Ever since I was little, I have had the very bad habit of biting my nails. I’m not sure exactly when it started, but I think it was when we lived in Wisconsin and I was in early grade school. Nail biting is called onychophagia and is a common habit that affects around 30% of the population. The obvious and default cause relates to psychological factors like anxiety and stress relief (many people bite their…
Today is like the end of August in Santiago, Chile. The high will be 87 degrees. Luckily for us, we are arriving in the early morning at the airport next Friday and being immediately whisked away (at least its immediately in my imagination…I’m sure there will be an abundance of waiting around in the arrivals area while a meaningful component of the 930 Viking passengers, all wandering around with their luggage with little red Viking…
As most of us settle into whatever retirement housing configurations we prefer, it is hard to deny that we all want to have nearby friends to commune with on a daily basis. These are not replacement friends for the people we have known and loved for years and with whom we seek to gather regularly as circumstances allow, but rather a new set of friends that share our usually mundane and common interests like gardening…
Last night my friend Mike sent me a CNN article on Chile and the collapse of their electric grid due to excessive summer heat, drought and infrastructure overburdening. Yikes! Seems like Chile is experiencing a combination of California and Texas calamities just as we are heading down to begin our cruise. Mike seemed a bit pensive about it all where I felt like I wanted to take it more in stride. I take some solace…
I’ve never been a car guy. That’s due to my early adoption of motorcycles, I suspect. I was fine with my Tesla X for many years due to the novelty of the EV, and I am now very pleased with my Ford F-150 Lightning because my truck serves my gardening. But for almost more than 15 years, we have driven a Mercedes Benz GL450 (technically now a GLS) due to comfort preferences. We think of…
More than a year ago I started taking a daily dose of “greens” by consuming a shaker full of AG-1. I am not exactly a poster child for healthy eating and especially not for anything resembling health food. Nonetheless, I started the regime of shaking up a canister of this green stuff every evening after dinner. Somewhere along the route, I decided to switch to a morning regime because it seemed easier. It has become…
Back in 2010 I was teaching at Cornell in my Pensions class and I was trying to explain to a rather arrogant young graduate student that gathering enough wealth so as not to need to worry about retirement savings per se (i.e. insufficient pension asset accumulation or what is often called unfunded pension liabilities) was a false sense of comfort. My point was that you have to think about the broadest implications of such macro…
We’re almost at the end of February and for whatever reason this year February in the North County of San Diego seems particularly wonderful. It’s 8 AM and we are about to get in the car and drive to Phoenix but in typical fashion I am ready and raring to go a full 45 minutes before our scheduled departure. Buddy is off with his doggy pals at daycare either wondering when we’ll come back or…
Two weeks from today, I will be in Valparaiso Chile preparing to board the Viking Jupiter cruise ship for an 18 day trip around Cape Horn ending in Buenos Aires Argentina. My biggest concern at the moment is the status of my right knee, which is still suffering from a fall 10 days ago where I landed with my full weight on a rock on that right knee. I have generally felt that it was…
We all know that I have too much time on my hands and that my laziness drives me more into sedentary pursuits than walking the roads in my neighborhood. That means I am reading more than ever these days. I have just read two articles that in strange combination have given me even more confusing thoughts than normal that I feel inclined to share. I feel like a kid who has just realized that outer…