From the Caldera Into the Fire We awake this morning in our rustic cabin on Diamond Lake. The sun rise is behind us and we enjoyed the pleasure and grandeur of the sunset over the mountain ridge last night from a pontoon boat that I cajoled our group into renting. I was asked if I knew how to pilot a boat and I said, “sure!” The truth is, I did go for two summers to…
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream When Shakespeare has Hamlet ponder this thought, it is a follow-on to the famous “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Shakespeare is as heralded a poet as he is because he does, indeed, ponder the imponderable thoughts we all have on any given day. “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea…
Wooden Eye Wood is on the rise again. It seems to go in and out of favor like the bathroom porcelain color palette. There are times when wood is all about it for design purposes and other times when wood gets ripped out as grandmotherly. When I was a kid, knotty pine wood paneling was very comforting. I remember staying at some friends’ house and feeling very much at ease in the wood-paneled study with…
Rosebud When I was a kid, watching all the great sitcoms of my youth, I remember watching an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show (which ran from 1961 – 1968) when Rob and Laura Petrie were trying to explain to his son, Richie, why his middle name was Rosebud. It was a November, 1962 episode written by our old friend, Carl Reiner and it wound up that Rosebud was an anagram of an origin…
Road Trip! What is it about some people that they have wanderlust? I think it must go back to the Hunter/Gatherer psyche that arrayed early man. Some people settled and were happiest when they were putting down roots that bound them to a place on the earth as though to not do so would leave them free to spin off the planet into the ozone. Other people would sooner spin out into space than be…
It’s All About Soul Yesterday I was taking a motorcycle ride on a sunny Saturday and chose to head inland towards the mountains. The Mount Palomar Observatory is forty miles away and while I rarely actually go up to the gated observatory at the very top of the mountain, I do regularly ride the switchback road up the mountain from the West and ride down the sweeper road that heads south to Lake Henshaw (or…
Strawberry Trees Forever I am currently sitting in the shade of my garage on this lovely, sunny 73 degree San Diego day. Both doors and the side door are open, so the breeze from the Pacific Ocean might make this the loveliest spot on earth right now. There’s a big window in the garage facing West and I must admit, I always assumed someone had an extra window when building the house, so they said,…
The River of Dreams Some of the best song lyrics out there were written by Billy Joel, who, God knows, doesn’t seem like a spiritual man (to paraphrase his own lyrics), and yet they are hauntingly universal the way things like rivers and fruits are universal. When I was in Guatemala and we were trying to connect with the indigenous, mostly Indian, people, the common point of connection was favorite fruits. The Africans, the Bedouin,…
Looking for the Comet About the time the United States started taking the Coronavirus seriously, specifically March 27, 2020, NASA discovered a new comet that would come through the Earth’s solar system in its path through the cosmos. The comet was called NEOWISE in honor of the acronym for the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This spacecraft has been a project that wasn’t launched to find comets like NEOWISE, but did that nonetheless and…
Travel to Gravel It has just come to my realization that this was the day we were supposed to return from our big summer family trip to Krakow, Poland. I had rented a palace with fifteen rooms with separate baths for ten days, just twenty minutes from the Krakow. Joining us, much like at a Manor House in Western Ireland last summer, a Chateaux (castle) on the Cherbourg Peninsula in Normandy, in a series of…