Reliving the War When I was in high school in Rome, between 1968 and 1971, I think its fair to say that the Vietnam War was at its peak. There were 550,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam and the Tet Offensive by the North had begun its inexorable push to bring the war to a conclusion…or perhaps create the impression that if it didn’t end with a U.S. withdrawal that it would go on… forever. In…
Eating Out and Ordering In I spent forty-five years (minus two years for bad behavior when I got sent to Gulag Toronto) living in New York City. Just to get everyone on the same page, the two-year stint in Toronto was literally a three-year sentence (starting in 1990) by my employer, Bankers Trust Company, to run our Canadian Bank. I had been running a vast empire of the Global Derivatives business and the Global Commodities…
From Here to Eternity There is something very familiar about this unfamiliar place. I am in the Jury Lounge of the North County Regional Court Center in Vista, California. I have been called to service by the Superior Court for the County of San Diego. I already pushed this off once a few months ago due to my business schedule and unlike the last time I was called a few years ago during COVID, my…
The Hole in My Pocket As a storyteller, I often quip to people that when and if I ever write my proper autobiography (as though these blog stories don’t effectively do that already), I already have a title all picked out for it. I am a big title guy and often use a title to lead me into or out of a story. I guess there is a part of this storyteller that is also…
Curb Appeal Every day I wake up with some new idea that I cannot believe I haven’t had before. Now that Ive taken care of all the currently necessary fixes and maintenance of my property, I’m free to innovate and improve as I see fit. I started out thinking that I needed to take three approaches to the property. There was the front that had been heavily planted with a vast variety of cacti and…
The Guardians of the Galaxy We tend to throw around astronomical terms without necessarily knowing of them in detail. I’m not sure I have ever spent the time to understand the full scope of the firmament. The classic human conundrum that more or less defines the limits of our simple minds is to ask how far space extends and, for that matter, what is beyond that. The void is the default mechanism now as it…
Done Trippin’ For some reason that I can’t completely explain other than to say that I can’t avoid taking responsibility for my own cumulative decisions, we are suddenly immersed in more trip planning than normal. We literally have things on the docket now for each of the next six months. This month is relatively easy because we are just going back to New York to spend time with the kids, the pretense being granddaughter Evelyn’s…
Boredom at Sea Back in early 2019, what seems like two lifetimes ago, one for retirement and another for COVID, Kim and I went on a two-week cruise around New Zealand and Eastern Australia, including Tasmania. We had done a similar two-week cruise through the Baltics the year before, visiting nine countries, and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The bottom line on our Southern Hemisphere jaunt was that we found that we were more bored…
Back to Rock n’ Roll This story can and probably will be about two very distinct things. As you probably know by now, I write about whatever is going on in my life at the moment. Sometimes that’s about current events or something that is on my mind (or perhaps has been stewing in my head for some time) or perhaps something as mundane as my small little life of the moment. I do not…
Parsing the Day Today I went out early and took the string trimmer down to the lower hillside below the wildflower garden and weed-whacked myself into oblivion. Operating an electric power-pack string trimmer does not look like particularly hard work until you do it for a while. These tools are well constructed and properly balanced so that the handle is pretty much in the right spot so that its as easy as possible to make…