Florida Calling My kids all love theme parks and especially so Disney World and Disneyland. I have many stories from their youth to depict this passion for a fun day of rides, lines and mediocre food, but none quite reaches up to the heights of my daughter’s honeymoon. As the dutiful father of the bride, I gave them two weeks in Tahiti, thinking that would be an ideal spot post-nuptial. I should have remembered that…
Freight Forwarding We are in the week after Thanksgiving and it feels, as always, like we are wrapping things up for the year. We are having a few final things done at the house (replacing the flooring in the MBR and Guest Rooms), we are planning our last two trips (one to Joshua Tree for Joshua’s 40th birthday, and the other to NYC to see the kids), Kim is wrapping presents at her wrapping center…
Hazy and Lazy I make no apologies for it. I have had a lazy streak in me my whole life. I tend to think it is caused by my not inconsiderable bulk and Newton’s First Law of Motion that a body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. And the bigger the body, the more energy it takes to keep it in motion and once…
Kneeding Comfort When my kids were younger they fell into two categories. Carolyn and Thomas were forever rambunctiously scraping their knees and existing in a somewhat constant state of scabbed kneecaps from their falling. Roger, on the other knee, was s different sort of child. He was the child that at the age of one crawled to edge of the blanket on the lawn, touched the wet grass and recoiled back to the safety of…
Aging Gracefully Dylan Thomas told us to not go gently into that good night, that old age should burn and rave at close of day, and we should rage, rage against the dying of the light. I think of that poem often and remind everyone that Thomas lasted all of thirty-nine years. The stories of his death comport well with his thoughts of raving and raging at the end. He literally drank his way into…
Normal Is As Normal Does Yesterday, Kim and I decided at noon to go to see a movie at 1:50 in the afternoon. That’s the sort of thing we might have done two years ago on a Saturday while living in Manhattan. But yesterday was Thursday and we are still living under a COVID cloud. So, to begin with, we are retired and do not have jobs that keep us occupied Monday through Friday. We…
The Simple Life My friend Gary is always telling me that I live a more active life than he could stand. Kim has often wondered why I do all that I do. While that may have been true at one point, I’m not so sure that’s the case any more. I still work at things and I still write a lot, but I really am a man of leisure these days and I am getting…
The Hallowed Halls I am once again sitting here in the hallway of a building on the campus of the University of San Diego, where I am an adjunct professor in the graduate business program. When I was at Cornell’s graduate business school for ten years, I was not alone as an adjunct professor, but it was not like here. I do not know, nor do I plan to investigate the exact balance between full-time…
Calico Cats Quandry I currently subscribe to global news feeds including NYT, WAPO, WSJ and FT, but also read New Yorker, Esquire, Vanity Fair and NatGeo. Oh, very relevantly, I also read the monthly AARP Bulletin. When Apple News feeds me something I can’t read without subscribing, I generally pass and just absorb the headline. I also use Prime, Netflix, AppleTV, HBO Max and Hulu for subscription videos. I will ignore the social media subscriptions…
Chasing Projects My back hillside is finished. My Garden is done and perhaps overdone. My patio area is complete. My games area is ready and waiting. Even my Fairy Garden is set until the next change of season. What then to do with my abundance of time, enthusiasm and need for accomplishment? I guess I now have to rely on three sources of new projects. The obvious first one is to consider what I can…