I have noticed lately a proliferation of movies about the final days of the Third Reich. In these days of personalization, it’s hard to tell if that is a true trend or whether Amazon Prime and Netflix have just decided to feed my interest in that topic. One of the best of these is Downfall, made in 2005, an award-winning depiction of Adolf Hitler’s last days in his Berlin bunker as told by his final…
On the spectrum of sociability, Kim and I probably rank at the higher end. There are certainly more social animals than us, but we like people and prefer to be around them rather than not. I have never understood people who prefer to travel alone. I’m not a fan of too big of a group when traveling, but it always seems like more fun to have a gang. For thirty years now, I’ve had a…
Sometimes you encounter a day when its not a weekend and yet there are absolutely no errands that are critically demanding attention. This is the case for both Kim and me today. Don’t get me wrong…there are always things that can be done to fill up the day, but sometimes there is nothing that is in desperate need of attention. In our case today, the Christmas decorations are all down. The repairmen have fixed or…
The Anza-Borrego Desert “superbloom” is a spectacular wildflower phenomenon that occurs in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in Southern California, typically between late February and April. A superbloom happens when an unusually large number of wildflowers bloom simultaneously across the desert landscape, transforming the normally brown and sparse terrain into vibrant carpets of color. This requires a specific combination of conditions. First and foremost, there must be adequate winter rainfall, generally at least 3-5 inches between…
For the better part of fifty years, my career was a moveable feast with me doing different things every few years. For many of those years this was not of my doing, but rather a function of moving where I was asked to go and doing what I was asked to do. Early on I adopted a persona of someone who liked new challenges and embraced change and that image became who I was. I…
I spend a lot of time going back and forth about whether I like excitement or calmness in my life. I can’t tell if I feel more this way about life than others, but I certainly expect that I am not alone in this quandary. When things are too exciting, I yearn for stability and normalcy and when things get too normal, I get bored and start seeking out excitement. Sound familiar? If I broaden…
There’s a lot to love about Southern California and every once in while even she surprises you with a gift. For the next seven days, I see that the weather forecast says that the average high temperature will be 75 degrees, the emoji attached indicates sunny skies and there is 0% chance of any rain with humidity running at about 20-25%. I’m not sure that it gets much better than that. This pattern was supposed…
A few days ago we had a very galvanizing event occur in this country. As most of us have seen in various videos, there was an ICE raid of some sort under way in Minneapolis. The scene was on a snow-covered suburban street where a maroon SUV driven by a 37-year-old white suburban mother was sideways in the street, somewhat blocking oncoming traffic. It is relatively clear that the car was purposefully positioning itself as…
I turn 72 in a few weeks and I’ve been living out here for six years, which means I’ve been retired for at least five years. Retirement is one of my favorite topics to write about for some reason, and always has been since I started writing for fun forty years ago. I am not sure where this obsession with retirement comes from, but it probably originated just about forty years ago when I took…
For some reason, over the last few days, Kim and I have been noticing the cloud formations surrounding our hilltop. I cannot say that they are dramatically different than they’ve ever been, but sometimes we just take note of their beauty and vastness that much more. I have always had a thing about clouds. I first noticed my attraction to them when I was in Ninth Grade, in my one year at prep school at…