An Extra Day in the Life It’s Monday and I have now been in Ithaca for five days in the warm embrace of cousin Pete and Nancy in their comfortable home on South Hill. It was Nancy, working for Cornell Development in 1997, who met me at an alumni function and said that she was married to my cousin. I got to know Pete and Nancy and hired Pete to manage my house on Warren…
The Wisdom of Sage I joined the Advisory Council of the Johnson Graduate School of Management (JGSM) in 1990. That Council was used to engage successful alumni of the school such that they would become part of the leadership group for the school, both in terms of policy decision-making and, most importantly, in fundraising (both direct and indirect). That invitation to join the Council came as a direct result of my appointment as the Chairman…
You Can’t Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe borrowed the phrase “You Can’t Co Home Again” from another author (with permission) so I will do likewise, but with no ability to get permission from the long-since deceased Thomas Wolfe. In fact, his novel with that name was published posthumously in 1940, so there are all sorts of permissioning issues involved right from the get-go. The story is about a writer who has achieved some degree of…
Ithaca Odyssey Nothing is more central to a classic education than the study of the Classics, and, of course at the center of classical literature is Homer and his epic poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Both are written in 24 books and done in Dactylic Hexameter, which is rhythmic form of writing with a specific cadence, which the Greeks thought of as heroic in nature. The Iliad is all about the Greek conquest…
Getting Hosed When you retire, certain things you have taken for granted for many years suddenly come to the fore and take on a much higher level of importance. I’m sure this varies based on where one lives and what interests you are likely to pursue in retirement. But I think its fair to say that retirement has an aspect to it that involves trying to spend more time with nature and for most people…
Lawyering Up Everywhere I turn there are lawyers. The American Bar Association says that there are over 1.3 million lawyers in the United States. That’s only 0.73% of the working population of the country (I define that as those over 25 but under 75 since that seems like the working age), but it still sounds like a lot. That compares to 2 million engineers, 1.1 million doctors and only 141,000 bankers (I find that number…
Who Dat? You may recall that several years ago, soon after we moved to this hilltop on a full time basis, we had a middle-of-the-night encounter with something crawling around on the rood in the living room. We never figured out exactly what it was (I insisted it had to be a bird of some sort, Kim thought it was too heavy and noisy to be a bird), but I installed a Ring camera on…
Party Time Neither Kim nor I have ever thought of ourselves as party people. We both have stories from high school and college where we are less than enthusiastic participants in parties, less party poopers, but more just not into it the way others who live for partying are. It takes all kinds to make a world go around and both of us think of ourselves as upbeat and otherwise fun-loving people in a more…
In Memoriam to Summer We just went through the Memorial Day weekend and that is traditionally the start of the summer in America. We spent the weekend chasing the warmth of the desert on Saturday, did the Barbecue for friends and family out on the patio on Sunday, and did a bunch of gardening and went to our first summer movie (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth in the Mad Max series….original, Road Warrior,…
Just Be Cuz The top of my head has been blown off by the Trump convictions yesterday, but I am weirdly not inclined to spend much time writing about it, perhaps because so much has already been said and written about it and also because it is so startling that it has taken 77 years for a guy with Trump’s despicable lack of character to have his comeuppance. The one thing I am inclined to…