Getting Hosed When you retire, certain things you have taken for granted for many years suddenly come to the fore and take on a much higher level of importance. I’m sure this varies based on where one lives and what interests you are likely to pursue in retirement. But I think its fair to say that retirement has an aspect to it that involves trying to spend more time with nature and for most people…
Lawyering Up Everywhere I turn there are lawyers. The American Bar Association says that there are over 1.3 million lawyers in the United States. That’s only 0.73% of the working population of the country (I define that as those over 25 but under 75 since that seems like the working age), but it still sounds like a lot. That compares to 2 million engineers, 1.1 million doctors and only 141,000 bankers (I find that number…
The Republic of Humanity When you come into our house, you will see a good deal of interesting art and artifacts from all around the world. I inherited my eclectic taste from my Bohemian mother and every piece has a story attached to it. It is all very bespoke except that you will see a series of mid-sized interesting framed photographs on the walls of our guest suite, kitchen, dining room, living room and elsewhere.…
Who Dat? You may recall that several years ago, soon after we moved to this hilltop on a full time basis, we had a middle-of-the-night encounter with something crawling around on the rood in the living room. We never figured out exactly what it was (I insisted it had to be a bird of some sort, Kim thought it was too heavy and noisy to be a bird), but I installed a Ring camera on…
Party Time Neither Kim nor I have ever thought of ourselves as party people. We both have stories from high school and college where we are less than enthusiastic participants in parties, less party poopers, but more just not into it the way others who live for partying are. It takes all kinds to make a world go around and both of us think of ourselves as upbeat and otherwise fun-loving people in a more…
In Memoriam to Summer We just went through the Memorial Day weekend and that is traditionally the start of the summer in America. We spent the weekend chasing the warmth of the desert on Saturday, did the Barbecue for friends and family out on the patio on Sunday, and did a bunch of gardening and went to our first summer movie (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth in the Mad Max series….original, Road Warrior,…
Just Be Cuz The top of my head has been blown off by the Trump convictions yesterday, but I am weirdly not inclined to spend much time writing about it, perhaps because so much has already been said and written about it and also because it is so startling that it has taken 77 years for a guy with Trump’s despicable lack of character to have his comeuppance. The one thing I am inclined to…
The Bite of Life This morning I got directed to and read in its entirety a story from GQ about Kevin Costner. I can’t say I remember ever having read a GQ article before, but I quite enjoyed it. Mostly I enjoyed it because the topic of Kevin Costner has always been of interest to me from his earliest days in film. Just the other day I rewatched from start to finish, The Big Chill,…
History as Judge I religiously read Letters From an American every day, first thing. I was put onto it by our friend Candice several years ago. Candice is a retired NYC school teacher and is someone I always describe as a person for whom the word “Moxy” was invented. The daily post is authored by Heather Cox Richardson, a noted academic historian and Professor at Boston College, where she specializes in the arenas of the…
Agave Maximus By my approximate count I have something like 300 blue agave plants on my 2 1/2 acres. These blue agaves range in size from pups that are only six or 8 inches across to some monstrously large plants that are perhaps 15 feet across and 10 feet or so high. The blue agave is often called Century Plant and one of the reasons that name is that gardening lore has it that these…