I am currently in the process of taking inventory of the books in my library. I’ve started with the physical books and so far I’d put the estimate somewhere between 1,200-1,400. I know that I have more than 1,700 audiobooks on top of that. And another 500 or so e-books. Call it 3,600 books all…
Well, my desk is a mess and maybe I’ll put it into some order today. I have far too many books I want to read, all of them RIGHT NOW and on a wide variety of subjects. I want to re-learn science, not how it was taught in school, but with a historical backbone to…
I spent a lot of time in 5th grade drawing pictures of Ozzy Osbourne concerts: two dimensional pencil sketches looking at the stage with stick-figure band members. The most careful, detailed part is the sketches was the big OZZY that hung over the stage with connected Z’s. Blizzard of Ozz was my entry into a…
When I used to come to Santa Monica for work, I’d stop in at a local AM/PM to pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Times. I read that paper growing up and particularly enjoyed Al Martinez columns. It was always nice to come back and read the paper early in the morning. This…
The world is a noisy place and it is hard to tune out the orchestra of modern life. So I seek quiet places. I returned to one such place over the holiday weekend, at a resort in West Virginia. The resort itself is noisy and chaotic as resorts often are. But it is surrounded by…
Though I dutifully filled out all of the forms online ahead of time, when I arrived for a recent medical visit, the receptionist handed me a dreaded clipboard and asked me to “fill out the highlighted parts.” This caught me in a Puckish moment. I proceeded to fill out all of the parts so indicated…
To escape the heat, I dragged a reluctant Montainge downstairs, where it was cooler, and collapsed into a comfortable chair beneath the breath of an air conditioner vent. Montainge was going on about sadness, but I muted him beneath the book cover and sat listening to my youngest daughter sing in the shower in the…
The best part of my early morning walks in summer is pausing under this goldenrain tree. If I am listening to a book or music, I pause the audio and stand still, listening. The tree hums. The bees pollinating the flowers in the crown seem to harmonize so that the tree sounds like some kind…
I am fascinated by how people work. It is part of the reason I love reading biographies. I’m always on the lookout for little nuggets of inspiration and ideas that I find when reading them. In a biography of Thomas Jefferson I learned about commonplace books. In a biography of John Quincy Adams, I stole…
We were out of Q-tips and I went to the store to buy more earlier today. I wasn’t entirely sure which aisle they were in, but figured they’d be in the same aisle as things like medicine and nail polish remover. There was store employee stocking shelves on that aisle and I asked where Q-tips…
On the checklist hotel housekeeping uses when servicing a room, one thing seems lacking. It is a small thing, something that would take almost no time (a second or two at the most). But in my experience, it is almost never done: Check the alarm clock, and if it is on, turn it off. Usually,…
Yesterday, I saw something on the bike path that I’ve never seen before in the dozen years we’ve been coming down to this part of Florida. In pre-COVID times, the bike paths here are busy, and they haven’t been empty this time around either. I’ve seen unusual things on these paths: strange bikes, unusual attire,…