New Shoes in the Rain

It's Saturday, friends, and I'm ever so glad to be in weekend mode.  Hope you'll get to enjoy some downtime, too. I just returned Thursday from a four day trip to the Cleveland, Ohio area for some training for my new job.  Met some interesting people, but what stuck with me the most in two trips into the middle of the city there was the extent of rundown or even abandoned commercial and residential structures. Boarded up, beaten down, depressing scenery, block after block of it. To be fair, Lexington has that, too, but the scale is so different in a city the size of Cleveland.  I found the same in the Detroit, Michigan area, at least in parts of it, during frequent travels there late last year and early this year.  But it's still something that takes me by surprise, and then leaves me somewhat depressed for those affected by it. I watched a documentary a while back that spent some of its running time addressing the water situation in Flint, Michigan.  I'm ...

Good morning, friends.  We're facing a major weather change here in central Kentucky, with heavy wind and later some severe storms, although it pales in comparison with the "bomb cyclone" that hit the Rockies yesterday!  We received a report from our daughter in the Denver suburbs of heavy snow and wind and cold, such that none of her gang even ventured out of the house! This week's revelations about the college entrance cheating scandal have been astounding in their creativity and downright meanness, and I have a few things to say on this subject. First, anyone who does not or did not already recognize that wealth offers certain people discernible advantages over those without it should come to this realization quickly.  Money and the advantages it offers pervade so many areas of our society, from where we live to what we drive to what we wear and how we're sometimes treated based on all of that. But this whole scenario, which involves a college admissions ...

Friends, it's late on the first Monday afternoon of March.  And it's 24 degrees.  And the temperature had to really struggle to reach that level today! It snowed here in Kentucky yesterday, as it did in a lot of other places.  My wife and I were returning from a hockey tournament in Oxford, Ohio yesterday afternoon and noticed that the further south we went, the worse the roads became.  And there were more cars off the road.  Our son was following with his family a few miles back and he reported that a car lost control in front of him, careened (his word) across all three lanes, and finally came to rest just off the shoulder--facing the wrong way! So, in other words, while the winter may almost be over, the operative word there is ALMOST! It's over for hockey, we know, as our grandson concluded his season well with the trip north and a couple of games yesterday morning.  The later of the two was an absolute blowout, which means that the entire team ha...

It's a chilly Sunday morning here in central Kentucky.  Hope the weather is tolerable where you are! I never mention this until it's already happening, but I started a new job last Monday.  It's still in the same industry where I've been for the past twenty-plus years, but a little different area of the industry than in the past.  New people to know, services to market, responsibilities to meet.  Looking forward to the challenges it brings. Kentucky's basketball team went through some changes of their own this week, as they lost a nail-biter at home to LSU on Tuesday and then roared out of the gates to beat the Number 1 ranked Tennessee Volunteers last night, again at Rupp Arena.  We here in the Bluegrass State are accustomed to seeing college basketball played at a pretty high level, but once in a while a Kentucky team comes along that seems capable of even greater-than-normal things.  This team might be one of those, as they have a great blend of insi...

It's Tuesday, friends.  Hope you had a "super" weekend! By now you know that the New England Patriots won Super Bowl 53 over the Los Angeles Rams by a score of 13-3.  The Patriots have now won six Super Bowl titles with Bill Belichick as their head coach and Tom Brady as their quarterback, and their victory sets numerous records.  Congratulations to the team, its owners and its fans. For my part, I could care less, I didn't watch a second of the game for the third straight year. Why? I suffer from Patriots Fatigue, an ongoing malaise that keeps me from admiring ongoing success by a given team.  I watch a fair amount of professional football every season, but have reached the point that I don't watch the Patriots, since they're often shown on CBS and the games broadcast by Jim Nantz, the openly-Patriots-friendly play-by-play announcer.  Each time the Pats appear on CBS it seems that we're reintroduced to the greatness that is Robert Kraft, the team ...

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...