I’m sitting at San Francisco Airport waiting for the last flight back to San Diego. I flew up here this afternoon, was on the ground for five hours and spent two of those in the city visiting with a friend. This was an unexpected trip but one that very much needed to be made because some big decisions were made and friends need to support friends when they make such big decisions. “Peace out” as…
Most people are kind, right? Depends on how you measure it, but the evidence suggests that’s a true statement…but with caveats. Behavioral economics experiments (like dictator games and public goods games) consistently show most people share resources, cooperate, and punish unfairness even at personal cost, more than pure self-interest would predict. Lost-wallet studies (a famous one across 40 countries) found most people actually try to return wallets with cash in them, and surprisingly, more cash…
Last night I went to go see the summer blockbuster film The Odyssey for the second time. It seems that Spiderman may be overtaking Odysseus for the top spot, but the Escondido IMAX was still pretty crowded after a few weeks since the release of The Odyssey, so I think it’s holding up at the box office. As you may recall, I saw the movie the first time from the second row of the Hollywood…
Today is August 1 and we begin our march to the end of another summer. It’s our last day with our granddaughters before I take them to the airport for their return flight home to Brooklyn. We are all on short time now. For over a year since I defeated my edema by, among other things, wearing compression socks almost every minute of every day, I have been wearing long pants rather than shorts. Boys…
There is no such thing as a perfect day, but there are days that are more pleasant than others. Yesterday was a pretty good day on this particular hilltop. It began with me having a kick-off meeting on a new case that I’ve just been assigned. By now I can tell if a case is going to be well-structured and organized or whether its going to be chaotic and all over the place. This kick-off…
This morning I am on a plane to San Francisco. This was not a planned trip, but rather was an anticipated trip that I knew would come sooner or later and may well not be the last of these trips in the near future. You see, I’m going to visit a long-time friend who is not well. I don’t use the term pilgrimage lightly just to refer to a casual trip to visit a friend.…
About a week ago my daughter Carolyn, who is the source of many of the great new innovations in my aging life (she’s the one who put me onto stretch – U, among other things), told me I needed to get an Oura Ring. An Oura Ring is a “smart” ring worn on your finger (preferably the left index finger) that tracks health and wellness data using sensors rather than a screen or buttons. It…
When we are kids, we revel in having fun. The world revolves around having fun at the early stages of life. You can see the instinct clearly in Buddy, who is still a young dog at three. When he wakes up in the morning, all he wants to do is play. He will come up to our faces in bed and try to convince us that its time to get up to play. He is…
In a few weeks Kim is heading off for her 50th high school reunion in Wabash, Indiana, her home town and where she spent the first 20 years of her life. Kim is not only connected to Wabash for family reasons…though she has very little family left there now, but also because it’s where her musical roots began. Over the years that Kim and I have been together, she went back to Wabash twice to…
It’s that funny transitional time of the summer when every morning starts out in a cloud and we wait and see when this hilltop will break through to the sun. It always does because summer is simply not a time for rain on this hilltop. I remember when I lived in Maine for three years back in the mid-60s. I worked on the golf course each of those three summers and so I was acutely…