Occupying the Suitcase We are on our first road trip (or any trip for that matter) since July. That was four months ago. For years during my active working life, I had a private view that it was important to plan some sort of getaway every two months. Of course, that was in addition to weekends in Ithaca, business trips to here or there and nights out. I mean I would plan something “special” to…
The Holiday Spirit I am not sure that A Christmas Carol, the Dickensian story of the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge makes my top five favorite holiday movie list (It’s A Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, Love Actually and a tie between Four Christmases and The Holiday…and maybe Elf), but it is a very memorable tale that I suspect any one of us could recite with ease. It all revolves around the spirit…
The Heirarchy of the Jungle The lion sleeps tonight, but the boss man is ever-vigilant. Despite yesterday being Thanksgiving, that’s a distant memory on this particular hilltop. Strangely enough, I am not talking about myself as the boss man. I have delegated boss man status to Handy Brad and wasn’t altogether certain he would assume the mantle of responsibility, but he has done so and more. We are at full strength today with Handy Brad,…
Deck The Halls and Haul The Deck Did I mention that I am playing contractor on my deck renovation? Even if I did, I need to howl at the moon over this and so this story is what comes out. Long ago I thought I wanted to be an architect. That morphed into wanting to be a structural engineer, which evolved into an engineer more broadly, and that drifted based on a nasty run-in with…
A Visit to TeslaLand When I was a kid in grade school, there were two things we spent all summer anxiously awaiting in September, and neither one involved the start of school. One was the new network TV show line-up from ABC, CBS and NBC. TV Guide would dutifully construct and publish a two-page weekly schedule. We would pour over that schedule and curse the network scheduling executives that purposefully matched up head-to-head the shows…
The Heat Is On So far this year I have written about 325 blog stories. I used to write more than one per day (especially on weekends) but I have mostly stopped that practice because I don’t want to wear myself out. Obviously, writing is not physically demanding, but there really is only so much in the tank to say and I neither want to churn out really shitty prose nor overdo it to the…
Tattooed How many times have you seen movies where during a wild and crazy night, the protagonist goes the last yard and wakes up the next morning with a crazy tattoo in a crazy place on his or her body. If it’s a guy, the tattoo is something too cute for words and it’s in a spot where all his friends can see it to make fun of him. If it’s a girl, the tattoo…
Taking It To The Limit I don’t think I have that gene that causes me to test the limits on everything I do. I know people who have that going on and some are still with us and some managed to exceed their limits and pay the ultimate price. Obviously, not every activity has a terminal penalty associated with pushing too far. Sometimes the reward is simply a proverbial speeding ticket, a slap on the…
Making Hay This is feeling like an unusual moment for me and while I’m not in the limbo that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris inhabit, it is a bit of a suspended animation moment for me as well. I can’t tell if it is all the build-up to the election and now waiting to find out what the mad man-child will try to do next, or something else. It probably doesn’t help that I am…
Dead Poets In September, 1967, at the age of thirteen, I entered Hebron Academy in Hebron, Maine as a Freshman. Hebron is a school that is 216 years old. We had moved to Poland Spring, Maine in January, 1966. My mother was the Deputy Director of the first Women’s Job Corps Center. She had a Ph.D. in Adult Education and had over twenty years of building and administering programs for the betterment of the lives…