Wooden Eye Wood is on the rise again. It seems to go in and out of favor like the bathroom porcelain color palette. There are times when wood is all about it for design purposes and other times when wood gets ripped out as grandmotherly. When I was a kid, knotty pine wood paneling was very comforting. I remember staying at some friends’ house and feeling very much at ease in the wood-paneled study with…
Rushin’ Around the Russian River A few years ago, Kim and I joined our friends Gary and Oswaldo on the perfunctory Alaska Cruise for a week. We went up to the Glaciers that make for the scattering of islands where Sitka and Ketchikan are located. One of the things all Alaska Cruise tourists see is the influence of Russia on the 50th state. The Russian Tsars pushed eastward across the North Pacific as early as…
Rosebud When I was a kid, watching all the great sitcoms of my youth, I remember watching an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show (which ran from 1961 – 1968) when Rob and Laura Petrie were trying to explain to his son, Richie, why his middle name was Rosebud. It was a November, 1962 episode written by our old friend, Carl Reiner and it wound up that Rosebud was an anagram of an origin…
Road Trip! What is it about some people that they have wanderlust? I think it must go back to the Hunter/Gatherer psyche that arrayed early man. Some people settled and were happiest when they were putting down roots that bound them to a place on the earth as though to not do so would leave them free to spin off the planet into the ozone. Other people would sooner spin out into space than be…
Get Away Day In this year of broken plays, where whatever we were all planning to do, we have had to cancel, postpone or modify, Kim and I proposed to our dear friends Frank and Lydia a celebratory road trip to the Columbia Gorge. We proposed it for the second half of summer, feeling that by that time we would have this nasty Coronavirus thing, whatever it turned out to be, well under control as…
Amazon on My Mind It is said that when Jeff Bezos was taking his now-famous cross-country trip to move to Seattle, he wrote the business plan for his new business idea. That idea was to build the world’s biggest bookstore using this new concept that was gaining traction in 1994, the Worldwide Web. The internet and its packetization of information across large and remote data networks had been building in the defense and academic worlds…
A Good Day Fridays are most often good days. I believe that gets a bit blurred by both my partial-retirement status and the Coronavirus situation that has one day flowing into another with much less differentiation between weekdays and weekends. To be honest, this year it is hard for me to even realize this is summer versus any other time of the year since the weather out here in San Diego is nice all year…
What Comes Around The year 2008 is often referred to by many in the markets as the ultimate ”annus horribilis”. That is a bit hard for me to reconcile because where my personal “annus horribilis” was rightfully 2007 based on the the disastrous episode with the Bear Stearns Asset Management hedge funds that hit the wall of the CDO (collateralized debt obligations) and sub-prime mortgage crisis, that was also the joyous year (earlier in the…
Passing Through Portland At the end of next week, Kim and I and our friends Frank and Lydia, will be passing through Portland, Oregon as we escape the confines of the Coronavirus for a road-trip holiday up through the Northern Coast of California, where the Redwoods proliferate and into Oregon. After Goos Bay, we are going to the mouth of the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark ended their transcontinental journey. That expedition started in…
Travel to Gravel It has just come to my realization that this was the day we were supposed to return from our big summer family trip to Krakow, Poland. I had rented a palace with fifteen rooms with separate baths for ten days, just twenty minutes from the Krakow. Joining us, much like at a Manor House in Western Ireland last summer, a Chateaux (castle) on the Cherbourg Peninsula in Normandy, in a series of…