Commander Softpants Today Kim handed me a letter that was addressed to me and she had glanced at the addressee. She asked me who Commander Softpants was. I tried to think of something witty to tell her, but then I decided that the actual truthful story was better than anything I could make up. So, I decided to turn it into a story. I mean, why waste a perfectly good title and an interesting story…
Yucca Yucca Yucca Get too close to a Yucca and you get a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, actually a sharp sword-like leaf end. It’s actually a bigger and more serious hazard than I make it sound. Yucca leaves are about eighteen inches long and spring forth in every direction from the end of the branch. They actually form a sort of ball of green leaves about three feet in diameter. A…
The Ghost in the Darkness There is a middle-of-the-road ($75 million in box office) film from 1996 that stars Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer called The Ghost and the Darkness. It is the story of two man-eating lions that ravage and terrorize a crew of workers building the Uganda to Mombasa rail line through the village of Tsavo. It is a true story with a somewhat stylized script and tells about how Lt. Colonel Patterson…
Mud and Bands This is week twelve of my deck saga. I feel like Peter Mayle creating a document-drama about a year in Escondido and all the attendant house renovation projects and local characters that find their way to his door. For me there are three primary characters; Handy Brad, DoRight Dave and Rascally Rich. There are many other folks that work on the house in one way or another, but let’s start with just…
The Next Donald Trump No, I am not going to go off on Don Junior…though I easily could. And no, I am not going to wave the warning flag of autocracy by describing the dangers of not convicting him in this new Impeachment Trial such that another despot-in-waiting will rise to new atrocities…though I easily could and should. I want to talk a little about what is next for Donald J. Trump. I believe this…
Seize the Day After Day For years I have adopted Carpe Diem as one of my personal themes. I have a copy of my 60th Birthday invitation which declares Carpe Diem. It was seeing that invitation on my office wall that caused me to think about how long I have been working to seize the day, over and over again. Today and tomorrow (as well as yesterday), I have been focused on seizing the moment…
Turning the Corner The deck, the deck, my kingdom for a deck. It has been eleven weeks since the work started on this damnable deck renovation. I had originally estimated (I thought conservatively) that it would take eight weeks. It now looks like I will be lucky if it is finished in thirteen weeks. That is a full quarter of a year, in this case the months of December, January and February. That’s a long…
Lazy Day Kim gave me one of those 25-pound blankets for my birthday. We’ve been joking about them every time we see them advertised on TV, but I had no idea that she would buy one. For some reason I was very tired last night so I crawled into bed early and I do mean crawled because getting under that heavy blanket takes some effort. I don’t know whether it was being so tired or…
Super Bowl Sunday .Today is the first Sunday in February, which makes it Super Bowl Sunday, which is deemed to be a quasi-National Holiday. I grew up both without a resident father and, for one half of my youth, outside the United States. What that means is that I am devoid of any spectator sports obsession of any kind, including for our national sport of football. I have a strange relationship with football anyway. At…
You Can’t Win Against Crazy When I was a founding partner of a venture capital company that would up being very successful, I learned several important lessons. We had one company that failed early because the young, 23-year-old CEO started having a meltdown early on. He was a co-founder of his company and his partner was the reason we were in the investment in the first place. He got crosswise with that partner and used…