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…
As most people who read this blog know, I am traveling in Europe at the moment, heading back to New York City tomorrow to spend a few days with the family in Midtown Manhattan to celebrate the holidays and then head back to our hilltop to dig in for the full holiday season. I have written often about the angst we have about traveling as the years pass by. I get regularly chided by friends…
I have a long and involved affiliation with Venezuela. In 1946, my mother, at the age of thirty, “joined the Foreign Legion” by hiring on to the Rockefeller Foundation to go to Venezuela to do rural indigenous development work. She was literally choosing to escape a turbulent five years on both the global and personal fronts and trade in her decade of work with the New York State Welfare Department for a new adventure. After…
Back in the 1800s on some obscure cricket field, when a bowler achieved the rare feat of taking three wickets with three consecutive deliveries, he was traditionally awarded a new hat from his club, or allowed to pass around his hat to collect money from spectators. Then in hockey (among other sports), the term became a big celebratory moment… literal hats rain down onto the ice from the crowd when a player scores three goals…
We all have our quirks. One of my quirks has always been that when I order something, I rarely, if ever, return it. If it doesn’t fit, I stuff it in a lower drawer or just put it in the give-away bin. This is completely contrary to Kim’s way of life with regard to online shopping. The number of packages she gets is only slightly greater than the number of packages she returns. Our Amex…
This morning I spoke to my friend Steve, who lives in Phoenix. He mentioned that he and his wife Maggie have bitten the bullet and rented an apartment to move to starting in two weeks. He talked about the move less about not wanting the rigors of a large sprawling house and garage, and more about this being an opportunity to finally get a grip on downsizing and cleansing. Steve is of Scandinavian heritage (and…
Today here in Southern California, we are having he storm of the year and it has been pouring down much of the morning. Luckily for us, we here in San Diego are not getting the worst of it…the folks in the L.A. area are once again getting the brunt of the deluge. I’m sure we will be hearing about mudslides and such based on the large amount of wildfire-scarred hillside land that is now exposed…
The clothes make the man, right? The phrase “clothes make the man” has roots going back to ancient Rome, but it took a winding path to become the expression we know today. It’s ancient origins come from the Latin saying “vestis virum facit” (literally “clothes make the man”), which was already a proverb in classical times. The idea was that your clothing revealed your social status and character. The Dutch scholar Erasmus included this saying…
Every once in a while a coincidence will happen that makes you wonder about who exactly has his hand on the tiller of the universe. Back in 2006, Kim and I were meeting some friends for dinner at a restaurant on the upper east side of Manhattan. Neither of us frequented the area, but Kim had an orthopedic appointment nearby. In fact, I noted that I had last been in that same area in 2005…