I can’t see more than 100 feet this morning on account of a heavy and foreboding fog that has enveloped our hilltop. It’s a pretty normal January day here in San Diego with the high temperature expected to be about 60 with the morning starting out in the low 50s. There is really nothing to complain about weather wise. That’s not the case for most of the rest of the country, where the temperatures have…
On the spectrum of sociability, Kim and I probably rank at the higher end. There are certainly more social animals than us, but we like people and prefer to be around them rather than not. I have never understood people who prefer to travel alone. I’m not a fan of too big of a group when traveling, but it always seems like more fun to have a gang. For thirty years now, I’ve had a…
Sometimes you encounter a day when its not a weekend and yet there are absolutely no errands that are critically demanding attention. This is the case for both Kim and me today. Don’t get me wrong…there are always things that can be done to fill up the day, but sometimes there is nothing that is in desperate need of attention. In our case today, the Christmas decorations are all down. The repairmen have fixed or…
We all understand that while the Christmas tradition of gift-giving is most closely linked to the legend of Santa Claus, the origin of the story dates back to St. Nicholas of Myra, a Christian bishop in Myra (modern-day Turkey). A few years ago, on our motorcycle trip through Turkey, we actually stopped in Myra and stood beneath his statue, so I can say I’ve been to the real North Pole. St. Nicholas was known for…
My experience with sushi dates back to 1976 on my first day of work in the New York City banking world. I don’t think I had ever really even heard of sushi before then. I started work at Bankers Trust Company on Monday, June 28, 1976. I had secured a spot as a Cornell MBA graduate in their bank training program and was being paid the princely sum of $17,000 per year. That had afforded…
There is something about these years when Christmas and New Years fall in the middle of the week (this year it was Thursday) that make the holidays feel like they are somewhat extended. I don’t want to sound like the Grinch, but they seem to be dragging on. Truth be told, our relatives (other than son Tom) left quite briskly on the 26th and Tom did his usual departure on New Years Eve, all of…
For the second day in a row, I find myself sittting here in the living room of our hilltop with the sun shining brightly on a crisp December morning and the air being so clear that the Pacific Ocean feels to be right at our feet to the west. Just over the rolling hills of Vista that sit between our hilltop and the coast, we can see a full 40 miles of deep blue ocean.…
Stephen King is one of the best-selling authors in history with over 400 million books sold. Nearly every major work has been adapted for film or TV. He’s achieved sustained success across five decades, which is extraordinarily rare. For decades, critics dismissed him as a “genre writer” producing commercial horror rather than “serious literature.” But that is changing and he has won the National Book Foundation’s Medal (2003), won Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards,…
We are changing it up this holiday season every which way. We started by taking our trip to London, Edinburgh and Prague over the Thanksgiving holiday. And while we kept to form with our NYC Cornell Club family gathering and will have the whole local family over on Christmas Day, we usually have done a New Years Party for the neighbors, but have chosen to substitute that with a neighbors’ holiday gathering here next Saturday.…
One of the things that I carry with me from my 40+ years of living in metropolitan NYC is my love for bagels. I had had bagels during college since Cornell is basically an outpost of NYC in some ways, and the biggest bakery/eatery/hang-out spot in Ithaca is called Collegetown Bagels. But it was my lime living in NYC and Long Island that made me love bagels. My favorite bagel is an Everything Bagel, which…