The Summer Solstice A few days ago we had a quaint reminder of days gone by when life was simple and summers were about listening to music in the park and catching fireflies. Quick, what was your first job as a kid? Some might say mowing a lawn, For me it was caddying at the Poland Spring Golf Course in lovely Poland Spring, Maine. We lived there from January, 1966 until August, 1968. Those years…
The Pause That Refreshes After three days in a row of 10+ hour report writing (I have to incorporate research and data as I go, so this sort of expert report writing takes time), and four sequential drafts sent off to my lawyer friends who are effectively my client, I got an email today telling me to pause my writing while they catch up. I have one thing only to do vis-a-vis this case where…
Whisk Me Away I am comforted by thinking that what I am experiencing in life is not so very different from what others my age are going through. I am not talking about physical maladies (though we all have our own “organ recitals” to go through on any given day). I am also not talking about financial affairs. I just saw a piece by an MBA classmate of mine that has built a practice of…
Hitting a Nerve Sometimes people ask me why I feel compelled to write as much as I do. I am feeling that question well-up right now since my trip to Ithaca burned up my backlog of stories. I’m sure that regular readers have noticed that sometimes my daily stories are timely to the point of feeling like they are being published contemporaneously, and sometimes they feel several weeks old (hopefully not so stale as simply…
Decadence I have been getting the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog for years. The merchant has been around for 175 years, which is, in itself, impressive and means that it’s origins in the Bowery area of New York City in 1848 as a hardware store set its beginnings in the pre-Civil War era. That means it was just in its early years during the era of the Dead Rabbits Gang and Boss Tweed with his Tammany Hall…
A Summer Trim I know what you’re thinking….you think I’m going to talk about losing two pounds and bragging about taking a few bags off the Queen Mary, as they say. Nope. OK, so now you’re thinking that I plan to boast again about cutting my own hair and how easy and economical that is the post-COVID world, even though my one trip to a barber had him telling me that you can REALLY tell…
Staying Relevant I have spoken before about the issue of people of a certain age (that would be of an older age like me) dealing with the issue of relevancy. This issue for me is less about desperately trying to find a way to stay relevant, and more about the issue of the decision we must all make at one time or another, or even on a continuous ongoing basis, as to whether or not…
The Irony of Hunter We have all just heard about the conviction of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. This has been a long saga that really began in the middle of Trump’s presidency. Republicans and Democrats alike were screwing around in Ukraine in between the first assault on that sovereign nation in Crimea by Putin’s Russia in 2014 and their more recent and more widespread incursion into the eastern third of Ukraine in 2022. Yes,…
There But For the Grace I’m at the Syracuse airport waiting for my flight to Atlanta, and after a few hours layover, I’ll board my flight back to San Diego. I remember that when my son Roger complained a little bit about me moving as far away as San Diego, I smartly quipped that the difference between a five hour flight to San Diego and a three hour flight to Florida was not so great…
An Extra Day in the Life It’s Monday and I have now been in Ithaca for five days in the warm embrace of cousin Pete and Nancy in their comfortable home on South Hill. It was Nancy, working for Cornell Development in 1997, who met me at an alumni function and said that she was married to my cousin. I got to know Pete and Nancy and hired Pete to manage my house on Warren…