Category Archives: Personal Projects – not AD

5/17/2019 – work, work, dinner out

Friday

UTMH – met with Pauline Decarmo about collaterals printing. Notes to new sales people. Re-wrote the Tinkering with Capitalism essay. Mostly re-arranging text and eliminating extraneous material.

Telecon with Troy Web. 25 minutes wasted on project management tasks they should know how to do and be doing them. Then rambling discussions, frequently amongst themselves about various trifles. We have to get rid of them. They are expensive but not contributing.

Met with Michael Queralt with David and Seth. 3 hour discussion. He is very experienced technologist and entrepreneur. Next steps may be interesting. He is knowledgeable of the healthcare marketplace. Nice guy to boot.

Spoke with Tony Kieraldo about renewing the utmhealthcare.com website.

Sent note to Linda McNutt and Mike from Kach Inc. about the repairs to the front lattice and gate.

Wrote note to Sam and Dan Sapoznick about blockchain technology mentioned by Queralt.

Walked up to Swoon for dinner. Big crowd at bar when we walked in. Gave up on sitting at the bar and sat at a table for dinner. Two Dewars and two dinners $85. Ole Breuning and Crystal Heinz came in. Ole and I spoke of UTMH matters. I told him that we had been stuck for twenty minutes on the name of a guy sitting at the bar . Finally recalled, Victor Amendola. Ole said, “It was a senior moment.” I corrected him, “It was a senior intermission.”


Karen noticed these fire connections with upside down medallions.

 

4/29 – 4/30/2019 – work, book club, MRI, dinner

Monday and Tuesday

Still underpowered from cold. Foggy and low energy. 

Met with Tony Kieraldo at Rev about UTMH matters. He told me about his music tour in Europe and Lebanon. We talked through a new social media campaign to develop leads for UTMH. Bright guy. Also met with David and Seth. The, late afternoon  Ole. Missed an appointment at PT with Corey Smith. This has not happened before. 

HAL NonFiction Book Club – picked up Erika Born out in Ghent because Nick was busy and couldn’t come. Good discussion of Drawdown edited by Paul Hawken. Emily, Karen,  Lisa Stewart, Erika Born, Nancy Kuster, Michael O’Hara, Ruth Tamaroff, Juan Flores(new) and Bob Braunlich from SunCommon in Rhinebeck. Michael gave a good description of how a carbon tax could be implemented.

Up promptly Tuesday morning. Enema in preparation for the prostate MRI up in Latham at ImageCare. Arrived at 10:30 back in car at 11:40. 30 minutes in the machine. Wait for the results.

Emily called from the library to discuss how to handle requests from Register Star for video from security camera on second floor that may have caught the altercation between Tom DePietro and John Friedman during a Common Council meeting last week. Camera belongs to Galvan but is recorded on our equipment. The police had come by earlier and taken a copy with Galvan’s permission. Emily will refer them to Galvan for permission to release.

Long nap in the afternoon. Dinner at Dave’s in Catskill. Karen made a salad and I made rice pudding.  Lamb, saag paneer, yellow sauce, cheese cake by Hazel.

8 pm looking west.

 

4/19/2019 – web project, work, drinks at Le Perche

Friday

Cold slowly departing. Spent much of the day working on various aspects of updating and integrating materials into this website. Long telecon with Troy Web. Making good progress on many matters. Communication seems much better. Talked with Matt who had not done very much.

Long nap. Made red lentil gorp.

Went to Le Perche to meet Richard and Roberta Cummings for drinks. We had run into them last Saturday at Bob’s. They told us that Friday was a Le [perche night for them. They didn’t show this evening. Chatted with staff. Talked a bit about Karen’s book group discussion the evening before about Michelle Obama’s book. Jonathan called Karen from San Francisco where he had participated in a conference and given a talked he described as most important. Very warm damp weather in the evening.

4/18/2019 – cold, diary project

Thursday

Cold continues. Spent good part of the day in bed. Rest of day working getting posts here up to date.

Karen returned from her talk in Boston around 1pm. She seemed uncertain about how the talk had been received. This despite lots of evidence during and after the talk that people were engaged and moved by the project. She went off to her book group. I drove the car around the block. High tide on the river.

Then beef with scallions at Red Chopsticks.

 

4/16/2019 – cold, work, web project

Tuesday

Still feel pretty crappy. UTMH team meeting was short – 30 minutes. No Ole, Wexelman or Gayle. 

Reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece, “Under Water – can engineers save Louisiana’s disappearing coast?” (4/1/19).

These two maps jump out as a starting point.

Wrote up a description of the HAL  Fundraising Committee for next Saturday’s board mtg.

Spent rest of the morning and most of the afternoon updating transferred posts. Categories and tags. 

Reviewed Karen’s book presentation for tomorrow. Only needs better sense of Parker’s condition, capabilities….

Made chicken salad for dinner.

Watched MidSomers Murders followed by a Veep. 

4/15/2019 – cold, web projects, work

Monday

Felt crappy all day. Mostly spent time collecting old materials and publishing them here. 

Sent out notice and notes to HAL board for next Saturday’s meeting.

Talked with Seth about UTMH matters. 

Still need to send extension for NYS taxes.

Skipped Hudson-Creative meeting at library.  

Fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. 

4/14/2019 – web projects, diary, tennis, dinner at Barnwood, photos from Holland

Sunday

Overall a sluggish day. Sore throat, low energy. Worked on various new entries for projects in the diary. Old writing that seems germane even after ten or more years. Me and Religion and Are We Over Taxed..??.. 

A little gallery sitting….saw David Murphy on the street. He is back from Ft. Lauderdale.

Photos from Jonathan and Nan  

By chance I had seen photos from these fields on Facebook in the last couple of days. I pointed out in a comment that there are over a billion bulbs planted by hand. When Karen and I went on a tour of this area in early March 2017 we saw men dangling prone in a box hauled across the field by a tractor planting the bulbs by hand. The tractor driver was standing in the field nearby having a smoke. The tractor is guided automatically over the field by GPS or laser location.

Tennis with Ted at 4pm. Dead on my feet. Stopped by 5pm due to rain.

Dinner with David Drake at Barnwood.

Me and Religion – an essay

Me and Religion

(Most of this was written in mid-2014 – revised a bit in 2019)

When I was perhaps nine years old, sitting in the Congregational church that the family attended (excepting my father who only appeared to hear my mother play the organ), I heard the minister discuss “original sin”. I thought then that I had committed no original sins and couldn’t quite imagine what this had to do with me, a pudgy little boy. This religion thing was a mystery. At age fifteen, while spending a summer at music camp in Maine, I came to a further conclusion, that there was no God; I spent more time worrying about how it could be that the universe started at some point in time (the “big bang”); what existed before the “big bang”? Continue reading →

4/13/2019 – breakfast, DOG sitting, drinks with Ruth and Michael

Saturday

Breakfast at Bob’s with short visit to ShopRite. CVS to pick up Tadalafil. Only took two 20 mg tablets at $106. See if it works. Gallery sitting rest of day. Karen went to her balance class at the library and then to Ctr for Photography at Woodstock for an opening.

Seen at ShopRite. Not sure why “paws” is better than “feet”?

Spent lots of time on 2011 road trip project here. Also a posting on AD of John Oliver’s pieces on the US justice system John Oliver’s pieces on the US justice system.

Emily and Michael Chameides came by the gallery at the end of the day. Left exactly at 5:30. Good talk with Michael about his supervisor role and other local politics and policies. Very smart guy, Low key, pleasant to boot. Since I speak with Emily regularly we barely spoke. They enjoyed the exhibit, LandEscapes.

Michael O’Hara and Ruth Tamaroff came for drinks at 6:30. Lots of talk about Michael’s two week visit to Rome in January. We are planning a visit in May.  He gave us very detailed descriptions of places he visited with suggestions along the way. I took three pages of notes. Very much fun visit with them. Ruth was a bit tippy on leaving. Michael seems impervious to drink.