I have written before about my extended family by virtue of my father’s multiple marriages and dalliances over his life. By last count there are nine of us siblings with six females and three males. I am the oldest of the males…at least as far as I know. That’s the thing about my father, you can never really be sure because owning up to his parental obligations was simply not a high priority to him.…
If you look at my resume or even my profile on my expert witness website, you will see that I consider one of my core competencies to be the area of investment management that is often referred to as wealth management. While that term can be applied to almost any sort of financial instrument investment process (wealth being generic term not necessarily confined to any market segments), it is generally applied to the accumulation of…
Recently, a report was released by the Commission on National Defense Strategy. This was a panel of eight Washington defense and intelligence experts, what me might call senior staffers, assigned by the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee and its senior Republican (Mike Rogers and Joe Wilson) and Democratic (Adam Smith and Joe Courtney) members. This group made an exhaustive review of public and confidential documentation and conducted extensive interviews across government and non-government sectors…
I’ve just read an interesting article about a third state of being. That would be something other than dead or alive. It seems biology is getting turned on its head by the realization that when living cells die they do not just go to dust as the old expression goes. “Dust to dust” might have to be stricken from the vernacular as we further develop our scientific research and thinking about this supposed third state…
Poor Little Buddy For the second week in a row, I have had to take Buddy to the urgent care vet because he was clearly off and in pain in the morning. Buddy is such a ball of fire usually that it is easy to tell when he is off because he does not run around and jump up with a toy in his mouth like he usually does. He gets lethargic and shakes. They…
Strong Like Bull I just had my annual wellness visit today and I’m glad to report that all is….well. From what I can tell, this is nothing like annual physical that I used to get in my working days. This consists of a series of assessments that seem designed to reassure me and my doctor that I’m still bumping along as I age and that they cannot be blamed for not having asked me all…
Today we are going into our third Maritime province of this trip. New Brunswick. It is also one of the four Atlantic provinces, which add Labrador/Newfoundland to their ranks. New Brunswick is not an island, but is rather part of the mainland, adjacent to Maine and Quebec to the south and west and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Bay of Fundy to the north and east. The province is 83% covered in forest,…
In 1908 the literary world was visited by one of its great soon-to-be successes. That’s when Lucy Maud Montgomery published her classic tale of an orphaned waif named Anne Shirley, who gets relocated to a farm on the north shore of Prince Edward Island at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The farm is owned by two middle-aged siblings who, as childless and unwed brother and sister, are accidentally chosen to raise Anne in…
The weather concerns for this week of riding in Nova Scotia have always focused on how much rain we would get. In terms of temperature, my weather app has been telling me that it was staying with highs in the mid 70s all week across the region. It looked like we weren’t gonna get any rain, but of course yesterday, we got rained on in the Highlands. Today the temperature dropped by 15° and got…
Ive heard about the Cabot Trail for years and it always sounded like such a romantic place. Even in my recent research when I looked up John Cabot, I came away with the impression of a Medieval Marco Polo adventurer who came looking for the Northwest Passage to these chilly environs and at least left with a place named for his explorations. The reality seems instead to be that John Cabot did whatever landfall exploring…