Test Taking I am sitting in room 223 of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice on the campus of University of San Diego. I am sitting here more of less quietly while sixteen students in the graduate business school program, in search of their MBA degrees are taking the final exam in my GSBA 520 Advanced Corporate Finance course. The exam has been underway for about 35 minutes so far and the…
Methods of Expression I got into a funny debate with my birthday-boy nephew last weekend while we were all gathered out in Joshua Tree. There was no set agenda, but rather a loose schedule of dinners and a few hikes with the rest of the time left largely unstructured for people to do as they please and commune both with one another and the surrounding desert landscape. The Airbnb that was the central gathering spot…
Tongue-Tied Sometimes I have to struggle to find a good title for a story or, indeed, find a good story. My friend Gary, who reads and comments on almost every story I write has recently told me that it is only logical that I will run out of things to say and stories to write and I have challenged that. I said that so long as I have breath and can get around and do…
Up Schitt’s Creek I have just started to catch up on the Dan and Eugene Levy cable TV comedy that aired from 2015 – 2020. What prompted it was that I needed a gap-filler TV show to watch while I wait for Kim either before dinner, after dinner or while she is getting her PJs on. I guess I am just more sedentary than Kim because when I sit down for the evening and start…
Playing Chicken As the seasons change and cooler weather is starting to get interspersed with the normally warm days, my back hillside work is grinding to a halt. It is leaving a definite gap in my daily activities which I am not so ready to abandon just yet. Well, that led to my buying an eight-foot tall chicken. Sounds logical, right? It did to me anyway and I ordered up this huge metal sculpture for…
Treat Arbitrage Kim and I spend a lot of time commenting to each other about Betty. Try as we might, we are not fully able to understand what floats Betty’s boat other than the immediate gratification of as much food as she can possibly eat. Indeed, there seem to be no limits to how much she thinks she can eat and is apparently stuck in that mindset of deprivation which probably defined most of her…
Mixing & Matching Today I went to the local CVS Pharmacy to get my COVID-19 booster shot. Just yesterday the CDC had followed up on the FDA’s prior day approval of the Moderna and J&J booster shot and added the ability (maybe even as much as a suggestion) that we were allowed to mix and match vaccine manufacturers. I tend to think this was mostly done for the people who had gotten the one-shot J&J…
Stuffed I have just spent the last half hour listening to my lovely Kim writhing in agony after having eaten some tuna fish with low-fat mayonnaise. Kim is trying to get back on her feed, so to speak, after gastric bypass surgery. I know it is still early days (her surgery was three weeks ago today), but she seems to be having a tough time of getting her GI system back into some semblance of…
A Gooey Mess I really want to do more things around the house myself, but by now I should know better where to draw the line. It’s one thing to take on the reroofing of a wooden bird feeder by buying copper sheets and learning how to work them and fashion them into a hexagonal roof, as I recently did. The cost of such a whim is the cost of materials plus the potential cost…
The Shifting Wind Do you remember Mary Poppins? In case you don’t, she blows in on the East Wind and when its time to leave she blows out on the West Wind. I’m not altogether sure what the East and West designations means but I remember what Burt the chimney sweep has to say about it. He says, “winds in the east, mist coming in, like somethin’ is brewin’ and bout to begin…can’t put me…