New Shoes in the Rain

It's the Monday before Christmas, so if you're not ready yet, well, your time is becoming limited! I want to offer a line of thought that I found clarified some things for me.  I somehow thought that politicians are driven, ruthless individuals who are looking to win at all costs and often don't care who gets in the way of a given objective. It turns out that this is not correct. I have two recent examples, both United States Senators, members of what has long been called "the world's most deliberative body."  I will not name names, but I will help to identify who each of the examples might be. The first one is a Senator from the state of Arkansas who has been outspoken in his opposition of the current Presidential administration.  He apparently held up the nominations of a substantial number of nominees for United States Attorney positions in a variety of locations.  He was apparently unwilling to disclose the reason for his objection to their nominations pro

How's your holiday shopping coming along?  That well?  I have to admit, I'm a little envious! I kid, ours is going pretty well.  It starts kinda early because, well, we have to.  Our daughter and her family live in the Denver suburbs, so shipping comes into play. And we all know that there's LOTS of stuff being shipped this year, whether by individuals and families, merchants big and small, or the usual online sellers of just about everything! We got our box together for the Colorado branch of the family along about Thanksgiving, and I took it to an area post office that weekend to process it (using the automated kiosk, which I prefer to the indifferent staff at the counter most of the time) and to potentially ship it, depending on whether it would fit into the package receptacle. Weighed and measured it, accepted the weight and was stunned to see the two options I was presented for shipping this package (which, incidentally, only weighed 3.5 pounds).  Neither was inexpensi

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Today is the day when we all take time to give thanks for the many blessings we each enjoy.  But I prefer to believe that every day is a day to feel and even express our gratitude. Here are some of the things that make me feel thankful: My wife, whom I met about 37 years ago.  I was not close to any of my immediate family (for a lot of reasons that I won't go into here) but I met my wife and her two amazing kids and I felt a sense of belonging that I had never known before.  The kids grew up, and they married and had kids of their own.  And the love has grown exponentially since then.  There are an awful lot of things about me that have not changed that much, but I prefer to believe that my personal traits that have improved are entirely thanks to her! My kids, whom I mentioned above.  They are both outstanding people, good spouses and excellent parents.  I'm proud of them, certainly, but appreciate them and the relationships we now enjoy as adults

Happy Wednesday, everyone.  Hope your week is going well enough! Had an interesting experience over the weekend, as my grandson's youth hockey team was entered into a tournament in and around South Bend, Indiana.  My wife and I would have said, well, OK, except for the location, as this was a golden opportunity (and you'll pardon the pun) to see some of the campus of the University of Notre Dame. So we threw in and got a room as a part of the tournament block, and last Thursday set sail for Mishawaka, Indiana, which is adjacent to South Bend itself.  Made a pit stop in Milan, Indiana, the home of the "Milan Miracle" upon which the sports movie "Hoosiers" is based.  It's a real place, a little wide place in the road with a couple of stop lights and the kind of "downtown" that would look equally at home with dirt replacing asphalt on the main street and horses tied up in front of the old buildings.  We didn't go in but whatever locations were

Happy middle-of-the-week day, everyone.  Not much on talking about "hump day," so there you go! I think I had mentioned before that I've had some fun with several of my grandkids by referring to myself as Richard, the Knower of All Things.  Most of them chuckle along with me, but our middle granddaughter just can't bring herself to admit that I know a thing or two, and responds by calling me Ricardo. You never can tell. Anyway, I don't have a specific theme for today's post, so it's a little bit of several categories.  Here goes: We watch a show called Morning Joe on MSNBC most weekday mornings, as they routinely discuss politics and national issues and have a pretty good variety of guests on the show.  I began watching a number of years ago, when Joe Scarborough, the primary host and former Congressman, very suddenly replaced Don Imus on MSNBC after Imus offended some viewers with one or another of his comments.  The co-hosts of the show were and are Mika

Good pre-Halloween Friday to everyone.  Hope you're ready to trick or treat, or hand out candy, or go to a Halloween party, now that it's safer to have one of those.  I don't have a costume, at least not yet. I just returned from getting my COVID vaccine booster.  Why did I?  Well, for one thing, this horrific nightmare scenario is not yet over.  I have been most fortunate that no one in my immediate family, extended family or circle of friends has had it with any long-lasting effects.  One such friend tested positive, suffered only a runny nose and eventually concluded that this might have been a false positive test. Another reason is that I have underlying health issues.  I'm overweight and have some medical history that makes it essential to get as much protection from this virus as possible.   The third is that my wife also has some existing medical circumstances, so the last thing I would want to do is bring the virus home to her without knowing it.  She, too, has

Happy Friday, my friends, we've almost made it! I've been making some mental notes, for all of the good that usually does, about things I've seen during my travels that made me pause, or laugh, or feel uncomfortable, or, well, all of the above.  For instance: I followed what I believe was a food truck for a few miles not long ago, until we both turned onto a four-lane highway and I pulled alongside of it.  I don't know if the name of the entity was in another language or was simply painted so poorly that I just couldn't read it.  I suppose if the food's any good that this would have a following, cult or otherwise, but why wouldn't you want to put the name of your business on the thing legibly? I was in a town a couple of hours away earlier this week and saw signage for a restaurant.  "Wasabi Mexican and Japanese Cuisine," the sign read.  I'm not sure how I feel about that. Outside of the same community, near Lake Cumberland (a man-made lake tha

Good Tuesday morning, friends.  I am at home today and off work, and will explain below. Before I get into what's happening here, let's talk about a few things happening elsewhere. I'm not a Facebook user, as my stock excuse is that "I graduated high school."  That used to be a much more accurate statement than it is today.  I don't use Instagram too much, although I post a picture there once in a while and have a handful of friends I follow there.  Another very good friend decided to try living in Panama for a few months and so I'm communicating with her via WhatsApp. All owned and operated by Facebook. Yesterday's outage was rather amusing to me, given that so many people spend SO MUCH TIME on the main Facebook app.  There were numerous funny items I saw on Twitter about what people were doing with their time without Facebook or Instagram to weigh them down. But I find the outage to be just a little suspicious, as a former Facebook manager appeared o

Hey, it's Friday, everyone!  If you're among the majority of folks who don't have to work on the weekends, good for you, we've almost made it to a couple of well-deserved days off! My wife and I bought a new car last weekend.  This is significant for a number of reasons, the primary one being that the last time we did this was almost fourteen years ago!  The other reason is one I'll explain below. As I've noted here, I work in a healthcare sales position and have responsibility for a pretty large geographic territory.  During the worst of the initial COVID-related lockdowns and limitations, this job became a work-from-home gig, which was OK with me, as I'd done that before.  My counterparts and I have been asked since sometime in the summer of 2020 to begin getting out to see active and prospective clients a day per week, then two, then three, and now back to our original model of four days per week in the field.  Complicating matters is that many of the act

Happy Monday, er, Tuesday, everyone.  This is always confusing for me following a Monday holiday, but I made it worse by taking last Friday off as well.  Despite today's uncertainty, I enjoyed my long weekend, and hope you had the opportunity to do so as well. One group that we can probably rest assured didn't get extra time off is our medical personnel.  I live in Kentucky, as mentioned here repeatedly, and it seems we're now on the list of states "of concern" to public health officials at the national level.  Why?  Because we have too few of our citizens vaccinated against COVID-19 and therefore our hospitals and emergency rooms are overrun with COVID cases of varying severity. Kentucky is one of the states where a significant portion of persons have continued living their lives pretty much as they always have, without masks or social distancing or avoiding congregant settings.  So it isn't hard to understand why these circumstances are converging so rapidly

Lots going on today, so let's get right into some things.... First and most importantly, I hope that the stunning variety of weather that's affected various parts of the country have not caused any direct problems for you. Where I live, in central Kentucky, we've gone from heavy rain to stifling heat and it stands to be that way for a while. But that's nothing compared to the massive rain and flooding in middle Tennessee a few days ago.  I just visited the Nashville area a couple of weeks ago, and the majority of the heavy downpours occurred not far west of that area.  As with most forms of severe weather, there was really nothing residents could do, and it's such a shame for a freak occurrence to claim so many lives and so much property. Not that different in the northeast, where Hurricane Henri left a pretty significant amount of rain and wind damage as well.  The primary problem there, as reported on national news, appears to be the loss of power for so many resi

Happy Friday from the heat dome, central Kentucky division.  It's in the high 80s here right now, and, wow, is that an improvement over the last couple of days!   I kid, of course.  If you have loved ones who are living in the broad area affected by this heat wave, make sure to check on them and help them get to a cooling center if they don't have air conditioning. OK, now my real reason for posting today.  I think I detailed here what a happy occasion it was for my wife and me to finally be able to spend time with our children and their families after all of the adults were vaccinated.  Not only did we have occasion to see everyone who lives here in the area, but our daughter and her family were able to visit for a full week from Colorado in late May. We all thought that we were in the clear, so to speak, at that point, that vaccinations would continue apace and this COVID thing would be in the rear view mirror. Not so, as it turns out, not by a long shot. Thanks to the mutati

Happy Monday, everyone.  Got going early today, so hope you're able to have a good day, too! Once in a while a thought crosses my mind and I think "I should include that in my next blog post," but it isn't really related to whatever I happen to be writing about in that next post.  So this is going to be something of a listing of such random thoughts and comments, and they're in no particular order. While I'm not quite as strident as Alabama's governor on her stance on COVID, I have to agree to a point that the unvaccinated are putting everyone at risk by not getting their shots.  I know, there are a number of legitimate reasons why people are hesitant, but for goodness' sake, the vaccines do not contain microchips and are not designed to rearrange one's DNA.  I am appalled at the number of otherwise thoughtful and intelligent individuals who take refuge in one of these tinfoil-hat theories rather than doing the responsible thing for society and get

Good morning, and happy Tuesday, everyone. Was thinking not long ago about how common it is for people to start food blogs and post pictures of items that they've whipped up in their own kitchens.  I don't do that, although I'm not above bragging about a really enticing plate of food at a restaurant with a photo and a description for a friend or two! But I confess here and now that I've always enjoyed playing around in the kitchen, from the time I was a kid--and that was in a house with a gas stove!  This is true....my mom used to let me make my own lunch sometimes, and it was usually a can of pork and beans that I would "doctor up," as she would say, with brown sugar, ketchup and occasionally some meat, usually a cut-up hot dog or some Spam.   Humble beginnings. My wife did all of the cooking when we met, but she taught me a few things about grilling and during the warmer months we grilled regularly, first on a traditional charcoal kettle grill and later on a

I've been meaning to stop by and share some semi-random thoughts and observations, so it appears that today is the day! Last week I had my first overnight business trip since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.  My job has steadily increased the amount of time I'm out in the field over the past several months to where it's pretty much what it used to be, which is four days per week.  So let me start there with firsts. First time since the pandemic to have rented a car.  I hadn't had any success even reserving a car recently, given what's in the news about so many of the car rental companies having sold off large percentages of their fleets during the idle periods of the lockdown.  But for last week's trip, which was to northwest Indiana, I was able to secure a car.  When I arrived to pick it up, I was offered a compact pickup truck or a Nissan Rogue compact SUV.  I chose the latter, as I've had earlier models of that car, and felt I made a good choice.

Good morning, friends.  I don't often post on Saturdays, but here goes.... I'm a parent.  Specifically, I'm a stepparent, but my kids know that they are MY kids as well as their mom's.  I have a lot of thoughts about parenting at this stage of life. First off, I was raised by my parents, two products of the Depression and natives of Huntington, West Virginia.  Neither grew up in privilege and I certainly didn't either.  I'm the middle of three sons in our household, each of my parents was married to another partner prior to their own marriage.  My father had two children in his first marriage, my mother had none. They did the best they could, I guess, as I grew up in the era of a single breadwinner in the family.  So child-rearing was often left to my mother, as my dad's "job" was to go out into the world and earn the money that we needed to live on. I don't think I ever fully understood my father.  He had a good mind, but because he was raised

Happy Wednesday, friends.  Or, I think it's Wednesday.  I'm on vacation this week, so it's hard to know! Short post today.  Our daughter and her family drove here from their home in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado to spend the week with us.  And it's been wonderful to have them here and to have our entire immediate family (our kids and their families) together at last. We've had pizza parties, we had a celebratory dinner at a special place in the region, we're going to have dinner together here tonight and the "local" grandkids are here for the day to spend time with their Colorado cousins. My wife and I are so immensely grateful that our national and regional situation relative to the coronavirus has finally allowed us to be together, thanks to the vaccinations of all of the adults in our circle. I sincerely hope that the recent decline in case counts and restrictions has permitted you to spend more time with those whom you love, too!  

Good Monday morning, folks, hope you had a great weekend! I have to say that we certainly did, although there were a few things leading into the weekend that were a little, well, different. First, the good.  We celebrated the tenth birthday of our younger grandson this weekend with a sleepover, his first trip to White Castle and then a family dinner at a local hibachi restaurant.  He and his immediate family (my son and his wife, plus his two sisters) went to Cincinnati for a Reds game. This was only our second dining-out experience since restrictions began to be lifted, the first being the night of our son's official law school graduation a couple of weeks before.  The place we went was taking all of the right precautions, and all diners were required to wear masks upon entry. The chef who prepared our dinner mentioned that he came to this country (and to Lexington) in 1998 and formerly cooked at another now departed hibachi restaurant.  He was a fun and pleasant fellow and very a

Well, it's Monday, friends, so I hope that you had a good weekend. We did around here.  Friday we watched our son go through commencement exercises to commemorate his graduation from law school in the fall of 2019.  The ceremony ordinarily would have been the following spring, but, of course, was delayed by the pandemic to this spring.  He's already been practicing as an attorney for over a year, having passed the bar in March 2020, but it was still a meaningful occasion. And yesterday we celebrated my wife and daughter-in-law with a nice brunch with our son and his family.  Now that we're seeing them regularly it's hard to believe how seldom we did this from March 2020 through April of this year. Now, on to today's topic du jour.... I have a little bit of biographical information in my profile for this blog, but I'd guess that a good many of you who visit this site regularly don't know much about me.  So here are a few factoids that may be of some interest.

Good Monday morning to you!  It's late enough in the morning that I can afford to be chipper, having had coffee and a reasonable amount of time to return to work-mode. Did you watch the Oscars last night?  We debated on it here at my house and ultimately decided that we had nothing else planned, so we invested three-plus hours in what I could easily characterize as the most unusual awards show I've seen in a while. Important to note that we attempted the same with the Golden Globes several weeks ago, and gave up after about fifteen minutes, it was that bizarre. This was better in several respects, namely the setting.  The event was staged at Los Angeles' historic Union Station, which is a classic art-deco building that still exudes the same appeal it did when newly constructed.  And there were no hosts, which means fewer lame jokes, no production numbers, etc. But the cadence of the show was off.  Presenters would walk into view (in a variety of locations in the building, i

Here in central Kentucky we awoke to a bit of snow from the night before.  Always a bit of a shock to be wearing shorts one day, and have snow on the ground the next.   Yesterday’s news of the guilty verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was in some ways unsurprising, yet in other ways downright shocking.  So seldom does a verdict come out the way that the known facts would indicate it should, given what a racially charged situation this was and still is.  Experts had said repeatedly that the length of jury deliberations would be a direct indication of whether Chauvin would be found guilty or acquitted. Amid the rejoicing by so many people of so many backgrounds, it was hard not to consider the fact that the legal system allows for appeals of convictions, so this is far from over, in my view.  As it stands now, Chauvin will be incarcerated for eight weeks until his sentencing hearing, and it’s likely a given that his legal team will start the appeal pr

Welcome to the weekend, my friends!  We hardworking folks look forward to two days of respite and doing what we want, instead of what we must! This week I had and experience I had not had since sometime in 2018.  I attended a Major League Baseball game, hosted by and featuring my lifelong team, the Cincinnati Reds. I don't imagine I need to detail the reasons why it's been so long since I last went to a Reds game.  If memory serves, I accompanied my son and his "big" kids (now 11 and 9) to a game back in the 2018 season.  During a big part of 2019, I was again in the midst of a job search and did not want to spend the money necessary to go to a game, so didn't.  And in 2020, of course, fans were not permitted to attend regular season games due to the coronavirus pandemic. So I was simultaneously excited and apprehensive about the Reds' announcement that Ohio state regulations allowed them to welcome a certain percentage of fan capacity to games this year.  I r

It's Thursday, friends, so hope you're looking forward to the weekend. I was very upset with the news from Colorado that there was yet another mass shooting event in that state, a state where my daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren live.  This event occurred at a King Soopers grocery store, part of the same chain where my daughter and her family shop and not terribly far away from the Boulder store where this happened. The following day we learned that the suspected assailant is a 21-year-old man with a history of violent outbursts and assaulting others, a man who had been bullied by fellow students earlier in his life.  To my knowledge there's been no specific statement made about the motive for the attack, which left ten people dead.  In his initial court appearance yesterday, his attorney requested a mental health assessment of her client. Just a few days before, a man entered and opened fire on employees and others in a series of Asian-owned spas in the Atlanta ar

IT'S FRIDAY! Need I say more?  Maybe not, but I will anyway. I'm working in my home office today, having spent yesterday out in the field, and am listening to a Dire Straits album that was first released in 1980.  Yes, that's approximately 41 years ago, and I make no apology for that.  The band's leader, Mark Knopfler, was and is a guitar prodigy (search him on YouTube and prepare to be astounded at his talent and range).   I prefer to think of music like this not as old but as enduring.  I've listened to some of Knopfler's solo recordings since the breakup of Dire Straits (by the way, that's a really cool name for a band) and I like some of the music, but not as much as his old band. By way of explanation, if you're a regular visitor here, you may have looked at the sidebar comments about me and you'll see that I don't generally listen to music made by performers younger than I am. That's getting harder, since I'll be 61 in July. But tha

The week's nearly over, friends, so hope you have a good weekend planned and get the weather to do some things you'd like to do! It was a year ago today that we received so much news about how COVID-19 was already influencing our normal way of life.  On this day The WHO declared it to be a pandemic.  Then-President Trump announced a national ban on travel from Europe.  The NBA cancelled some games.  We learned that Tom Hanks and his wife had both been diagnosed with the virus.  And we were told by public health experts that things were going to get a great deal worse. And they did.   Today, though, I'm struck by how many positive things seem to be happening right now, and, of course, some of this is a matter of perspective.  First up, President Biden will sign the American Rescue Plan tomorrow, which passed both houses of Congress despite not receiving a single Republican vote.  Audacious in its dollar value of nearly $2 trillion, the bill provides funding to a number of CO

Greetings one and all.  Hope the weather hasn't caused you any problems....certainly feel badly for those affected by the heavy rains and subsequent flooding throughout parts of the Ohio Valley, including parts of my home state of Kentucky. I like to think of myself as a neat and reasonably well-groomed fella.  I once had hair that covered my ears, a period that ended when I began working an after-school job where unloading trucks was a regular task and got tired of having sweaty hair.  I had a semi-beard briefly in college, but only once after that did I attempt facial hair, and shaved that off soon thereafter.  And I've worn my hair in what I would generously call a crew cut for about twenty years. With all of that in mind, I've always had a few distinct habits when it comes to my personal grooming.  I must confess that I've never been an everyday blade shaver.  My dad gave me an electric shavers when I turned 16 (would have liked to have received a car, but that'