It’s a Dutch Door Life I just saw a piece from the Atlantic that caught my eye. It is called The HGTV-ification of America and it’s opening salvo is “You can’t escape gray floors”. As I read that, I looked down at the gray luxury vinyl floors under my feet in our office. We had originally put in two shades of gray (not quite the fifty that pop culture demanded) when we renovated our kitchen…
My Wannabe Socialist Friends? Twenty-seven years ago I started a motorcycle club with a few pals. I had gone on a solo motorcycle walkabout through the canyons of Southern Utah in 1994 when I turned 40 and had been inspired to make that an annual ritual. The first year I could only get one guy to go with me. He was a lawyer and a bit of a henpecked husband (his wife didn’t like him…
Maybe Elon is Right Elon is a strange name. Google tells me it is the 950th most common boy’s name at this point with some 234 baby boys (and 5 baby girls) getting christened with that name last year. It is both a Biblical Hebrew name meaning Oak Tree and an African name meaning Spirit (technically, the individual that God loves). It’s not just God, we all gotta love Elon. If you absolutely have to…
Papyrus Denial There are very few places in the world I either have not been to or do not care about returning to. That is not to say I cannot get enthusiastic about a trip to a specific spot by specific means with specific other travelers. I do not dislike foreign travel, I’ve just done so damn much of it that I am less and less enthusiastic about prioritizing it. I know it sounds boring…
Laughing It Up While I was just in NYC (actually more in Connecticut than NYC), I had the opportunity to have breakfast with my old friend Roger Baumann. Roger is just about the sweetest guy I know. It’s not just me that feels this way, Kim says the same thing about him all the time too. The only person as sweet as Roger is his lovely wife Julie, but I don’t get to see her…
Luxury Redefined The concept of luxury comes from some combination of Latin, Old French and Old English and generally meant excessive extravagance. It was generally considered in olden days to be decadent, bordering on offensiveness. But then society decided to change all of that a few hundred years ago and the concept of luxury turned more benign, or at least less troubling. It became a standard of extreme comfort that may have gone beyond pure…
Cooling Off Sometimes things are easy. Two days ago, our northern air conditioner went on the fritz. That is the older half of our AC system in the house and if measured in BTU strength, it is also the smaller half of the system. I’m not sure that is a wise configuration, given the importance of AC to comfortable sleeping, but I inherited and retrofitted the HVAC and Hot Water systems in this house and…
Going to the Dogs When we were young, we would sometimes be forced to tell our friends that we had to go because our mothers were expecting us for some reason or other. Then as we got more independent and older, but were still mostly dependent on others, we used our schoolwork or perhaps our new work situation to create an excuse for why we all needed to run off before the festivities were completed.…
Weekend at Moonstruck We are coming up on the first weekend of August and we are completely unscheduled for the next three days. While we are by no means social butterflies, we usually do have activities of some sort planned for the weekends. Sometimes it is only a dinner or a movie, but our usual go-to’s are out-of-pocket. Sister Kathy is trying to get out of her COVID bout, but can’t seem to get a…
Pizza, Pizza It’s taken us three years of living out here on this hillside, all the while under the cloud of a Global Pandemic that restricted services, restricted business operations, mandated masks, gave us CDC guidelines to live by and generally made us all wary of interfacing with anyone we absolutely did not have to interact with. Starting this summer, we seem to have finally broken through to forming some local friendships in our neighborhood.…