This morning I’m heading out for a motorcycle ride to go out into the eastern ranch country near Julian. We will drive out through Valley Center, probably the reddest part of the county, then through the various Indian reservations, which I find always hard to divine in terms of their degree of social consciousness (do they care more about helping their poor and downtrodden or about their casino revenues that buy them all shiny new…
I’ve been using the word squidgy a lot lately. I didn’t think it was a real word, but apparently the Cambridge English dictionary disagrees and says it is, indeed, a real word. It means “soft and wet and changing shape easily when pressed” and it seems to be most often used in relation to bread that has been not quite fully baked and has a squidgy center. What’s interesting about that is that it is…
Yesterday we arrived in San Diego from our short trip to Florida and got in about 7pm. That was basically 12 hours from when we left Andy’s house in Vero Beach. We drove down to West Palm Beach Airport, returned the rental car and sat in the Delta Lounge to await our flight to Atlanta. Kim found us some nice fresh crudite and hummus to sustain us and then we joined the rest of the…
Both Kim and I have had bariatric surgery. I had a lap-band installed around my upper stomach to restrict my intake of food. It was installed in 2006 and has been operating in that capacity for almost twenty years. Technically, the device was designed to be adjusted regularly with a saline inlet portal, but I quickly determined that fine tuning is not necessary for me and that the absolute restriction did a good job of…
Today we are planning to go to SeaWorld here in San Diego. We’ve now lived here more than six years and owned this hilltop for fourteen years, which means we have been here long enough to have tried almost every attraction in the area. That said, I have not been to SeaWorld since I came here in 1990 for a father/son roadtrip with my oldest son Roger. I had recently separated from Roger’s mother and…
Riding a motorcycle through the desert during the winter does interesting things to one’s mind. You think about the strangest things. That’s especially so when you decide that it’s not as interesting to listen to music through your Bluetooth helmet, but rather to take in yet another book on tape. Lately I have very much gotten into listening to one book after another, mostly because of the time I spend each day on my treadmill…
I currently have sixteen benches on my property. Three of them are down in the play area for when we gather folks for a game of cornhole or croquet, three of them are around the upper driveway and are used for staging various activities (like building new benches!), two of them are in the Cecil Garden and are used for reflection while hand watering the garden, and the other eight are spread out strategically across…
Tomorrow we are doing something I can’t remember doing for a long time…we are going bowling with a group of neighborhood friends. Growing up in Wisconsin in my elementary school days, bowling was a regular activity. I recall it was 35 cents per game, a dime to rent shoes and free to use any of the bowling balls you could find to fit your fingers. We would regularly roll three games and try like hell…
After a run of very nice warm winter weather out here on the hilltop, while much of the rest of the country has undergone a particularly cold and brutal winter, we have momentarily reverted to the cold and wet that winter is generally thought to be about. It’s 50 degrees out and pouring rain today, but the good news seems to be that the rain will end some time this morning and the temperature will…
Our nearby neighbors have five kids. You don’t see that much these days. I have no idea if that’s a religiously driven situation or just a family plan preference. They are lovely people and we have a good relationship all up and down the age range, having employed each and every child except the youngest in one household chore or another. They have even hired my son, Tom, to do some business videos for the…