I remember the first time Carol made me laugh out loud. Not giggle. Not chuckle. Laugh out loud. We were PMing at the time, and she was recalling a bus trip she’d been on in Mallorca. I replied that I saw busses in our future. She wrote back, “Of course you see busses in our future; you don’t have a car.”

When a potato sits too long in a pantry, it starts to grow sprouts. Fearing the same might happen to me on the couch, Carol prevailed upon me to make a road trip to Yorba Linda and the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. The Library was celebrating the 50th anniversary of Nixon’s first State of the Union address in 1970.

I would have thought that by now I’d learned how to dress myself. But Carol has shown me there’s still a lot of meat left on that bone. I’ll start with my feet.

Watching the recent Amazon Prime documentary Jacob reminded me of my own brush with a genuine polymath. I’m proud to have called him a friend as well.

In our European trips together so far, Carol and I have stayed at about two dozen different hotels and apartments. It’s not surprising, then, that a lot of people would probably like to have asked me what’s been our favorite accommodation.

Over the past two years or so, Carolyn has appeared several times in my dreams. In all cases, we were separated from each other, she living in a different city from me. I believe in all these dreams, the plan was to meet up again, but something kept popping up to keep us apart. Separation being analogous to death, at least in this dreamscape, I took these dreams as visitations. Then I experienced a true visitation.

I do not consider myself an adventurer, but I do admit to an impulsive nature. The two aren’t unrelated, mind you. It’s just that the adventurer winds up in a National Geographic Special, while the impulsive tends to be featured on America’s Funniest Videos or a segment of

I like to cook, but I am no chef. Basically, I just like to eat; it follows then that what I like to cook is what l like to eat.

A contingent of Carol’s family recently headed off to Portland, Oregon for the holidays. Since I had made a couple of train trips there, I was asked to recommend places to go and sights to see. As the experienced reader of this blog may have immediately discerned, I had precious little to offer. Outside of the famous Powell’s bookstore, there was the historic landmark of the city’s Union Station, which I was aware of only because that’s where I had disembarked from Amtrak. There was the homeless encampment surrounding the station, the motel with the iconic 1950s era sign, where I stayed quite cheaply, and a sports bar near a strip joint that had been located within walking distance from the train station.

“Goodness, it’s already quarter to ten,” Carol recently observed one morning. Yes, my love, time flies, I replied with my inner voice, especially when we don’t get out of bed until quarter to nine. I didn’t see the need to call attention to the lateness of the morning that we’d finally slithered out of bed. In our defense, it was an unusually late a.m. hour to get up, given that we’d gone to bed around that time the previous p.m. Needless to say, retirement has been one of the easiest “life events” which I have embraced with the enthusiasm and energy of… a three-toed sloth.