Yesterday, on a quiet Saturday afternoon found me finished with my weekend round of planting the sixteen new rustic pots that I carefully placed (and Kim even more carefully adjusted in their placement) along the stone Patio wall on the north side of our barbecue area. It was then that Kim told me that Doctor Zhivago was on Turner Classic Movies. I have become so used to on-demand streaming of movies that it unsettled me…
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…
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…
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…