Let the Sun Shine In The day is getting off to a slow start ramping up to its anticipated mid-80s temperatures, but the sun is breaking through as the morning crests its half-way point. It’s a Saturday so the traffic patterns are not following the normal Cornell commutation cycle with cars and trucks heading down Warren Road into Forrest Home in the morning and flowing up and out of Forrest Home in the late afternoon.…
On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin! That is the beginning of the University of Wisconsin fight song. It carries on with “fight on for your fame”. I lived in Wisconsin from 1961 to 1965 and pretty much spent my grade school years at the Spring Harbor Elementary School on the southern shore of Lake Mendota, which, along with Lake Monona, bound the capital city of Madison, where the central University of Wisconsin campus sits. This state took…
A Trip to the Shore From my hilltop I can see forty miles of Pacific Ocean. That shoreline from Oceanside down to San Diego or even from Oceanside north along Camp Pendleton to Dana Point is arguably some of the nicest stretches of beach in the world. There is something about the beach in Southern California that is integral to the way of life. For us, while we occasionally take a ride over to the…
Summertime and the Living is Breezy It’s been an unusually nice summer weather pattern here in Ithaca the past fortnight. Some days get up into the 80’s and feel a bit hot in the afternoon, but most days have been in the mid 70s and start and end cool. Yesterday, my big event for the day was to be a barbecue in the early evening with several friends from my University involvement days. The granddaughters…
Cold and Rainy I spent my entire adult life living in the Northeastern United States, most of it in the Metro New York area, but also up here in Ithaca. Using Ithaca for this math, the average annual rainfall is 37.4 inches, with snowfall of 63.3 inches, resulting in 159.3 days with precipitation, leaving 155 sunny days. That compares to Escondido, which only gets 15.2 inches of rain (no snow) on 41.6 rainy days and…
The Immutable Power of Nature I have pontificated on many subjects here and in general. Pondering the great truths of life is something I am prone to doing more and more the older I get. I think in some ways that is very natural, but in other ways I have an unnatural need to declare these great truths, not so much because I don’t think others have thought them before me, but rather because I…
When I’m 64 Today is Kim’s birthday, and yes, she turns 64 years old. So, naturally, the Beatles 1967 song from The Yellow Submarine album comes to mind. That song was written by John Lennon, who would be 82 this year and Paul McCartney, who is 80 years old this year. I am four years past that milestone birthday and that would hardly qualify as a milestone were it not for this very song. The…
Dismantling a Heritage When people ask me where I am from, my answer depends on the context of that particular exchange. If I am sitting having a long conversation with someone, I explain that I grew up all over the world and that there are parts of me that started in Venezuela and Costa Rica, wound their way through all of the major parts of the United States from California to the Midwest to the…
Paging Doctor Cohen with an Assist by Cliff Davis We are spending the weekend at Camp Davis on Lake Ariel in the Poconos, the lovely vacation home of our dear friends Cliff and Linda. I met Cliff and Linda fifty-one years ago on the second floor of University Halls Dormitory number Four (called U-Hall 4 by its denizens). The greatest difference between this U-Hall and the other five identical cinderblock post-WWII buildings was that unlike…
Father’s Day Technically and even though it has been celebrated in other forms since the Middle Ages, Father’s Day was first celebrated in the United States on the third Sunday of June in 1910. At 112 years old, the celebratory day still remains three years behind the recognition of Mother’s Day, which began in 1907. But officially, it wasn’t really nationally established until 1968 when President Lyndon Johnson made an official proclamation as to its…