A Liberal Retirement This is a strange week for me. So much is strange and new in 2020 that it’s hard to calibrate strangeness, but this seems to have crossed a threshold that has caused me to want to write about it. Let’s start with what makes this a strange week. I am in an expert witness hearing all week (actually two separate hearings since one goes all week and I must listen to it…
The Arc of the Sun I just noticed as I sit here in my office at my glass-top curio table, that the sun now rises further south and thus, in the live oak tree that sits on the very top of my little hilltop here in Escondido. This is convenient for me since earlier in the summer, the sun would rise further north and shine into my eyes as I sat her, requiring me to…
Are You Havin’ Any Fun? Tonight I turned on that wonderful movie Quartet starring Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, and Pauline Collins about four aging opera singers who find themselves in the same old age home for musicians in the outskirts of London. They are struggling with their old relationships and their fading talents as singers. They struggle to agree to sing Rigoletto, an opera written by the most famous operatic composer of all…
Breathing is Overrated I have recently come to recognize that you have to breathe to stay alive. That may strike you as an obvious statement, but I think it deserves some reflection. Doesn’t it strike you as a little strange that Mother Nature endowed us with this powerful cerebellum that’s capable of relatively advance reasoning. It’s capable of all sorts of great things. It can invent important breakthrough stuff. It can conjure great and elaborate…
Tree People It is the morning of Labor Day 2020 and I am sitting in my office in my underwear (one of the luxuries of life on the hilltop where I am out of view of all prying eyes). I have just spent fifteen minutes figuring out how to fix a documentation gremlin that has plagued me. I have to send a signed grant award contract to an agency in Scotland. The first version I…
Going Bald This is purported to be the hottest day of the year out here in San Diego. My weather.com app (now owned and operated by the once-venerable IBM) tells me it is already 87 and the sun has just come up. The high is supposed to get to 109. Yesterday was the first time since their installation in April, that my Tesla Wall Batteries got a workout. The electricity grid from San Diego Gas…
Quick Like a Bunny I am getting in the habit (does two or three days constitute a habit yet?) of writing tomorrow’s story in the morning hours out here in the garden on my throughly described garden desk. I think what I like best about the view are my little stand of resurgent bonsai redwood trees. When they arrived and I placed them in the rock garden over a month ago they were immediately shedding…
A Pain in the Neck Quick, without thinking too much, which do you get more often, a pain in the ass or a pain in the neck? I’m betting on the later. I will admit to having had a hemorrhoid or two in my sixty-six years and I may have pulled a glut muscle once or twice, but pains in the ass are pretty rare by my estimation. But pains in the neck are way…
Cruising on Grand I haven’t been out of the house (or at least off the property) all week. The main reason has been that I have lots of work to do, and the secondary reason is that we’re still heavily engaged in several household projects. This week it was all about the inside and outside of the garage. The outside was getting a functional makeover. That included a new cedar shed in the back for…
Heating Up It’s morning on the hilltop again and I am listening on my iPhone speaker mode to an old protege of mine (he is actually both the son of an old colleague and a guy who worked for me twenty years ago). He is a wonderful guy who has spent his career drilling down into a specialized area that sounds relatively mundane, but has been very productive for him. He is going on about…