Catching Up I had lunch with an old friend today. In actuality, this was a guy who worked for me on two occasions and worked with me on another project where he was positioned to be my #2 guy. He last worked for me twelve years ago, so since we have stayed in regular touch with one another, it is fair to say we are friends more than colleagues. There is a point in time…
Youthful Exuberance Well, we did it. We drove 2,900 miles across country, arriving in Hidden Meadows at Casa Moonstruck at 7:00am precisely this morning. Hey, wait a minute, did I just say 7:00 AM? After driving 10.5 hours from New York to Knoxville covering 707 miles (avg. 67 mph), and 12 hours from Knoxville to OKC covering 864 miles (avg. 72 mph), we had planned to drive for just 8 hours to Santa Fe covering…
Feeding Myself I have often said that if my only path to nourishment was through my own cooking, that I would probably weigh 120 pounds. This has less to do with my physiology and much more to do with my abject inability and disinterest in preparing food. People naturally assume that due to my size, I must be willing to do whatever it takes to enable significant consumption of large quantities of food. Not…
The Tattoo of Life We are all a product of what life has dealt us over the years. Some people wear it on their face with their wrinkles showing the hardships they have endured. Other people show the wear and tear on their souls where it is not as obvious at first, but comes through equally clearly after time spent with them. I think we all know people that have become embittered with age. They…
Evangelical Epiphany We are in Oklahoma City tonight. We’ve just driven 864 miles from Knoxville, Tennessee, across the length of that state, across the Mississippi and then across the girth of Arkansas and into Oklahoma to the midpoint of that state. One of the first things I saw this morning was a 300 foot cross outside a evangelical church in Tennessee. Along the way on Rt. 40, the thing I saw the most (other than…
Educating Our Children I recently saw an old Confucian proverb that goes: If your plan is for one year plant rice. If your plan is for ten years plant trees. If your plan is for one hundred years educate children. I was raised in a household that valued education. My mother had grown up in rural upstate New York in a family where neither the mother nor father had much formal education. They were a…
Ridge Running At 6am we flew our of the City through the Holland Tunnel. After cutting across New Jersey on Rt. 78. That takes us over the Delaware Water Gap into the business part of Eastern Pennsylvania, past the old mill towns of Allentown and Harrisburg. It is there that we connect with Rt. 81 for our ride south. I know Rt. 81, but I usually use it from Scranton to Binghamton for my rides…
Cleaning House In 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 was tragically brought down over Lockerbie, Scotland with 259 souls having their lives cut short by a terrorist bomb. That was a routine daily London to New York flight taken by many of us and used by my bank to transport the daily pouch with “important” interoffice communiques. On that particular day, we not only had our pouch on board, but also one of the officers in…
Taking a Break Due to needing to drive forty-two hours and 2,818 miles in the next four days, I have gotten out ahead of my normal writing tasks by writing five stories and loading them into the blog system for times release daily over the next five days (I am taking the added precaution of loading in one for next Sunday in case I need a recovery day). This is a nice feature of the…
Global Exit It seems that my Global Entry status is up for renewal. I went through the rigmarole of filling out my application online for a renewal and then went through a two-week wait for preliminary approval. I will assume that it did not take two weeks due to any difficulty in clearing me (I am as pure as the driven snow…at least in terms of being a national security risk), but rather because this…