Ars Gratia Artis When I was in High School at Notre Dame International Prep for Boys in Rome, Italy we had a rotating roster of Brothers of the Holy Cross (the Catholic order founded in France in 1837, but made famous through the founding of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana in 1841). Being a long-ago lapsed Catholic (lapsed when I was four-years-old, strangely because while in a tropical valley in Costa Rica we…
The Night Before COVID Christmas I thought about writing a Christmas poem this year as a traditional retake of the Clement Clarke Moore classic and then Apple News and The Atlantic intervened. At this point in the news cycle, I am starting my day by reading many news summaries. I read them in the sequence in which they come in since I am somewhat dogmatic about reading my emails in chronological order. There is probably…
Hurry Up and Slow Down While I watch what seems like the painfully slow process of my deck going up joist by joist, I keep waiting for the work to turn this magical corner and start racing towards completion. I sort of thought that would happen today, but as the old joke goes, “not so fast, Abernathy”. My new digital, app-based irrigation system was installed in a day and now works great, giving me the…
Popcorn Is Life For many months now, Kim has been in the habit of snacking at night on popcorn. She buys bags of popcorn or kettle corn and I find it hard to resist taking at least a few handfuls. I was mildly disappointed the first few times when I realized her request of whether I wanted some popcorn or not was not followed by the sound of popping corn on the stove, but rather…
Light The Night What reasons do we have for wiring up and lighting the out of doors? Beyond the security aspects there is the beautification issue. But there must be something else. I have had my own little internal wrestling match on this issue through the year. To start with, all my motion or photosensitive security lights around the house (I have nine of these), I replaced earlier in the year. I did it for…
Finding Things To Do I want so very much to remain upbeat and positive and I know I prize achievement orientation above most things, but I am still more at loose ends than I feel comfortable. Today is an instructive day in assessing my current problem. It is a week before Christmas and it is a sunny day here in San Diego County with temperatures ranging up to the mid-60’s. I do not see any…
No Snow Day I woke up early today, but it was a good sleep night. Mornings these days are about whether I was up a little, a lot or not at all during the night. I started taking Atorvastatin earlier this year even though I have had a long history of low cholesterol. I think it was a belt and suspenders prescription suggested by my new California doctor since statins are about restricting cholesterol production…
Decorating for COVID Christmas Will this be our only COVID Christmas? Hard to say. It started at just the right time with the WHO announcement on January 9th that there was a mysterious virus in Wuhan, China. The first case of the Coronavirus hit our shores, from a man returning from Wuhan on January 15th and getting diagnosed by CDC on January 21st. By then four had died in China and the Chinese were sort…
PJ and the Bear In the Fall of 1971, I was just like every other schlubby Freshman at Cornell University, living in University Halls (U-Hall 4 to be precise, second floor, north wing) on West Campus. Those WWII-era cinderblock dorms were torn down and replaced by fancy new upperclassmen dorms bearing names like Hans Bethe House and Carl Becker Hall. I like to joke that instead of freshman yelling “Dorm 3 Sucks!” from the dorm…
Remote Fatherhood When psychologists plumb the depths of who we are they tend to use easy mechanisms like listing the things with which you might complete the sentence, “I am…..”. There are many things I can come up with to complete that sentence, but none is higher on the list than the answer “a father”. That doesn’t make me especially unique among men, but the priority I place on fatherhood as an institution is perhaps…