The Chateaux of My Mind This morning I am waking up in a lovely French Chateaux on a small tributary of the Loire River. I expect to see a riverboat with wine country tourists lounging on its deck coming past any minute. No, wait, why is there an egret high-stepping through the mangrove roots, they don’t have mangroves in France. Oh yeah, this particular Chateaux is not in the Loire Valley. I am on John’s…
The Fountain of Eternal Life We are now on the flight from Atlanta to Orlando. We had a “normal” layover in Atlanta and our flight there was not really late in arriving, but we landed at the E concourse and were taking off from the T concourse. While that’s not quite as bad as the letters make it sound, its still pretty bad. We had to take the train from E to D to C…
Swamp to Swamp This week I am hopping from swamp to swamp here in Florida, visiting friends while Kim spends more quality time with her cabaret pals at Disney, in the middle of the Orlando swamps. I have at least eight sets of friends littered up and down the East Coast of Florida from Delray Beach up to Daytona Beach. I lunched in Palm Beach Gardens with Terry and Paula and dined with Kevin and…
Nothing Can Stop Us Now Well, I am back in my Disney hotel room recuperating from my one day at Disney, in this case the Hollywood Studios park specifically. Thematically, this is where the rides, attractions and related merchandising are all connected in some way with the movies. I had forgotten how tiring a day at Disney can be. According to my iPhone step-meter, I did slightly more than what I do on a very…
Ohmmmmmmicron I’m a traveling man again this week. As I’ve perhaps mentioned more times than I care to count, I get more and more inclined to stay put the older I get, but I am nonetheless traveling this week and the one thing I know about myself is that I can shift gears when needed and revert to traveler mode when I need to. There must be a part of my cortex that knows how…
The Disney Machine Special Edition To the many people who come to and love Disney every year, I cannot ignore the need to write about this iconic place that has become synonymous with American culture as I spend my one allotted day here. We got in last night at around 10pm after wrestling with the normal array of rental car and direction issues. We even kicked off our visit to the heartland by stopping at…
Sunrise Siesta It’s 6am on Friday and guess what? Yep, we awoke at 4:30am to prepare for our 5am Uber to the San Diego Airport for our Alaska Airlines direct flight to Orlando to start our Florida extravaganza. Last night we had to go pick up Natasha at the airport as her Jet Blue flight from JFK was an hour late. We only got home at 10:30pm so we knew we were going to have…
Ramski I was born RAP, but became a RAM. That’s right, I was born Richard Albert Prosdocimi, the name my father and his father carried with them when they emigrated right before the end of WWII to Venezuela from Italy. I have never confirmed the exact position in the Mussolini government held by my paternal grandfather, but have been told that it was something pretty high-ranking and something like the Minister of Ethiopian Affairs. I…
Kumon When we lived in New York City I used to ride down Seventh Avenue, which turned into Varick Street at Clarkson Street, where my youngest son Thomas’ high school was located. Somewhere along that length of Seventh or maybe Varick, I would see a curious sign on a storefront. It was called Kumon with the “o” in the name formed by a round little face with two wide-set eyes and a straight little line…
Framing’s the Issue Last year at this time I was deep into my trauma of my deck repair that became a deck renovation that ultimately turned into a deep and dark hole of a deck replacement. The bad news with all that is a distant and fully healed wound at this point, but the knowledge gained about construction has lingered. As they always say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. That goes double with…