Buying Myself Flowers I spend more time buying myself flowers these days than I probably have my whole life. Most often they are not cut flowers, but rather plantable flowers that are part of my gardening diversions. Last month I planted a whole array of flowers ranging from miniature carnations to marigolds to Shasta daisies in an effort to find things that the bunnies would not eat and that would therefore keep the Betty Garden…
Me and the Military As I have explained before, my age places me in between major American wars and just beyond the reach of the draft. I grew up with WWII on the brain and that has never left me, as both Prime and Netflix long ago figured out by way of their movie selections for me. I spent my high school and college years thinking about and worrying about military conscription and the war…
The Winds of War The year I graduated from high school, 1971, Herman Wouk published his second novel about WWII. His first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, was The Caine Mutiny which was made into that great movie staring Humphrey Bogart with Captain Queeg rolling ball bearings in his trembling hand during a court martial trial of his First Mate. Wouk was clearly a great storyteller, but he was also a great fictional historian…
Gray Grey Day Here in America, we live our lives for the most part in the gray, much less so than the grey. Do you know the difference? I didn’t until I Googled it and found out that it is one of the most commonly queried words in the English language because both spellings look right to us. The only difference between the two, which are both very commonly used, is that gray appears more…
Trump on Stage Today’s news cycle has been dominated by the civil trial in New York City of Donald Trump and the Trump Organization. Today was the day when the prosecution called Trump to the stand, having already heard from his co-defendants Don Jr. and Eric last week and before the court hears from his daughter Ivanka. It was quite a shit show from the sound of it. I say the sound of it because…
Party Hard When we first moved out here four years ago, I was surprised that Kim didn’t want to engage with some form of singing or musical theater group. It took her a while, but eventually she found a choral group called Encore that she decided to audition to join. As with all things about singing, Kim is very unassuming and she declared after her audition that she was not at all sure that she…
Patty Melt Not everyone orders a patty melt whenever they see one of the menu, but I usually do. I know very few people who don’t like a good patty melt, even if they are disciplined enough to not order one whenever its on offer. A patty melt is simply a cheeseburger with fried onions on some grilled toast, but there is something about that combination that just works. Why else would a place that…
Sleeping Late Over the past month or so I have noticed several changes. To begin with, my daily workout schedule, mixing gym training twice a week and swimming the other days, intermingled with an abundance of yard work has all made me much more physically solid. I notice that my belly is rock hard from all the core work and that my arms and shoulders are much more muscled than they used to be. My…
The Gift That Keeps On Giving In the fall of 1998, twenty-five years ago, my long-time friend and partner, Bruce had an idea. A group of us had invested with Bruce in a company founded and run by two of his friends a year or so earlier, and now that our firm was selling itself to the big German bank Deutsche Bank, most of us were thinking about our next act. To put it into…
Still Skating on Thin Ice As some of you know by now, I spent six years working on building the New York Wheel on New York Harbor. There are lots of stories about those times that involved figuring out how to finance and refinance this massive attraction, working through significant partnership wrangles, seeking and getting approvals from the City and the Borough of Staten Island not to mention every imaginable agency in between (Federal, State…