High Tide at Westcove Southwestern Ireland is comprised of four fingers that project out into the Atlantic Ocean. There is a road that meanders through all four peninsulae called Wild Atlantic Way (it actually covers 2,500 km from the top of the island to the very southern part of Cork). The common aspects of that road are that it follows the sea and it’s about as narrow as any road you will ever drive on.…
Tempus Fugit I am no Latin scholar, but I did take four years of Latin in high school. My mother, who had never taken a moment of Latin during her education through graduate school, was convinced that Latin was an extremely useful course of study for a young man heading out into the world. You may recall that doctors used to write their prescriptions in Latin so as to make it less likely that scoundrels…
Flags of the Realm In case you haven’t been paying attention, we are in Ireland for a few weeks. The length of a vacation is a tricky thing. It seems like the biggest risk is to under-book and leave yourself wishing you had a few more days wherever you are off to. That is certainly less than ideal since fulfillment versus being left wanting does help soothe the demons within. I went a lot to…
The Keogh Connection The Keogh family of Killarney is a long-standing part of County Kerry and has had great influence on all of Ireland and, indeed, all of modern civilization. Its descendants include a young lass, Fancy Nancy, who hails from Ithaca, New York, and who has come back to Ireland and County Kerry in search of her roots. Of course the irony in all of that is that her roots are firmly entrenched in…
The Cats in the Irish Cradle My son Roger is thirty-seven years old and I am particularly pleased to have him along with me on this week in Western Ireland. Roger is, for all our differences, more like me than not. There are many ways to notice this, but the best way is to spend a week in a “strange” new land with specific culinary customs. Now some would say that Ireland is more like…
Riding the Rails to Kerry We always knew it would be an adventure to drive in Ireland on the left hand side of the road, but little did we realize how much of adventure we would experience on the first day. To cut to the chase van, let’s summarize by saying that one of four vehicles is down for the count and at least one other is due for some rental company settlement. We have…
Borderlines This is not the pro-immigration rant you have all come to expect from me in this blog. By the way, I am very pro-immigration and I do seem to be ranting more lately (mostly at work and at the moon over Mr. Trump), but this piece is about different borderlines. I am haunted by great movies and there are very few that are greater than Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. I think…
Hacking and Wheezing There has been some lousy bug floating around (I’m sure it’s not limited to New York City, but it’s definitely here) that is not the seasonal flu strain (I got that shot), but it has debilitated several people including me. When I say debilitated, I should be careful. I have not lost one day of work (some of my colleagues who have it have lost a few odd days), and I have…
Some Things Never Change Last night Kim and I had dinner with friends Cliff and Linda. Cliff was on my freshman floor at college. We were both engineering students with him thinking he wanted to be pre-med and me thinking I had no idea what I wanted to be. He came to college with a high school girlfriend in tow, who was attending college in nearby Cortland. I came to college with an army…
Too Much, Too Often, Too Funny I have a problem. I over-communicate. I talk too much I’m sure, but what I really do too much is write. It takes form in all aspects of my life, both personal and business. Self awareness is a good thing, but recognition without solution may not be all that valuable. Not that many of the people I run with are in Wikipedia, but I am. It states a number…