Growing Up COVID When I was growing up I was influenced most by two wars. First there was WWII with it’s amazing sea-based battles. The visual images of dive bombers and Kamikazes buzzing like flies around battleships and aircraft carriers were vivid in my minds eye to the point of being the subject of many of my childhood drawing efforts. As for the ground battles in Europe, the landings at Anzio and Normandy were only…
The Don Marlon Brando had a film career that put him at the top of the male lead actor charts for fully fifty years. It is hard to pick a best among Brando’s many films. He started in the 50’s with such greats as A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva Zapata, The Wild One, On the Waterfront and Guys and Dolls. These were all iconic roles and iconic films. In the 60’s he expanded his repertoire…
To Listen Is To Be Strong My youngest granddaughter Evelyn just started Kindergarten. She did well in her science-oriented nursery school (her father is a bit of science buff), but as the younger of two sisters, we don’t tend to think of her as the brilliant sister. She has the image more of the spunky sister. But truth be told, Evelyn is actually very smart. I’m glad I said it that way since the word…
Coping It is a foggy morning on the hilltop today. My mind is geared to my garden and I enjoy a misty or foggy morning for the benefit of the moisture it brings to the plants. I also know by now that it is just a matter of a few hours before it will burn off and it will once again be a sunny and glorious day. It is Sunday and I have the pleasure…
Aiming for 2060 Today marks the 105th birthday of my mother, Dr. Ludmilla Ann Uher Prosdocimi Marin Jenkins. If she had not died at age 100 four and a half years ago, my mother would have turned 105 today….or maybe Thursday. It seems that in 1916 it took two days in Lansing, Nëw York for a birth to be properly registered, so while born on September 14th, her official life commenced on September 16th. That…
Letting Go We got back to the hilltop today. The continental winds were with us today and we made it to San Diego about forty minutes earlier than expected. All of that meant that even with checked baggage, we made it home before noon with some Taco Bell in tow for good measure. This was, by any measure, a short absence from the hilltop. The last time we left this summer by car, we returned…
Getting Started in a Ford And here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson. For some reason, Kim put The Graduate on TV tonight. It has been a while since we’ve seen the movie, but some things always stick with you. In the case of The Graduate, the memorable runs to everything from the dialogue to the music. The music in this most famous Mike Nichols classic from 1967 was, of course, the dulcet tones of Simon &…
Buying a Stairway to Heaven If everything good happened fifty years ago, then everything bad took us back a step twenty years ago. Fifty years ago, when I was but a pup heading to start college at Cornell, I would have gotten a D on my Rock n’ Roll report card. I was liking things like Elton John and Bread with some Jim Croce and Cat Stevens thrown in to balance the rough and tumble…
Making Gummies I’m feeling very tired for some reason. Thanks to my CPAP machine, the first data point I get each morning is how many hours of sleep I have gotten overnight and the ancillary issues of any sleep interruptions or mask removals. I rarely, if ever, have a problem with the latter, but I keep a close eye on the hours of sleep. I am convinced that one of the basic non-rocket-science concepts of…
The Burden of Expectations You have often heard people describe how they are too hard on people because they demand a lot of themselves and find that they should do likewise for others. That is a smallish dilemma when it comes to managerial oversight because one can set objective standards and allow people to perform against them such that you can always define the parameters of success based on how the universe you are trying…