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…
Getting Ornery Have you ever woken up on the wrong side of bed and had your day go sideways from there? I’m betting everyone can relate to that sensation. Well, this morning as I struggled to get out from under my new heavy blanket (that thing is headed for the sofa today on the theory that it does little good for my sleep in bed, but might help Kim or me nap better on the…
Wetter and Wilder in the Moment Tomorrow I turn sixty-seven. Since I am four days ahead of myself with my writing (a sure sign that I’ve been cooped up by the weather lately), you’ll be reading this when I am into my sixty-eighth year. I have a good relationship with aging, so I almost always refer to myself as being at the age of the year I am working on. That means that in a…
Necessita Casita We live on 2.5 acres of boulder-strewn hillside. We are on top of the hill, perfectly situated for views in all directions and the boulders create a lovely landscape to create nice spaces in various area of the lot, The Patio is nestled amongst boulders. The hot tub is perfectly sited in between and shielded for privacy by several large boulders. The newer Cecil Garden is framed by the boulders which form the…
Timber! Over the last year, as part of my succulent education, I watched an Agave Americana on my back hillside grow its once-in-a-lifetime seed stalk to a height of about thirty feet. The base of the Agave looks like the Queen Victoria Agava but the scale of stalk quickly outsized the Agava plant. The base is about three feet high and perhaps two feet across, but the base of the stalk grew to about ten…
Drafting The word draft is one of those English words with not only multiple meanings, but the word takes the form of a verb, an adverb, an adjective and a whole array of nouns all at once . You can draft a draft of a proposal to draft a drafting specialist by sending him a draft as a down payment to help correct flaws of a drafty room before he or she gets conscripted in…
Double New Yorker I wish the New Yorker magazine treated its subscribers like American Express has chosen to, with a designation on the card that declares “Member Since 1976”. I must admit, I am proud of that designation. And here is the thing, in the forty-five years of my membership, I have never once not paid the AMEX bill in full every month. It used to be that there was no choice to do otherwise,…