I listened to a video that a friend made based on a letter of advice he had sent to his granddaughter on the occasion of her going off to college. He was giving her advice about how to make friends and specifically how to selectively establish relationships that will help you create the world you want to inhabit as you go forward. It was all perfectly good advice, but one thing struck me about his…
I seem to be in a virtuous cycle of watching movies with single word titles. Instinct (1999) is the latest. It’s a psychological thriller starring Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding Jr. Anthony Hopkins plays Dr. Ethan Powell, a renowned anthropologist who disappeared into the African wilderness to study mountain gorillas. Two years later, he’s found and arrested after killing two park rangers and injuring others. That makes it a blend of Gorillas in the Mist…
All life ebbs and flows. There are special times and mundane times. Things get exciting and then they get boring. There are moments of great hope and then come the depths of depression. Such is life. Even if we are people that enjoy the roller coaster ride with all its ups and downs, it would be hard for anyone to admit that it isn’t a bummer when you come off a high and have to…
I was watching a movie last night about the exiled Kaiser Wilhelm during World War II. It was called The Exception and it starred Christopher Plummer as the Kaiser. At the time, he was in exile in Holland while Adolph Hitler was ravaging Europe. He had just invaded Holland in 1940 and the story tells the tale of the military and service people surrounding the Kaiser as Hitler tried to manipulate him to root out…
Today I am wearing a t-shirt given to me by my daughter Carolyn. It is a light blue shirt that simply says, Easy Breezy. I suppose that it might be a statement about the weather here on the hilltop. Today, a day in early February, it’s scheduled to be in the high 70s, which usually means it will end up being in the low 80s. Right now at 8am its sunny and 65. From the…
The Tyrol (or Tirol) is a historic region in the Alps that straddles the Austrian-Italian border. There’s the Austrian Tyrol, which forms the Austrian state of Tyrol (Bundesland Tirol) with its capital of Innsbruck and South Tyrol (Südtirol/Alto Adige), the southern part that became Italian territory after World War I. That is now an autonomous province of Italy with its capital being Bolzano/Bozen (the place of my state’s heritage). There’s area is still largely German-speaking…
Everyone knows that health is wealth, but it is also said that “Health is not valued till sickness comes”. Well, this past Sunday morning, for the first time in a long time, I awoke to the beginning symptoms of a cold. A typical cold follows a fairly predictable pattern over 7-10 days. It starts with scratchy or sore throat, sneezing, and fatigue. Then symptoms intensify – nasal congestion becomes heavy, runny nose with clear or…
It’s been a while since I’ve written about my weight loss program, so I thought an update was in order. I am now about four months into my Zepbound journey and just finish bed my 10mg dose allotment. That means I an two thirds of the way through what they say is a 22% average weight loss program. I am currently 12% down in weight, so a bit further than half way there. While on…
My youngest son Thomas now lives in Denver. There are lots of reasons that he and his wife moved there last year, but one of the big reasons I suspect is ent many young people gravitate to Colorado…for the skiing. All three of my children were raised on spending their winters skiing, mostly in Park City, Utah, where I kept a ski house for fifteen years. In my day, I used to spend 35-45 days…
I have struggled to write about the events that unfolded over the weekend in Minneapolis. The brutal and unwarranted killing of Alex Pretti is all over social media and shows no signs of leaving the news cycle any time soon. In fact, the political fallout from the killing of Pretti has been so severe and bipartisan that it now seems that Trump is finally backing down in a way that he was not prepared to…