CostCo to the Rescue As I have previously explained, my hilltop pal Mike is a real devotee of CostCo, along with about 119 million other people on the planet. That all makes CostCo the third largest retailer in America behind Walmart and Amazon. When I think I need something right away, I go online to Amazon and try for the same-day delivery program. I just did that for my favorite shampoo yesterday (false alarm, I…
Control Yourself I am exploring a side of life that comes up every so often. It is that strange balancing act we all do between keeping busy and being busy. Keeping busy is a good thing that has many benefits including the fulfillment of some purpose and an identification that we are adding value in some way to the world. Being busy sounds like an excuse right from the get-go and generally envisages a state…
The Dance Card Gets Filled The notion of a dance card started in the Eighteenth Century, but it really came into vogue in Nineteenth Century Vienna. I always thought of it in regard to Gone With The Wind with the young Scarlett O’Hara with a small booklet looped to her wrist where the evening ballroom dances were listed and next to which she could write the names of the many beaus and potential suitors that…
Our Gypsy Blood I am somewhere in season five of following the travails of Thomas Shelby and his family of Peaky Blinders. I recognize that I am a full decade behind in finding fascination in this series, but I am enjoying it nonetheless. The story covers the fifteen years after WWI in Birmingham, England and follows the rise of a larcenous and unscrupulous family as they work their way through the roaring twenties dealing with…
And the Hits Just Keep On Coming It was shaping up like a bit of a horse race between Jack Smith and Fani Willis as to who was going to criminally indict Donald Trump first for his purported attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. In the past few days there has been a lot of speculation about Willis, the District Attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, and just how ready she was to bring her…
The Framers’ View I just saw Eric Holder, the ex-Attorney General under Barack Obama, responding to a question about all of the Donald Trump indictments and pending legal actions. That is the sort of question that is being asked of many many people these days, whether they are ex-government officials or just cable news pundits. One of the things that we have all been thinking about for the past six or seven years is the…
Is the Bloom Off the Rose? I am sitting on our patio this sunny late July morning and there is a slight breeze from the east. I am doing what I always do in the morning if I am not rushing off to do something or go somewhere, I am trying hard to be in the moment and feel what I feel around me. I like the patio in the morning and in the late…
A Son is a Son When we were recently at the Lodge at Red River Ranch in Southern Utah, we had one evening when our plans to go stargazing got temporarily postponed due to a bull bison on the loose on the ranch grounds. The Lodge proprietor and general buffalo wrangler, Dave, was out with the cowpokes trying to do two things simultaneously. They needed to corral the young bull bison that had escaped its…
The Unholy Land Kim and I have traveled to Israel fairly extensively. It is certainly a fascinating ancient place with lots and lots of human cultural history and religious significance to at least three major religions representing the ideology of a majority of the world (57% by best estimates). Being one of the crossroad spots of human evolution, it is claimed as sacred by many and has been fought over for millennia by multiple constituencies.…
Tough Guys I’m a tough guy most of the time, but a tender guy at other times. I’m big and burly and I ride big motorcycles and have been the breadwinner for several families worth of dependants. That and the fact that I survived forty-five years in the top ranks of Wall Street, one of the tough guy arenas, makes me fit the tough guy profile. Buy I cry at sad movies and have a…