Cadence

I have grown deeply attached to the rhythm of my day, getting up early when it's quiet to meditate and read, proceeding through breakfast and the paper to my morning session with notepad and computer, slowly proceeding from topics of very long term nature to those of the day. First something spiritualish, then the paper, focusing on longer-duration stories rather than market news of the day, before checking the futures and email. Easing into the day, as it were. Generally, the exercise is one of attempting to maintain as long a horizon as possible.

Then I get in my car and listen to a book, right now, having finally polished off Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, I am returning to Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, which Mary and Graham and I had listened to some of months ago and then I let slide. Then I read more of Harari's stuff in another context and learned that the guy does silent meditation for two months a year (yes, he talks to nobody during that time, and I think consumes no media) which is just freaking crazy but intense and, clearly, fruitful.

A friend and client recently asked that I write a quarterly newsletter outlining my thinking on markets, something I am considering. But I think that the quarter is such a constraining, artificial, and misleading construct that it will warp anything I write. I also think it's too short a time period to be meaningful. (I think in principle that quarterly reporting on the part of corporations is distortive -- but that from a control and compliance perspective it's good because it provides actors within firms with an incentive to keep it tight, and it gives analysts a window into firms to spot fraud).

I'll figure something out.

On the lawsuits

Just finished reading this New Yorker article about the lawsuit against Harvard by some conservative guy and an alliance of Asian-American organizations he cultivated. First off, let's start by saying that the kid who first got very riled up about not getting into Harvard did get into Penn and ended up graduating from Williams. Fucking Williams. If not the then absolutely one of the top 3 best liberal arts colleges in the USA, and he's whining.

Overall the Asian-American beef is that all these kids get 1600s on their SATs and 4.7 or whatever elevated GPAs they had and then they don't get in at their top schools.

Here's my perspective. I got the equivalent of a 1600 (they have renormed the SAT twice since I took it and scores have gone up) and I was the only person at CHHS to be 4.0 when I graduated. And doing those two things was fucking child's play compared to the other things I did. Winning the state championship, running a reggae band, etc. Even more importantly, the other things I did were so much more important to my life. Learning to be on a team and accept a role and appreciate and celebrate my teammates, many of whom had very different profiles from me and have done different things in life, that was huge.

And perhaps the most important thing I did was something I didn't do all that well, which was basketball. I never got that good, but I did try, and doing so gave me some contact with a lot of other people with whom I would never have otherwise been in contact. And it taught me humility and a since of my own limitations. And I kept trying, and over time I got marginally better.

But back to the college admissions thing. I interview for Yale, and when I do so, my job is to get a sense of who these people are and convey it back to the rest of the admissions team. Whether they read it or weight it much, I don't know. I have interviewed a bunch of Asian kids who I'm sure look great on paper, and some of them are interesting and have a spark in their eye because they are warm and engaging souls, others of them don't. I try to reflect that in my comments. In that regard they are just like everybody else I interview. I talked to a kid this year from Cary, some generic white kid, and he was an asshole. That was gently reflected in my comments, mostly as the very faint praise that damns.

Overall, as has been well publicized, many Asian nations -- China, Korea, Singapore, etc. -- along with the Finns, have been kicking America's ass on standardized tests, especially in STEM fields. It is presented as a national crisis. And yet America has been stubbornly more productive then most other nations (though China, Israel, and Estonia are catching up) at entrepreneurship and economic dynamism. Why is that? I like to think that it is partly because our society is structured in such a way as to reward things other than GPAs and test scores. Creativity, grit, what theorists call "multiple intelligences". Once you graduate, the market really doesn't give a fuck where you went to school. If you have a good idea, if your empanada is tastier and you can produce, market, and distribute at scale and at an agreeable price point, you win.

Re the Asian kids themselves, mostly I feel sad for them. They are victims of the culture of GPA and SAT, of tennis, chess, and violin. They get hauled in to afterschool study sessions with intensive Chinese lessons like the ones that happen or used to happen at Seawell. They are deprived of enjoyable, goofy, foolhardy, American teenagerdom. I have seen it.

******

In all my years of education, some of the most enjoyable time I spent was on the basketball court at Columbia. There was some good ball, and an interesting and very meritocratic culture, as evolves in most gyms. Winners held the court, and the best players had a wide variety of backgrounds. In addition to students, there were guys who worked for the university of a wide variety of ethnicities, black, hispanics of many shades and ethnic mixes. I was decidedly lower-middle tier, which meant that most of the time I wasn't playing on court #1 at peek hour (5-7 pm).

There was this one Asian kid, maybe 5'11", not the most athletic player out there, but fast enough, fit enough, and with a tremendous handle and a smooth jumper, so he could create driving opportunities because they had to respect him outside. Long before Jeremy Lin, so he had no role models at the top level, just a kid who had driven himself to excel. That guy got picked up on court #1. But he was a loner, barely spoke to anyone.

And then there were a bunch of other Asian kids who flat out sucked, but they came out now and again. I remember one night, probably a Friday, there were a bunch of them out there I got involved in a game of 3 on 3 with them. They were horrible. They were throwing up ridiculous hook shots and crazy shit that would hit the backboard if they were lucky. And then they would fall on the ground laughing. I'm not sure I've ever had more fun on the basketball court.

I do hope the Asian ultraachievers of today have this much fun, More importantly, I hope their parents allow and encourage them to hang out with lots of other kids and do all sorts of things that are silly and often counterproductive. The great virtue of doing those things when you are young is that -- under the best of circumstances -- you can go home and talk to your parents about what you did and learn lessons in a safeish environment. There were definitely times when it seemed like that wasn't happening with some of Natalie's Asian friends.

On the road again, narrow wheels edition

Yesterday morning I had to drop Graham off for robotics competition, and I saw a guy I know from out in RTP whose kid is on the team. I stopped and talked to him, and he told me he was riding 65 miles that day, ramping up to a 100-mile charity ride. His wife, he told me, wouldn't let him get a motorcycle.

Later in the afternoon, after hustling with Mary down to Buies Creek to catch the tail end of the robotics (we were a little late), I decided to go out riding myself. It was either that or go running, and I was sore from a longish run on Saturday. Plus I have been nagged a little in the back of my mind by the thought of my bicycle rusting and languishing in the basement. When I bought the bike back in 2007 or so it was, after all, the most expensive thing I had ever bought for myself -- as opposed to a house or a car. It has since been passed in that category by the little laptop I am typing on, but not by much.

In any case, I went out for a bike ride, with the intention of just "reminding the biking muscles that they exist." In the end I went all the way out to Calvander and then looped back home through downtown Carrboro and Chapel Hill, just because I like to. By the end I had done more than remind the muscles they were there. I was sore and a little bit concerned that I might get some cramping.

But I didn't. I made it home and rehydrated and ate a bunch of food. It was all good. I do think that the sitting meditation and the mindfulness re stretching it is encouraging is helping me all around.

And my bike did fine. No blowouts, brakes were good. I gotta keep mixing the biking in to my exercise portfolio.

Argument, and procrastination

Mary and I just got in an argument. I am tempted to add details, but that would contravene my policy of not writing about marital strife.

Then, while paying bills, I chanced to look at Natalie's bank account, which had risen since I last looked at it. I must confess to feeling considerable pride looking at her list of transactions and the frugality that they imply. Mostly because I know it's about her being super busy doing cool things, as opposed to squandering money on beer, cheeseburgers and the like, as I did in my day. And I know that she is actually having fun, or at least faking it pretty good.

Then I paid bills, including for a couple of Aflac policies my mom started for me years ago of questionable value. I refreshed my memory of what one of them is for.

It is, in short, remarkable the range of things one can poke one's nose into while trying to procrastinate from doing taxes.

Alpha, mastery, and purpose

In recent weeks I've had a number of conversations with individuals who invest their own portfolios in individual stocks. A couple of them have done well, one of them exceptionally so.

One thing they have in common is that they each of them is somewhat underenthused about and underengaged in their primary breadwinning activity, in one case academia, in the other case law. But they each got really excited in talking about their stocks, or their practice of investing in them (in one case, we didn't talk specific stocks, just the fact that the person bought and sold them).

Then there's also the case of someone local, a woman, artist, somewhat quirky, was living at home with her parents last I heard, who wanted to get together and talk markets. She has been day trading S&P index futures, I think. I suggested we get together for coffee around 3, and she was like "no no no, that's the trading day." She said she couldn't possibly get together before 5, because she had "aftermarket activities" to engage in. She had also reached out to me sometime to see if I knew where she could rent an apartment around our neighborhood. By that time I'm trying to shut down and exercise and/or get home to my family.

Which leads me to wonder: is active engagement in the market -- trying to beat it -- often really reflective of a feeling of lack of engagement and/or success in one's primary professional activity?

And, now that I say that, I must ask it of myself. To what extent have I followed that path?

In any case, for the moment I need to get back to the business of taking care of my people.

Dinner date

We had dinner with some neighbors yesterday evening, who have a boy who is Graham's age and who shares some of his enthusiasms and quirks. The two of them were very animated at dinner, to the point of loudly monopolizing the dinner table conversation, such that Graham wasn't hardly even eating. I tried to lightly steer the conversation by, for example, looping in the boy's less quirky younger sister, to open things up.

Afterwards, our neighbor suggested we all go in the back yard to watch the sunset, apparently something they do regularly. When we were out there I was, I fear, slightly too negative about some of the things the boy was doing (pursuing ultra-accelerated math, thinking about entrepreneurialism as a path [my gut was he didn't have the people-skill inclination that would make him good at going out and pitching endlessly]). I wasn't overbearing, but the mom did pick up on it a little.

I hope not too much. I think I was ultimately coming from a place of fear about Graham's own social ticks and how they might mess him up and, of course, my own experience -- mom not letting them skip one grade and doing lots of things (getting braces on my teeth early, buying me Izod shirts, etc) to help me assimilate towards the middle socially, which ultimately has given me a bigger pack of people with whom I can associate and more social practice, in a sense, so maybe somewhat less bad social skills, in aggregate.

But last night I was not at my best. My own insecurities got tapped, and I acted out a little. But the kid is truly an excellent kid and we want Graham and him to hang out as much as humanly possible.

There's clearly only one thing to do: write an effusive thank you note and promise to have them over soon.

IRL again

The news broke this week that Facebook was under attack by the US Dept of Housing and Urban Development under the charge that its microtargeting of specific demographic categories, when carried to a logical extreme, replicated the "redlining" practices whereby, in days that seemed to be of yore, African-Americans and other minorities were excluded from buying houses in specific developments, which turned out to be almost everywhere except where white people wanted them to live.

We were talking yesterday after our soccer game about how game designers employed behavioral psychologists to figure out how to make games more addictive, just like they used to tune the nicotine content of cigarettes to keep people puffing.

More and more, the virtual world, as it extends to encompass all aspects of our lives, comes to replicate the ills we have sought to curtail IRL (in real life) through accrued wisdom, so we have to learn lessons all over again.

It is reminiscent of nothing so much as the world of Jose Luis Borges, in which the noumenal world extends to be coterminous with the phenomenal. As in the famous fable of the map which comprises the story "On Exactitude in Science"

... In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

But now it is time to shave and get ready for brunch.

Kids

A little annoyed right now at my beloved daughter. I'm working hard to coordinate flights for her around Europe and home in late June right now, and she goes dark on me, despite me communicating with her entirely in the coin of the young people's realm: the text. Ah well.

On the positive side, our soccer team won today after getting whumped last week, and most of us had to play the whole game because of the large number of slackers off galavanting on some beach cuz it's Spring Break. I will have the last laugh late in the season, when I do some of my own traveling, because it will be hotter then. Cosmic justice, you gotta love it.

Mary is working in the yard now, and won't want to come in till it's pretty much dark, so I should really go have a snack.

Starting the day

One of the great things about not being on the road is being able to more easily adhere to healthy rhythms and practices, and one of the absolute best and most crucial for me is my early morning quiet time.

I get up early, before everyone else, when everything is quiet and do basics: make coffee, feed cats (so Rascal will leave me the fuck alone). While the coffee brews, I have pure quiet time. For some time it was closer to the "prayer" modality, which is to say that I sought to channel my thoughts intentionally and often in the form of words towards some other presupposed entity, if not necessarily an anthropomorphized deity.

More recently, I am moving towards more of a "meditation" mode, which I view as being more about focusing on clearing the mind. I put "prayer" and "meditation" in quotes because who knows what the words actually mean. In a sense the practice of engaging in either or both of them is groping towards one's own workable conception of them, or perhaps rather one's practice of them, inasmuch as each of them are actions of a sort.

Then I mix in crunches and push ups.

By now the coffee is ready, and I do some reading. The reading has varied over the years. It began with Al-Anon daily readers, but it has branched out to include other spiritual traditions. To date select Jewish stuff has been best, especially Abraham Joshua Heschel, but a slim volume of the stoic Epictetus was also good, as was Tim Galloway's The Inner Game of Tennis. Right now I am reading Chogyam Trungpa's Shambhala: The Way of the Warrior. I haven't found anything Christian that I can read just yet.

After breakfast, prior to working on morning correspondence, I read Nick Murray's daily reader for financial planners, Around the Year. To date Murray is the only one who has grasped and gone after the truly holistic demands of what we do as planners.

Soreness

Natalie came out for lunch yesterday, and before feasting we went for a bit of an exercise walk to "justify our love" for the delicious food we were about to inhale. Natalie has been playing club ultimate frisbee at Yale, meaning she is exercising more and more consistently than she did in high school, where she nominally did frisbee but was really too busy doing mock trial, debate etc. to go to practice much.

I had discussed with her a few times how much doing sports was integral to a good life for me, to the enjoyment of life, and how some baseline level of physical fitness was too. So I asked her if she was enjoying the fitness part of it more, and she said not really, and specifically cited being sore all the time as part of the problem.

I had never really reflected much on the issue of continual soreness, but I will say that it has been with me so long that I think of the mild discomfort as itself just part of life. A little muscle or joint ache tells me that I have done something recently. And if it is not there, I feel slack. Particularly on vacation, I actively want to get to the end of most if not all days having pushed myself hard. I would rather walk seven miles than three miles. And for sure, part of it is that it lets me eat more. No doubt.

Which isn't to say that I don't wrestle with laziness and actually getting out there and doing something. Even as I write this, I'm realizing that I need to hustle to pack my bags for work, including a gym bag so I can stop in to Planet Fitness end of day and put in my statutory 3 miles or so on the treadmill. I don't do it every day, but I need to do it enough days so that I don't have to go out and buy new jeans, which are always uncomfortable at first. And so we can check out Don Chicken on Elliot tonight!

Bad pop music

Natalie is home for spring break, and right now she is back in her room listening to some crappy pop music I have never heard before, singing along. There is a fire in the fireplace, as I try to burn off all the wood I brought onto the screened in porch before it gets warm, so I don't have to haul it back up to the wood pile. All in all, life is pretty good.

Robotics

Mary, granny and I rolled out to day 2 of East Chapel Hill's quest to win a robotics competition in Gibsonville. Graham's role on the team has been limited. He is part of the build team but it's unsure just what his specific responsibilities are. Which is cool. Mostly he is learning about being on a team. He has been staying rather late in the evenings, occasionally to the detriment of his school work. But he's sorting that out too.

The competition was rather intense. It was pretty amazing to see how different the robots were. Each team had to make decisions in the design phase about what aspects of the game to focus on. East's robot focused on "cargo" (hefting bouncy balls into chutes -- worth 3 points) and being a high climber (at the end of each round, the robot hauled itself up to a high platform worth a whopping 12 points). Other teams (Carrboro's team - in its rookie season) specialized in hanging disks (worth two points) and playing defense (making forays into the other team's area, banging against their robots, and generally messing them up). After the qualifying rounds, teams picked others to join "alliances", since it's always a game of 3 on 3. During the qualifiers, Graham was a statistician, and he did a fine job at that. It was important to form teams of complementary skillsets, as opposed to just the ones with the hwas ighest scores.

In the end, East came in 2nd (of 36) and won some special awards. The whole shebang was surprisingly engaging, and when it looked like East might get knocked out in the quarters, I was momentarily crestfallen. They came back.

All in all, I have to give it up to parents who do this all through their kids' childhoods. That is, haul themselves off to soccer, basketball, chess, whatever kind of competition. It's a total time- and soul-suck, involving an epic selflessness. Or does it? Certainly one hears of all too many instances of parents getting excessively wrapped up in living through their kids' accomplishments, and the college admissions scandal that broke last week may be just the most extreme instance of that. My point being that this utter level of commitment is not in some sense so selfless at all.

Our team picked the team from Orange High School as an alliance partner, which was a little surprising initially because they weren't ranked that highly. But the parents were right next to us in the stands, and they knew what they were watching (unlike us). They were also vigorous cheerers, and there was a lot of back and forth between alliances between rounds. Blue Alliance vs. Red Alliance, etc. True call and response. At one point in time, the opposing alliance, across the gym, started chanting "We believe that we will win" and then pausing, waiting for us to respond. I was ready to shout them down. The Orange parents did not. The woman to my left, a schoolteacher, explained to me that they did not like that cheer and did not participate in it. Good eggs.

Back and forth

I have been toin and froin a bit since last I wrote. A stop in through San Franscisco to see some peeps, now down in N Myrtle Beach to pick up Natalie from Spring Break. Having an all too rare sighting of the Atlantic Ocean as we speak, here at this condo "resort" where they only had non-dairy creamer for coffee not just in the room but also in the breakfast place (conveniently right across from my room). The woman was about to charge me $2.15 for a cup of milk for my coffee but I reminded her about the internet. Since she gave me some milk I will refrain from naming the resort.

Otherwise all good. Nice to see the sea, slept with my sliding glass door open, but my phone kept beeping at me. I didn't need that.

More later.

Home again, as it were

Back in this same cafe in Seattle near Mark's from whence I posted two years ago. The croissants are so damned good.

Not surprisingly, I return to the same theme, or a variant thereupon. There was a woman about my age, OK, probably younger, who was in here with her young girl (that's how I know she was younger). She started talking to a woman standing next to her about how she was from Ann Arbor and moved here a few years ago and how much Seattle was like Ann Arbor, blah blah blah.

I resisted the temptation to jump in and say: "My wife went to school there and her dad is from there and I really want to visit and get a sandwich from Zingerman's blah blah blah." Because the game she was playing and that we play all the time is "I am from the same tribe you are and we are educated and affluent and isn't that nice?" And that's all there is to it. We are from the same tribe. It is good sales technique.

And look where that has got us.

Whiplash

At around 8 on Friday night, I was headed up to Josh's house at the lake. It was a nasty night. Driving rain made the brights almost counterproductive. When I got to PayJay's on Route 1, I pulled off into the parking lot to enter the lake house address into my GPS so it would guide me the last bit, which I didn't feel confident to navigate in the dark.

I pulled off into the exit from the parking lot onto the road, so that my car was parallel to the road. In retrospect, it wasn't the absolute best place to perform this task, but there was plenty of space behind me, at least two if not three car lengths, where anybody could get around me to get into or out of the parking lot, and I wasn't gonna be there but 30 seconds, and my lights were on.

All this notwithstanding, I'm sitting there with my phone in my hand when I hear a crunching sound off to my right and I feel the rear of my car shifting to the left with a reasonable amount of force. Yes that's right, fair reader, somebody exiting the parking lot had slammed into my parked car, going pretty fast. I exclaimed something, most likely an expletive, but then within a microsecond or so my brain, ever the optimist, entered into denial and thought "that didn't just happen, did it?" But of course it had.

I got out, looked at my car, then looked back into the parking lot where some small car had a portion of its front bumper hanging off. I went up to it and knocked on the window. A guy was sitting there with his cellphone in hand, and I asked him "Are you OK?" (honestly, what he should have been asking me), and he's like "Yeah, I hit someone." "That was me." "Oh, I didn't see you, my windshield was a little bit fogged up." When I told him I thought we needed to call the cops he said. "Do we have to? My license is a little bit messed up. But I do have insurance. I was just calling my guy about my insurance."

Anyway, this is taking longer to narrate than I thought it would. I called up Josh because I didn't think he was in front of me and confirmed we needed an incident report, then called 911. Not too long thereafter, Melvin (the guy, who was entirely apologetic, and promised he had insurance) and I were waiting inside the store, and Josh shows up. Being hungry, Josh of course availed himself of not one but two pieces of the fried chicken I had in the back of the car, and I joined him in a drumstick while we waited for the sheriff's officer to get there. It was still hot.

In due course, the officer arrived, took our licenses and plates, but not our insurance and registrations, surprisingly, and in any case it didn't really matter because Melvin "didn't have no GEICO card on him" -- which somewhat begged the question of how he had been calling his insurance guy earlier. The officer promised a report would be available at the Warren County Sheriff's office on Monday morning, which we shall see about soon. Josh's professional assessment was that Melvin almost certainly did not have insurance, and the cop didn't want to embarrass him further by citing him for it, and I get that.  It was a rainy Friday and the guy had fucked up his car or, worse, his mom's or cousin's, and there was no reason to mess him up worse. He was a nice guy and was sincerely contrite. It's for situation's like this that we carry uninsured motorist coverage.

As to whiplash, my back felt and feels a little bit achy but I think it's getting better. Konanc didn't make it up there to give me a free professional opinion, sadly. Even more sadly, I didn't play basketball although the court was, surprisingly, dry enough. The car drives fine but I wouldn't be shocked if it needs $7k in work.

Listening in the car

Right now my car listening is Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. I have the actual book but have never made much headway in it, because it is boring, as most behavioral finance stuff is. I have been listening to a lot of this kind of non-fiction in the car, vaguely stuff that is supposed to help people learn how to think about stuff and manage life. I can't even list all the titles, and I also start to forget the authors a little because they blur together a little (but include Angela Duckworth, Daniel Pink, Ray Dalio...)

In fact, narratives stick better in my mind, including the bios of John Hope Franklin and Trevor Noah, as well as The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Probably I should listen to more of those. I was, after all, a literature person rather than a philosophy or other social science one, and there's a reason for that.

But of course!

A fair amount of ink has been spilled in the financial press this weekend about the troubles at Kraft/Heinz and how that has impacted Berkshire Hathaway's results. The story basically goes like this: "Kraft/Heinz got pummeled because the American consumer is moving away from legacy brands like Oscar Meyer and Heinz ketchup, but these are the kinds of brands Buffett likes so therefore Berkshire's model is at risk." And we all say, "but of course, that makes all the sense in the world." And it does, and I, having read one very fat bio of Buffett plus about 50 of his roughly 55 annual letters, can attest that this thesis makes a lot of sense.

Problem is, I didn't see it coming beforehand, even though I was aware both of the ever-diminishing stickiness of American brands as consumers move more to store brands, generics, fresh food (kinda) and so on. I was also aware of Buffett's love -- thanks to the strong influence of Charlie Munger -- of a good brand.

That's because there are all too many themes, trends, and theses out there in the marketplace, and tracking and weighing any of them consistently and confidently is deucedly tricky. I'm sure there are a few gurus who saw this coming and will bask in the financial media sunshine for a few days for having done so. Some of them may have made good money placing bets here. But guessing which guru will be right cycle after cycle is its own game. It is therefore imperative that in thinking about markets, we focus on data over long periods of time and the things that have offered consistent incremental advantage, namely factors, and investor behavior.


nb. By far the best thing to have come out of the reporting of the Kraft/Heinz results was the piece in the Journal on Saturday about Buffett's Brazilian partner 3G and its practice of zero-based budgeting, how it has influenced management in consumer goods companies worldwide, and how the relentless focus on cost-control at Kraft-Heinz meant that it wasn't paying enough attention to the consumer and got hammered. That was where the wisdom was.

Driving and scrapping

Graham and I went out driving at the Friday Center parking lot for the 3rd time today. He put the car in reverse for the first time, which is an odd thing for sure. There are very few analogous experiences in life, there's not even much that preps you for that in the experience of riding a bike. I suppose back in the day bumper cars helped prep us a little. But my kids have never been into going to the rides or the State Fair -- we were never really at the beach enough for it to be an issue.

In a recent conversation with another parent of a kid on the spectrum, I learned that that kid -- now a college graduate -- was living at home and refused to go places because he didn't know his way around town, except to go to the gym. So I am beginning, as consistently and programmatically as possible, to try to get Graham to pay attention to where we are going and to have him give me directions to common places we go. It is surprising how little attention he pays, how few places he knows how to get to. So we will work on that.

After I got back Mary and I got into a little scrap. As a matter of policy, I don't delve much into marital difficulties here on the blog. Ultimately for us -- and I think for many -- many of our disagreement come down to the question of who is giving up the most, who is making the greatest sacrifice, for the sake of the household. Which is a tough thing to work through. But conversations with many others, women as well as men, confirm that I/we are not alone in this.

What is mine

At my normal Saturday morning meeting today, my mind continued to focus on a business meeting I had yesterday, in which one of my partners kind of rode roughshod over our plan in a way that annoys me and is reminiscent of my dad. I was able to listen to what was shared some, but not too much, perhaps not quite as much as would have been optimal.

After the meeting, I said hello to a client with whom I hadn't been able to connect for a while. He shared a bunch of issues with me, some of them kind of financial, some of them familial. Some of them are in domains in which I could be of service, if asked, or I could refer him to someone who could: and he knows it. But he didn't ask, because he was too far down in his own weeds.

And I realized it was time to get Graham to martial arts, that I can't ultimately control either of these folks, and I shouldn't let myself be subsumed by them. In the case of the Friday's meeting, we either get the business or we don't, neither is fatal. With my client, I just need to give him what he wants.

Self torture

Today is a holiday for me: Presidents' Day. I could work, but I'm not going to, aside from working on my taxes a little. And I'll do some reading, indeed, have already done so, about the new economic zone on the border of Kazakhstan and Xinjiang and how the politics of China's Belt and Road Initiative are complicating things there, even as BRI itself breathes life into an otherwise sleepy place.

So it would have been nice to have had a restful night of sleep. But no, my brain's not gonna let that just happen. Instead, somewhere around 5 in the morning, it starts obsessing about the 4 main things that go into underwriting a mortgage. I only know about this from a project I did back in the summer of 2003 doing a time and motion study of mortgage underwriting for a private mortgage insurer.

I could think of 3 of the 4 (the borrower's credit rating, income, and assets), but not the 4th. Somewhere around 630 or so I realized the fourth might be the appraisal of the property being bought (it is). Mostly my brain just tortured itself.

But why, we may ask. Why would it do that? Maybe because Mary was pregnant with Graham then, indeed, it was during that project that I was in Albany in August 2003 when the power went out all up and down the East Coast, scaring the shit out of me, since I initially assumed it must be September 11 redux. Then yesterday I'm out teaching Graham to drive.

Or maybe it's because it was on that mortgage underwriting project that, while visiting with our client down in Raleigh, I found myself across the table from an African-American woman from my high school class that I had never heard of and could have sworn I had never laid eyes on, but she was our homecoming queen. And tonight we have a 35th reunion meeting at which there will be a couple of African-American women, and I can't begin to put faces to names.

It is a very odd thing. I was in almost all honors and AP classes as high school wore on, and there weren't many black people in them. I knew all the black guys because I played basketball with them -- like any NC male, I played ball, but there were few black women out there (Pam Clarke), and few in classes with me, so I largely don't know them.

Killing cinema

Today's obit in the Times for Bruno Ganz made me ponder the state of the cinema today. It listed so many films I had never heard of, by directors I know. There was a time that I stayed on top of this kind of thing, but that time is long, long past, having been superceded by the earning of dollars and the raising of rugrats.

But I wonder if we have perhaps failed these very rugrats by not letting them know that we care about cinema. Mary and I used to go to a lot of movies, even films. Our very first real conversation, after all, was anchored by sharing our love for Dushan Makaveyev's work (and Wikipedia now tells me that Makaveyev died a few weeks ago).

So there is this very broad corpus of great work to which we haven't exposed our kids at all. Yes, we have shown them Monty Python, and Peter Sellers's best work (including The Mouse That Roared), and Airplane. When they were young, I had a copy of Mr Hulot's Holiday and I tried to get them involved in it, with a little success. I think we've shown them a little Hitchcock.

But mostly not. Mostly we watch whatever we can get them to watch, which has been a lot of sitcoms for Natalie and an awful lot of adventure for Graham. A lot of Star Trek, which has been good for me.

And I guess they are just at the age at which the great and slow stuff might even begin to appeal to them. To get to that stage myself, I basically had to consume such a huge volume of genre stuff that I was exhausted by its conventions -- that I basically already knew what was likely to come next.

I think Graham is getting there. We're in the middle of season 3 of The Wire now. Barksdale just got out of prison, and has reentered the world of his criminal enterprise, which has been nurtured by Stringer Bell in his absence, who has substantially corporatized and defanged it, making it more profitable and less deadly, but something Barksdale can't understand. Graham looked at Stringer and Barksdale and said: "I think within three episodes one of those two will have killed the other one." I agree.

Bezos and his dick

Yesterday's news that Amazon will not set up HQ2 in Long Island City is big. I won't go too far into it, save to say that I think it is a loss for New York and for America, in the sense that we are not nurturing our densest metro area which -- for all its faults -- is one of our great treasures, and has been slammed by a lot of things, but nothing so much as the 2017 tax bill and its treatment of state and local taxes, which has provided people with yet another reason to leave the tri-state area. So much good happens there. I will refer you again to Broughton grad Ryan Avent's The Gated City and his well-reasoned defense of density and its benefits writ large.

I am sure that I have shared my love-hate relationship with Amazon and the tech giants. We all have it. We love them and we fear them. Amazon has been ruling the most in the last few years, so it is front and center. As an investor with a data-driven reticence to focus on the selection of individual securities, I frankly expect it to revert to the mean before too long, as most investor infatuations do.

And it is interesting to see how that might be happening: having become the world's richest man, Bezos gets a little caught up in Hollywood, glamour, and beautiful people. Has an affair with a supermodel looking woman. Gets caught. Moves toward divorce from his wife of a quarter century or so.

So now, all of a sudden, Bezos -- who had viewed HQ2 as a way of decentralizing power within the organization -- is staring down the barrel of a divorce which could see his holdings in the company cut in half, roughly, which would further erode his control of the company. So -- HQ2, having been split in half already, is dialed back. The Northern Virginia campus will continue to grow, but it will be a lesser outpost, as will the new Nashville facility. Amazon's core strategic growth for the foreseeable future will continue to be focused in Seattle, a place which is already having a huge affordability crisis. So it is going to be hard to attract and recruit talent there. They are already having to hire just whoever is already there.

Wellness

Everybody in my industry talks about holistic financial planning, and there is tremendous buzz about the concept of financial wellness. Many of my reflections here on the blog have been about the interrelations between aging, decay, and maintenance, and you can be assured that in the back of my mind I am thinking in terms of time allocation, which can be managed with and translated into money. And I have often made the analogy between the financial advisor/planner and the general practitioner physician, in conversation if not here.

The more I think about it, I am increasingly of the mind that there is no fine or firm line between financial wellness and wellness generally. They are intimately bound up together. This thinking is to some extent being facilitated by William Goetzmann's Money Changes Everything, a book by a Yale professor which looks at the roots of finance going back to Mesopotamia. It is not light reading.

I have to present to a 401k in a couple of weeks on financial wellness, am in the process of developing the presentation. We'll see how much I meld the concepts of financial with physical/mental wellness in this presentation.

Funny pages

While we were gone to New Orleans, the newspaper delivery person -- someone I actually know from high school, which is cool -- slipped us a free copy of the News and Observer Sunday paper. Which included funny pages, which I haven't seen for a long time.

I took the time to read through them, and was mildly amused. There were no moments of convulsive guffawing, just some low-volume chuckles and slight curling of the mouth. But, as someone who makes and has made an effort to produce a volume of hopefully readable and worthwhile text over a long period of time, I have all the respect in the world for the people who draw and write the comic strips. It ain't easy to just keep producing, day in day out, or week in week out, year after year.

Perhaps more importantly, it's very helpful for me to adjust my expectations of what constitutes good humor. What's wrong with dredging a slight moment of sympathetic recognition or a remembrance of childhood from the funny pages, as opposed to the full body laughs that came from the best of Dave Chappelle's first season? You can't have genius all the time, and if you are demanding it of the universe constantly, you're setting yourself up for unhappiness. Much better to accept what's on offer and roll forward.

Big and easy

Mary and I are getting ready to go to New Orleans tomorrow for the weekend, our first time ever. The occasion for the trip is a little talk I have to give at a conference of Slavists on alternative career paths -- the last time I am ever doing this for free, unless it's a short drive from home.

It's also the first time we've ever gotten on a plane to go somewhere for a weekend for fun, and our first weekend alone as a couple for several years. We did it maybe in 2015 in Asheville or so after dropping Natalie off at camp or something.

It's obvious that it's a good thing to do for our relationship. Graham is 1/8th of the way through high school now, and of course it's clear to me that that will be over tomorrowish, the way time flies at our age. We need to relearn how to spend time together enjoyably as a couple.

The other day Adam said the blog was sometimes repetitive, and I know that I have been thinking about this theme for a while, so it's likely I've blogged about it. So I'll stop.

The great cycle of forest-trimming

I got home from lunch and a couple of errands yesterday, and what should await me but a bunch of Asplundh trucks in front of our house, trimming back branches. Making a lot of noise. Great.

I remember well the last time they were on our block, I wrote about it in this post. So now we can see they are running in about 5 year cycles here, at least in our mature, forested neighborhood. Their deployment was no doubt occasioned by the couple of outages we've had this year, though I honestly can't say if our neighborhood is worse than any other around here.

One thing that does appear to be the case, at least anecdotally is that Duke Power is being proactive and mindful about managing the risk associated with overhanging trees. Hopefully it has done enough, unlike PG&E, the Northern California utility that was forced to file for bankruptcy last month because of claims arising from all the fires in that region -- many of which have been put down to its failure to keep its power lines safe.

Of course, the weather (and climate?) has been kinder to North Carolina in the last decade or so than it has to Northern California. We haven't had a drought, so our trees are healthy, whereas NoCal's have been weakened by drought. The story is more complicated than that, to be sure, but I can't speculate further right now, because it's time to pack up and get ready for first tennis (coming for you, Z), then work.

College fun

We had a nice video call with Natalie on Sunday evening while granny was over for dinner. She was working in the Branford library, then had to go outside because the fire alarm kept going off, then, once that was over, she retreated to the Branford common room where a Super Bowl party was going on and sat in front of a mirror (details added for future memory sparks).

She told us that she had a paper due for her essay-writing class the next evening at 8, and that it was hard because it was in the autobiographical mode, which wasn't something she was comfortable with (despite having written fine college essays).

Then, yesterday evening at 7 she texts mom a picture of the menu from a pescatarian (mostly vegetarian) Chinese New Year feast she was attending, and said it was running longer than she was expecting and that she didn't have her paper done. This made Mr. Achievement over here nervous, and I nudged her a little. She said that she would only get marked down a third of a grade for being late, and that it wasn't worth rushing.

In the end, I think she made the right decision. Trying new stuff out, meeting people, experiencing the world, those are the benefits of being in college and going to a place like Yale where there's a lot on offer. Her grades will be fine, she works plenty hard and is super organized. Straight As her first semester, something I never quite pulled off. And Lord knows I wasted tons of time doing many things much less productive than eating a bunch of interesting Chinese food.

The lesson for me is, clearly, back the fuck off.

Evolving identity

Over dinner last night I learned that Graham needed to focus on Latin homework rather than starting season 3 of The Wire with me because he had gotten a 40 on a Latin test. Not a quiz, a test. Now, this teacher is known for giving hard tests and for letting kids make up their mistakes, but a 40?

We are paying $80 a week to an executive function coach to help Graham with issues around studying and being organized, and a few weeks back she came and found me after their session to tell me that Graham was on top of his Powerschool, which I interpreted to mean that I should get out of his jock. I perhaps shouldn't have backed off as far.

Then I sat with Graham to help him with his Latin, a language which I only took 1 year of, 35 years ago, more or less as a lark because it wasn't an honors class and it was super easy. Needless to say, despite years of Spanish and French and traveling in Italy and Brazil and also knowing Russian and other Slavic languages so I am comfortable with a language with cases and declensions, it wasn't easy. Particularly since they were translating pretty abstract passages from freaking Cicero.

And Graham did not have a handle on it. He was struggling pretty mightily.

So now Graham is on the cusp of getting at least one B in his first semester in high school. Which would axe his chances of being a valedictorian, i.e. being in the top 10% of his class. Sigh.

So I guess I need to be more attentive and offer more guidance. Mostly around the structured process of how to study, the need to put in the work, and making choices (maybe not staying at Robotics Club till 9 several nights a week).

Over the course of our lives we learn to distinguish between the things that come to us more or less by nature -- in our case (me and Graham) great memories, curiosity, persistence in searching down answers -- and the things that come to us by adjusting our natures to the demands of the world so as to channel our gifts towards accomplishment. In some real if paradoxical sense, it is only the latter -- what we become by learning the Way of the World -- that can really said to belong to "me," because it reflects intentional effort on my part. Which is to say, to extend beyond the logic of Descartes' cogito ("I think therefore I am"), that my truest "I" is the part of me that overcomes the tendencies bequeathed me at birth.

Limits

I often come across people who are in career transition, or perhaps have substance use disorder issues, or maybe are trying to grow a business, and I want to help them by sharing my own experience. I have been through a lot of this stuff and have meditated, read, prayed, and otherwise just pushed through various flavors of this stuff, and I always believe that I can be of service to them. In recent weeks I've had a client and a good prospect who are in the middle of looking for their next roles, and I've held myself out as a resource.

But then, in fact, as I wrack my brain for how I can actually, concretely help them with contacts etc., as opposed to with general exhortations ("get out and talk to people, have faith in yourself, keep going, read this, everybody's been through it"), my stable of resources is somewhat thin on the ground.

Right now, that's largely reflective of the fact that I haven't been out and meeting that many new people myself, I haven't been in the streets as much. On the one hand, that's no big loss. Intrinsically, and I've blogged about this before and have read about the phenomenon in both Daniel Pink's When and Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, there's no particular reason for me to want to be out meeting more people. People's desire to do this winnows as we age. I know a lot of excellent people, and I don't have time to adequately fulfill all the roles that I have allowed to settle on me and keep in touch with all of them.

I've also been trying to focus on physical health and being at home with my kids and Mary, as we have launched Natalie into the world and I'm all too conscious that Graham is on his way to the bigger world. And I just feel fat.

But there is something about being in the streets, about looking for angles new things, meeting more people, that is invigorating, and opens new pathways in the brain.

Sweet relief

I was supposed to meet with a pretty good-sized prospect today, back for a second meeting to discuss a proposed portfolio/approach, but their dog had gotten cancer and needed to go to the vet. Seriously. I could have been better prepared, having gotten caught up at a client's house for longer than anticipated yesterday, so I was behind in prepping. So I was pleased to be relieved of this task, to put it off for another day.

Then, while I was at martial arts with Graham, I got a text from his executive function coach, asking if we could move his session tomorrow back from 10 am to 2 pm. Oh yes we can! So I can chill and enjoy my Sunday pancakes a little better, instead of feeling pressed for time to hustle over to Carrboro.

It is excellent and most welcome to have a second weekend in a row in which there is little I really need to do. Sure, I could be trying to get out ahead on taxes, and yes I could be carting stuff off to the Goodwill Store. But I'm not. Instead, I chilled on the couch and read the pretty decent mystery novel I've been working through. Now I will do a little more serious reading (Buffett's 2014 shareholder letter) before heading out for a run, because I'm not but so slack.

Half-Lion

Just finished up a biography of Narasimha Rao, who was President of India from 1991-1996 and was the guy who fundamentally opened India up to liberal capitalism, after it had moldered under the Nehru-Gandhis. I had never heard of the guy, and am not sure how it got onto my shelf. Probably The Economist had given it a good review or something.

In any case, it was a tough reed, but ultimately a rewarding one. The world is such a large place, there is so much going on out there, and it's impossible for us to have our arms around all of it. But that doesn't mean that diversifying what's coming into one's brain doesn't bear fruit. Alongside Our Daily Bread, the bio of Green Revolution scion Norman Borlaug, this book opened new doors into the recent history of the developing world in a way that very little else has.

In the end, the key learnings from this book were the following:

• to effect significant change, it's often important to present the change as being continuous with the ideas of that which is being changed: Rao used Nehru's rhetoric to validate some of his reforms
• be wiley and think several steps ahead. This is hard for idealists like myself. Tactics sometimes precede strategy

The author, a young PhD candidate from Princeton named Vinay Sitapati, characterized a bio of Deng Xiaopeng by Ezra Vogel as "magisterial." That's high praise. That book is now on my list.

Losing weight

Just went upstairs with a firm intention to get my computer and blog, but I got sidetracked into first changing the sheets and then responding to a couple of emails from clients and/or potential partners. Worked through that.

So I weigh too much. I know that. 10 pounds more than I should, 15 more than would be ideal. My pants definitely know that, or at least they tell me that. And I hate shopping.

I have been trying to exercise more. I ran a bunch on Saturday, did some core and upper body work yesterday (should have done more, but was kind of hamstrung waiting for a truck so we could deliver Graham's old bunk bed to a Burmese family -- I'll spare you that story), etc. I will work out today at the gym, I promise I will. Even though this couch here is mighty warm and nice, as is this novel I am reading.

But I have a real difficulty eating less. I am just not good at it. I like food too much, and I consider it my due, since I have quit so many other things that are bad for me. Yesterday night we went to a new place (Haw River Grill on Elliot, perfectly fine if not exceptional -- not better than Al's, for example) and I had a burger and shared a bunch of fries with the table. I surely ate more of them than anyone. My attempt at moderation consisted of not getting cheese on the burger.

To seriously lose some of this weight, I need to eat less, or seriously ramp up the exercise, and the latter is hard because of time constraints and, frankly, aging concerns. Non-muscular pain in my feet if I run too far/long, for instance. Sigh.

Volunteers at the core

For the second morning in a row, Mary was off to some meeting pertaining to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools Special Needs Advisory Council, on which she's been serving for some time now. She volunteers in a lot of other contexts, and she takes it seriously. She gets anxious before meetings, worried that she won't come off at her best.

A woman who serves on a board with me, and who has served on many and has very good instincts, said at a meeting not long ago that she had been thinking a lot about the extent to which many organizations -- and by extension much of our society -- was propped up on female volunteer labor. One of my first, if not quite my first (OK, maybe my first) instincts was to say to myself "hey, I volunteer a lot too," but then I realized it was not all about me and I didn't say anything aloud.

But I was thinking just now about the overall health of high-performance school systems like ours may be partially explained by the presence of a lot of volunteer hours filling in with little or large touches to support this or that activity or initiative that the school system itself doesn't have the institutional agility to support. And that he absence of this pool of volunteer labor -- whether because less affluent working moms have to participate in the labor force at higher rates and work more hours at shittier jobs, or because they weren't imbued with as intense a sense of responsibility for or influence over their kids' educational outcomes by the models of displayed to them by their parents -- might play a big role in the challenges of school systems in lower wealth areas.

Maybe.

As counter-examples, I remember one time going to an orientation meeting about how non-profits could volunteer for shifts to feed people at a homeless shelter, and I was impressed more than anything by the fact that the upper middle class was significantly under-represented, whereas there were a lot of people from working class churches etc. there. Also by the fact that the working class -- whatever its political persuasion -- really seems to show up big time in disaster recovery efforts after hurricanes, etc, in a way that the chattering class does not. Which is to say that our volunteerism is arguably more self-serving, driven as it is by an urge to protect our interests as a class. Which is one of the things others hate about us.

The extreme grey

It is very grey outside today, as it has been for so much of the last few weeks, which hasn't really helped. Meanwhile, Natalie has flown north after a long and lovely holiday break, and we took down the Christmas tree. As if in honor of all of that, I find myself in my finest charcoal grey outfit of flannel, chamois, and sweats, waiting for the plumber to call to come fix our water heater, which keeps breaking.

Intensely interesting story in today's Journal about Northern California's utility PG&E, and all the things that have put it in trouble (a subsequent story says that it is already filing for bankruptcy). Basically, the fires in Northern California -- and insurance claims related to them -- have bankrupted the firm. So many themes come together: climate change, population density, control of people's land (not wanting to let utility on to cut down trees in danger zones) etc etc. Utilities are an intensely-regulated business, and they are not able to easily change rates to price things properly, that runs through California's state house.

But ultimately, we are talking about the utility that serves the Bay area and its hinterlands, a place creating a lot of wealth and innovation that is intensely dependent upon electricity. Apple, Facebook, NetFlix, SalesForce, Google, and so on ad infinitum. There is a lot of money there, and they will figure out how to pay for this, it just won't be fun.

But understanding what's going on and getting buy in around the structural changes that need to happen to make a solution workable, that is a political problem, and people on both sides of the aisle, and who watch all the major cable news networks, need to be brought to understand what's going on. The right needs to accept that climate change is happening. The left will need to accept greater flexibility in rate-setting mechanisms. Everybody is going to have to suck it up and let utilities cut more trees on the property to which they hold title.

The "nineteen hundreds"

On NPR yesterday evening -- in rapid succession -- two separate commentators referred to the 20th Century as "the nineteen hundreds", once in tight concatenation with "the eighteen hundreds." This was the first time I had heard the century in which I spent the first two-thirds of my life referred to as something seemingly deep in the past, as opposed to relatively recent history. I felt old.

At home, however, we continued to enjoy our new Alexa speaker's ease of calling up things from its music catalog, but I stumped it by asking for the Swedish Chef's song, which seemed like a pretty simple request. Natalie was not familiar with this Muppet Show masterpiece. YouTube was more than happy to serve it up to us, and she caught the bug. We sat on the couch and watched about 15 minutes of Swedish Chef highlights, with her cackling enthusiastically: "it's so funny!" After about 12 minutes, the joke was getting a little old, but it is still quality.

Rebuildng little publics

Everywhere I go, and I'm sure I'm no exception, retail space is being hollowed out and opened up as Amazon et al eat the world. Yes, there are mild counter-trends as specific retailers learn to fight back, but that's the trend.

To the extent that theses spaces are finding tenants, they seem to be being replaced by two kinds of places: ones where you can ingest calories, and ones where you can burn them off: gyms, spin cycle studios, etc.

The common themes between these two seem to be the outsourcing of difficult functions (making interesting food, having the willpower to work out), but also just being in public. People seek places to come together and be with one another. Main streets and malls used to provide this outlet, but they are withering.

And one reads about the "epidemic of loneliness" and the fragmenting or splintering of society and I think there's much to this.

I know that I miss the days when Graham and I used to go to the public library on Sundays, both because it was a sort of ritual for the two of us, and because it was a great place to run into somewhat random people. Similarly, I am in principle happy to go to the grocery store, just to see people. Admittedly this kind of random bumping in is just good for my business, a necessary component of it, even.

This is one of the key drivers of the profusion of coffee shops and coworking spaces, and even the growth of WeWork, which is trying to create walled garden versions of this for professional people.

Which made me think of something Ben at the Faculty Club said to me about what we're doing over here at the lake. "Any amenity you can add is good." It makes me wonder whether it might not work to add a small library, study house, coffee space to a place like the Farm. It would be a huge risk, for sure.

Repetition by accident, and things Mary's mom says

Not for the first time ever, I just wrote a post that substantially repeated what I had written before, only this time just a couple of days ago. In other years I have seen the same themes, even the same jokes, repeat multiple times, on those rare occasions when I go back and re-read things.

But this time it was just a couple of days ago. That's a new low! You would think I might have remembered it. Another of what can only be termed a "proto senior moment." I'm pretty sure I've used that phrase before.

Speaking of seniors, I may take a moment to catalog a few Mary Leeisms. I did this for the kids when they were younger, the cute things they said. I'm sure the kids could do it for us too. Graham recently pointed out that Mary and I were the only people who pronounced "Mueller" like "mule." Everybody else says it like "mull." So shoot us.

In any case, Mary Lee sometimes says words she didn't grow up with funny, and it can only be classed as endearing.  These include "salza" (for "salsa"), "fruton" (for  "futon"), guacamole pronounced with a silent "e" at the end. Over Xmas, she came up with the best one ever. She kept calling spanakopita "cornucopia." You can't beat that.

She turns 87 this year, she won't be with us forever, so we might as well have a written record of this stuff for future reference.

My mom has a few. She is the only person I have ever heard say the word "hurricane" as if it rhymes with "pelican".

Back in the Office

Strange as it may seem, it is good to be back here. The familiar halls. Peanuts just over my shoulder in the cabinet. Coffee machine just around the corner, accompanied by friendly if quiet scientists. And now darkness has descended outside my window. Soon I will wander home.

Planning and reflection

I went to a talk a month or so ago where this CEO-type was talking about how he always used the week between Christmas and New Year's as a time of reflection and goal-setting for the upcoming year. This is roughly in line with how I have treated the time over the years, but I had never formalized the thinking like that.

So I got all of my expenses totted up and submitted before I came North, so I wouldn't have that odious task hanging over my head.

But, as is the way of all things, I got caught up in the thrall of family and clients. One client recently lost her mother, another was jilted by a lover and may end up moving back to Europe if she can't sort out her job situation, and so on. Helping Mary and Rob empty the attic. Going through George Sr's files making sure we had everything we needed to document Mary Lee's basis in the house, when the time comes to sell. Going up to George Jr's for dinner and to watch Raising Arizona (truly a classic).

Yesterday Graham waxed both Rob and me in chess, in succession. Graham had resisted playing chess against me, saying I took too long. I didn't realize chess was normally played with a clock. I think beating both of us handily was very good for his ego. Afterwards he spent most of the evening on his Chromebook, practicing for Quiz Bowl. I think he is girding for future battle, which is awesome.

So, it's all good. I may not have gotten my CEO seclusion. Or, rather, I may not have spent it a la Stephen Covey, journaling and setting goals. I sat under the blanket, read a book, and looked at the water. So shoot me.

The end?

And so, another vacation in Larchmont draws to a close, perhaps the last one. In the distance, across the Long Island Sound, the lights of the North Shore twinkle in the distance. I have spent many excellent hours on this couch, several of them today. Will this be the last of them?

We shall see.

Much of the last few days was spent ploughing through John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, in which the Wall Street Journal reporter tells the tale of the epic lie that was Theranos, and the many good people who had the backbone to stand up to the delusional bullies who ran it. It is in the end a heartening read, because the good guys win, but the list of those who were hornswaggled is astonishing: George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, Bill Frist, David Boies, Rupert Murdoch... Elizabeth Holmes shared the stage with Bill and Hillary, with Jack Ma, I'm sure with Obama too at some point in time. But she was full of shit from day one. She never had anything but drive and a willful disregard for truth. And we all lapped it up because she told such a good story.

Never again?

The excitement of approaching

It is hard getting up to come in to The City, especially when it is grey and wet, like today. But as I draw ever closer: coffee, shave, shower, ride to station, train... the old excitement returns. Or, I should say, the excitement of the buzz, the flow of the city, which is on offer for me specifically because I am a visitor. It was a grind when I did it daily, I shouldn't romanticise it unduly. But even then, there was something magical about the city. The distance people traveled to work in teams, which created an extraordinary hive mind. And the sheer scale of it all.

The calm before the storm of wrapping paper

By now, all the kids are teenagers, so they aren't the first ones up on Xmas morning. Actually, judging from the stocking, Graham was the first, but then he retreated to his bed where he is probably (and I just confirmed this with an Xmas morning hug) ensconced in his devices.

The sun is coming in off the Long Island Sound here in the sun room. We have unfortunately gotten into a rhythm in which presents are opened during the sunniest moment of the day, so we are pretty much blinded, but for now, I am in a shady spot where I can see my screen.

This year is a melancholy one for us all. It is not improbable, and probably it is the right thing for all concerned, that this should be our last Christmas here in Larchmont. There was a bunch of mold and other old house problems that had to be remediated in the fall, and Rob is being driven bat-shit crazy living here with his mom. Which is normal for a 50-year old guy, however quirky. He did not grow up aspiring to be the caretaker of a 100-year old house. Who in his right mind would?

So we are doing our best to enjoy the holiday. I won't lie to you and pretend that these wacky markets are helpful in any way. The absence of sensible, principles-based leadership the world around, the profusion of us-firstism married with a disregard for human rights, all set against a backdrop of global overleverage, does not make the path of 2019 and thereafter look to be a simple or easy one. But we will figure it out, and that is a task for another day. For now, onward to breakfast!

Classifying miles

As I move towards the end of the year, I am going through the exercise of going through receipts and my mileage tracker and classifying expenses and drives as personal or business. Sometimes I get to something -- like being in Graham on Saturday, August 4 and I think: what the hell was I doing there? And then I realize: Natalie and I were out canvasing for that nice young woman running for Alamance County Commissioner, the one Maya was interning for. That was a very nice day. It warms me to remember it.

Challenges

Reading this morning from Around the Year, Nick Murray's book of daily reflections for financial planners -- which I read every morning before breakfast along with other things, he commented on the fact that about 80% of financial advisors cited volatile markets as the biggest challenge to their business. Nah.

Make no mistake, volatile markets, nervous people, and high ambient amounts of atmospheric uncertainty do suck. But there is always uncertainty.

The most difficult thing is using one's time wisely to figure out how best to serve one's clients best, while also seeking to grow one's business. In the end, these are problems of time and scope management -- figuring out what it is you should be doing, what you should be delegating, and what you should be defining as outside of your competency and referring out and/or asking an expert.

Yesterday, for example, I did a phone interview with a journalist about the life and financial lessons one should be teaching one's kids before they go to college. I spent time preparing for a meeting with a prospect who has a multi-million dollar package of Phantom Stock Units that will come into play if/when his firm IPOs a few years out. I reported to 401k wholesalers about the pain points of a prospect with whom we will be meeting in January to help them pick a new platform (or not). At the end of the day, I went to a board meeting for a non-profit, after which I conferred with a guy who wants to set up his own non-profit about some of the things he should be thinking through. I gave him my card and told him I'd connect him with a friend who consults on this kind of thing. An ex-girlfriend, actually.

In each of these interactions there were questions I didn't know the answer to and I had to admit it frankly and/or appeal to a specialist for guidance.

Then I went home and watched The Wire with Graham. At the end, he fell asleep with his feet across my lap. That was the best part.

GE AAA

Read a long article in the Journal this weekend about GE and its collapse from being one of the biggest companies in America to its ignominious position today. The long and short of it is very similar to the story at AIG: a rapid climb under a legendary CEO, leveraging a AAA credit rating to expand into too many lines of business, the inability of a successor to find a way forward. As a personal story, admittedly, in many ways Jeff Immelt is more like Steve Balmer of Microsoft -- an underachiever who diddled his way to mediocrity, than Martin Sullivan was at AIG -- a catastrophe. Presumably that's because Jack Welch was less of a control freak than Hank Greenberg was at AIG, and developed stronger lieutenants.

But the use of the AAA credit rating as a way to finance whatever rhymes convincingly with AIG's experience. Admittedly, GE went much crazier than did AIG in terms of getting into everything but the kitchen sink (though they probably did make those).

More than anything, it makes me wonder -- along with the entire investing world -- about succession at Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett has discussed it for years somewhat openly, and we know that the culture of the "organization", if one can even speak of such a unitary thing in Berkshire's case, is as distributed as it can be. But is it held together by nothing other than pixie dust, Cherry Coke and the credit rating? Time will tell.

Guest blogging

Today, I am coming to you from the couch downstairs, next to the Christmas tree. This is very rare, very rare indeed. I find it more or less necessary to be alone when I blog, and I am very rarely alone down here, but today Mary is with Graham in Durham at a Quiz Bowl tournament, where I must spell her after lunch.

Interestingly, it is at the NC School of Science and Math, which back through the 60s was Watts Hospital, where I was born. I'm honestly not sure I've been back since then. Certainly when I had my bout of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in '73 or '74, I went to Duke. And there was no way I was trying to go to Science and Match back in the day, because I was a humanist by inclination, and we had a soccer championship to win at CHHS, and how could I be certain of the quality of the ladies in a place like Science and Math, when I was certain there was much honeys at the high school, including some lovely new ones from Culbreth.

So it will be interesting today, and great to see Graham up there competing. I know he is ready to go, based on the degree of competitiveness he showed over dinner last Sunday with one Chad Ludington, Professor of History at NC State. Graham was flat out drilling him on details of 16th Century British succession -- admittedly not Chad's deepest area of focus.  On the one hand, Chad was digging the jousting element. On the other, we had to talk to Graham a little about the extent to which he was dominating the dinner table conversation and not letting others talk freely amongst themselves -- mostly because Chad and Graham were at opposite ends of the table.

Anyhoo, today is open competition, and it is all about answering them questions fast, and Graham is ready to go.

Obituaries

I am formulating a policy, firming up what has heretofore been an inclination, to read any and all tributes people post about loved ones passing on Facebook. People show their true stripes when telling tales of their beloveds and, in the end, honoring the dead is in its way as important as nurturing the young.

Up date

I have come a long ways from the early days of this blog, when I exercised great vigilance to be sure to post something every day, so as to maintain a discipline of de minimis writing. Nowadays, I end up obsessing about whether I have something to say, whether it is worthy of the blog, or I just get caught up in the doings of the day and plum forget. Which is silly.

The onset of this snowstorm (did they name it Diego or something?) accelerated the turn of the seasons. On Saturday I worked hard to rake up the bulk of the leaves on the "grassy" (I caveat because a good portion of the lawn has been ceded to the ravages of Japanese stiltgrass) parts of the front lawn, and also the deck and driveway. I hauled like seven or eight big tarps (don't ask) to the bottom of our back yard, where it is poised to wash down and one day enrich Jordan Lake. At the end of that I climbed into the leaf pile and chilled, looking up at the sky. Off to the left of me, I could hear seagulls screeching. Yes, seagulls, who are visiting our lake in great number due to a lake management anomaly, but that is a story for another day. But I couldn't really hear much of them, on account of the leaf-blowers around the neighborhood, and small airplanes flying lowish above, despite the closure of Horace Williams Airport a few miles away.

It struck me how we formulate freedom in the sense of freedom to (freedom to hunt, shoot, drive fast, use small motors for whatever the fuck we want to) and not much in terms of freedom from (freedom from the encroachments of others). I could riff on this all day.

Then -- back to the changing of the seasons -- Sunday and yesterday, the snows came, paralyzing the area in wintry whiteness, and my sore body, having exerted itself moving leaves, found itself shoveling snow. All good, and part of any disciplined seasonal cross-training regime.

Then there were Xmas parties, and intimations of mortality (Robb Ladd injury, David Brower Sr. passing, someone else has terminal cancer). And last night we video-called with Natalie, who is making her way through her first semester's papers while trying to go to bed earlier, and has purchased a new scarf.

And then there is work, to which I am off.

Changing complexion

Really since Graham Allison's book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap came out, the complexion of thinking about China has changed, and Trump has really ramped it up. Now everyone is very much focused on China more as an adversary than as a partner.

A few thoughts

1. We need to be very careful about Russia. We know they don't really regard us as their friend, at least the current leadership, which generally enjoys support. I spend some time within the last year watching Russian tv (in Russian, not RT), and one thing that's clear is that they are courting China. So when Pompeo starts sabre-rattling (as he did this week) about pulling out of nuclear arms treaties with Russia, that's a big fucking deal.
2. We need to be very clear what we believe in, and who we support. Throughout the Cold War we has a clear stated goal of supporting human rights in the Soviet Union. Our attitude was "we don't oppose the Soviet people, we oppose the Soviet regime." We need to keep this idea front and center now. The Chinese -- via the Belt and Road initiative and whatever other means necessary -- are exporting an ideology of China first, human rights be damned. We need to oppose that on principles. We need to watch with great care the panopticon police state the Chinese are establishing in Xinjiang as a test bed for elsewhere. Right now the Chinese have a "fuck it, who cares about those Muslim Uighurs" attitude. But it's bad, and they are honing the tools that they could use elsewhere, and you'd better believe that Google, Facebook, Palantir, and Amazon are watching the Chinese experience there, how the rest of the world reacts to it, and what it means for them.
3. We need to be very open to and solicitous of the Chinese in America. Make no mistake, they are for the most part not spies. They were pissed off when Trump accepted Stephen Miller's suggestion that they mostly are. They have come here because of what America has historically stood for and what we strive to be: a good place to live, have a career, raise a family -- with as many kids as you want and without breathing shitty air. They form the backbone of our scientific class now, and they are important.
4. But we need to anticipate more Chinese PhDs moving back to China -- as they have been -- because of a better atmosphere there for entrepreneurialism, as well as tensions here. That means we need to be serious about figuring out how to develop a scientific cadre here -- and not just from blue zip codes. Reading the biographies of Norman Borlaug and John Hope Franklin in the last year reminded me of how the path from rural places into the highest ranks of academia used to be much more plausible and open. Partially it's because the barriers to entry in terms of early academic achievement are a little higher, and the average quality of public schools in red counties lower. I think. But it also may be because the academy has become so stultifyingly blue and not an attractive place for someone who grew up in a red county.

OK, I am rambling and speculating. So shoot me.

Different thanks

It seems that, in the South at least, the idiom for expressing thanks has split in recent years across racial lines. In white society, people are frequently wont to say "Thanks so much!", with a pretty healthy mmph and a note of enhanced earnestness plugged into the "so much!" part of it. I find myself saying it sometimes, but I don't really like it.

Many black people, on the other hand, have taken to saying "I appreciate you" in place of good old "Thank you." The phrasing is typically pretty low key, because the words, rather than the larynx, are carrying the weight of emphasis. I like it. I think I am going in this direction going forward.

The Headmaster

Just pawed my way through McPhee's The Headmaster in two days, not much of a stretch, as it was a thin tome, as McPhee's typically are. The great thing about McPhee is that, as with Caro, we can sense the extent to which he has fallen in love with his subject at times, and cannot help but to join in.

Also, I should note that, when Graham and I got home from martial arts on Saturday, we saw a cat walking along the rock wall in our back yard. It seems that the cat was out on its accustomed walk with its owner, who told us that the cat always accompanies her when she walks around the lake and the neighborhood.

Fresh air

For the time being, I have put aside Knausgaard, with about 400 of 1200 pages of Volume 6 in the rearview. It is still on my bedside table.  It was fucking killing me. He just needed to get on with it.

And so, I am breathing the oxygen of other writers. First I knocked off Pistol, a biography of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel (I just had to Google the author's name, it wasn't really sticking to me). This is a good, if not great book about a pretty fascinating figure. Maravich would be more interesting as a figure if he had lived longer, and if he was more multi-dimensional as a character. Or maybe he was, and Kriegel's just not a great writer. His other book is about Joe Namath, so that tells us something about him.

At the conference in Asheville somebody mentioned the autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America. I found that it was available on Audible, so I quickly downloaded it and started listening to it on the drive back (I had been listening to a book by Eric Posner and somebody else on using auction mechanisms broadly throughout society to reconfigure everything, which was kind of interesting, but also rather stultifying).

Franklin's book is great. I will say this, if only it were truly a mirror to America, we would all be living in a much better place. For, although Franklin catalogs a number of indignities to which he was subject throughout his life, he transcended every one of them through a herculean work ethic, an unshakable sense of right and wrong, and astounding grace. And his language! If he had a British accent, it is true, I might want to shoot him. But he doesn't. He writes with a formality and erudition which seems to have long since vanished from these shores.

Franklin is someone I will be reading more of, most likely his biography of George Washington Williams, whoever the hell that is. Franklin considered it his crowning achievement, so I will get it.

Right now I am quickly going through John McPhee's The Headmaster, a slim tome (as all of his are) about Frank Boyden, who had run Deerfield Academy for 60 years when McPhee wrote it. It is also lovely, and was already nostalgic 50 years ago.

Soon, I suppose, it will be time to snap out of the past and get back to reality

Graham and I are watching The Wire, which is pretty real. Perhaps more naturalist than realist, but more on that later.

IEI conference in Asheville

Went down to Asheville for a day for the ReConnectNC conference from the Institute for Emerging Issues. The premise of the conference was to reconnect communities that weren't communicating well. At that it pretty much failed. It was desperately overprogrammed. The breaks were too short and too few, because there were too many speakers. The speakers were generally overfocused on promoting what they were doing in their own communities, and of those there was dramatic overrepresentation of liberals: people of color, women, people in the arts, blah blah blah. Of course, I generally agree with those people about most things, with the exception of the transformative power of arts and culture in the public sphere. All too often when arts and culture are undertaken with state support, you get cant, bullshit, and half-baked pieties, at best.

Then at lunch, which was late because there were too many speakers, they tried to have each table have a focused discussion on a theme put forth by one of the speakers. I'm so sure. When were we supposed to "connect?"

I go to bed with a liberal every night, I brush my teeth looking at one in the mirror. I don't have a problem finding more of them to talk to. The problem is that I don't talk to enough conservatives, and people who could bring themselves to vote for Trump. I still don't get how conservatives can have done that, and still look at themselves in the mirror.

David Brooks of the NY Times was good, and the story of how Tru Pettigrew and the Cary Police initiated and fostered dialogue between the African-American community in Cary and the police there was pretty amazing.

In short, the model was excessively dirigiste. IEI is nestled with NC State and has pretty significant headcount. I don't know what its funding model is, but I am surprised that it has not come under attach by the legislature while the Republicans had a veto-proof supermajority.

Such sweet sorrow

Mary and I took Natalie to the airport on Saturday after Thanksgiving, and she was sad again about leaving home, so we were too. I explained to her that everybody said it was normal for kids to feel this way their first year of college, according to my panel of experts, to wit, Leslie and Hilary. Natalie said she wasn't homesick at Yale, only when she was leaving home.

Then on Sunday she texted me and asked permission to apply for a trip to Peru over spring break to learn about environmental and oceanographic and other stuff. I of course said that would be cool. She used a number of exclamation points in her text, as is the style.

So I think that she is essentially in a pretty good place. She is basically happy where she is, be it home or college, and excited about going other places. I wish the same could have been said for me at that age.


Meanwhile, yesterday evening Graham suggested that, instead of starting Boardwalk Empire, that we should watch Twelve Angry Men, the 1957 film starring Henry Fonda, with a young Jack Klugman in a supporting role. We meant to watch just the first half of it, but watched the whole thing instead. We hope this may signal a turn towards more sophisticated content on his part. Lord knows he has the noggin for it.

Maintenance day

It is glum and rainy, so I have been doing things like

• Upgrading malware protection on my computer (why is the fan running all the time? suspicious)
• Deleting apps from my phone, including Facebook
• Checking some financial records, including bases in Roth IRAs (just cuz I saw them there in a folder on my computer) and report from Social Security administration
• Reading periodicals that are clogging up flat spaces in the house, including article on Long-Term Care and the survey on competition in the most recent issue of The Economist 
• I really need to 
• connect my new phone to my car using Bluetooth, although the weather makes me not want to go out in the driveway
• go to the gym
• challenge Graham to a game of chess
• figure out the next thing Graham and I will watch on Netflix or Amazon
• replace some burned out light bulbs

In a little while we will have lunch with Leslie and her family, and then I will take Natalie to the airport. Then there's the question of eating the Thanksgiving leftovers, which I presume will be a Sunday night thang with mom

After which it will be back to reality.

Relative humility

After five years or so of having the book, I finally made my way to the end of the complete Berkshire Hathaway shareholders letters, 1965-2012. There was much learning to be had about a variety of subjects.

Towards the end, the most interesting comparison probably is with the biography of Jimmy Clayton, founder of mobile home manufacturer (and finance company) Clayton Homes. Buffett praised the book in a letter from 2003 describing his acquisition of Clayton at the time -- a transaction that was part of the collapse of the manufactured home market due to crappy lending, an harbinger of the later housing crisis.

So I went out and bought Clayton's book and eventually read it. It was good for a while, though marred at the beginning by the obligatory chapters about growing up dirt poor in Tennessee and about how he and his parents weren't at all prejudiced against black people. Then it got much better, as he told stories of building his various businesses, together with his brother, of trials they went through together, clever things they did, how hard they worked, how they had good and bad partners, etc. All told, the middle of the book is quite good and full of learnings.

After a while, however, Clayton started believing his own press and talking about how he spent his money. He talked at reasonable length about "giving back", including a fairly detailed discussion about some Knoxville hospital he gave money too and how he wrangled with them about the naming rights. Like I could give a fuck.

Compare Buffett's giving. Yes, he has been very public about it, but he explicitly decided to give to the Gates Foundation as opposed to building a big competitor organization because he figured Bill and Melinda were doing a good job -- as they seem to be. But he has also been public so as to recruit more rich people to the Giving Pledge, which has to date secured pledges totaling $365 billion, which is non-trivial money.

It is clear that Buffett is not without ego, and that his public persona is pretty carefully shaped and crafted. But fundamentally he seems pretty much to be what he appears to be. I think he works hard to take care of other peoples' money and do good things, and that he husbands his time carefully and reads a lot. Which I respect.

Now I need to read Buffett's letters from 2013-2018 from the pdfs posted on Berkshire's web site. Then I'll be all caught up.

Rainy day, teen chatter

Grey morning, not really excited about getting out of bed. I was upstairs getting ready for the day when it occurred to me that I should really take Graham to the bus stop at the top of the hill and sit in the car with him till the bus got there. Because I can, really, that's all.

But I was behind the curve. Graham ran out into the street and then headed -- down the hill. WTF? Made no sense. In any case, I put my coffee in a travel cup and hustled out to the Prius, and then went down the hill to see what was up. He was down at Tyler's house, coming out of his front door with an umbrella. Seems he and Tyler -- who normally rides his bike to school -- had texted, and Graham was to accompany him up the hill to the bus, which Tyler had never taken.

So they hopped in the back and we drove up the hill, and I got to listen to them natter about goings on, homework assignments, clubs, what have you. It was lovely, again, a great luxury to be able to do it. When the bus finally arrived, the sisters who go to the bus stop about whom Graham had told us --citing them as the rationale for walking all the way to the top of the hill as opposed to waiting for the bus at the most natural spot on Markham -- got out of their mom's Odyssey, and Graham greeted them heartily: "Hello!"

We often worry about kids on the spectrum -- and even kids not on the spectrum -- these days. They seem to isolate in their rooms with their devices a little too much. So it's good to see them in their element, knitting together.

Probably we should consider switching off the wireless router for at least a portion of Sundays, as one family we know does, and as is the fashion in Silicon Valley.

Compost pile

Our compost pile has some good features, and some bad ones. On the good side, it's very easy to dump stuff into it, I just walk out onto my deck and throw stuff down. On the negative, it's hard to flip the matter that's in there, so it takes forever to break down, and gets really dense, and never makes it to the magical fluffiness that we achieved in Princeton in our composting wheel. Nor do I get the magnificent steaming of the pile when I flipped it with a pitchfork.

I could replicate what I had in Princeton, but it would have go out into the back of the yard, which would make taking stuff out there much more of an ideal.

But would that be so bad? There was something magical about taking the compost into the yard in Princeton. Probably it was bound up with the improbability of our yard, of having that much land (about a third of an acre) right there in town, particularly when the stand of trees was still there, before our legal tussles with the Barskys over their planned development, which eventually ended in the felling of all the trees and their building four McMansions across the fence from us.* Our yard felt like a mythical space, particularly if I had just come home from Manhattan or had flown back from Nebraska or something. Kind of like the great woods behind Glen Heights, but on a much smaller scale. And, in the back of my mind, I knew that both Sir Thomas Kuhn and Aaron Burr had -- at different times, obviously -- lived just on the other side of the woods, lending them a certain allure.

Don't get me wrong, my current backyard is also pretty cool. But the experience of it differs, probably by the fact our home is much more open to the natural environment here, so the inside/outside distinction is lessened. In general, we got more of it here in NC. New Jersey is really the Garden State only in its mind.



*This struggle is probably at some level narrated back in the 2004-2005 entries in the Grouse, but it is not easily keyword findable, and I don't have time to go spelunking for it.

Not atypical

I spent a good portion of yesterday -- beautiful fall weather notwithstanding -- working on Natalie's FAFSA and CSS/Profile (financial aid forms, for those of you blessed with ignorance of these acronyms). Partially because I need to lead a workshop on financial planning for college tomorrow evening and I figured it would help me get back down into those insect-rich weeds.

A week or so back Natalie had nudged me "shouldn't we be working on my financial aid application?", and I of course knew that the forms had become available for the upcoming academic year on October 1. But I had not looked at Yale's web site to see when they were due. I felt kind of certain that I was ahead of the game in getting them done in November.

But only kind of certain, not certain. And -- as I turned off the light to go to bed, I had this nagging suspicion that I should have looked to see when they were due. In earlier years this might have stopped me from sleeping, but I was tired from the day, which also involved getting up on the roof to push down leaves, running, watching crappy television with Graham, and a few pages of Knausgaard, quickly becoming the bane of my existence.

When I woke up and began my morning routine, the thought returned to me. What if I'm running late on the application? I went to Yale's financial aid site and saw that -- the timeline for financial aid forms for the upcoming school year will be posted at some time in the future. I was good.

So this is how I live my life.

One other detail of the zoo trip -- for the archives

So when I chaperoned Graham's class trip to the zoo a couple of weeks ago, I was in line behind Graham at lunch. I was waiting for my order to get ready, and I turned and saw that Graham had reached into his bag and gotten out his wallet so he could pay for his lunch.

No doubt the instructions for the trip had said that kids should either bring their lunch or money to pay for lunch and Graham -- ever the good rule follower -- had done just that. Never mind that his dad was standing behind him in line.

I squared it up with him and explained that there was really no need for him to have done that. Such a silly boy.

Shifting gears

With the elections in the rearview, it seems the holidays are pretty much upon us, but I am happy to largely take this weekend off to do battle with leaves, etc. And it seems the gods are smiling upon me. A soccer game scheduled for 9am that had been moved up to 8 was, blissfully, cancelled. I had already decided to sit it out due to some gimpiness around my left knee, and to go to my Saturday morning meeting. Turned out I had made the right decision.

For sure, there are tasks piling up around me: college financial aid applications, Obamacare enrollment, work, trip planning blah blah blah blah blah.

Today I will do my best to ignore that stuff. I need to do some reading, some napping, some leaf raking, maybe, just maybe, read something for Mary. I may convince Mary and Graham (both sticks deep in  mud) to go to a movie in the evening.

Off to my left, our cat Rascal is setting a good example for me. She has curled up in the sun in the reading chair next to my desk. I am headed there too.

But first, must schedule a tennis court for Monday morning...