Home Again, Home Again, Jiggidy-Jig Since all good things always seem better, or at least more appreciated, if they are hard-won, I suppose leaving the last day of our cross-country trip as a long and painful one is probably for the best. We had traveling companions who all wanted to get home on Sunday night because some task or travel was awaiting them Monday morning. Everyone who knows the route said to do various alternatives…
Rocky Mountain High Yesterday we were approaching Denver from the East and could see a wall of stormy-looking cloud cover over the distant mountains to the West. I have always been a big fan of big sky western panoramas with cloud formations covering the skies. There is something about that sort of view that seems to scream America the Beautiful to me. The power of the weather as shown by the clouds combined with the…
Holiday Road Who doesn’t love National Lampoon’s Vacation with Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Randy Quaid, Anthony Michael Hall, Eugene Levy, John Candy and Christie Brinkley? That trip took the Griswold family from Chicago to Wallyworld in California in the green Family Truckster that loses parts all along the way. We are in Springfield, Ohio tonight after our first 520 miles from Ithaca today. It was an uneventful day except for our lunch stop at the…
Every Picture Tells a Story I am sitting here in my dining room of Homeward Bound, waiting for Kim to finish showering and dressing, after which we will leave for our 3,000 trek to California. It is one of those weird waiting moments that I hate to waste and choose to find something to write about. This morning I am looking nostalgically at the artwork that I have on these walls. Every picture tells a…
Working It When I started college, I began as an engineering student at Cornell, one of the best engineering schools in the U.S. Like so many young men, I tended to show stronger grades and test scores for math and science than for verbal. That and a romantic sense of manly endeavors in the engineering world made me think that I wanted to be a civil or perhaps operations engineer. I actually did well in…
Dog Day Morning It’s only 9:30am and I’m already worn out. Youngest son Thomas arrived last night at midnight with Candice, our retired schoolteacher friend, and Hank, his “Dorky” Dachshund/Yorkie mix one-year-old pup with the Yoda ears. After five hours in the car the order of the evening was; 1. Bathroom (Candice rest stop), , 2. Let Hank run around, 3. Bathroom (Abe the Havanese, peeing on the dining room rug in anxiety of Hank’s…
Joe and the Indian Way back in 1995, I owned a large ranch house in the Snyderville Basin in Utah on the high desert plateau east of Salt Lake City and near Park City. This was a classic “Big hat, no cattle” ranch that was set on four acres in the middle of a basin that was about 7,000 acres in size. It had that “Big Sky” feel of the wide open spaces of the…
The End of the World Last night Kim and I went to diner st the house of a friend from business school. I knew John quite well during my eighteen months the Graduate Business School at Cornell (then called B&PA, now called the Johnson School….part of the Johnson College of Business at Cornell….too long of a naming story to recite in full here and now). I think its fair to say that John was the…
Dog Fight at Homeward Bound When Roger and Carolyn were little, a movie came out that they were desperate to see. It was 1993 and it was called Homeward Bound; The Incredible Journey. It chronicled the ever-endearing saga of three pets joining forces to try to get back home through the wilderness. Chance, Sassy and Shadow don’t start off as friends but develop their rapport through the trials of the journey. For an animal kids…
Arts & Crafts All through my youth in Middle America (not so much when living the survivalist regime in the tropics or the ethereal existence in Rome) I kept getting taught about how to do arts & crafts. In some sort of shop course in middle school in Middleton, Wisconsin (I was actually in middle school in Middleton in Middle America), I had to make a pump lamp where the pump handle was attached to…