The Longest Days Last night I stumbled on a Netflix series about the people around Adolf Hitler and how the National Socialist German Workers’ Party grew to prominence and control in Germany. The bottom line is that it was a slow and steady process that took fifteen years to take serious root and then lasted for twelve years. It started in 1918 as a direct result of the ignominious defeat of Germany in WWI and…
My Garden Desk When building out my garden recently, I had a heavy 3/8”-gauge steel pipe 8” in diameter, welded to a two-foot steel plate, left over from a shadesail pole that was installed. When I saw it, I saw a table base for some reason and the very small part of me that is penny-wise said that I should repurpose such a wonderful piece of steel. Steel was only introduced into human existence a…
Sunday School I was baptized Catholic because my mother was raised Catholic and because we were living in Venezuela at the time (my father was Venezuelan and my mother worked for the Rockefeller Foundation in Venezuela). But after my parents were divorced (yes, they were both Catholic and yes, they were both technically excommunicated for that) and the next thing you know we were in Costa Rica without my father. The thing about Costa Rica…
The Other Side of the Mountain You’re wondering where you remember that turn of phrase from. It was the title of a movie in 1975 about an Olympic hopeful skier (Jill Kinmont) that gets paralyzed in 1955 and has to put her life back together afterwards. The title implies that we spend a lot of time pondering the mountains we seek to climb, but often climbing down off the mountain is actually much harder and…
Pretending About the Future Once I had finished renovating the garage and building the side Bonsai Garden, I needed a new project. If you think its optional you don’t understand the nature of retirement. The key lessons of retirement are the subject of many old jokes and include never passing up a bathroom and never trusting a fart. But there is really only one lesson and that is to always stay occupied. A body in…
Preparing to Teach I taught at the graduate level at Cornell’s business school for ten years. I performed well enough to get myself promoted from Executive-in-Residence to full Clinical Professor of Finance. That felt like an accomplishment to me since I would never consider myself as academically oriented. The academy requires a degree of rigor that doesn’t suit me. I respect such rigor, but I know my general level of impatience and know that I…
Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll Six months ago, a friend from my motorcycle club sent me a copy of a book being written by his daughter. This was the story of a forty-seven-year-old woman who had been a serious drug addict in her youth, had kicked the habit in her twenties and went on to build a complex of drug rehabilitation centers and sober-living houses to help other recovering addicts. She had written her…
On The Road Again My friend Steve has just compiled a list of his top 100 motorcycling songs. Willie’s great ballad only made it to #42. I suppose that is because it wasn’t written specifically for the riding as much as for the playing, that is, making music with his friends. But I’ve always liked the theme of the song, which celebrates hitting the road rather than bemoaning it like Leavin’ on a Jet Plane…
Pause and Reflect It’s Saturday morning and I am finally back in the hot tub after what seems like a month of toing and froing. What a hard life, right? Not so much hard, but life is certainly more challenging than normal for everyone and that means that pausing and reflecting is an even better thing now than normal. What exactly is so challenging? Let’s start with a family review. To begin with, as Mark…
Frazzled On Wednesday I think I pushed Handy Brad too far. He had worked through the weekend to get necessary things done in the garage. This included painting the walls now that the epoxy floor was in and, as a last-minute, but logical, addition to the to do list, the laying of industrial rubber baseboards to finish off the intersection of new floor and newly painted walls. I must admit, what started as a practical…