Traveling to Freedom On Sunday I am taking my first trip since moving to San Diego. I’m flying to New York, where I will work and see my kids, and then I am flying to London for other work and will transit back through New York to be home after what is, in total about eight days. Big deal. I’ve done similar trips about a thousand times (literally 1,000 times over my adult life/career). I…
Handy Brad Now that we’ve moved in and mostly gotten our stuff placed and staged and generally winnowed down to manageable proportions, there are several small projects that need doing that seem either a bit beyond our capabilities and that we don’t want to bother brother-in-law Jeff to do. I would never undertake anything electronic in the house without first consulting Jeff, but I think it’s safe to say that he is perfectly content…
Beauty and the Beast When I wake up now, my routine after my most basic ablutions is to go into my study (conveniently located off our master suite) and check on the state of my world. I start by understanding how much sleep I have gotten. My CPAP machine nicely records that, and while I like to get seven hours, I’m satisfied with anything over six (I have yet to go much over eight and…
Outvoting Is it just me or is everyone more attentive to the primaries this year? Have I just awoken to this process this year where everyone else has been on this game while I was distracted with work or whatever? It’s not as though I haven’t voted before. I started with a vote for George McGovern in 1972 (I was just eighteen) and the rest is history. It was a miserable loss in both the…
Benny & Joon Today is a funny day of windows and doors. I woke up at 4am to check on a final report filing for a London expert witness assignment I have been working on. It needed to be filed by 5pm London time with the court and we had worked on it for a month with a particularly intensive last ten days and a very high pressure last 72 hours since we were given…
Self-Insuring During my career on Wall Street, I had occasion to become an expert of hedging and insurance. Let’s be clear about what I mean by an expert. I founded and ran our futures and options subsidiary thirty-five years ago when hardly anyone understood futures and options and very few in the financial world other than traders and commodities people even understood what hedging really was all about. This was the precursor to the derivatives…
Staging the Next Stage We are blessed with several friends who seem to enjoy being of service to Kim, and by extension, to me. They like helping her pack, unpack, organize stuff, sort out her clothes and other stuff. For two weeks we had Oswaldo here and that was a pleasure. Every time I turned around he would be doing this or that quite tirelessly and with no complaints. I actually think he likes staying…
Battery Math Today I went to a battery fair here in Escondido. I was invited by Baker Electric, the premier electricians here in Southern California, who installed my solar system last year. They were joined in this extravaganza, replete with free donuts and mimosas and great swag (umbrellas, string backpacks and notebooks with pens) by the strong and mighty Tesla, the dominant maker of home batteries. Naturally, I had to drive to the fair in…
Storage Stuff Today the moving truck arrived with our stuff from NYC. To be totally accurate, it arrived in two 24’ trucks, one with furniture and one filled to the brim with boxes. These trucks appeared on time at 8:00am (they drove down from their terminal in L.A.) and came with six very nice moving guys who stayed and went above and beyond helping us with rugs and moving furniture. They were on site for…
Boy Scout Bankruptcy Back in 1962 I was living in Madison, Wisconsin. At that time it was all about ice fishing, ice boat sailing and other middle-American pastimes. For vacations we would go north up to the Wisconsin Dells (sort of version of Lake George or Franconia Notch with lots of kid amusement areas) or even further north to Lake Superior for a cold, refreshing dip in the icy waters of the greatest of the…