A Good Day Fridays are most often good days. I believe that gets a bit blurred by both my partial-retirement status and the Coronavirus situation that has one day flowing into another with much less differentiation between weekdays and weekends. To be honest, this year it is hard for me to even realize this is summer versus any other time of the year since the weather out here in San Diego is nice all year…
Strawberry Trees Forever I am currently sitting in the shade of my garage on this lovely, sunny 73 degree San Diego day. Both doors and the side door are open, so the breeze from the Pacific Ocean might make this the loveliest spot on earth right now. There’s a big window in the garage facing West and I must admit, I always assumed someone had an extra window when building the house, so they said,…
The River of Dreams Some of the best song lyrics out there were written by Billy Joel, who, God knows, doesn’t seem like a spiritual man (to paraphrase his own lyrics), and yet they are hauntingly universal the way things like rivers and fruits are universal. When I was in Guatemala and we were trying to connect with the indigenous, mostly Indian, people, the common point of connection was favorite fruits. The Africans, the Bedouin,…
Travel to Gravel It has just come to my realization that this was the day we were supposed to return from our big summer family trip to Krakow, Poland. I had rented a palace with fifteen rooms with separate baths for ten days, just twenty minutes from the Krakow. Joining us, much like at a Manor House in Western Ireland last summer, a Chateaux (castle) on the Cherbourg Peninsula in Normandy, in a series of…
Bob’s Your Uncle When I come up with a story title that is a familiar expression to me, given that I have now written and posted 652 stories on this blog, I like to check myself and make sure I haven’t already used the title once before. Yes, I have actually found myself doing that and I’m not embarrassed to say that. I consider it less about a failing memory and more about finding an…
We’re Having a Heat Wave There are many things to learn about life in retirement, life in Southern California and life in the mid-stage of the Western COVID resurgence. Let’s start with COVID. Life on the hilltop remains largely unchanged except that I am back to having Handy Brad wear a mask when we interact, less because of the resurgence and more because he flew to the belly of the beast in Dallas last weekend…
What Doesn’t Kill You… You know the rest of that expression. I suggest that we are living in a bimodal world right now where some things that don’t kill you do, indeed, make you stronger, and others that don’t kill you, make you weaker. After 650 blog stories in eighteen months, representing approximately 800,000 words or about nine books worth, I know a few things about my writing, which I now do every single day.…
Of Rocks & Trees and Citrus & Quail The world is in a funny place right now. I spoke to a friend of mine who lives in Vancouver. He reads my blog so I expect he will recognize himself. I recently called him. I spent four years on his board of directors. The company was a small public company traded on the LondonStock Exchange. We spent most of our time trying to figure out how…
Upbeat Yes, I read the monthly AARP newsletter. There, I said it and I’m proud of it. I always used the excuse that I consider myself a retirement professional since I taught a pensions course for ten years at Cornell and I wrote a book called The Global Pension Crisis in 2013, which got reasonably well-read and even cited academically in the field (my academic claim to fame). However, I also read the AARP newsletter…
Water, Water Everywhere Samuel Taylor Coleridge went on to say, “Nor any drop to drink”, in his famous The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner poem. It is the story told by a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage as told to a stranger wherein the tale rambles through all the sensations of storytelling by invoking exhilaration, danger, boredom, serenity, and abject feelings of doom. My last name always drew me to the…