Aiming for 2060 Today marks the 105th birthday of my mother, Dr. Ludmilla Ann Uher Prosdocimi Marin Jenkins. If she had not died at age 100 four and a half years ago, my mother would have turned 105 today….or maybe Thursday. It seems that in 1916 it took two days in Lansing, Nëw York for a birth to be properly registered, so while born on September 14th, her official life commenced on September 16th. That…
Apollo 13 Last night I watched for the umpeenth time, this Ron Howard film about the troubled flight to the moon manned by Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert (last minute replacement for Ken Mattingly) and Fred Haise. The roles were played by Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon (Gary Sinise) and Bill Paxton. Ed Harris plays Gene Kranz, the Flight Director at Mission Control in Houston. Every time I rewatch a movie I see new things or think…
Handy Rich Ever since we came back from our summer cross-country trip, Handy Brad and I have modified our arrangement. I think this was a combination of Brad getting some other work in his neighborhood for an older woman (i.e. someone who was not so penny-pinching as some of his other retiree neighbors) and me running low on new projects. Now, if I need Handy Brad for something, I call him and we agree on…
Snap Out of It! My son-in-law, John, just sent a Facebook post asking for lines that fans can easily identify with a favorite movie. My favorite movie (determined long ago as such) is Moonstruck. It stars Cher, Nicholas Cage, Danny Aiello, Vincent Gardenia, Olivia Dukakis, and a host of great character actors. My favorite line from the movie (and there are so many noteworthy lines from which to choose) is when Cher slaps Nicholas Cage…
Drinking the Drink If we talk the talk and walk the walk, do we drink the drink? I believe I do. My relationship with alcohol is a strange one. Like most people, my awareness of alcohol significantly predates my consumption of it. Also like most every kid, I snuck a sip or two of beer, wine and even the hard stuff when I was young. I had just enough to know that I didn’t like…
Buying a Stairway to Heaven If everything good happened fifty years ago, then everything bad took us back a step twenty years ago. Fifty years ago, when I was but a pup heading to start college at Cornell, I would have gotten a D on my Rock n’ Roll report card. I was liking things like Elton John and Bread with some Jim Croce and Cat Stevens thrown in to balance the rough and tumble…
Hip to be Square Huey Lewis is four years older than me but, as it turns out, he did follow an early path very similar to mine. He entered Cornell as an engineering student as Hugh Anthony Cregg III, having gotten an 800 on the SAT math test. That bests my score by fifty points. The rest of his career was quite a bit different from mine, but presumably at the age of 71 now…
New York, Nëw York Tonight we flew into JFK on JetBlue from San Diego. Any way you slice it, that is a full day travel affair. We’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about reengaging with air travel and how we feel about it. While Kim hears all my thoughts on the topic, I don’t want to assume that her thoughts on the subject are the same as mine. I think we all have…
The Extended Self Today I read an interesting article in the Washington Post about people who have to evacuate their homes in an emergency. The theme plays into what seems to be a recurring theme these days, which is about materialism and its impact on our psyches. We start with a typical concentric circle approach to thinking about ourselves. When push comes to shove, like when we are very ill or in the hospital, there…
It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood This neighborhood is physically defined as a small hilltop outcropping that stands between a little valley called Hidden Meadows and the run down to the coast. As I may have mentioned before, there are about forty homes up on this hill on what I would characterize as six roads. There are hill crest homes around the edges and several inner homes that don’t seem to care so much…