Getting Busy The whole idea of retirement is supposed to be to get less busy and to relax, but that seems rarely to be the case. I have written an entire published academic book on pensions and yet despite being a financial professional, I prefer not to delve too deeply into the financial aspects of retirement. That is more about wanting to stay away from the micro considerations than the macro issues. I just figure…
Mapping the Trip The future is coming up on us fast. I am feeling it in several important ways. The first place this is happening is with our travel plans. Next week we will be heading off to Spain to suit up for a motorcycle ride through the Pyrenees and along the northern coast of Spain along the popularly significant Camino de Santiago. That ride will start in Barcelona, go up into Andorra, wind its…
One Not-So-Angry Man With a Metascore of 96, one of the top ten movies (number five to be exact on the IMDb listings of all-time greats) is Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, about a jury sequestered in a murder case. The story revolves around twelve men on the jury, already a gender-biased and racially-biased statement about the changing times, since this movie’s 1957 release. These are literally twelve white men, serving on a NYC criminal…
Purpose As I sit on any given morning, pondering what is on my mind at the moment, I often use visual cues to spur me on. Since I have lately been writing in the morning at my office desk, I can choose to examine the things around me in the office, things that are by design filled with memories and imbedded aspects of my life that cause me to reflect. Every picture may tell a…
Changing Your Stars One of my favorite movies is A Knight’s Tale, staring Heath Ledger. In it he plays William Thatcher, the son of a thatcher (as in, a maker of thatched roofs) who is told by his caring father to go forth and change his stars as he hands him over to a knight to apprentice the boy and give him opportunity he might not otherwise get in Cheapside, where he is from. I…
Of Fathers and Sons My daughter, Carolyn, has her mother/daughter posse that she always wanted. I’m very happy to see her so happy as a mother, but especially as a mother of two lovely daughters. Based on her blonde/blue-eyed genetics combined with her husband, John’s Norwegian heritage, this has caused her to have two blonde/blue-eyed beauties that share a bedroom and are the best and closest of sisters. Carolyn is an energetic mother (she is…
Long Live the King Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in the history of Britain, is dead at 96. Her husband Philip, the longest term consort to a reigning sovereign in Britain, died last year at 99. King Charles III, at age 73, becomes the oldest king or sovereign ever to become king (by almost a decade) and the longest serving Prince of Wales in Britain’s history. Joe Biden is 79 and if he…
So, after my class Wednesday, the student who gave me the four “CBD Patches” corrected me and said that I had misunderstood and that they were, indeed THC Patches. Hmmmm….. That makes me need to stop and think about it before using the patches. I had a gathering with several neighbors last night and asked the question of them. Should that change my instinct to try to help my shoulder pain and sleep patterns by…
The Business of Teaching I just finished teaching my Law, Policy & Ethics course for two hours tonight in what felt like a 90 degree classroom (we are all asked to conserve energy during this heat wave). It wrung me out and felt like a hard day in the salt mine by the time I was done. There is nothing inherently hard about the course material or this particular class, since it was the introductory…
Living Once Apparently, where I have been saying “Carpe Diem” for many years, even long before the movie The Dead Poets Society, when Robin Williams whispers it to his prep school students, telling them to “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” as written by poet Robert Herrick in 1909, who took the phrase from The Book of Wisdom from the Bible, others have been saying YOLO (You Only Live Once) to imply the same thing.…