Party Time Neither Kim nor I have ever thought of ourselves as party people. We both have stories from high school and college where we are less than enthusiastic participants in parties, less party poopers, but more just not into it the way others who live for partying are. It takes all kinds to make a world go around and both of us think of ourselves as upbeat and otherwise fun-loving people in a more…
In Memoriam to Summer We just went through the Memorial Day weekend and that is traditionally the start of the summer in America. We spent the weekend chasing the warmth of the desert on Saturday, did the Barbecue for friends and family out on the patio on Sunday, and did a bunch of gardening and went to our first summer movie (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the fifth in the Mad Max series….original, Road Warrior,…
Just Be Cuz The top of my head has been blown off by the Trump convictions yesterday, but I am weirdly not inclined to spend much time writing about it, perhaps because so much has already been said and written about it and also because it is so startling that it has taken 77 years for a guy with Trump’s despicable lack of character to have his comeuppance. The one thing I am inclined to…
The Bite of Life This morning I got directed to and read in its entirety a story from GQ about Kevin Costner. I can’t say I remember ever having read a GQ article before, but I quite enjoyed it. Mostly I enjoyed it because the topic of Kevin Costner has always been of interest to me from his earliest days in film. Just the other day I rewatched from start to finish, The Big Chill,…
History as Judge I religiously read Letters From an American every day, first thing. I was put onto it by our friend Candice several years ago. Candice is a retired NYC school teacher and is someone I always describe as a person for whom the word “Moxy” was invented. The daily post is authored by Heather Cox Richardson, a noted academic historian and Professor at Boston College, where she specializes in the arenas of the…
Agave Maximus By my approximate count I have something like 300 blue agave plants on my 2 1/2 acres. These blue agaves range in size from pups that are only six or 8 inches across to some monstrously large plants that are perhaps 15 feet across and 10 feet or so high. The blue agave is often called Century Plant and one of the reasons that name is that gardening lore has it that these…
The Road to Borrego Lately we have been taking excursions with Buddy, just because we have the time and we like the surrounding territory and want to explore more of it. We went up to see what there was to see in Temecula and just two days ago did the same up into Fallbrook and Bonsal. These are places we have been to before, but we somehow feel that there is more to see and…
Le Baguette Lately I am on a kick of buying two fresh baguettes from the Costco bakery at my local Costco Wholesale store. Who doesn’t like baguettes? Bread is one of those things that can we wonderful or it can be a boring filler. In the case of fresh baguettes, they are most often wonderful. One of my favorite French photos is of a beret-wearing Frenchman riding off into the sunset with two baguettes strapped…
Costco on the Brain I’ve known about Costco for many years. It has existed since I came into adulthood after college, but I probably first thought about it in the late 1990’s when my old motorcycling friend Bob Kirby went on and on about selling his Cattle Drive Chili (Bob owned Castlebury Stews out of Augusta, Georgia) through Costco. Bob was a Harvard MBA who had made the food business his passion. He would talk…
Waves of Expertise There are plenty of historians who believe that the world moves forward in waves rather than in anything approximating a straight line. The Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is perhaps the best known of these waves or cycles and it states that there are four 20-year waves that form one full 80-year historical cycle. I have looked at the historical timeline and I find it hard to deny that there is a very clear…