The Humidifier My Nephew Jason was here painting his wonderful Otomi mural on our garden wall during the hottest two days of the San Diego summer. Now, Jason has lived his entire life in Las Vegas with its Uber-hot summer weather. His business is a garage door company, so he is often out with his installers and repair crew in the heat of the Las Vegas day. And then, to top it all off, he…
August Doldrums I just sat at my desk and realized that my New Yorker calendar was still showing June. How did that happen? Well, I guess that means I’ve had a busy summer and while it has involved a lot of work of many types, it has mostly just sort of slid by without me formally sitting at my desk and keeping things refreshed, like my calendar. Today is Thursday and that means trash…
Otomi on My Mind Kim can’t speak a lick of Spanish and her pronunciation is worse. And here we are, living in an Hispanic culture where almost 90% of the people who come to the house to work on things for us, from the house cleaners to the gardeners are Mexican. Handy Brad is from the Pennsylvanian part of México, but most of the rest are from the Altiplano or Mexican Plateau. This is where…
Teaching the Unteachable I am getting that prickly feeling after six months of planning to teach a course in late September. I am six weeks away from the first lecture, but I have been through this drill and I know how many hours of preparation is required for each scheduled hour of lecture. Experienced professors will tell you they can get it down to 4-5 hours of preparation. When I started teaching in 2007 at…
It’s a Dog’s World Yesterday Kim told me she is ready to get a new dog and she wants to find a senior dog to adopt. Her reasoning is that she will never replace Cecil in her heart, but she wants to improve the life of a aged dog in its declining years. She seems aware and prepared to accept that she will have some heartache over the possibility of another pet dying, but she…
Cruising on Grand I haven’t been out of the house (or at least off the property) all week. The main reason has been that I have lots of work to do, and the secondary reason is that we’re still heavily engaged in several household projects. This week it was all about the inside and outside of the garage. The outside was getting a functional makeover. That included a new cedar shed in the back for…
Heating Up It’s morning on the hilltop again and I am listening on my iPhone speaker mode to an old protege of mine (he is actually both the son of an old colleague and a guy who worked for me twenty years ago). He is a wonderful guy who has spent his career drilling down into a specialized area that sounds relatively mundane, but has been very productive for him. He is going on about…
The Life I Choose and Live Some movies never get old, and that is the case with almost anything with Martin Sheen. I know I have spoken about his son Emilio Estevez’s great movie The Way about the Camino de Compostela. It resonates with me now more than usual because this month we were supposed to be flying off to Barcelona with my ragged band of motorcycle pals. We were planning to drive north through…
The March of the Ants When I was a kid I used to like ants. To be fair, I had lived in Venezuela for four years and then two years in Costa Rica. I think I may have mentioned the little tropical valley there several thousand times. What I may not have explained is that the thing that makes the tropics the tropics is that the daily weather works something like this; it starts off…
1917 For some reason, the past year has all been about the stuff of a century ago. To begin with, Peter Jackson had his project to take the 100 hours of old black & white film footage from the British Imperial War Museum and do his magic. He did more than the usual coloration of an old film. He did something magic to the old footage of stilted and surreal soldiers who suffered through the…