Waiting for Popovers

Waiting for Popovers

It’s Sunday morning, Easter Sunday to be exact. It’s a grey day so far here in San Diego, but as I have learned, that can change quickly, hopefully for the better. Dark Sky, MyRadar and The Weather Channel (a subsidiary of IBM) are of little help as they show no particular weather front over or near us. I am tempted to say that this weather seems to be flying below the radar. Thanks to the holiday, Kim is making popovers and as it is 9:40am and I’ve been up for three hours, I’m getting hungry. Presumably, popovers are such a special treat that they are worth waiting for, so here I am waiting for my popovers.

While I am generally not a fan or tweeting or messaging what I am doing at any given moment, I think these times are different in that we are all looking for both snippets of entertainments (i.e TikTok and now Quibi) and we are all looking for insight and suggestions about our own daily dance card and how best to fill it. My current agenda consists of the following on any given day (and as we all know, one day is running into another):

1. CEO stuff – I still run a scientific R&D company with six people spread out across the northeast U.S. and eight in Scotland. We have honed the mission down to a clear technology development path and a less clear, more opportunistic grant, loan and equity funding path. There is stuff to do, but only so much.

2. Expert witness stuff – I have one case that just settled and one that is winding down in terms of what is likely needed from me (there may be a final deposition and hearing round, but that seems unlikely). I have two cases that may or may not come my way for which interest has been expressed and questions asked and answered. And then there are two business development initiatives that involve producing outlooks and reviews about how the latest crisis is likely to impact the litigation environment for financial services firms. It is clear that turbulent times create a vast array of litigation situations. It brings new meaning to the expression that troubled maters make for good fishing.

3. Course preparation – It is a bit early yet, but I am on the roster for teaching a Fall course at University of San Diego on project financing. It will be two weekends, or four days of course that I will fashion from my prior course at Cornell Johnson School of Management on what I called Project-Driven Alpha and the ups and downs of financing a major $650 million attraction project (based loosely on the New York Wheel project experience). That is not until late September, but my experience with preparing courses is that it takes longer and comes on sooner than you think, so its better to get ready sooner and tweak it for current events later. So that’s something on my docket to do.

4. Motorcycle fiddling – This involves dealing with my lemon law K1600 GTL claim (that bike is sitting in parts at the Escondido dealership), my new BMW R1250GS Adventure and the new do-dads I may want to put on it, my Kawasaki Versys 1000 that has a whopping 700 miles on it after three years and finally, the disposal of my (technically mine, but theoretically my son’s) Suzuki V-Storm 650 that is sitting in the garage in Ithaca on a trickle charger. I can also always find things to do in preparation of the supposed mid-May ride in the Canyons of Southern Utah. That Utah ride is looking less and less likely to happen and I last heard from the Lodge owner (whom we have befriended for over 20 years) that the locals are none too keen to have virus-laden outsiders coming to town at this point.

5. I still have an array of trips and reservations after May ranging from a flight to NYC for Kim and I to go up to the now-cancelled early June Cornell reunion, a big family gathering trip to Krakow, Poland for 10 days in early July, to be followed directly by a road trip down into Transylvania for five days of Dracula searching. We also have flights booked and a deposit down on a two week ride from Barcelona to Porto on motorcycles. I have long wanted to ride the Pyrenees and the Camino de Compostela and this was to be that trip. Maybe later August is far enough out to allow it to take place, but who knows. I am not booking anything new until I find ways to use the $40k+ in unused travel credits I have stacked up. That will be an entire job unto itself.

6. I am sitting next to a book by David Roberts called Escalante’s Dreams, which is about the trail of the Spanish discovery of the American Southwest. I have opened and closed this book twenty times, averaging a bit over one page per opening. I find it fascinating reading, but I am so used to audiobooks now that I rarely actually read a book. Magazines or Newspapers, yes. Books, not so much. Just today I read the latest New Yorker as well as most of the New York Times Sunday paper, both of which are the remnants of paper delivery services we maintain. Truth be told, the Magazine section is still next to me for more in-depth reading if I get a moment to do a deeper dive into the article on Italian Healthcare workers.

7. TV movies and series. I try to save this for the evenings as I am finding it hard to get to a decent after-dinner hour before heading off to bed. I can pretend I will watch something from bed as we did last night with the Home Version of SNL hosted by Tom Hanks (from home), but usually I fall asleep and then just find myself waking up earlier than I need to and starting the dance-card-filling process for another day. Weekend news is pretty lame and repetitive, so that leaves movies and series, both of which I enjoy, but only so much of in a day.

8. I can go in the hot tub for an hour or chase some online topics down some obscure rabbit hole, but that only takes up a bit of time. I am reminded of that movie About A Boy with Hugh Grant, where he plays a guy who has an inherited annuity (from a Christmas song his father wrote years before) and doesn’t otherwise work. He talks of breaking his day down into half-hour units and then finding ways to spend those units. Kim likes to nap during the day and while I am not immune to yawning, I am good at fending off the napping bug. Napping is a luxury I just don’t allow myself for indulge in. I have nothing against it, but fear for sleeplessness at night if I take a real nap.

It is now afternoon and that morning hazy gloom has not burned off and looks to stay for the day. Kim and I did our Easter errand of taking baskets of goodies to our respective siblings. We enjoyed a delicious Taco Bell lunch (don’t ask, it was Kim’s idea and a soft taco is a fine lunch to me). I have no pressing work and I have nothing in my inbox that needs attention.. This should all be good news. But there sits Escalante’s Dream, untouched today. I know….maybe I’ll go read it in the hot tub and wait until dinner time to turn on the TV?

I successfully waited for my popovers this morning and they were well worth the wait. Maybe waiting out the afternoon will help me enjoy some left-over pizza for dinner. At least tomorrow starts a new week and maybe it will bring more things to put on my dance card or maybe something once again worth waiting for.