Corona Horns Many animals have horns and when we are confronted by the horns of a dilemma, it feels like horns are there on animals’ heads to protect them from predators. This is sometimes the case, but many times not so much. Zoologists suggest that horns exist in nature for protection in some species, but they most often exist to establish male dominance and to jockey within the species for territory and mating rights. Survival…
Pausing to Pause This morning I am reading reports that only half of Americans are taking the COVID-19 forced sequestration seriously. This more or less agrees with my anecdotal observations out here in San Diego. I’m betting that three quarters again of those non-conforming people are doing so out of the extreme need to maintain their lives that are more or less hand-to-mouth and unable to afford a pause to their daily routine of modern-day…
A Reason to Believe that Every Picture Tells a Story I’m sitting in my dining room for a change of pace and because Handy Brad is painting a wall in the study where Kim’s bookshelves will go when Amazon delivers them. This WFH program requires versatility and my mid-back tweak requires me to sit upright while I write. The workman’s compensation board assigned to my WFH program tells me that care for my lower and…
The Tea Tree Time I’m sure that herbalists and Aborigines will find this hilarious, but I have only recently discovered Tea Tree products. Somehow over the last year, probably when Kim was away somewhere, I was forced to do the unthinkable, go out into the commercial sector (in this case a Duane Reade Pharmacy) and buy my own shampoo. Can you imagine? I inadvertently bought some sort of Tea Tree shampoo and as soon as…
Beauty and the Beast When I wake up now, my routine after my most basic ablutions is to go into my study (conveniently located off our master suite) and check on the state of my world. I start by understanding how much sleep I have gotten. My CPAP machine nicely records that, and while I like to get seven hours, I’m satisfied with anything over six (I have yet to go much over eight and…
Benny & Joon Today is a funny day of windows and doors. I woke up at 4am to check on a final report filing for a London expert witness assignment I have been working on. It needed to be filed by 5pm London time with the court and we had worked on it for a month with a particularly intensive last ten days and a very high pressure last 72 hours since we were given…
It’s Always Something For many years I have been saying that if I ever get a yacht, I plan to name it Always Something. This was intended as a cheap bit of humor since I had and have no intention of ever having a yacht. If I was serious about it I would have called my house here in San Diego Always Something, but instead I called it Casa Moonstruck after my favorite movie. I’ve…
The Kids Are All Right There is a movie by that name starring Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. It’s about a same-sex couple (Bening and Moore) who have two children who were the product of each of them plus a common sperm donor (Ruffalo). It’s a fairly contrived story that might possibly exist in a few real life situations, but is unlikely to represent the issues faced by a broad swath of…
An Invasion of an Unusual Hut I have just discovered a treasure trove of handwritten stories done by my mother when she was transitioning from high school to College. These are stories on lined paper, written in ink in very neat cursive writing and in this first story’s case, written on Thursday, October 26, 1933 by Millie (Ludmilla) A. Uher. Given that she wrote this when she was just seventeen, presumably a Freshman at…
Remembrances This week Kirk Douglas died at the very ripe age of 103 years. He was born in December, 1916 in upstate New York. My mother, who always liked Kirk, was born in September, 1916 also in upstate New York. They grew up about 150 miles apart. She lived 100 years and died three years ago last week. In the same way that Kirk Douglas, a.k.a. Issur Danielovitch, was the child of immigrants from Belarus,…