge Over Troubled Water The year was 1970. The world had just lived through a difficult transitional decade of the 60’s. Students at Kent State had died on the campus. A cow pasture in Bethel, New York had been trampled by more than 400,000 young people seeking love and harmony and the best rock and folk music of the day. Both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Ted Kennedy was busy…
Red Sky in Morning – EXTRA This morning, for the second day in a row, we have awoken before 6am. I am in the habit of looking first at my CPAP machine to see how long I have slept. I do this before I look at the clock to check the time. This morning it said 7 hours and 12 minutes, which is good, but then the clock said 5:41am, which seems suboptimal. I would…
Goal! In working out my new games area it became clear that Handy Brad would need help. Mostly he needed help with the heavy lifting involved in moving artificial turf around. The 15×60 main piece, prior to installation weighed about 350 pounds, which is 300 more than I prefer to lift. There is also the old turf that has about 750 pounds of sand on it, so that weighed perhaps 1200 pounds and was in…
Power Play I am watching Rachel Maddow interview Michael Cohen, who is now on house arrest and out of the federal penitentiary where he has been spending his time. While I think highly of Rachel, I find this interview beneath her. As an avid anti-Trump person, I suppose I should like anything that Michael Cohen says in his book or on cable news that is harmful to Trump. And no one is more scorned by…
Tree People It is the morning of Labor Day 2020 and I am sitting in my office in my underwear (one of the luxuries of life on the hilltop where I am out of view of all prying eyes). I have just spent fifteen minutes figuring out how to fix a documentation gremlin that has plagued me. I have to send a signed grant award contract to an agency in Scotland. The first version I…
Democracy as We Knew It When I was born in 1954, the United States with its $390B in GDP, represented 7.23% of global GDP. In 1954 we were the beacon of democratic light. We had just saved the free world from the horrors of Fascism that had spread from Germany to Italy and Spain and was blooming in its own Asian version in Japan. We can’t even talk about Latin America in those days since…
Going Bald This is purported to be the hottest day of the year out here in San Diego. My weather.com app (now owned and operated by the once-venerable IBM) tells me it is already 87 and the sun has just come up. The high is supposed to get to 109. Yesterday was the first time since their installation in April, that my Tesla Wall Batteries got a workout. The electricity grid from San Diego Gas…