Being Predictable On Sunday we went to the San Diego County Fair, ostensibly to watch Kim perform with her vocal group, but really because who doesn’t like an old fashioned county fair? I was not part of the 4H crowd like my friend Frank. He was a real farm boy who drove tractors and kept chickens to sell the eggs. For him, going to the county fair was like the culmination of all the hard…
Personal Screens I know it is popular to talk about how so much screen time for kids is harmful for their development, but I’m less sure of that than ever. I am sitting in my living room with my two granddaughters, who are eleven and eight years old. They are each on their own iPads wrapped in protective and colorful plastic bumpers. I’ve asked them what they are doing and Charlotte, the older one was…
Back to Normal? I want to explore for a moment why everything feels like it’s back to normal today. First of all, I’m not entirely sure what normal means anymore. For many years (1976 – 2019…43 years) normal meant getting up and being consumed by work for most of the day, any and every day, and then squeezing in other life activities like family and friends whenever and wherever they fit around the edges. Yesterday,…
Sleeping It Off It’s the morning of July 4th and I am bone tired. I actually have a decent reason for that. My daughter and her family of four flew in last night. It was late last night because while we reserved the flight more than four months ago, this is a big travel year as we read about more and more every day. Making up for COVID may be a part of it, but…
Things I Do Not Understand I know that most of you are thinking this is going to be an extraordinarily long story given the title, but I will try to keep it down to my usual size and declare right up front that this is not intended to be a comprehensive list of things I do not understand, but just the ones that are on my mind today. We are on our last day at…
The Heat is On Here in Virginia Beach, it is 86 degrees with 76% humidity, which my weather app says makes it feel like 98 degrees. If you asked anyone in our party, especially those who wandered through the USS Wisconsin, going four decks below the water line into the bowels of this steel battleship, they would add about another 15 degrees to that. I checked our hilltop and see that it is 84 degrees…
Life’s a Beach The Supreme Court has been very busy as it comes to the end of its term. Most of today’s attention has gone to the decisions regarding the obstruction of justice ruling regarding the January 6 insurrection, and about the overturn of the Chevron case which effectively guts the ability of agencies to operate in the manner in which they have in the past. But there’s always a silver lining and today’s silver…
Artificial Travel I saw an interesting article in the New York Times this morning. I suspect that its the sort of article we are going to read more and more often as the applications of artificial intelligence start to shine through and change our lives at the day-to-day level. This particular piece was about a reporter who was planning a vacation to Scandinavia and used some combination of three AI bots to plan her trip…
Mid-Atlantic Madness Neither Kim nor I are big Social media users any more though I do watch Instagram to keep up white the next generation and we all tend to use Snapchat for a family chat group and photo vehicle. We call it Marin Madness and its pretty much restricted to the kids, their spouses and us. I’ve gone so far as to steal that sentiment and call my games area on the property Moonstruck…
And Then It Was Summer I have always liked the weather here in San Diego. What’s not to like, right? Well, that may be even more so now in the era a Climate Change. As I watch the news of heat domes and derechos, tornados and tsunamis, early hurricane seasons and rising coastal surges, I am liking my hilltop more and more. While we have lived here (basically 5 years now), we have never had…