A Liberal Retirement This is a strange week for me. So much is strange and new in 2020 that it’s hard to calibrate strangeness, but this seems to have crossed a threshold that has caused me to want to write about it. Let’s start with what makes this a strange week. I am in an expert witness hearing all week (actually two separate hearings since one goes all week and I must listen to it…
Gardening at the Edge Living on the edge is one of those claims that I enjoy making about my lifestyle. I have always liked the unorthodox life history that I have led and while the first seventeen years of my life I must attribute it to my mother and her wanderlust and adventurous lifestyle, I took only an educational breather for five years (BA and MBA) before reinventing my own personal version of that life…
The Dripping Faucet No, I am not expanding my DIY repertoire from gardening and big household projects to routine handyman maintenance tips. I know what a washer is but I have no idea if new age faucets have the damn things. From the few Delta/Moen/Koehler ads I have seen that show the latest digital faucets with Alexa voice commands to “fill 17 milliliters of water, thank you”, I am presuming that even if I had…
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…