New Shoes in the Rain

Good morning, friends.  We're in the midst of a small heat wave here in central Kentucky, as the temperature has reached 11 balmy degrees.  But I'm not here to discuss the brutal cold that has struck the majority of the country. No, I don't have any interest in relating tales from contacts in Michigan and other northern localities where the temperature (and not the wind chill) is well below zero during daylight hours. Not planning to mention some of the stupendously ignorant comments made by our President about this weather and him asking for "good old global warming" to return. I could give a shout-out to a friend who braved these extreme temperatures recently for a hike in the cold and snow, but not just now. I could discuss the marvel of physics that allows it to be below ten degrees and yet the sun melts and evaporates snow from driveways and sidewalks, but I won't. And I didn't know that somewhere along the way our weather experts renamed th...

Happy Friday, everyone.  It's cold here in Kentucky, was cold during this week's business travel, too.  Cold in a lot of places, it seems. Step back from your day-to-day issues and give some thought to the headlines we presently see online, on the evening news, in a newspaper or any relatively current news source.  And just think about this: "Trump associate indicted on seven counts" "Officials rejected Kushner for security clearance but were overruled" "Shooter at large after four killed in Georgia" "Three-year-old found alive in woods after days missing in North Carolina" "Trump Administration plans to turn asylum seekers back to Mexico" "General Mills recalls flour over salmonella concerns" "Schools closed due to widespread illness" "Florida secretary of state resigns after photo reportedly shows him in blackface" Those all were pulled from the website of a major news organiz...

Good Sunday morning, my friends.  Hope you're not experiencing too many inconveniences courtesy of the harsh weather that most of the country has seen over the past day or two. I returned Friday afternoon from a car trip, which is a little less common than my recent frequent air travel.  I had to visit assigned accounts in northwestern Ohio last week, so I opt to drive when visiting that locality.  My trip began Tuesday morning and ended as mentioned above. Anyway, I was cruising along 1-75 northbound through Cincinnati and Dayton, the two largest cities through which I pass on this trip, and was about forty miles north of Dayton when traffic came to an absolute standstill late Tuesday morning. I've learned to watch what the truckers do, as their elevated driving positions give them a better perspective of the road ahead.  Several were moving into the lefthand lane, so I followed suit.  We crept along in a start-and-stop fashion for well over two miles bef...

Happy Monday, friends.  First full week of work for many of us in, oh, at least a couple of weeks.  Hard getting back into the swing of things, isn't it? Since it's a new year and I had mentioned displays of things to help us organize our homes and our stuff in my last post, I wanted to continue on that theme today. A while back our daughter told my wife and me about an organizational expert from Japan named Marie Kondo.  She wrote a book entitled "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," and espouses what she calls the KonMari Method, which indicates that you should discard items that do not "spark joy" but it's also necessary to thank your soon-to-be-jettisoned stuff as it departs.  This has apparently turned into a lifestyle brand, and, yes, now, there's a Netflix series featuring Ms. Kondo (and an interpreter). My wife and I were always pretty neat in our overall habits, but as I've mentioned in this space in the past, moving to our curr...

Happy new year to you and yours! Today's one of those days.  If you are one to make resolutions, you begin the year with something to accomplish or at least something to prove.  If not, you go on, knowing that the calendar has turned over and the slate is clear. In my case, it's back to work tomorrow. I've been off for most of the past two-plus weeks, working two days last week.  It's been a wonderful break from travel, e-mails, conference calls and the like, but we'll get back into the swing of things tomorrow with a two-day business trip.  Luckily the flights both ways are direct and relatively short! I titled today's post to correspond with how we spent part of our Sunday.  We un-decorated our house! To be fair, we live in a smallish patio home, so we don't have lots and lots of decorations for Christmas.  We have a prelighted tree, which saves some headaches, wreathes on our entry door and the door from our garage, and some other tabletop item...

Friends, it's now a week until Christmas, if you celebrate that holiday with your family and friends.  Hope you're ready--I think that we finally are! Was thinking the other day about shoes, particularly about my personal history of shoes and foot issues.  When we were kids, both my older and younger brothers were diagnosed by the doctor as needing "corrective" shoes (do these still exist?) and my parents dutifully bought them--once for each boy.  None after that. As I recall, my older brother seldom wore leather dress shoes after that.  His shoe of choice for many years was the original Converse Chuck Taylor basketball shoe.  He generally had multiple pairs to allow time for them to dry between wearings, which is actually something that folks in the know suggest.  My younger brother often wore whatever shoes one of us no longer wanted, to the point where I never actually knew what size shoe he wore. And then there's me. I had long feet as a kid, bu...

Happy Tuesday to all....hope you're not digging out from a foot or two of snow, as some of my friends in the East/Southeast are today! I have to say that I caught a major break on the path and pace of that winter storm.  I made my annual trip to my company headquarters in south Florida for meetings last week and was due to fly out late Friday afternoon, just as I did last year.  This year, the weather in Atlanta was workable and so my flights left and arrived on schedule, delivering me home on time.  Last year a similar winter weather system caused a virtual shutdown of the air traffic system from Dallas to Charlotte, which prevented folks with connections from traveling through to their destinations further north.  I was delayed an extra 36 hours, but finally made it home on Sunday afternoon. And as a resident of the northern part of the southeastern US, I can vouch.  Despite efforts to prepare and to keep up, our home area is woefully unprepared for harsh ...