My high school class has a Yahoo group to connect with classmates from yesteryear. It is usually dormant except for an occasional obituary notice. Yahoo recently announced that it is abolishing such groups, perhaps because Facebook has made them an anachronism. The notice has awakened our group. An old friend of mine volunteered to rejuvenate the internet group on Google, which has brought out thank-yous from around the country. As each person pops up on the Web, I feel a sense of relief that they are still alive and lucid. Sometimes it is a spouse or friend who joins the…
Author: Lloyd Graff
This was a good year for applesauce. My farmers market guy, Mr. Hardin from near Kalamazoo, selected a bushel of apples, Honeycrisp, Mac, Fuji, Cortland, Jonagold, Gala, and a few Golden Delicious. Risa and Noah’s wife Stephanie peeled them, Noah and I sliced them up, and then we boiled them into the applesauce which will never last until next October. Applesauce is a ritual for us every year. It’s a punctuation mark for the end of summer. College football is a mess, back to school is back to chaos, but for apples in the Midwest it has been a wonderful…
September 30, 2020. End of third-quarter. First presidential debate. Baseball playoffs beginning. NBA finals start. For Jews, it’s the beginning of a new year. Today feels pivotal. Sometimes you can sense things are changing. The weather has abruptly shifted in Chicago. It went from summer to decidedly fall overnight. The real apple cider has come in. The sweet corn is all but gone. I plan to buy my two bushels of 10 varieties of apples this Sunday at the farmers market from Hardin Orchards near Kalamazoo. It is my yearly ritual. My wife, Risa, peels them, I slice them. We…
Sleep and lack of it has long been one of life’s biggest mysteries to me. Some days it feels so easy and comfortable, an effortless, pleasant activity, and the next night it is an elusive phantom that I mentally grab for and continually miss. I used to find it much easier. Wash up. Light stretch. Hug my wife. Casually discuss the next day’s plans. Turn over, and sleep would easily take me. Not so anymore. For years, after being told I had sleep apnea disorder, I struggled with an annoying breathing apparatus that was supposed to provide me with a…
I talk to a lot of folks in the machining trade every day, and the clear sense I am getting is that business is improving. The automotive segment is definitely firming. Auto related work has bounced back from the April, May, June, July doldrums. Demand has picked up, and car showrooms are extremely short of hot inventory. European and Japanese companies were also shut down, and the supply chains are strained. Guns and the medical sector are strengthening. We are seeing an uptick in the used machinery business. The auctioneers are surprised at how strong their sale prices are holding…
There is a common thread when it comes to success in baseball, business, and poker. You must have the guts and the strength to walk away from bad bets. You must admit mistakes, accept that they are part of life, and courageously walk away. The Chicago Cubs and the Chicago White Sox are both in first place on September 1, 2020. This may be the first time that has happened in a hundred years. The Cubs had the courage to rebuild a mediocre team when new ownership brought in new management with Theo Epstein in 2011, who had successfully rebuilt…
Like desert marigolds flowering out of nowhere, 4 million square feet of new buildings are going up simultaneously this week in the primarily African American South Suburbs of Chicago where I live and work. Twenty miles north of here in Englewood, where my dad grew up and attended High School, people are shooting at each other every night and connecting with disturbing accuracy. The daily carnage is staggering and overflowing into the expensive Magnificent Mile of North Michigan Avenue, leaving it looking like Beirut’s downtown. Amazon loves the South Suburbs. They already have built half a dozen fulfillment centers in…
I had a very informative talk yesterday with a member of the machine tool brotherhood who is diversifying his portfolio into real estate, specifically Airbnb rentals in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area. I thought Airbnb was in trouble because nobody was traveling out of fear of the pandemic, but he had a different view. He moved to Charlotte two and a half years ago from Chicago, where he had grown up and worked for two decades. His plan was to buy units he and his wife could manage themselves, saving any management fees. He wanted spots that would demand a…
Chicago is appalled by the disgusting and brazen looting of stores like Gucci and Nordstrom’s on its Magnificent Mile. Our Mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is furious and humiliated that her city’s elite shopping area has now been ransacked several times by bands of young thugs that communicate by cell phone, coordinating when to strike and who to hit first. They come by car and train and overwhelm the police so they can grab clothes, electronics, and booze. There is good camera surveillance, so the authorities can pick up many of the looters later if they are inclined, but the State’s Attorney,…
The automotive world is churning these days. New cars are creeping out of the showrooms, but used cars are going bananas. CarMax stock has doubled since April. Yesterday’s announcement by Ford that CEO Jim Hackett is stepping down should come as little surprise after his 3-year tenure saw Ford’s stock plummet 39%. His predecessor, Mark Fields, lasted only 2 years. Ford’s big plus has always been its F-150 pickup, and it is reintroducing the Bronco, with 150,000 pre-sales to position itself against the Jeep Wrangler. Hackett was an outsider who was recruited from furniture maker Steelcase. His successor, Jim Farley,…