It Never Rains in California The song says it all. Seems it never rains in southern California Seems I’ve often heard that kind of talk before It never rains in California, but girl, don’t they warn ya? It pours, man, it pours We’ve had two days of dry overcast and today California explained reality to us. It started pouring rain in the wee hours. As with most things, we were the last to know the…
A Dog’s Life The main reason we drove 2,900 miles cross-country last week was to get our dog, Cecil to our new home in San Diego. Cecil is a Bichon Frise (pure breed as it turns out) who came to us as a rescue in August 2009. He was estimated to be two-years-old when we got him. That means he is about twelve years old now. He has a replacement leg ligament, from which he…
Youthful Exuberance Well, we did it. We drove 2,900 miles across country, arriving in Hidden Meadows at Casa Moonstruck at 7:00am precisely this morning. Hey, wait a minute, did I just say 7:00 AM? After driving 10.5 hours from New York to Knoxville covering 707 miles (avg. 67 mph), and 12 hours from Knoxville to OKC covering 864 miles (avg. 72 mph), we had planned to drive for just 8 hours to Santa Fe covering…
Cleaning House In 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 was tragically brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland with 259 souls having their lives cut short by a terrorist bomb. That was a routine daily London to New York flight taken by many of us and used by my bank to transport the daily pouch with “important” interoffice communiques. On that particular day, we not only had our pouch on board, but also one of the officers in…
A Very Slow Goodbye We are heading out for California in eight days. It feels like we’ve been heading out for six months. The fact is, we have been. Time seems to be passing far more slowly than it normally does. Everyone says and thinks that time moves by faster and faster as we age, but I’m here to tell you that time modulates based on the circumstances. Sometimes it whips past and sometimes it…
Another Farewell Back in 2002 I went to Las Vegas to see Cher in her farewell tour. It was a fabulous show with Cyndy Lauper as an energized opening act. Cher had a schtick at the beginning of the show where she said she had been a “fricken’ Diva” for forty years and that she had killed it in that role. This was classic Cher show of extreme self-confidence, the sort of thing only a…
Stand-up Comedy If you’ve seen the movie The Aristocrats, you know how demented comedians can be. The Aristocrats “joke” is purposefully lewd and disgusting. In fact, the joke perpetuates and magnifies the crudeness and pushes comedians to try to out-do each other with more and more sick imagination. It does not help burnish the image of the profession. I’m sure one of the biggest challenges for new comedians is to know where to draw…
See the U.S.A. In seventeen days we will get in our leased Mercedes Benz 450 GLS, loaded up with luggage, the dog (and his dog seat…complete with seatbelt) and my Audible book files. We’ve done this before a few times, the biggest reason being that its the only way to get the dog cross-country. I like driving, so this is not something I dread. The last time we did this, we did it in three…
Life as an Outline In my story of several days ago I wrote of the sense of end of days as we approach yet another decade turning point. That got me thinking about the beginning of decades and what they have tended to portend. As I have reflected, I have found that there does, indeed, seem to be a pattern of optimism and new beginnings that accompany the start of a new decade. This may…
Memory Lapse Yes, Ambassador Gordon Sondland forgot he had said this and that, that he had done this and that and that he had called President Trump from a Kiev restaurant and then admitted to embassy staffers that Trump cared only about his own political goals in Ukraine. Yes, Trump doesn’t seem to remember what he said about this or that or in whatever formal response to the Special Counsel he may or may…