Cleaning Up During my adult life (meaning post-college), a span of forty-four years, I have not lived alone for very long. I am what they call a serial monogamist. I don’t understand people who enjoy playing the field. I can only handle one relationship at a time, but I have a strong need to be in a primary relationship. I am on my third and last marriage. I can be so certain about that…
The Danger Zone Today I spent several hours with my lovely granddaughters, literally taking a handoff from my youngest son, their uncle. After a round of volleyball with a soft indoor ball (I enjoyed teaching the four-year-old how to use both hands to volley) we settled into GrubHub dinner and a showing of The Sound of Music. I was surprised when my daughter told me they had only seen Mary Poppins the day before and…
The Cheesecake Connection The Cheesecake Connection It’s 2020 and I am working through my self-assigned chores as diligently as I can. I have started on the garage door openers. What can be more suburban than garage door openers? They scream that we live in car country and that we are all about technological convenience. I choose not to call it laziness, and God knows I am lazy, but garage door openers have entered the realm…
Imperfect Vision How many stories will be written about the implications of entering 2020? I suspect they will be many and they will carry on throughout the coming year. I will even anticipate a whole spate of stories about leaving 2020 behind symbolically. I just wish all the analogies and metaphors were justified. Any implication that the future is clear and readable in this messy world we live in is naive. The stock market is…
Boxing Day San Diego this morning seems stuck in that mix of sunny skies in one direction and threatening rain in another.I am adjusting more and more every day to my new existence out here and trying my best to think like someone who will be doing this for a long, long time. I am already well over any jet lag, which is to be expected since I didn’t jet out in the first place,…
The Jabrone Preamble As it turns out, there are Gibronis, Jibronis and Jabrones and they collectively attest to the power of urban lexicon. The differences between the words is pretty insignificant, even though some seem to want to parse that some are meant to declare rather than denigrate; designate, but not condemn. I find that all pretty funny and more indicative of our Uber-concerns about political correctness, or more accurately our fervent wish to not…
It Never Rains in California The song says it all. Seems it never rains in southern California Seems I’ve often heard that kind of talk before It never rains in California, but girl, don’t they warn ya? It pours, man, it pours We’ve had two days of dry overcast and today California explained reality to us. It started pouring rain in the wee hours. As with most things, we were the last to know the…
A Dog’s Life The main reason we drove 2,900 miles cross-country last week was to get our dog, Cecil to our new home in San Diego. Cecil is a Bichon Frise (pure breed as it turns out) who came to us as a rescue in August 2009. He was estimated to be two-years-old when we got him. That means he is about twelve years old now. He has a replacement leg ligament, from which he…
Educating Our Children I recently saw an old Confucian proverb that goes: If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. I was raised in a household that valued education. My mother had grown up in rural upstate New York in a family where neither the mother nor father had much formal education. They were a…
Cleaning House In 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 was tragically brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland with 259 souls having their lives cut short by a terrorist bomb. That was a routine daily London to New York flight taken by many of us and used by my bank to transport the daily pouch with “important” interoffice communiques. On that particular day, we not only had our pouch on board, but also one of the officers in…