A Merging of Interests Kim recently offered our neighbor Mary to tend to her plants while she was away seeing family in the Midwest. Kim took this task very seriously and diligently went over to Mary’s house every day (usually using it as an opportunity to give Blind Betty a nice walk). One of Mary’s plants that lived on her deck was suggested to be brought over here to be looked after more easily. It…
Busy Day I have three major work activities that occupy my days…except when they don’t. I have some days when nothing at all is going on. But then there are days like today that make up for all that free time. Today I started my day with a two hour conference call with my European (Sicily and Lisbon) expert witness partners. We went over my final response to a rebuttal of my rebuttal on a…
The One Before All Zeros I am sitting in a parking lot in San Diego. Now let’s start with an important observation, parking lots in San Diego are one helluva lot nicer than parking lots in most parts of the country. This is not the first time that I have noticed this, but now I am a resident of San Diego, so I look at it through renewed eyes. I have been a permanent resident…
Bearing Witness Tonight my niece’s husband and two children came over for dinner. We haven’t seen them all year thanks to concerns about their kids’ and our COVID vulnerability (their kids have CF and we have old age). It all came off without any hitches and their daughter Mila was able to test out our new Moonstruck Madness games area. She pretty much played all the available games; mini-golf, bocce, disc golf, horseshoes and cornhole.…
My Aching Back About ten days ago I was going into my hot tub in the middle of the afternoon. That was when the weather was particularly hot and I was using the spa to cool off. Heat is such a relative thing. In the middle of winter, ninety degrees in a hot tub feels almost cold and you need to crank it up to 100 to be soothed. But in the summer, ninety degrees…
Tree People It is the morning of Labor Day 2020 and I am sitting in my office in my underwear (one of the luxuries of life on the hilltop where I am out of view of all prying eyes). I have just spent fifteen minutes figuring out how to fix a documentation gremlin that has plagued me. I have to send a signed grant award contract to an agency in Scotland. The first version I…
Going Bald This is purported to be the hottest day of the year out here in San Diego. My weather.com app (now owned and operated by the once-venerable IBM) tells me it is already 87 and the sun has just come up. The high is supposed to get to 109. Yesterday was the first time since their installation in April, that my Tesla Wall Batteries got a workout. The electricity grid from San Diego Gas…
Feelin’ Hot, Hot, Hot It’s been a hot month here on the hilltop. My pattern has been to spend the early morning catching up on news and perhaps writing my daily story, then go work outside doing something on some project or other for the late morning hours, working up a sweat. Then, after a dip in the spa or cooling shower, I go into the coolness of the house to do my serious work.…
My Garden Desk When building out my garden recently, I had a heavy 3/8”-gauge steel pipe 8” in diameter, welded to a two-foot steel plate, left over from a shadesail pole that was installed. When I saw it, I saw a table base for some reason and the very small part of me that is penny-wise said that I should repurpose such a wonderful piece of steel. Steel was only introduced into human existence a…
The Other Side of the Mountain You’re wondering where you remember that turn of phrase from. It was the title of a movie in 1975 about an Olympic hopeful skier (Jill Kinmont) that gets paralyzed in 1955 and has to put her life back together afterwards. The title implies that we spend a lot of time pondering the mountains we seek to climb, but often climbing down off the mountain is actually much harder and…