New Shoes in the Rain

Happy mid-holiday week, friends.  Hope you had the chance to do something fun during the Memorial Day weekend. This morning's subject is work.  No, I'm not going to address anything specific to my current or past employers.  I made a commitment to myself and to you when I started this little enterprise a few years ago.  But I do want to talk about the state of work in these United States, at least from my own perspective and that of others close to me. And in the interests of full disclosure, I am indeed grateful that I am not having to perform menial, mind-numbing repetitive tasks like cracking rocks or digging ditches.  There's value in that, to be sure, but I am appreciative of that fact all the same. The subject came home to me yesterday while talking with a friend and former colleague who, like myself, was recently laid off unexpectedly from the company where we worked together for many years.  He was a solid performer during the time we worked t...

Friends, it's unusual for me to post on two consecutive days, but I wanted to share a great experience my wife and I had last night. As a wonderful Christmas present, my kids went together and purchased two tickets to the Lexington appearance of a touring production of "Rain:  A Beatles Tribute," along with a generous gift card for a nice restaurant.  Ready-made date night! A little background here:  I will be 55 years old in July, so I was a kid when the Beatles were big.  Knew who they were, knew some of the songs, watched the Saturday morning cartoon show, etc.  I think I was about 10 when they broke up.  But in early adulthood I had the chance to listen to some of their recordings (not just what you'd hear on the radio) and was really hooked.  A friend of mine had half-speed mastered British import LPs (records) of all of their catalog, and loaned them to me so that I could listen and make recordings. Wow! Time passed, and as I no longer ha...

Happy Monday to all....hope everyone had a good weekend. I report this morning on the long-anticipated golf trip that I took with a couple of buddies over the weekend.  As I had mentioned in this space previously, we had planned to do this about a month ago, but the prediction of inclement weather made us change our plans (and, as it turned out, for naught, as the forecast for that weekend and location was not accurate). One of us lives in the Owensboro, Kentucky area, and I and the other traveling companion are in Lexington, so we agreed to meet at Covered Bridge Golf Club in Sellersburg, Indiana for our initial round of golf at 1:00 PM.  We chose courses in the southern half of Indiana to facilitate another mutual interest, minor league baseball.  Our plan was to travel to Indianapolis on Saturday night for a game at Victory Field, home of the AAA Indianapolis Indians.  More on that later. Weather in Lexington Friday morning was clear with a few clouds and so...

Good Monday to all.  I hope everyone enjoyed the weekend. I did, but with a couple of caveats.  We've had a pretty lengthy stretch of really warm weather here in central Kentucky for about two weeks, perhaps a little longer.  That's welcome, after a cold winter and a wet and mostly cool spring. What's not welcome is when that increase in temperature forces your home climate system to work harder and to ultimately fail.  That's what happened at our house, anyway.  Friday afternoon, I returned home from a meeting and commented to my wife that the house seemed a little warm.  Did a little checking, and the thermostat confirmed that it was warmer than it should be in the house. I went to the circuit breaker box to ensure that nothing there had tripped, and found it had not.  Then I went to our outside air conditioning unit (in addition to the other unit that is locate in our attic space). Nothing.  Not moving at all. I remembered a year or so ...

Good Monday morning, all.  Very nice weather lately here in central Kentucky.  Hope the same for your home area. I've had an interesting weekend, albeit different from most.  My wife is away for a visit with her aging mother and returns today, so I've been a quasi-bachelor since Thursday morning. As I believe I had mentioned previously, we decided to try out the HBO Now app on Apple TV (and other Apple devices, though we never got that far) and didn't find much we both wanted to watch.  However, there were a few things that I wanted to see.  For example, I managed to binge-watch "True Detective" after my wife's departure, since she watched the first episode with me and did not find it to her liking.  Intriguing mini-series, well acted and written.  Not at all predictable, which was a nice change from so much traditional television drama.  And it had a quirkiness to it that I really liked. I must be on a Matthew McConaughy run right now, as a...