Hunting for Hunter This title will probably do more to raise the readership of my blog among my red friends than anything other than one denouncing Hillary for something obscure and yet serious, like the mishandling of top secret government document. But while the story has nothing to do with Hunter Biden and why right wing deflectors need a bane of their existence to distract them from all the very real, growing and harsh criticism…
Papyrus Denial There are very few places in the world I either have not been to or do not care about returning to. That is not to say I cannot get enthusiastic about a trip to a specific spot by specific means with specific other travelers. I do not dislike foreign travel, I’ve just done so damn much of it that I am less and less enthusiastic about prioritizing it. I know it sounds boring…
Journaling Every once in a while I will look back over my blog stories for one reason or another. I have now been doing this under the Old Lone Ranger monicker since early 2019 when my son Thomas told me I should do it. That is three years and seven months or about 1,300 days. My blogging software feeds me all sorts of statistics that I generally ignore since I am not doing this commercially…
Contrite Is as Contrite Does The concept of contrition is often thought to be associated with Catholicism. We think of sitting in a confessional and leaving with the seemingly trivial penance of saying so many Hail Mary’s or Novenas to absolve ourselves of our sins. But contrition is a far more general and important concept for modern life than these old, somewhat antiquated memories or images. We all need to start from a common basis…
Long Distance Grieving I am packed and ready to head to the airport for a Redeye flight to JFK, arriving tomorrow there at the bright and early time of 5am. I know I won’t sleep much on the flight even though i am traveling in Jet Blue’s Mint service, which had lie-flat seats. I used to sleep like a baby on overnight flights when I was in full work harness, but those days and those…
Touched by the Big Chill Yesterday was quite a day. I have written about our AC problems in this mid-August heat wave, a problem that got resolved with relative ease. I have also written about the events at Mart-A-Lago and the irony of all the informational overload we as Americans are being asked to take in about all the people from the right that are trying literally and figuratively to flush all evidence down the…
Cooling Off Sometimes things are easy. Two days ago, our northern air conditioner went on the fritz. That is the older half of our AC system in the house and if measured in BTU strength, it is also the smaller half of the system. I’m not sure that is a wise configuration, given the importance of AC to comfortable sleeping, but I inherited and retrofitted the HVAC and Hot Water systems in this house and…
Going to the Dogs When we were young, we would sometimes be forced to tell our friends that we had to go because our mothers were expecting us for some reason or other. Then as we got more independent and older, but were still mostly dependent on others, we used our schoolwork or perhaps our new work situation to create an excuse for why we all needed to run off before the festivities were completed.…
School Daze It’s early August and despite my every effort to the contrary, I cannot make myself into Rod Stewart. My Freshman Fall at Cornell was heavily dominated by Rod’s rendition of Maggie May, which came out in July, 1971 on his Reason to Believe album. You may recall that for him it was “late September and I really should be back at school…” Well, for me at age 68, it is a case that…
Weekend at Moonstruck We are coming up on the first weekend of August and we are completely unscheduled for the next three days. While we are by no means social butterflies, we usually do have activities of some sort planned for the weekends. Sometimes it is only a dinner or a movie, but our usual go-to’s are out-of-pocket. Sister Kathy is trying to get out of her COVID bout, but can’t seem to get a…