A Trip Down The Nile A few years ago I got it in my head that on the short list of places I wanted to go was to Egypt. I have fond memories of traveling to Egypt on a school trip in high school (keep in mind that I lived and went to school in Rome, which is only 1,300 miles from Cairo, a quick flight across the Med). Marc Antony was able to woo…
Terrorizing Myself These days, my morning protocol is to start by understanding what obligations for video calls or meetings I have in the early morning. That is a normal situation I imagine for many people who live on the West Coast since we are three hours displaced from New York and eight or nine hours offset from Europe. While I have done plenty of business with Asia over the years, my connections do not tend…
The Elves of Nature This Monday morning I am sitting in my office wondering about how to begin my week. It is another clear-sky morning here in San Diego with an anticipated high of 71 degrees. I see my weather app predicts twelve more days of sun, 70ish weather with 0% chance of rain. So, there is nothing to worry about weather-wise and I can get no guidance from the forecast since I am free…
Todd, I Presume Every day we take risks and we try to manage them as best we can. We do not live in a perfect world and no matter what we do, we cannot live life without some risks. Hopefully we minimize the big risks and get lucky for the rest. Can any of us do better than that on a day-by-day basis? When it comes to personal household security some people believe in fortification.…
Getting Big Enough Ever since I can remember, for at least the last sixty years, I have lived with the reality that I am too big. The relative measure that causes me to say that has nothing to do with life insurance charts that define healthiness based on a height/weight ratio or a BMI (Body Mass Index). I long ago decided that I fall outside those standards and that they just don’t apply to me…
Working Stiff I have a strange feeling that 2020 was a buffer year for me, not so much by design, but by happenstance. After many years (I mark them as starting in 1966 at the age of twelve…so call it fifty-five years), the inertia of work has set in. People talk about “failing retirement” as a cute tongue-in-cheek way of bragging that they are so busy in retirement or see such a demand for their…
Weather Station Echo Charlie Alpha Back in January, 1966 we moved from Middleton, Wisconsin to Poland Spring, Maine. The names alone tell you a lot about that transition. Middleton can’t help but sound pretty ordinary. Wisconsin is the Dairy State, where Maine is Vacationland. One doesn’t allow you to buy margarine rather than good ole butter within its boundaries and the other has so many French Canadians in it that one car dealership used the…
Elevating the Lowly Bison My Bison Boulder outdoor sculpture has now been sitting out on the Western hillside for a week. Yesterday’s strong and somewhat violent rainstorm brought with it an almost instantaneous golden patina to the sheet metal “fur” of the bison head, hoof and tail. I knew it would rust to a dark brown in a few months, but it is interesting to see the rapid onset of the oxidation from the rain.…
The First Key to Writing is to Write, Not Think Tonight I stumbled on one of my favorite movies while flipping through the Prime offerings. It was strange because rather than the normal indication that the movie was either included in my subscription or that I could rent or buy it for $X, I was offered the opportunity to view the movies for free if I was prepared to allow advertisements. That was a big…
Ars Gratia Artis When I was in High School at Notre Dame International Prep for Boys in Rome, Italy we had a rotating roster of Brothers of the Holy Cross (the Catholic order founded in France in 1837, but made famous through the founding of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana in 1841). Being a long-ago lapsed Catholic (lapsed when I was four-years-old, strangely because while in a tropical valley in Costa Rica we…