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…
Pretending About the Future Once I had finished renovating the garage and building the side Bonsai Garden, I needed a new project. If you think its optional you don’t understand the nature of retirement. The key lessons of retirement are the subject of many old jokes and include never passing up a bathroom and never trusting a fart. But there is really only one lesson and that is to always stay occupied. A body in…
Preparing to Teach I taught at the graduate level at Cornell’s business school for ten years. I performed well enough to get myself promoted from Executive-in-Residence to full Clinical Professor of Finance. That felt like an accomplishment to me since I would never consider myself as academically oriented. The academy requires a degree of rigor that doesn’t suit me. I respect such rigor, but I know my general level of impatience and know that I…
On The Road Again My friend Steve has just compiled a list of his top 100 motorcycling songs. Willie’s great ballad only made it to #42. I suppose that is because it wasn’t written specifically for the riding as much as for the playing, that is, making music with his friends. But I’ve always liked the theme of the song, which celebrates hitting the road rather than bemoaning it like Leavin’ on a Jet Plane…
Pause and Reflect It’s Saturday morning and I am finally back in the hot tub after what seems like a month of toing and froing. What a hard life, right? Not so much hard, but life is certainly more challenging than normal for everyone and that means that pausing and reflecting is an even better thing now than normal. What exactly is so challenging? Let’s start with a family review. To begin with, as Mark…