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…
It was truly a dark and stormy night here in Southern California with whipping winds and rain coming down in buckets. The garden was well past saturation point and now I had to start worrying about the tall stately cacti and succulents on my hilltop that tend to fall over under their own weight when things get too soggy. We had gone out to an anniversary (18th) dinner with houseguest Phillip and Kim’s brother Jeff…
I have never been terribly involved in local politics or even community organizing. I think that stems from my personal history of being moved around so much in my early life. We never lived anywhere long enough to justify getting too deep into whatever community we were living in at the moment. When I was in my early adulthood, I was busy with other priorities and it always felt like local stuff was less important.…
When I was young, one of the things that made absolutely no sense to me was soup. How could anyone feel that a bowl of some flavored liquid, even with a few chunks of meat and a few noodles would be fulfilling? I just didn’t get it and had little or no use for soup. Back in 2002 as I was crossing over into middle age, there were a few years when I got into…
Today I went for a very eventful personal appointment. When I moved here in 2020, I went about getting a California drivers license, which was not an easy feat in the midst of COVID. I finally got an appointment in the Temecula office of California DMV (Kim had to go all the way to Hemet to get her’s) once the DMV felt it was safe to reopen their offices to the public and re-expose their…
We, like so many people, used to say that we were not cruise people. It’s funny how that has changed over time and once you get a look at the people who do cruise you understand that unless you are going on Carnival, Celebrity or Disney (all of which tend to cater to families with kids), the adult cruise lines have an older demographic. Our choice of cruise lines is the one that gets consistently…
As I started my senior year in college, 1974, a guy by the name of Robert Pirsig wrote this philosophical novel as an exploration of the concept of Quality. What he called the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) originated with his college studies as a student of biochemistry. He found the number of rational hypotheses for any given phenomenon appeared to be unlimited. It seemed to him that this undermined the validity of the scientific method.…
I am in our room at the University Club of San Francisco. The University Club of San Francisco was founded in 1890 by a group of college graduates who wanted to create a social and cultural center for university alumni in the city. The club was originally located in several different downtown locations before moving to its current home at 800 Powell Street in 1909. The distinctive clubhouse building, designed by architects Bliss & Faville…
Last night we went to a party on a hilltop near us. To the north of our hilltop are several other hilltops (we live in a very hilly area to the west of the serious mountains, but to the east of the flat plains that run out to the ocean). Tucked in between Hidden Meadows and the Lawrence Welk resort complex (that’s right, once owned by Mr. Bubbly himself), there is a relatively expensive gated…