Experiencing the Holidays My youngest son, Thomas, gave us two experiential gifts this year. One of the bright people at Airbnb came up with a revenue filler called Airbnb Experiences and he and his significant other, Jenna, thought it would be a good gift for us. One was the about learning to be Polish, done by a lovely woman from Krakow who is an underemployed tour guide. The other, which we did last night, was…
Going Beyond Perfect Vision Today is the first day of 2021 (or it will be when this publishes). I have rarely felt so much angst and anticipation for a new year as I feel this year. I suspect I am not alone in this feeling, but perhaps I am more inclined to elaborate on that feeling than others. To begin with and to get this out of the way, going beyond 2020 with one’s vision…
Weather Station Echo Charlie Alpha Back in January, 1966 we moved from Middleton, Wisconsin to Poland Spring, Maine. The names alone tell you a lot about that transition. Middleton can’t help but sound pretty ordinary. Wisconsin is the Dairy State, where Maine is Vacationland. One doesn’t allow you to buy margarine rather than good ole butter within its boundaries and the other has so many French Canadians in it that one car dealership used the…
Elevating the Lowly Bison My Bison Boulder outdoor sculpture has now been sitting out on the Western hillside for a week. Yesterday’s strong and somewhat violent rainstorm brought with it an almost instantaneous golden patina to the sheet metal “fur” of the bison head, hoof and tail. I knew it would rust to a dark brown in a few months, but it is interesting to see the rapid onset of the oxidation from the rain.…
The Night the Lights Went Out No, this is not another Santa Ana wind emergency or a story about SDG&E and my struggles with Tesla Power Walls and the solar/battery system installed by Baker Electric. That has “resolved” itself by virtue of a simple call from Baker to me on a calm morning when I did not feel like getting crosswise with another vendor. They have done nothing to physically alter my system or its…
Circling the Wagons We all know this has been a strange holiday season but for us it got even more strange. We have known for nine months now that we are not in any way immune to COVID or the virus finding us on our hilltop. That wishful thinking evaporated in March when our nearest neighbor (a man we did not know) died suddenly of heart failure a week after his mother’s family funeral. He…
The First Key to Writing is to Write, Not Think Tonight I stumbled on one of my favorite movies while flipping through the Prime offerings. It was strange because rather than the normal indication that the movie was either included in my subscription or that I could rent or buy it for $X, I was offered the opportunity to view the movies for free if I was prepared to allow advertisements. That was a big…
Ars Gratia Artis When I was in High School at Notre Dame International Prep for Boys in Rome, Italy we had a rotating roster of Brothers of the Holy Cross (the Catholic order founded in France in 1837, but made famous through the founding of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana in 1841). Being a long-ago lapsed Catholic (lapsed when I was four-years-old, strangely because while in a tropical valley in Costa Rica we…
The Night Before COVID Christmas I thought about writing a Christmas poem this year as a traditional retake of the Clement Clarke Moore classic and then Apple News and The Atlantic intervened. At this point in the news cycle, I am starting my day by reading many news summaries. I read them in the sequence in which they come in since I am somewhat dogmatic about reading my emails in chronological order. There is probably…
Hurry Up and Slow Down While I watch what seems like the painfully slow process of my deck going up joist by joist, I keep waiting for the work to turn this magical corner and start racing towards completion. I sort of thought that would happen today, but as the old joke goes, “not so fast, Abernathy”. My new digital, app-based irrigation system was installed in a day and now works great, giving me the…