In three days it will be Christmas. As I’ve explained before, we tend to spread out the Christmas season over the course of a month. We have had our Holiday Party here in Casa Moonstruck on our hilltop for neighbors and friends. We have done our trek to Midtown Manhattan in New York City for the gathering with all the kids and our extended New York family and friends. We’ve done the Holiday Gala on…
Just before the election, some time in October as I recall, the Washington Post declared that they would not be issuing their normal presidential election endorsement. That meant that they would not be endorsing Kamala Harris as one would expect. The same decision was taken by the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Both papers announced that their decision was in keeping with their desire to remain neutral arbiters of the news and to not…
The primary reason why Kim and I come to New York City every December is to see and gather with our family. Our family is somewhat less New York City focused at this point with oldest son Roger and his wife Valene living in Delaware and youngest son Tom and his wife Jenna living in Denver. Nonetheless daughter Carolyn and her husband, John, and our two granddaughters Charlotte and Evelyn, remain firmly rooted on the…
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…