A Nice Week Ahead I read that Spring has come early all across the country, but that is deemed a mixed blessing at best. This was supposed to be a particularly harsh El Niño winter, but at least here in Southern California, that feels like it barely materialized. It’s always nice when the groundhog doesn’t see his shadow and we get an early Spring, but I should note that Groundhog Day was just over six…
Hello & Goodbye This evening we are going to a going-away party for some local friends who are moving to Bend, Oregon. We met Sam and Chris through the Hidden Meadows Garden Club, which is the vehicle through which we have made most of our local friends unless they are right next door to us. At some Garden Club event about three years ago, I was doing what I tend…
Buddy Boy We have now had our little Buddy for three months, which means that he has settled into his new territory and made it his home. Both Kim and I have noticed that the blend of fun-loving pup and feisty devilish troublemaker has skewed decidedly towards the former. He still gets those orange/red eyes at times when his blood is up, but for the most part he is a happy and contented little dog.…
Planning to Plan Do you remember Owl Jolson? He is that little adorable Merrie Melodies cartoon character from the 1936 animated short called I Love to Singa. It’s about a young owl whose father (that sounds funny…Who, Who) believes that the only pure music is classical whereas little Owl Jolson wants to sing Jazz. In other words, its a cartoon version of The Jazz Singer, with all the angst and…
Playing With Your Life One of the areas that I spent a great deal of time in during my professional life was the arcane arena of life insurance. Somewhere over the years, the business of life insurance took some very strange turns in this country. To begin with, the lobbying army that represents the industry is formidable, and they have done a wonderful job of making an arcane arena all the more arcane by purposefully…
Circulation I’m not sure how long its been now, but for some time I have been plagued with numb toes. It really has no adverse affects and I have had it checked out vis-a-vis diabetes and it’s not that. My glucose levels and my A1C are all in line and my doctor agrees that its not diabetic nerve damage. I’ve been to a neuropathist and besides telling me what I know that there is some…
The Windows of Life Back in November, 1985 when my 42-year-old son was three years old, Microsoft launched what is now its ubiquitous and comprehensive personal computer platform/application called Windows. Since then, Microsoft has had a stranglehold on the business application business that no one, even Apple, has been able to unseat this behemoth from its lofty perch overseeing almost all of our daily business lives. We are all pretty much joined at the hip…
Returning to the Scene Life is short and memories are long. It’s been three years now since I had my big altercation with Cornell University over the house at 313 Warren Road. I long since moved my belongings out and handed over the property to the University. One of the things I took with me was the brass sign I had placed on a large rock at the entry. It had the address and the…
Feeling Healthy During our recent trip, I got mildly felled by a stomach bug and knocked it out with a dose of Azithromycin that Kim had with her for that exact purpose. It was a three-day course of a very powerful antibiotic and it did the trick such that I literally only sat out one dinner and was otherwise fine both sitting for all the meals, but also going out to whatever tours we had…
The China Syndrome Do you remember the 1979 Jane Fonda and Jack Lemmon movie, The China Syndrome? It was about a cover-up at a nuclear power facility that was malfunctioning and creating a nuclear hazard. I’m not sure how much we Americans have thought about either nuclear disaster or even China as a risk to our lifestyle since then, but we are about to be faced with a whole new version of China risk than…