Nothing Can Stop Us Now Well, I am back in my Disney hotel room recuperating from my one day at Disney, in this case the Hollywood Studios park specifically. Thematically, this is where the rides, attractions and related merchandising are all connected in some way with the movies. I had forgotten how tiring a day at Disney can be. According to my iPhone step-meter, I did slightly more than what I do on a very…
Tolkien Spoken Here I spent my middle school years in the back-woods of South Central Maine. I guess that helped make me, in part, a Mainiac. We were living in Poland Spring, the scene of oh so many stories. Poland Spring was an old-world resort for the carriage trade of Boston and New York going back as long as 1794 when Hiram Ricker “discovered” that the combination of the fresh spring water, devoid of most…
Weather or Not For as long as I can remember, I have advised myself and others that the selection of a long-term or retirement residence should be based on those people closest to one’s soul. They may be parents, siblings, children or friends, the circumstances of and social conventions of one’s particular family will likely set the priorities or preferences. But the choice of retirement home is even more challenging than, say, any other residence…
Total Recall It’s late Christmas morning and most of the presents have been unwrapped and the bows and ribbons saved for another future gift wrapping while the wrapping paper gets crumpled up and thrown into a trash bag. Kim has perfected the Christmas morning program with everyone getting a big stocking stuffed with small joking wrapped gifts. The objective is to find things that are mildly appropriate and amusing and yet not so over-the-top that…
Father Knows Best In 1975 my best friend Paul convinced me to apply to business school at Cornell and to join him on his quest for strategic greatness in the business world. In those days I spent all my time with Paul and his young, sweet wife Ann and we often joked about his favorite childhood TV show, Father Knows Best, starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt as the iconoclastic parents that represented the best…
Into the Death Zone I get my inspiration in many places, but none more than the here and now of what is right in front of my eyes. It’s late Saturday afternoon and I have spent an active day of gardening. I bought three trees and used my new power cart to place them on the back hillside where I want them to be planted. They were each heavy and the power cart was essential…
The Total Agony of Love The other night we watched a movie that was a Christmas movie made in 2021 called Love Hard. It was about a cool L.A. blogger who gets “catfished” by an Asian kid from Lake Placid. They spend the next few days pretending to be a couple and they fundamentally disagree about the best Christmas movie. It seems this subject, which I covered extensively a few days ago, is getting to…
Mistletoe We are gearing up for the holidays around here this week because we are scheduled to head out to NYC to see the kids for a few days. The last time we saw them was September when we were supposed to be heading to Spain and Portugal, but cancelled the motorcycle trip since some in our group were not so comfortable with the feinting surge in the Delta variant. So, we spent a week…
Ragamuffin A ragamuffin usually refers to a dirty and unkempt child, a waif, an urchin or a guttersnipe. It comes from a combination of old English, referencing the rags that adorn such a child and perhaps embellished by the Dutch from the word muffe, which means mittens. Those children with ragged mittens are ragamuffins. For some reason in Jamaican slang, a ragamuffin is a street tough, so less pitiful and more tomcat mongrel. Our little…
Traveling to Enlightenment We went to see the new Ridley Scott movie The Last Duel last night at the local Angelika Film Center. Once again, it was very lightly attended with a mere 8-10 people in the well-appointed theater. The film is set in 1386 or so and chronicles what was the end stages of the Middle Ages in Europe. The movie makes reference to the economic hardship to noblemen and their estates by virtue…