Heating Up It’s morning on the hilltop again and I am listening on my iPhone speaker mode to an old protege of mine (he is actually both the son of an old colleague and a guy who worked for me twenty years ago). He is a wonderful guy who has spent his career drilling down into a specialized area that sounds relatively mundane, but has been very productive for him. He is going on about…
The Work Day I find myself in full-on, task-oriented, deadline and goal-oriented mode. All it takes is a specific project like my latest expert assignment and a tight timeframe and I am at my desk first thing in the morning, working until my iPad runs low on juice (~4 hours), taking a break to check in on my other responsibilities ranging from my scientific R&D company to my teaching gig to the various projects I…
On Your Mark We are lying in a comfortable king-size bed in the Edgewood Lodge on Lake Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada. It is a full-service resort, which has all the trappings of a Four-Star resort. The gatehouse with guard, the valet parking only, the vaulted yet modern lobby that screams Lake Tahoe and the magnificent views from its lakeside perch. When we check in we get a cute silk gauze bag with hand sanitizer and…
From the Caldera Into the Fire We awake this morning in our rustic cabin on Diamond Lake. The sun rise is behind us and we enjoyed the pleasure and grandeur of the sunset over the mountain ridge last night from a pontoon boat that I cajoled our group into renting. I was asked if I knew how to pilot a boat and I said, “sure!” The truth is, I did go for two summers to…
Columbia Gorgeous The Columbia River Gorge is designated as a Federal National Scenic Area (in1986) and is the largest such tract in the United States at 80 miles long and a average of about 12 miles wide. By my math, that suggests about 800 square miles, which makes the area as big as the state of Rhode Island. Besides all the beautiful scenery and massive water flow that drains the Cascade Mountain range and the…
To Sleep, Perchance to Dream When Shakespeare has Hamlet ponder this thought, it is a follow-on to the famous “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Shakespeare is as heralded a poet as he is because he does, indeed, ponder the imponderable thoughts we all have on any given day. “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea…
Get Away Day In this year of broken plays, where whatever we were all planning to do, we have had to cancel, postpone or modify, Kim and I proposed to our dear friends Frank and Lydia a celebratory road trip to the Columbia Gorge. We proposed it for the second half of summer, feeling that by that time we would have this nasty Coronavirus thing, whatever it turned out to be, well under control as…
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,…