For many years now, when I’ve gone on motorcycle rides that included my friend Frank O’Connell, I would hear about this little toy company that he was involved with. Frank is a marketing guru of significant renown and he also has a connection to the toy business from years ago when he worked for Mattel on the Intelevision product. I know this for two reasons, the first of which is that it’s what business friends…
A few weeks ago and for no particular reason, I downloaded onto my Audible app, a copy of Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), one of America’s greatest writers and humorists. Born in Missouri, he grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi River, a setting that would define his most famous work, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry…
To cruise, or not to cruise, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous travel, or to take arms against a sea (or river) of troubles, and by opposing end them? To dine: to sleep; no more (from seasickness); and by a nap to say we end a long shore excursion day. The heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, ’tis…
In 1963 I was nine years old and my mother, at the age of 47, was getting her Doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in the capital city of Madison (Go Badgers!). We were living on her fellowship of $3,000 (that’s per year, not per month). She had rented a little house in a typical suburban development that must have had about 200 little crackerboxes of the sort you learned to draw when you were…
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…