Kim tells me that today is Buddy’s one year “Gotcha” anniversary. That means we got Buddy a year ago today. The woman that groomed our sweet Betty girl called Kim while we were in NYC last year and told her that one of her other clients had a friend who was trying to rehome a little brown toy poodle and would we be interested. The first stop we made once we were home was to…
For several weeks now, Kim and I have had time to leisurely decorate the house for the holidays. I have gone through many different stages with regard to holiday decorations. In the mid-Nineties I can recall paying as much as $5,000 to a local decorator to decorate our ski house in Utah for the holidays season so that we could enjoy all the festive atmosphere of the holidays without having to detract from our one…
Way back in 1991 I discovered Utah. I had been to Utah a few years before to ski with a bunch of my gang from my Latin America Division. We had rented a cabin at Sundance, the quirky ski canyon in the lower Wasatch Mountains that was owned by Robert Redford. He named it after his breakout role as the Sundance Kid in the 1969 classic Paul Newman / Robert Redford film, Butch Cassidy and…
The 1989 Academy Award choice for Best Picture was a story of aging, friendship, racism and antisemitism in the socially turbulent era of WWII through the 1970’s. The Deus Ex Machina of the story is Daisy’s (Jessica Tandy) inability to drive safely after she drives her Chrysler into the neighbor’s yard, giving rise to her son Boolie (Dan Ackroyd) hiring Hoke Colburn (Morgan Freeman) to drive her wherever she needs to go. I have not…
When you get to my stage of life you spend a lot of time thinking about seasons. I watched a nice movie the other day called The Last Rifleman, starring Pierce Brosnan as the last member of the Royal Ulster Rifles Regiment from Northern Ireland that landed in Normandy on Sword Beach in 1944. After his wife’s death, he “escapes” from his managed care facility to travel by car, bus, train and ferry to get…
I spent the better part of forty years working in Midtown Manhattan. I started in 1976 reporting for duty at 280 Park Avenue (between 48th and 49th Streets), and was there almost to the end of the firm in 1999. The Bankers Trust building was a mainstay during those years when other banks like Manufacturers Hannover Bank, Chemical Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank and J.P. Morgan all went through mergers and consolidations with their offices swirling…
It’s only mid-November and we are seriously into decorating the house for Christmas. Most years that doesn’t happen until just after Thanksgiving, which is the traditional starting gun for the holiday season. I could give you lots of reasons why we have started to do all this sooner this year. Both Kim and I find ourselves having just finished big projects (hers a vocal concert and mine a series of expert witness testimonies), and the…
Last night was the second of two shows put on this weekend by Kim’s Encore Vocal Group. They do two Main Stage shows twice per year and several smaller shows in between. This is the second show they have put on at the Grand Ritz Theater in Escondido. They did last year’s fall show there as well. All of their shows have a theme, which guides the selection of songs and give the cast a…
Out here on this hilltop, November is an unpredictable month. I can remember a stormy November with 17 days of torrential rain which almost made my flat roof unserviceable. This year it is more normal with a hint of evening rain on one or two days , but mostly clear skies, like we have had for the past many months. It’s been very dry overall for a long time…so say my succulents. With daytime high…
I’ve had some strange dreams lately. I really don’t know what to make of them, so I’m doing my best to ignore them. As is usually the case, I only remember dreams if I wake up in the middle of one. Disturbing images are not so incomprehensible, but sorting out what motivates some dreams gets very hard. Why would you dream of someone you long ago made peace with? Especially if that dream consists of…