Rain, Rain Go Away I started writing about the rain on January 1 and here it is the middle of January’s and I’m still doing it. This has been an unusually wet month here on the hilltop. Last night sounded like the wrath of God with the wind howling and rain pelting the house and windows. It all started yesterday once I landed and it hasn’t let up yet. According to the online weather report,…
Seeing the World There are only a few pieces of promotional mail that I bother with. One of those that I can’t seem to ignore is that National Geographic Expeditions magazine. The magazine is a pretty fancy piece of literature that must be expensive to produce and is therefore probably not just sent out randomly. I must be of the preferred customer list as both a long-time subscriber to their magazine and an occasional buyer…
Garden Tours I first drove up to this house on Christmas Day, 2011, so eleven yeas ago. I was on my motorcycle and brother-in-law Jeff was on his bike and we we tooling around looking at what Zillow said was on offer in the general vicinity. Kim, Thomas (his official name at the time) and I had driven down from San Francisco over the course of a week and looked for what I guess we…
The Structure of Retirement Every stage of life has some degree of structure for most of us. Some of us prefer as little structure as possible and some of us need more structure to keep us on track. We are not only all different, but we are different differently at different times of our lives. I find that a certain amount of structure to my life and even to my day is preferable to fully…
Trailers Today I am hopeful of doing my first transaction for 2023 and it could be a meaningful one. A month or so ago I finally put an ad on a website called Trailer Traders. For ten years I have had a motorcycle trailer that I have used perhaps ten times to take my motorcycles across the desert to a place where I can comfortably ride them to one of my motorcycle club’s gatherings. I…
New Year Resolutions Getting older has its advantages. I don’t just mean the older and wiser issue, though there is plenty of truth to that. What I really mean is that there is a degree of reality and truth that stems from a clarity that escapes us when we are younger. I’m sure there are people who cannot help but delude themselves in their dotage so as not to spend their waning moments wallowing in…
Top of the Wall Everywhere I look these days, I am seeing articles about one of two issues: homelessness in America and the crisis and the U.S. border with Mexico. It is sometimes hard to reconcile the two issues. On the one hand people from all over the world, especially Central America are finding the conditions in their countries intolerable and abuse for risking life and limb to get to the U.S. border to seek…
End of the Semester A semester seems to be an eternity when it begins. You look at the syllabus you have created for a course and you see something like sixteen weeks laid out ahead of you. That’s a something like fifty hours of class time lectures, hours of reading papers and grading exams, hunting for parking spots and lots of freeway time back and forth to campus. Then, before you know it, its the…
Duck, Duck, Goose It’s not completely random, but working with different lawyers on expert witness cases can be pretty hit or miss. As a hired gun, I am not in charge of anything in these cases expect the specific opinion that I am asked to render to support my team in the case. Like any lawyer considering accepting a case, I am asked to accept a case based on a minimal amount of research and…
A Benign Conundrum When I returned from my stint in Gulag Toronto, the assignment I was given in 1990 as punishment for presiding over a commodities merchant banking unit (I had been specifically asked to keep charge of it as I tried to wrestle the burgeoning global derivatives business to the mat during its adolescence) when it took a large loss on a supposedly secured cotton merchant loan. It turned out that the bonded warehouse…