Country Life John Denver said, “Well life on the farm is kinda laid back, Ain’t much an old country boy like me can’t hack. It’s early to rise, early in the sack. Thank God I’m a country boy.” No one would ever mistake me for a country boy. But I’m no metrosexual smooth dude either. I never grew up in the suburbs. I’m worldly and global, but not very Latino or Italian (those being the…
Owning it All I was worried about having time to write my blog this weekend. We are in Ithaca staying at our house there, with my daughter and her husband and kids. Their Ithaca life is heavily dominated by the pool, the yard and fireflies at dusk (as it should be) and my weekend is dominated by seeing old acquaintances from college. These are not my usual classmate crowd that I lived with for most…
Summer Haircuts Our dog, Cecil, is pure Bichon Frise, so like the dandelion pappus that adorn the late-summer lawns of the U.S., he becomes a fuzzball as the summer rolls on. When he gets his summer haircut he is as happy as a dog can be. It could be my imagination, but he seems to hop around with his high and tight white clip. Kim thinks he struts like a little tough. He looks cooler…
Picking Your Friends We all find and make friends in different ways and at different stages in life. When we are babies, our mothers make choices for us. These days it is most common for young mothers to join activities with their child that quickly lead to the forming of playgroups. We all want our children to be socialized and not bound solely to the nuclear family and the cat. So, these groups are,…
Reverse Polish Logic I’ve discussed my love affair with the Hewlett-Packard 12C financial calculator. It is from that device that many of us learned about Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). It’s the logic protocol used by the 12C for operating the calculator. With it, the operator (the numbers) come before the operands (the function like addition or multiplication) when inputting the equation one is looking to solve. RPN was invented in the 1920’s by Jan Lucasiewicz,…
Responsible Hosting I have owned vacation homes since 1986. That is 33 years. Over that time, I have owned vacation homes in the Berkshires (2), The Hamptons, Park City (5), San Diego and Ithaca. By my count, that is a total of ten vacation homes. At one time, I have owned as many as three at once (what a headache). The big issue is always how to maintain the home in my absence. By…
Day Tripping In 1998 when I was at the apex of my banking career, I met Terry. I was on the Management Committee of Bankers Trust Company, where I ran both the Global Private Banking and was Vice Chairman of BT Alex. Brown, responsible for their Private Client Services business. It was a big job with loads of perks, easily the most I ever received. The biggest perk was a car and driver, which was…
Pseudo Back in 1999 lots of funny things happened. It was very much an end of an era for me. I was the end of a twenty-three-year career, with all the incumbent ups and downs, with my primary employer, Bankers Trust Company. We sold ourselves to Deutsche Bank for $93 per share and all got lots of money from our pent-up options and restricted stock. Some of us got our walking papers, some got…
Road Show Last night we went to New York City Center for a performance of Steven Sondheim’s musical Road Show. This is a twenty-year-old version of a story which has been produced under various names like Bounce, Wise Guys and Gold!. While we thoroughly enjoyed the show, it had little to do with the production and almost everything to do with good music/singing and the captivating story of the life and travails of the Mizner…
A Persian Goodbye I always wanted a to be an architect. That came to a screeching halt the first week of freshman orientation when this student magazine was slid under all our dorm room doors on which it showed the earning power of all the major professions. Veterinarians were at the top and architects were at the bottom. I had not applied to the school of architecture, but as an engineering student, I still had…