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…
Indian Autumn When I think of Indian Summer I think of the days in mid-October when the weather goes all the way up to the 60’s or 70’s for a few days and we all remember the warmth of summer to carry us through the impending long dreary days of winter that lay before us. Those rare sunny days have a combination of falling leaves and warmth that certainly confuse the local flora and make…
On A Mission Our friends Gary and Oswaldo have finally moved back from Staten Island to West Hollywood. I tried being a goof and telling them that there really was little difference between the two places and that they would hardly notice the move. That didn’t work even for a quick laugh. I’m not sure what it is about Staten Island that brings out this “run away, run away “ reaction from people, but it…
Time Management I must admit I am more and more in a quandary about my personal time management. Am I a working guy or am I a retired guy or am I something in between? Do I really have to define myself so specifically and does anyone really care how I do that for whatever purpose? I am bothering to write about this because I suspect that while many people had cause to worry about…
Hitting The Deck I have traumatized my left knee on several occasions. The first time was in 1990 when I was in Marbella with a large group of derivatives professionals at a conference. One of the activities involved four of us in a Japanese version of an open-topped Jeep running the traps of a scavenger hunt through the hills of Andalusia. I was one of the few in the group of 200 who spoke enough…
3:10 To Yuma This title is written with my brother-in-law Woo in mind. He is a retired helicopter cavalry pilot with the U.S. Navy and along with the smell of napalm in the morning, there is nothing he likes better than a good western. I said that mostly for effect since he was mostly a rescue pilot who served a bit in Vietnam and more in Iran and Antarctica. Nonetheless, I am presuming that he…