Topic Overload I occasionally get recommendations from readers for topics for my blog stories. Yesterday, one of my regular readers, my friend Steven, sent me a list of ten such recommendations. I know he was flying back to New York yesterday, so I suspect he was killing time in between movies on the flight. I have another friend who is also a regular reader and also has the name Steve. He was recently on a…
Fear of Aging For as long as man has walked this earth, he has shown a certain fear of aging. The Bible gives us an alternative to aging in the legend of Methuselah. He is noteworthy in providing the link between the original prophets of Genesis (specifically Enoch) and Noah. His predecessors lived for several centuries and his descendants, like Noah, and he lived to almost 1,000 years. From that time, human longevity kept shortening,…
Atlantic and Pacific I am drawn to the differences between East and West. I lived most of my adult life in the East and I have chosen to live the rest of my life in the West. The Egyptians built their cities for commerce and living on the East bank of the Nile and they built their monuments and mausoleums for their passage into death on the West side of the Nile. The sun also…
Aqua Velva Water as soft as a baby’s bottom is the literal translation of Aqua Velva. I think of it as the oldest men’s cologne in existence. It is, indeed, quite old since it was first introduced in 1917 to the American public and is so much a part of American male grooming that during WWII, the book The Thin Red Line, about the battle for Guadalcanal tells the story about a PX set up…
Barking Buddy We’ve had Buddy with us now for about five months. He has settled in nicely and we with him. The one thing that is still going on that we want to correct is that the little guy does like to bark. I sort of understand why a 5.5 pound ball of energy might find the need to make himself known by barking, but it seems to be more than that that’s going on.…
Cousin Itt Do you remember The Munsters TV show? It only aired for two seasons (1964 – 1966, but a hefty 70 episodes that ran successfully for years in syndication) and like its competitor series, The Addams Family, they probably left an indelible mark on our youthful memories. The Munster show was produced by the team that brought us Leave It To Beaver and was similarly written to mimic suburban life, only with a macabre…
Accepting the Loss You may recall that I recently wrote about replacing some windows in my house on the hilltop. Views being such a big part of the appeal of this property, windows are a clear priority (pun intended). You may recall that I chose the prudent path of ordering the replacement windows from the top window firm in America, Andersen. I have yet to find anyone who has anything but good things to say…
Time to De-Junk Every once in a while I get the urge to declutter my life. We have lived out here on this hilltop going on five years now and we shed a lot of junk when moving here and when moving our extra junk from Ithaca here, but I think we have only had a junk man come to take away excess junk to the dump one other time. Like most people, the urge…
Star Witness This morning we are waking up to the most explosive part of the Trump Hush Money trial in Manhattan, the testimony of Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer and fixer over a decade in days gone by. At the early part of the testimony, the bulk of the pitter patter from the cable news legal/litigation pundits is about what the prosecution wants of Cohen and how the defense is likely to try to undermine…
Field Trip It’s May and its warming here on the hilltop. Yesterday we had a gathering of the Hidden Meadows Garden Club as organized by Kim and Melisa, its co-presidents. Kim carried most of the load since Melisa was recuperating from her prior day’s Emergency Room trauma. She had aspirated half of a Calcium/Magnesium/Zinc supplement and had spent seven hours at the Palomar Hospital ER (chauffeured there by yours truly) working through the dissolution of…