Silver Alert Yesterday was a day for acting like I was finally retired. Granted it’s August and lots of people are away enjoying themselves, but I am here in San Diego and it was Monday (the proverbial start of the work week). All our siblings are either off to work or off to home. Lazing about the house has a certain charm to it, but there were a few errands to take care of, so…
Controlled Falling Back in May when we were driving out of Death Valley I experienced the feeling of free falling as we descended out of the high desert to the valley floor. I wrote about it and likened it to parasailing down a mountainside. Today, I took a summer ride up up Palomar Mountain on South Grade Road (S6). It is a nine mile ride up from the Rt. 76, which runs along the base…
The Message of Flight On Friday we will fly out to San Diego for a five-day escape to our home out there. Ever since we bought the house seven years ago, whenever I fly out, I feel like I am, indeed, escaping reality. When we land at the gorgeous and efficient San Diego International Airport, formerly Lindbergh Field, we are picked up by our brother and sister-in-law in our Tesla X and we go…
Country Life John Denver said, “Well life on the farm is kinda laid back, Ain’t much an old country boy like me can’t hack. It’s early to rise, early in the sack. Thank God I’m a country boy.” No one would ever mistake me for a country boy. But I’m no metrosexual smooth dude either. I never grew up in the suburbs. I’m worldly and global, but not very Latino or Italian (those being the…
Sliding On In Doormen are unusual relationships for tenants. I have a very strong relationship with Corrado (Mr. Porca Miseria) based on the need to be sympathetic to the tragedy of his wife’s ongoing cancer treatments. In our apartment in the Seaport we had a doorman that had a daughter with a woman out of wedlock, who he was raising since she was in jail. That certainly gave us something to talk about. One of…
WeWorked By now, most people in the literate world have heard of WeWork. It is the shared workspace company that caters to and further encourages the entrepreneurial culture that is blossoming across the globe. WeWork has become globally ubiquitous in the less than ten years of its existence. What Uber/Lyft are to car culture and what Airbnb is to hospitality, WeWork is to Dilbert and office cubicle culture. Adam Neumann, the Israeli kibbutz-raised kid and…
A Bull in the China Shop China is fucked-up. Is this all their doing or is it because others are fucking with China? Donald Trump seems to enjoy doing that. Regardless, the question quickly becomes, does that fuck us up? Last night my lovely wife Kim surprised me by asking me if I was worried about China bringing down the world economy. I would normally assume this was a hidden question about whether Nordstroms…
Day Tripping In 1998 when I was at the apex of my banking career, I met Terry. I was on the Management Committee of Bankers Trust Company, where I ran both the Global Private Banking and was Vice Chairman of BT Alex. Brown, responsible for their Private Client Services business. It was a big job with loads of perks, easily the most I ever received. The biggest perk was a car and driver, which was…
Whining About the Future Have you seen the recently published maps of Europe with the heat profiles that we are suffering this summer highlighted? It was shocking when we saw those heat maps for the Eastern United States a few weeks ago, but now these European maps are astounding. We are witnessing before our very eyes the transformation of Sicily, Spain, Sardinia, Corsica, Malta, much of Greece, the Western shores of Italy, the Adriatic…
The Joy of Disconnecting I’ve been away for two weeks and while I was keeping up with my emails and even sending a few of my own, I was not watching any TV (zero, none) and that means that I was not watching any MSNBC or CNN news. Our regular routine is that I watch MSNBC from about 6pm through and until close to midnight. I may take a breather for a movie if…