On The Fly

Whenever Lori asks me, “What do you want to cook next?” my mind immediately goes blank. Completely blank. I stare into the refrigerator like a writer staring at an empty page, hoping the ingredients will somehow arrange themselves into a meal. Occasionally, I close the refrigerator door and open it again, just in case something interesting has happened in the last 30 seconds. It hasn’t. Let’s be honest: if Lori were counting on me to prepare our regular meals, we’d probably be on a first-name basis with every restaurant delivery driver in town. Learning to cook is a wonderful luxury for me, mostly because Lori graciously handles keeping us both fed. Meanwhile, my culinary career is progressing at a glacial pace. Yesterday’s dinner was only my second attempt at cooking for the two of us. My first was a pot of beef stew , way back on October 23rd. At this rate, I’ll have a cookbook ready sometime around 2056. I’ve discovered something about myself: I can’t just walk into the kitchen and ...

The Champion of Guajome Pond. This week, we're taking a detour off the beaten path to explore a hidden gem right here in Oceanside, California. Guajome Regional Park is more than a quiet place to stretch your legs. It's also home to some pretty interesting history. First, "Guajome" is a Luiseño word meaning "home of the frog." Since this place started as a 2,219-acre Mexican land grant in 1845, I'm guessing the frogs had quite the neighborhood. In 1851, the property became a wedding gift to Ysidora Bandini and Cave Johnson Couts. Apparently, back then, a nice set of towels just wasn't going to cut it. Couts later built a sprawling adobe hacienda, now considered one of the finest surviving examples of Spanish-Mexican colonial architecture. But I wasn't there for the real estate. This morning, I grabbed my daypack, tossed in a snack, binoculars, and water, and headed out for a leisurely walk. Gates open from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The park's 3...

Two different roads to the same quiet ground. Dan Riley’s new book, Is He Dead Yet? , hits the shelf with a title that sounds like an exasperated shout from the front lines of American politics. It is provocative, edgy, and deliberately jarring. But anyone who picks it up expecting another partisan hatchet job or a cynical venting exercise is in for a genuine surprise. Beneath that title is an intelligent, deeply reflective, and surprisingly calming field guide to surviving the modern media churn—and a blueprint for reclaiming what we allow to occupy our minds.  Riley spent an experimental year stepping away from the 24-hour news loop—a voluntary exile from the endless scroll of manufactured outrage and cable-news melodrama. In doing so, he arrived at a diagnosis that stopped me in my tracks: "We're a people in need of a national mind cleanse. Our minds crave more history, science, literature, philosophy, art, and nature, less outrage, silliness, and narcissism." When I r...

Take Thoreau’s Advice . . .  Four weeks ago, we stood on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, trying to channel Henry David Thoreau. Before leaving, I bought a pocket-sized copy of his essay, Walking . It’s slim because nineteenth-century transcendentalists didn’t have notifications interrupting their urge to wander. Thoreau’s counsel is disarmingly simple: step away from modern life's machinery and let the landscape recalibrate your perspective. Back home in Vista, I took that philosophy straight into the backyard. Thursday morning, ink-black, pristine skies arrived. I aimed my refractor at Jupiter, whose light has bathed Earth since mastodons roamed the plains. It felt cosmic. Profound . I left the telescope mounted overnight, convinced the heavens were on retainer for an encore at daybreak. Naturally, the universe called in sick. By sunrise, a wall of coastal fog had rolled in off the Pacific, sealing the valleys beneath a damp, gray Tupperware lid. After about th...

Have you heard of our hero, the marvelous Vo? The brainiest brain in the solar-cell show! When inverters go KLUNK! and transformers go FIZZ! The whole place erupts: “WHERE THE HECK IS THAT WHIZ?!” He bounds through the chaos; he leaps through the smoke, While lesser-sized geniuses cough, wheeze, and choke. With NextWave in orbit, his V-Team aligned, He can fix what’s gone wrong before YOU’VE even whined! Now here come the rookies, all polished and new, In plastic pajamas of spotless bright blue. Their manuals gleam and their hairdos are slick, But a speck on a panel makes each of them sick! “Don’t scratch me! Don’t scuff me! Don’t put me to work! I’m a premium product, not some common old jerk! I’m pristine! I’m perfect! I’m fresh off the shelf!” (Then a tiny cloud passes and ruins their health!) “Poppycock!” cries Vo. “That’s the silliest stuff! A gadget’s not useful just looking all buff! You don’t become REAL by avoiding each dent; You become REAL by the hours you’ve spent!” So le...

On July 2nd—Day Two of what I call The Great Un-Working —I sat down with my morning notebook to map out this new chapter of my life. One goal made the list in bold ink: Learn to Cook. At seventy, I was adding a skill most people master before they’re old enough to drive. Before you judge me, understand our household ecosystem. Lori is a phenomenal cook. For decades, she’s made meals so effortless and delicious that restaurants seem unsatisfying . My contribution to the culinary arts during my bachelor years–tuna mixed into Kraft Mac & Cheese. Let’s just say I wasn’t threatening her spot on the Food Network. But retirement changed the equation. I’m officially off the clock while Lori is still working. And I had a lovely thought: Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she came home after a long day to find dinner waiting? She loved the idea. Then came the question that haunted me for weeks: “What do you want to make?” I had no idea. Apparently, the first step in learning to cook is deciding wh...

Some things get better with wear: old shoes, old friendships, and old books. Especially old books. A new volume arrives with crisp corners and a spine that hasn’t yet learned to bend. An old one has been somewhere. It has traveled through time in the hands of people who may no longer be around to tell us what they found inside. The copy of The Velveteen Rabbit (first published in 1922) on my desk is one of those books. My friend Don Hanley gave it to me. This late-1950s Doubleday edition features William Nicholson’s original illustrations and cream paper boards softened by age. Worn corners, a split spine, and colored tabs mark passages worth revisiting. Don didn’t hand me a keepsake. He gave me homework. When we talked about the book recently, he pointed me straight to the nursery conversation between a young rabbit and an old Skin Horse. The rabbit had noticed the mechanical toys around him—the ones with internal gears, bright paint, and stick-out handles that seem terribly impressiv...