Animal House I hadn’t watched the movie National Lampoon’s Animal House for many years. To people of my generation and background, this 1978 movie staring John Belushi, is a classic. While the movie was supposedly written about Dartmouth, the similarity to my experiences at Cornell in 1971-1975 are quite startling. Having seen this movie so many times over the past 45 years, I know most of the gags by heart (and made sure to preview…
Humping Mulch If you read my stories every day you can’t help but notice that one day I may talk about cerebral issues that seem important to me, whether they are psychological, economic, social or political. The next day I may well write about my aching back and how I injured myself trying to do something on my hillside that was beyond my natural abilities, as they exist in my advancing age. It was Rene…
Self-Education Due to a clogged roof drain on our flat roof over by the office side of the house, during the heavy rains of March we developed a leak. We went through the normal process of sleuthing out the origin on the leak by having Handy Brad open up the outside wall between the sliding glass door and the window next to my desk. That was an area of about six feet wide, floor to…
Aging Out I am finding myself using that term, aging out, more and more often these days. The term requires no definition as it is pretty self-explanatory, it simply means that you are getting too old to do something that you have done for a long time and that you presumably like to do, but can no longer do either easily or in a way that you prefer. It can also mean that you are…
Buying Quality I’ve just written about how overpriced the world has become and how difficult it has become to capture value in today’s world of runaway generational wealth expectations. What I mean by that is that people seem to feel like they are being stupid if all they do is get by and earn a fair wage. Everyone wants to own their own business and sell it at some wonderfully high multiple and spend their…
A Sunday Selection In retirement, one day of the week wanders into the next with barely a care. My pal Mike and I have made a point of keeping track of each other’s minimalist schedules, almost as though our prior working lives, so governed by scheduling, require some outlet. Mike plays formal senior softball games on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and usually a pick-up game on Monday morning. He does home shores like vacuuming and…
Yikes!!! I came into adulthood when the housing boom really began in the mid-1970’s. I haven’t bothered to gather the actual data to back up my timing assertions, but I feel confident in saying that the era post-WWII until that time was an era of vastly expanded residential building and generally increasing access to the suburban American dream of owning a home. That and defined benefit pensions were the rewards American society chose to heap…
The Big Picture When you travel on vacation with a group, as we have done many times in the past with our motorcycle group, you end up spending time here and there with people who you might not otherwise go deep with. This happens at unusual times and places and under circumstances that perhaps even influence the nature of the conversation. Six years ago we did a flurry of travel in the fall of 2017.…
Risen Awareness Yesterday I was playing in the dirt. I was gardening, which is to say that after sleeping in (waking up at an unusually late 8am) and walking with Kim and Betty just to get the lotion from the motion benefit, I had a few errands to run (excess recycled cardboard is an extraordinary burden in retirement for some odd reason) and then decided I needed to tend to my garden. You see, later…
Clean-up on Aisle Six For years I have wanted to teach ethics in my business school course roster. For one reason or another, mostly, I imagine, because ethics is like Sociology… what could be so hard about it? Two years ago, I was given the chance and embraced it wholeheartedly. Setting up a course is always a lot of work. This is especially so when there is no defined curriculum. In my thirteen years of…