Decadence I have been getting the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog for years. The merchant has been around for 175 years, which is, in itself, impressive and means that it’s origins in the Bowery area of New York City in 1848 as a hardware store set its beginnings in the pre-Civil War era. That means it was just in its early years during the era of the Dead Rabbits Gang and Boss Tweed with his Tammany Hall…
A Summer Trim I know what you’re thinking….you think I’m going to talk about losing two pounds and bragging about taking a few bags off the Queen Mary, as they say. Nope. OK, so now you’re thinking that I plan to boast again about cutting my own hair and how easy and economical that is the post-COVID world, even though my one trip to a barber had him telling me that you can REALLY tell…
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…
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…
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…
Le Baguette Lately I am on a kick of buying two fresh baguettes from the Costco bakery at my local Costco Wholesale store. Who doesn’t like baguettes? Bread is one of those things that can we wonderful or it can be a boring filler. In the case of fresh baguettes, they are most often wonderful. One of my favorite French photos is of a beret-wearing Frenchman riding off into the sunset with two baguettes strapped…
Costco on the Brain I’ve known about Costco for many years. It has existed since I came into adulthood after college, but I probably first thought about it in the late 1990’s when my old motorcycling friend Bob Kirby went on and on about selling his Cattle Drive Chili (Bob owned Castlebury Stews out of Augusta, Georgia) through Costco. Bob was a Harvard MBA who had made the food business his passion. He would talk…
Aqua Velva Water as soft as a baby’s bottom is the literal translation of Aqua Velva. I think of it as the oldest men’s cologne in existence. It is, indeed, quite old since it was first introduced in 1917 to the American public and is so much a part of American male grooming that during WWII, the book The Thin Red Line, about the battle for Guadalcanal tells the story about a PX set up…
Cousin Itt Do you remember The Munsters TV show? It only aired for two seasons (1964 – 1966, but a hefty 70 episodes that ran successfully for years in syndication) and like its competitor series, The Addams Family, they probably left an indelible mark on our youthful memories. The Munster show was produced by the team that brought us Leave It To Beaver and was similarly written to mimic suburban life, only with a macabre…