Prelude to a Hobbit Today was a big day for my back hillside. On the occasion of our friends from Sonoma being in town for the weekend, we gathered my local family (all of whom know our friends very well) and had everyone over for a bagel brunch. I will start by explaining that I have a wonderful bagel deli here in Escondido, which makes life much nicer for me since 50 years of living…
Where to Live There are three considerations that have more impact on our lives than any others. We cannot choose when we live as that is the role of the dice we call procreation, whether you believe in the human soul or reincarnation or whatever. I suppose some people can determine actively or passively through their lifestyle choices, how long they live, but that is a very different issue. The other three considerations are the…
Heading Into Darkness I’ve never been one that was terribly afraid of the dark. As a young child I preferred to have the door cracked open, like most kids, but I also always wanted a glass of water before bedtime. That makes me think it had more to do with wanting some attention and assurance of connectivity than any particular fear of the loss of light. These days we sleep with blackout shades (which Kim…
My Personal Rainbow It is a transitional weather morning here on my hilltop. It rained and was stormy yesterday and last night and it looks like today it wants to alternate between that weather and clear and sunny by tomorrow. I am sitting at my desk on hold with some service provider or another. I have started to be in the habit of acknowledging that I now live on the West Coast and the rest…
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…