Juggling Tasks For the forty-five years of my active career, I recognized that the art of juggling tasks and prioritizing the use of one’s time was simply part of the job of working. I also knew that it was part of life in general outside of work, but rarely found that the personal tasks had the sort of urgency of triage that they had in business situations. Now I was never in the military and…
Seeing Red For the last two-thirds of our trip home from Ithaca, my car was telling me with increasing urgency that I was increasingly over the time when I was due for a service check-up. I had taken the car in just before leaving and even went to the extent of having four new tires put on it for good measure. The trip was 7500 miles long, which was apparently enough to cause the service…
Popeye Work What were the earliest cartoons you remember watching? While at 67 years old, I generally find little difference between me and people of 72 or, for that matter, between me and people of 62. We were all old enough to grow up on the music of the sixties, we all experienced Vietnam one way or another and we all grew to adulthood during the greatest housing boom known to man, We are all…
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…