Every Which Way But Sideways It’s Sunday night and today was a very lazy day on the hilltop for both Kim and me. I put in some time on my expert case and before I knew it it was almost 10am on another perfect San Diego summer morning. Mid-80’s with lots of sun and no humidity (ho-hum, just the usual). My agenda was to get the plants I bought yesterday down the hillside to the…
Shortening Life For years we all lived with the fears of the two-headed health monster snatching us before our prime. While it is probably hard to deny that both heart disease and cancer are strongly genetically-linked, I always considered heart disease to be a lifestyle disease and cancer a genetically-predispositioned disease. I can almost hear the uncomfortable rustling of people who immediately disagree with my characterization for some personal experiential reason. We all have friends…
A Secret Failure They say that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. I’m going to guess that nobody who is reading this story has ever bothered to figure out who first uttered that phrase. It is one of those pithy credos that gets made into posters and etched into rocks that are sold to people to hold down papers on their desk with all the other kitschy things they’ve accumulated over their…
Getting Even We all live life out of balance to some degree. Even if we think we are in harmony with everything and everyone, chances are that we haven’t factored in the perspectives of others adequately and we are imbalanced without even realizing it. We get our wheels aligned and our tires balanced because at speed we can feel wobbles in our cars and on our motorcycles, but when things are more slow-going it is…
Back to School Over the weekend, I spoke to my daughter, who has spent the majority of the summer (the last six weeks since school let out) at our family home, Homeward Bound, in Ithaca. We were there with her and her family for the first week or so and then we headed back West. She stayed on and lived the life of fireflies, lunch in the pool for the kids, husband John doing his…
Broadway on the Bay Our friend Matthew has been with us for a few days in the middle of Phillip’s whirlwind tour of all the Western upscale properties in the hotel portfolio of his new employer (a large household hotel brand that has been a part of our lives for decades and for whom Phillip plans to take sales to the moon and back). Mostly we have been showing him our very limited world of…
The Dagwood Effect The other day we were going to dinner in Escondido with Winston and Kathleen. Winston is such a great name, for a neighbor especially, since it evokes a person of interest that is both conservative and yet mildly daring at the same time. That description fits our Winston quite well, but more on that later. We drove down to the local Mexican restaurant (there are so very many in the area) that…
The House of the Rising Sun My sleep patterns leave a lot to be desired. I am blessed at the age of 67 to be without significant maladies. I take medication for high blood pressure, but they seem to work well in keeping me at a BP level that is normal and apparently without major health complications. I do not suffer from reflux or any of the other annoying gastrointestinal problems that often plague aging…
Back Up the Truck For the forty-five years of my Wall Street career the expression to “back up the truck” refers to something a guy by the name of Tom Pope said to me. Tom had grown up in the International Department of our bank in the first half of the 1970’s. That was when the domestic banking market was in its decline due to large loan losses on loans to REITs that had gone…
Stupid is as Stupid Does In 2020 we were scheduled to go to Spain and Portugal (Barcelona to Porto) for a motorcycle trip in August. Needless to say, by the middle of Spring everyone was unequivocally concerned enough about COVID to unanimously recognize the wisdom of cancelling the trip. We even went so far as to assuage our troubled motorcycling souls by tentatively planning a “post-Pandemic” trip in February to Patagonia. By the time the…