Living with a BooBoo It’s been two days since I sliced off the top of my thumb with a really sharp Japanese sickle blade and my left thumb has mostly stopped throbbing, but is still very much bandaged up for protection while that nasty wound heals. The good news is that it was a very clean slice that took off a wedge chapped piece of the gardening glove I was wearing and a small piece…
Reparations The 2020 movie called Worth that stars such greats as Michael Keaton, Stanley Tucci and Amy Ryan is about the valuing of lives lost in the 9/11 tragedy. It is a fascinating study in how professionals go about putting human lives into dollars and cents and it may be one of the more instructive stories to help us deal with the next great reparations issue, dealing with the compensation for African Americans who’s ancestors…
Charlie Bit My Finger! There was a very cute YouTube video a few years ago with a little boy playing with his infant brother, Charlie. Age one point, Charlie chomps down on the older boy’s finger to the point of sufficient pain to have him howl to his mum that “Charlie bit my finger!” in the best of British accented style. Well, today, I am typing on my iPad with 9 fingers since my left…
Waiting For Miss Betty It was almost three years ago that we adopted Betty (a.k.a. Cheyanne, the senior stray dog that was picked up on the streets of East L.A.). Betty has diabetes and, at the time we adopted her, was blind and scrawny. She has since had her teeth fixed (mostly pulled), had cataract surgery, and put on a regimen of daily eye drops and vitamins, not to mention a combination of very healthy…
GPSing In 1996 I was on one of the first motorcycle rides of what became my motorcycle group called AFMC (American Flyers Motorcycle Club). We were in northern Vermont at Shelburne Farms on Lake Champlain. We had had a very cold October ride through Vermont, warming our hands at every stop, like the Warren Country Store. In fact, it was that ride that convinced me to upgrade to a BMW R1100RT, which has guided my…
A Really Good Week I have always considered myself an extreme optimist. I feel that while the direct connections between thinking positively and actually accomplishing things is hard to draw, I do stand by the power of positive thinking as a force magnifier. There is little doubt in my mind that people prefer to be around positive attitudes than naysayers and that having other people on your side always helps get things done. That said,…
Breakfast of Champions While I was in college, Kurt Vonnegut, a notable fellow alumnus of Cornell University, wrote a book called Breakfast of Champions. The title is an obvious take-off from the General Mills breakfast cereal called Wheaties, which specializes in putting the pictures of famous athletes on the box to encourage young Americans to eat their breakfast cereal, which is basically a corn flake with bran added to keep the youngsters more or less…
Joventino Today is Wednesday and it’s the week that Joventino has come to work in my garden. Joventino arrives at 7am like clockwork and never leaves before 5pm. He puts in a very full day and is constantly moving, working for what amounts to about 9+ hours. I know for a fact that he does this six days a week. His going rate is $180 in cash per day, which is crazy. He comes in…
Summertime Today is the last day of May and even though the summer season doesn’t officially start for another 21 days until the summer solstice, June is a summer month and warm sunny weather is what we are all accustomed to finding in the lazy days of summer. As you know by now, this has been an unusual year here on the hilltop. Between atmospheric rivers and extended cooler weather, we feel as though we…
Recall? Recall?! I’m sure you remember that scene from the 1979 coming-of-age classic Breaking Away, which was set in Bloomington, Indiana. In it, a graduating local high school student, who loves bicycle racing forms a local “Cutters” team to compete against the Indiana University frat boys. His father is a local used car dealer and ex-cutter himself, who sells junkers to the naive local student body. The scene that I always remember as so memorable…