The Academy Plato would hold court in a grove of trees (presumably for shade) on a hillside outside Athens. Based on the name given the place by its owners, it became known as the Academy. Since those days, the word has been used for a vast array of institutions of learning and/or sport and it has always carried with it a sense that these are loftier pursuits that improve the mind and body and elevate…
Vindication Don’t you just love it when some long-held belief ends up getting some validation and makes you feel that you are not so very stupid after all? I’m not so sure that I am as opinionated as some people, but I have more than my share of long-held views that inform my lifestyle and make me the way I am. I think we can call it the Popeye effect where we all huff and…
I Express Therefore I Am I checked my files and I have twice written stories that used the expression Cogito Ergo Sum, I think Therefore I am, penned in 1637 by French philosopher Rene Descartes. Some expressions, and I guess especially the existential ones, always pop up when you get introspective. Well, I’m at it again on this foggy Mothers Day morning and it has little or nothing to do with my mother. Now there’s…
Mobilizing I find myself thinking a lot these days about the notion that motion is the best lotion. When I left New York City three years ago, it coincided with my long-time NYU general practitioner deciding he too was moving his act to California (somewhere up by Palo Alto, I think). He was an Irishman with a noticeable Irish accent and a tendency towards osteopathy, which is to say a more holistic view of healthcare.…
The Hole in My Pocket As a storyteller, I often quip to people that when and if I ever write my proper autobiography (as though these blog stories don’t effectively do that already), I already have a title all picked out for it. I am a big title guy and often use a title to lead me into or out of a story. I guess there is a part of this storyteller that is also…
Curb Appeal Every day I wake up with some new idea that I cannot believe I haven’t had before. Now that Ive taken care of all the currently necessary fixes and maintenance of my property, I’m free to innovate and improve as I see fit. I started out thinking that I needed to take three approaches to the property. There was the front that had been heavily planted with a vast variety of cacti and…
Ringing the Bell When we moved here more than three years ago, we had to make lots of arrangements to accommodate being here full time rather than only once in a while. We had owned the house for eight years while we thought about when the right time to retire might be. On Wall Street, for various reasons including the stress of the work and the hard head banging that goes on in the business,…
Boredom at Sea Back in early 2019, what seems like two lifetimes ago, one for retirement and another for COVID, Kim and I went on a two-week cruise around New Zealand and Eastern Australia, including Tasmania. We had done a similar two-week cruise through the Baltics the year before, visiting nine countries, and had thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The bottom line on our Southern Hemisphere jaunt was that we found that we were more bored…
Parsing the Day Today I went out early and took the string trimmer down to the lower hillside below the wildflower garden and weed-whacked myself into oblivion. Operating an electric power-pack string trimmer does not look like particularly hard work until you do it for a while. These tools are well constructed and properly balanced so that the handle is pretty much in the right spot so that its as easy as possible to make…
Beyond the Blue Horizon That song from Rain Man is repeating in my head for some reason this morning. The 1974 Lou Christie song has a twangy melody that feels somehow soothing. It’s lyrics are simple and its about how your life has only begun when you look out into the blue horizon and watch the rising sun. At this very moment, I am sitting in my office and looking east over my cactus knoll…