I feel great. No one has ever accused me of not being expressive, but I am having a hard time not telling the world how great I feel at the moment. I think this falls into the category of being thankful of my blessings, something I am always all about these days. And I know that there will be times and days when I do not feel great, so I like to acknowledge the moments…
There is something about the holidays that make us all want to hunker down around hearth and home. This year, nature is cooperating in that program by delivering what looks to be a four day stretch of foul weather to our hilltop and the surrounding county. That foul weather is starting today and running through Friday, which means it will engulf Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and what the Brits like to call Boxing Day. Kim’s…
Kim and I are both people who did not spend a lot of our lives doing what people call “partying”. That is to say, I don’t drink at all and Kim only drinks a little. We both like music (Kim, obviously, more than me), but we tend to like it in combination with some form of storytelling like musical theater or thematic cabaret. Neither of us is particularly inclined towards rock concerts and what I…
Buddy has never had to struggle a day in his three-year old life, as best I can tell. Granted, he has only been with us now two of those three years, but I doubt his prior life as Beau Cartier, as painful as that name may have been to his masculinity, was so horrible either. Clearly, he was too feisty by nature for those pseudo-refined folks who so willingly gave him up to us two…
As most people who read this blog know, I am traveling in Europe at the moment, heading back to New York City tomorrow to spend a few days with the family in Midtown Manhattan to celebrate the holidays and then head back to our hilltop to dig in for the full holiday season. I have written often about the angst we have about traveling as the years pass by. I get regularly chided by friends…
My friends who read these stories will all be waking up this morning of Thanksgiving and probably turning on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade spectacle with all the attendant celebrity hosts and various musical numbers from all the latest Broadway hits, performed in the cold and wet of the day on the street in front of Macy’s flagship store on Herald Square. They will be spending their morning preparing for whatever Thanksgiving dinner plans they…
We recently went to dinner with our good friends Terry & Paula, who are in the process of buying a house in San Clemente since they plan to relocate out this way, I think more or less permanently. They are a few years older than we are, but are very young-spirited and in apparently fine shape. We are very pleased that they are heading this way since we very much enjoy their company and they…
I don’t know whether its the world we live in these days or the specific circumstances we find ourselves in on our hilltop and in our semi-retired states, but both Kim and I find ourselves increasingly at philosophical odds with people we want to maintain relationships with. This is happening at the personal level (both friends and family to varying degrees) and at the institutional level with the organizations we have been trying to either…
My dear friend Frank is the guy who mentored me in the handling of private equity investment. He was a venture capitalist long before it was even known how cool it was to be a venture capitalist. Frank is a Marshall Scholar who attended the London School of Economics just when America was entering the 1960s. He did a stint in the Army like any good red-blooded American male did in those days, but luckily…
Time is a big deal because it’s the one truly non-renewable resource – the only thing you can never get back or make more of. It’s finite and uncertain. You don’t know how much you have. Could be 80 years, could be 80 days. This uncertainty creates urgency and forces us to make choices about what matters most. Every “yes” to one thing is automatically a “no” to something else. Some say that it’s the…