Victory!

Did we really think that this would not be the case?

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - Americans can keep guns at home for self-defense, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday in the justices’ first-ever pronouncement on the meaning of gun rights under the Second Amendment.

The court’s 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most federal firearms restrictions intact.

Boating Gone Wild

I need to get my son sailing!

My son is growing up with powerboats on his mind.

Not that I don’t love powerboating, as powerboats serve a very important purpose…. getting you to your sailboat.

I was very fortunate having spent summers in Cotuit sailing Opti’s beginning in 1974 at the tender age of 7.

I had no experience with motorboats until I was at least 9 or 10 when my grandfather let me steer his 12-foot aluminum Sears boat with its 7.5hp Clinton Gamefisher engine, the same boat that I got my first speeding ticket in, zooming into the Cotuit Town Dock not knowing the Police Boat “Alert” was sitting there behind the outermost dock.

Granted, I did catch a bit of the ’speed bug” when my buddy Christian and I rebuilt an 8’ foot hydroplane that we named “Baby Budweiser”, which I write about in Freedom Hall. We drove this on Shoestring Bay for a few years where the police boat could not come in because of their draft….

Wanting to give my son everything that I never had as a child, which really isn’t that much considering I was pretty spoiled, I bought my son a 13-foot Boston Whaler when he was 7.

Now that he’s 9, I must admit he’s quite the captain.

I simply couldn’t beg my mother and father enough to get this Whaler for me!

My 1980 Laser is still on loan to my nephew up in Maine who is not quite ready to give it back to me but once he is, I figure my son will not find sailing of much interest….why?

This is why….his grandfather’s 46’ Skater named Tomcat

I try to tell him that sailing can be as much excitement as it can be relaxing but the ear-to-ear grin on his face as we were zooming down the Barnegat Bay at 100mph told me otherwise. The boat, an amazing machine that defies description, is awe inspiring regardless of how you might feel about speedboats.

His grandfather once owned a 50’ Hustler that had over 3,300hp but because it was a single hull, it could only do 130mph or so. This Skater can do over 160mph I am told and has 2,200hp but the cat design makes all the difference in the world.

Granted, my goal in life is now a nice big trawler but a small sailboat like an O’Day Daysailor (needs to be fiberglass for me) is also in my future. I would like to say that a big sailboat is in my future, which I thought it was, but for many different reasons I have decided that a trawler is the way to go.

For now, however, my project is a 1969 Boston Whaler Katama (Bet you haven’t heard of that model!) It’s just big enough for Kerry, me and the two dogs and we got it for a steal considering all that it needs is a little TLC….What every Boston Whaler deserves!!!

Oh, my son really does like Kyaking….which is a step in the right direction….one of these days I’ll teach him how to Windsurf…

Thoughtless Behvior

One of my favorite artists of all time is John Gorka.

Ironically, John grew up only a short distance from me “on the corner of Inman and New Dover” here in NJ yet it was my sister Susan living in Maine who heard John on the radio up there and turned me on to him.

Through John, I came to know of Lucy Kaplansky who is also one of my favorites.

The first time that I recall seeing John play was on May 7th 1994 at the East Windsor Township Recreation Department near Princeton.

The last time I saw John play was only days before 9/11. I was working for Deloitte & Touché out of their Parsippany New Jersey office but spending lots of time in New York at their World Financial Center Location.

Fordham University Radio (WFUV) was holding a Folk Music concert series between the Towers Wednesday nights during the summer and John was on the schedule for August 29th. Of course I found a reason to be in New York that day!

I remember enjoying another great show and getting him to autograph the Program Guide which I hold dear. (Yes I do that once in a while)

The week before 9/11 I was in New York 3 or 4 days and always took the Path in from Newark and rarely made it to the office until 9:15 or so ascending the enormous bank of escalators directly into the lobby of the Trade Center.

I didn’t have to go in that ill-fated week.

Thank God.

Hangin’ in Chi-Town

I have luckily escaped the heat back in New Jersey having to be in Chicago this week.

Chicago is one of my favorite cities as it is a real city like New York and Boston. By “real” I mean that people live and work in town and that the towns offer a wide variety of things to do and see all within short distances of each other.

My company’s office is on Whacker on the river in a very nice part of town.

I have gotten to know the subway system quite well as I take the Blue Line Train from O’Hare pretty much to my office and then I take the Orange Line Train out to Midway airport where I can get a Sheraton Four Points for only $129 a night.

Chicago, like New York and Boston, has ridiculous hotel rates downtown and being a devoted Starwood patron and hating to spend more than $200 a night regardless of who is paying, I schlep out to Midway to get my points and save some dough.

Ironically, paying $129 a night at a Four Points gets me a nice room, cheap drinks at the bar, free wireless wi-fi, breakfast in my room for less than $10 and a 24 hour diner attached to the hotel that can serve up a midnight snack of just about anything I might want.

Downtown I would not get half as much for twice the price.

Tonight I think I will linger in town a little and enjoy some of the nightlife up on Rush Street. The Orange Line runs back to Midway 24 hours a day and since it’s the last stop on the line, I don’t have to worry about missing my stop.

How I have single handedly helped stop the increase in oil prices…

As I have said before, I have an uncanny knack for losing money in the stock market.

Yet, being the glutton for punishment that I am, I keep on investing and hoping for some good luck since I certainly don’t have any wisdom in the area of equities.

As the price of oil kept going higher and higher I figured it was time to invest in an oil company.

My rationale was twofold.

First, if oil keeps going up, I’ll consider myself a genius and the money that I make will help keep filling up my SUV and myriad of other gas guzzling toys and make the whole crisis less painful.

Second, if oil goes down, I’ll probably save more in gas than I would lose on my investment.

Hence, I took the plunge and bought some British Petroleum and lo and behold the price of oil started to slide the very next day.

At least it pays a decent dividend.

You’re welcome.

I Need Another Job to Support My Charities

Besides donating regularly to my church and my alma maters, I try to donate money to various charities as much as possible.

I like to think that the list of donees is pretty long and includes the ASPCA, Audubon, Ducks Unlimited, 3Bays, Christian Children’s Fund, Children International, just to name a few.

Not having made my millions, my donations are usually at the basic level since I prefer to spread my donations around rather than choosing only one or two.

What troubles me is the vast amount of solicitation that I receive from some of the organizations continually asking me to give more.

One of the worst offenders is definitely the ASPCA. Every day it seems I receive another piece of mail containing some gimmick like stickers with my name on it, an offer for a fuzzy sweatshirt or most recently a sheet of magnetized stickers that I could use to spell cute phrases on my refrigerator based upon my preferred pet.

It seems to me that they must spend more money on postage and materials than my meager donation can ever subsidize.

I love little fuzzy animals but I simply don’t want to donate more than I choose to do, during my annual flurry of donations around December 31st.

Almost as bad as the ASPCA are both Christian Children’s Fund and Children International. Both of these organizations are already getting close to $25 per month yet they feel the need to solicit me at least once every few weeks with a horrible tale of children suffering somewhere or with another request to provide something for the two children that I sponsor. As much as I would like to give more, I can only do so much.

I wish that these organizations would spend more of my money supporting the cause and less asking me to give, give, give.

I might even be willing to give more if I could somehow stop them from the bombardment.

Of course I’ll continue to give and each year I’ll try to find another charity or two to join the list but I find the charity that simply sends me a quarterly newsletter letting me know how my money is being spent far more pleasant than the charity that feels as though they can extract another donation by inundating me with solicitations.

 

TV on Cellphone = Bandwidth

That little investment I talk about could get another boost real soon.

It’s been holding up well since last weeks earnings report but I won’t jinx myself!

(This is not me on the video)

The New Way to Explore

Kerry and I have discovered a new way to have fun thanks to the wonderful technology found in our Garmin Nuvi.

We decided that for my Birthday weekend we would set out on a trip no more than 50 miles away (Gas is too expensive for any long drives nowadays) and we would use the GPS to make it into an adventure.

We decided that we would first pick a direction by flipping a coin twice; two heads we go south, two tails we go north and one of each we go west.

Standing in our living room, the toss was split so we were bound to go west.

We plugged in Easton Pennsylvania thinking that it would be a good destination but we set the GPS’s navigation criteria for shortest distance, least use of highways and to avoid toll roads.

The resulting journey was incredibly fun, albeit circuitous at times and it took us to places both familiar and new.

It first took us northwest through Summit, Chatham and into Morristown.  It then took us southwest to New Vernon and then west past Jockey Hollow. We connected with Route 124 in Mendham and proceeded westerly from there until we hit Route 57 taking us through Washington Township and then into Phillipsburg and across the Delaware into Easton.

We used the GPS to then find a decent hotel and we ended up spending the night at a Holiday Inn Express that was walking distance to a few good restaurants.

Being an old man of 41 now, I was more interested in a nice meal and an early bedtime than partying the night away so we ate and went back to our room to relax.

In the morning I fired up the GPS to find a church and the small Catholic Church that I found in downtown Easton was delightful.

We then decided to meander home by a more southerly route and once again the GPS showed us places in New Jersey that I never knew existed. Some where quaint and charming, some were rather depressing.

Nevertheless, this new found activity will certainly be one of Kerry’s and my favorite things to do and we are already planning another trip in the coming weeks.

Teenage Angst Awaits

My nine year old son is still as innocent and loving as he was when he first starting walking and talking, but as each day passes I can see the affect of his approaching teenage years and its scary to say the least.

If he turns out to have the same independent DNA that I had when I was a teenager, I need to enjoy each and every day that his loving ways continue and hope that his metamorphosis stays in abeyance as long as possible.

Can it last?

Is it inevitable?

Eating lunch together yesterday at Friendly’s, we were sitting next to a mother and a son who were debating the importance of his finishing high school.

Listening to his irrational arguments, his misguided priorities and the love in his mother’s voice, which obviously grated on him like a rusty cheese grater, I was taken back to my own teenage years when I’m sure that I gave my own loving parents the same heartache and disappointment.

To my surprise, Alex leaned over to me and whispered, “That’ll probably be me in a few years”, as if he knew that his time to test his parents’ love and patience would soon be at hand.

Alex could tell that this young man was nuts, yet inevitably he’ll fall prey to the same disease I’m sure. The question is simply to what degree?

Thank God that my parents and I survived that turbulent time. 

My parents had my three sisters to contend with as well.

Through their love and unfailing determination to see us through, we all managed to come out the other end of adolescence a little battered, but no worse for the wear.

I can only hope to do as well.

Freedom Hall Update

I have some bad news for those of you who have been enjoying my Freedom Hall excerpts.

I will no longer be posting any future excerpts as I write them.

Why?

Because if I ever hope to actually publish the book, it is not in my best interest to share too much of the storyline.

After having had the extreme pleasure of meeting Carol Higgins Clark last night at a birthday party held by a mutual friend, Carol was kind enough to give me some pointers about writing that I am going to take to heart.

One of them concerns sharing too much of my storyline in a public forum.

So, as much as I have enjoyed writing the story and sharing it online, I will no longer be posting excerpts.

Instead, I will be taking pre-publication orders.

Please email me and I will let you know where to send your check or money order.

Only kidding.

However, I do promise to work on it a little harder and try to get it done soon.

Cheers.