Ridge Running At 6am we flew our of the City through the Holland Tunnel. After cutting across New Jersey on Rt. 78. That takes us over the Delaware Water Gap into the business part of Eastern Pennsylvania, past the old mill towns of Allentown and Harrisburg. It is there that we connect with Rt. 81 for our ride south. I know Rt. 81, but I usually use it from Scranton to Binghamton for my rides…
Cleaning House In 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 was tragically brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland with 259 souls having their lives cut short by a terrorist bomb. That was a routine daily London to New York flight taken by many of us and used by my bank to transport the daily pouch with “important” interoffice communiques. On that particular day, we not only had our pouch on board, but also one of the officers in…
Taking a Break Due to needing to drive forty-two hours and 2,818 miles in the next four days, I have gotten out ahead of my normal writing tasks by writing five stories and loading them into the blog system for times release daily over the next five days (I am taking the added precaution of loading in one for next Sunday in case I need a recovery day). This is a nice feature of the…
Global Exit It seems that my Global Entry status is up for renewal. I went through the rigmarole of filling out my application online for a renewal and then went through a two-week wait for preliminary approval. I will assume that it did not take two weeks due to any difficulty in clearing me (I am as pure as the driven snow…at least in terms of being a national security risk), but rather because this…
Leaving the Party I’ve never been a big party-goer. I’m not sure why that is. I consider myself a reasonably social person. I don’t drink much, if at all, but I think it would be wrong to attribute this to that. It certainly reinforces my preference to avoid parties, but I felt this way about parties long before I decided I didn’t care for alcohol. I am a morning person, which means late-night is not…
Visiting Hours It is a cold and rainy Saturday morning and I am sitting in an outdoor waiting room that resembles a bus stop shelter. The benches are cold institutional steel and the only thing on them is a scratched-off instant lottery ticket that is testament to the loser lifestyle. There is a small space heater cranking out heat and had it been summer, there is a small window air conditioner to keep things cool.…
Prisoner’s Dilemma I have a friend who is incarcerated in a federal penitentiary. As Cher said on stage the other night, jail is the short term one and prison is the long term one. Well, this is a prison and I will go this Saturday to visit him. He will be in prison for another month, having served one month of his two-month sentence. Let us stop and consider that for a moment, how hard…
Do the Right Thing It has been 76 days since Nancy Pelosi announced the House of Representatives’ investigation into an impeachment inquiry. We have had 76 days of action that basically has taken the form of Democrats unearthing countless facts that support the claims that Trump abused his authority, that he coerced and bribed President Zelinsky of Ukraine, and that he has continuously obstructed Congress in its efforts to get to the bottom of what…
A Very Slow Goodbye We are heading out for California in eight days. It feels like we’ve been heading out for six months. The fact is, we have been. Time seems to be passing far more slowly than it normally does. Everyone says and thinks that time moves by faster and faster as we age, but I’m here to tell you that time modulates based on the circumstances. Sometimes it whips past and sometimes it…
Death of a Giant The news just came across this morning that Paul Volcker died yesterday at the age of 92. At 6’7” tall, he qualified as a giant of a man. But mostly, he was a giant to most of us who lived through the financial worlds of the 1970’s and 1980’s. His impact on the economic history of the United States and perhaps the world was matched by few men. As a man…