The Burden of Refinement We live in a modern, civilized and refined world. The last few nights we have watched some movies set in the late 1950’s and we are reminded that it wasn’t so long ago (a mere sixty years ago) that things were a lot less civilized and refined. We have watched Far From Heaven and Loving, both stories set in that era when I was a young child and when the country…
Thank You for Your Service When I was starting school in 1960 I was in a little tropical valley due east of San Jose. It was literally a one-room schoolhouse where the kids of the expats living and working at the Center for Tropical Agricultural Research and Education in Turrialba, Costa Rica went to school. To be fair, it was only for grades one through eight. After that, kids had to go to high school…
Another Thursday Night Everybody gets into routines. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Waldo, as he apparently liked to be called, was a big thinker in his time (the mid-Nineteenth Century) and a champion of several causes that don’t necessarily hang together much these days. He was an abolitionist, a transcendentalist and an individualist. I’m not sure I ever…
The Nature of the Beast I am uncharacteristically sitting at the kitchen counter this evening, watching TV on Kim’s kitchen TV (all is well with the new FireTV installation). I am doing this since I have to leave shortly for the airport to pick up our friend David, who is flying in from New York. I was reclining on our bed watching Law & Order SVU, one of our go-to shows (also not a normal…
Selling Real Estate I sometimes wonder if other people connect their psyches and tendencies to real estate the way I do. In it’s simplest form, real estate is about buying, renovating, holding and then selling. These are all very distinct phases, but they are phases that everyone must go through. The possible exception is that some people avoid the renovating part of the equation like the plague while others embrace it, enjoy it and perhaps…
A Busy Week Every day when I sit down to write, I ask myself what is going on that can make a good story. This exercise is not about just regurgitating the events of my life or the opinions I hold about the world events underway, or, for that matter, the recitation of the memories that come to mind that are fascinating to me because they revolve around my life. It so happens that I…
Moonrise Madneess It’s 5:30pm and I am enjoying a long-overdue hot tub soak. I’m not sure why I don’t go in whenever I want, but I have a system now where the tub filter goes on every day at 1pm and circulates until 4pm. If I want to go in and I want it warmer than ambient air temperature, I have to hit a toggle on my cell phone app, It can’t really get much…
Stucco! Stucco! Stucco! With a nod to Richard Fleischer’s 1970 iconic hit movie, Tora!Tora!Tora!, that won acclaim for its special effects and realistic warlike cinematography, I feel the need to wrap up my tale of stucco with regard to my Hobbit House since I have flip-flopped more than HGTV and the DIY (now Magnolia) Network combined. Given how many homes out here on the chaparral are stucco construction and the number of immigrants who pride…
Common Learning I am sitting in an atrium on the University of San Diego campus in the building in which my course on Law, Policy and Ethics is assigned to meet. The building is called the Learning Commons and I am happy to report that at 6:40pm on a Wednesday night, there seems to be a lot of activity. This is distinctly different from last semester, when my course met in the Joan Kroc Institute…
Always Something Who says retirement is easy? There should be little or no stress, right? That should certainly be the case with a casual fun project like my Hobbit House. My MO is optimism. As that pertains to projects around the property, that translates into a sense that everything is easy and quite doable, so what’s the problem? While I have been aware of this can-do attitude tendency, I do find myself slipping easily into…