On The Precipice This morning as the sun rises once again through my live oak, I find myself wondering what’s next. What do you call pre-postpartum? For one reason or another, things have stacked up around here with an end-date of mid next week. The obvious event is the Tuesday national election that has been the subject of all of our viewing pleasure and speculation for the better part of two years now. And yet…
The Gambit of Life I have begun watching the Netflix series called The Queen’s Gambit. It is a series set, like so many others of interest to me these days, in the 1960’s and it centers around chess. It is the story of a global chess Grandmaster by the name of Beth Harmon who is the orphan of a mathematics professor and a very troubled mother with a great deal of intellect. She is raised…
If You Need Me I’m Here The new way of life with regard to movies seems to be that when a studio wants to release a film they partner with one of the established streaming platforms like Netflix, Prime or Apple much like they used to partner with a distributor and then eventually sell the TV rights to an HBO, Cinemax or Showtime. The truth is that I have little or no idea how movies…
Perfection Redefined It is a cloudy and mildly rainy day here on the Escondido hilltop. To begin with, what brings all of this to mind this Sunday morning is that I have been awaiting this rain day for over ten days now. I know that by March I will be wondering what I was thinking wishing for rain, but to the best of my recollection, it hasn’t really rained here since April. I know that’s…
The Long Haul We are settling in here on the hilltop. It’s been ten months now and while it is a bit arbitrary, I suppose that at one year we can declare this as home sweet home. All my life, through fully twenty-seven addresses I have called home, I have been forced by repetition to settle in quickly wherever I have gone. Kim knows that I want pictures on the wall on day one. That’s…
Backing Up On Ice Have you ever driven a car or truck with a trailer attached? And did you try to back-up with that trailer attached? I’ll bet almost everyone has at one time or another. It’s challenging the first time and it takes a long time for it to get less challenging. I’m sure a neurologist can explain why our brains are not wired to easily handle doing things in reverse with lots of…
My Heroes At different times of my life I have admired many different people for any number of qualities. When I was four and living in Santa Monica, I remember discussing my heroes of the moment, who were the firemen and policemen of the local forces. The German woman with the Hispanic-sounding first name (Maria) that had come with us from Venezuela to care for my sisters and me, fed into my hero-worship by inviting…
People Are Funny Today, after several business calls with the financing half of my little scientific R&D company team and an email to my expert witness partner explaining that I am imminently qualified as an expert in why a project financing did not get financed for a big African gas project, I decided to take a long overdue motorcycle ride on a nice-not-too-hot afternoon here in Southern California. I know that rain is coming on…
An Unimaginable Life Last night we watched a Netflix show called My Octopus Teacher. Kim had heard about it from two separate animal-friendly friends and wanted to watch it. We share the same problem the rest of the world struggles with these days. It’s less that there is nothing good to watch on TV, but rather that we all rely so much more on TV to entertain us and the array of choices is seemingly…
Learning To Be Quiet When I was in college almost fifty years ago, I was a member of a fraternity at Cornell. In those days the University was woefully deficient in undergraduate dormitory housing for upperclassmen. I’m not sure which was the chicken and which was the egg in the equation (without dorms the need for fraternities was greater or with fraternities the demand for dorms was slack). Whichever was the cause and the effect,…