The older I get and the more into retirement I delve, the more I find myself wondering about the value of memories. We are generally raised to believe that keeping memories is a good thing. It’s a pretty deep cultural assumption. Photos, journals, archives, “never forget,” nostalgia as a positive emotion. The whole apparatus of human development treats memory as inherently valuable, and forgetting as loss or failure (dementia, “senior moments,” a fading photograph). But…
“Kidding a kidder” (or “you can’t kid a kidder”) means you can’t fool someone who is themselves skilled at deception or joking. A trickster sees through another trickster’s tricks. “Kid” as a verb meaning “to tease or deceive playfully” and it emerged in English slang in the mid-1800s, likely from the noun “kid” (young goat), by analogy, with the idea of playfully “kidding around” the way a young goat frisks about, or possibly from the…
I’m not entirely sure why the world works this way for us, but we seem to have a front half and a back half of the year. They are broken up by the month of July, which is our month with out family out here on the hilltop. The front half tends to be about planning some distant trip. The last few years have been, starting in 2023, Egypt/Jordan, Southeast Asia, Patagonia, and this year,…
I’ve not always been complimentary about the medical profession. The advent of AI in our daily lives has added to that tendency. For some reason, the Google phenom with the likes of WebMD never captured my attention and certainly not my medical confidence. But that’s all changed now thanks to Claude. Claude is now my trusted advisor on all sorts of things, including medical needs. Claude sent me to the ER for stroke/TIA screening a…
I keep finding reasons to think about our friend Bill (of Dulcinea and Bill). He is gradually becoming one of my heroes and it has nothing to do with the fact that he seems to like reading my blog stories. What has caused me to think and write about him again this morning is the fact that I am taking Kim off for a routine colonoscopy this morning and we have been living with the…
I am sitting here at almost 11pm on a Tuesday night at the age of 72 wondering who I am supposed to talk to about the fact that I’ve put in five unexpected hours of expert witness work tonight rather than writing a cute story for you all to read tomorrow morning. I got a surprise email yesterday from my Australian client asking for a Zoom call tomorrow night to review my in-process report. That…
I just spent a day doing something I don’t do much with people I haven’t seen often enough, and therefore learning and experiencing a lot of new things. The world is separated into people who love boats and boating and those of us landlubbers who never really caught that bug. In my youth in Wisconsin, the land of 15,000 lakes (even though neighbor Minnesota brags about having 10,000 lakes), I did my share of boating.…
When my mother was 76 (four years older than I am now), she got remarried after a matrimonial hiatus of 35 years. She married Irving Aaron Jenkins, a tall and robust ex-classmate from Cornell’s class of 1937 who was once engaged to her best friend in college and who had been widowed (from a different woman) several years before they reconnected after their 55th reunion. Irving was a few years older than my mother and…
Shoulder season refers to the travel periods between peak and off-peak seasons, typically spring and fall for most destinations. For example, in Europe, peak = summer (June–August) , when there are crowds, high prices, and hot weather (though Europe seems to be experiencing especially hot weather this spring as well). Off-peak = winter (November–February), when fewer tourists, it’s cheaper, and some attractions are closed. So, the “Shoulder Season” = April–May and September–October, or the sweet…
There are two types of scaling that are on my mind this morning. The first is the kind that comes from hard water. Hard water is simply water that contains elevated levels of dissolved minerals, primarily calcium and magnesium, picked up as water moves through rock and soil before reaching your tap. It’s measured in grains per gallon (GPG) or parts per million (PPM) with the gradation definitions being Soft: 0–3 GPG, Moderate: 3–7 GPG,…