Category: Newsletter (Page 5 of 23)

This is shoulder season in Morocco (high season is the spring and low season the summer), so at several points I’ve been the only tourist staying in my accommodations, eating at a restaurant, or visiting a store. This was starkest during my overnight stay on the edge of the Saharan dunes. My camel ride across the sand was in a caravan of one, even if there were other groups around headed for some of the other tent camps. I chose when to eat my dinner and sat in the large tent alone next to the space heater. Then I retreated to my tent.

As the moon was nearly full, I was denied a mind-bending view of the stars sans light pollution. It made for a slightly eerie glow instead; there was enough light to be able to see all around but not to see fine details. I’ve watched a few nature documentaries shot with low light cameras in recent years that have had a similar visual effect, but city lights drown it out most places. And the wind whipped through the night. In a different time it might have been a djinn of the desert, but such stories aren’t told as much anymore. The moonset in the west more or less coincided with the sunrise over a raised plateau in the east that forms the Algerian border and I was up early to take them both in a short distance from my tent camp and towards the giant dunes. Then it was off to breakfast and then onto the next destination.

There have been a lot of windshield miles on this trip. As it’s just me with my guide/driver, we sometimes go long stretches without speaking, though our conversations have grown deeper as the days have passed. Morocco is not a country filled with wildlife either. The only animals are birds, herd animals, dogs, and an obnoxious number of cats in the cities and villages. It is a country with varied topography, though. I’ve seen the Atlantic Ocean, four different mountain ranges, beautiful high-walled gorges, rolling hills of wheat and olive fields, valley oases, a lake at the base of a desert sand dune, and miles and miles of high shrubland plains. It provides time for thinking, and me not accessing the internet for the last few days has given me some mental space for that thinking time to be more than just focused on the next work tasks I’ll tackle when I return next week. It has been refreshing and something I’ll try to replicate at intervals through the year even without traveling across an ocean to do so. Even as I type this out, I’m sitting alone on a patio, sun back over my right shoulder and me facing the Anti-Atlas Mountains to the south. It’s a nice view, especially since I have some dates and cookies in front of me which my host so generously provided.

On Saturday, I flew first from RDU to JFK then overnight to Casablanca. It was yet another overnight flight where I failed to get any sleep. Maybe someday. My plan was for this to be a true vacation. I even built in a buffer of a few days in case one or more transactions bled into the new year. Alas, a couple of matters have dragged more than a few days into the new year and I’ve worked early mornings and into the evening. Maybe I jumped the gun a bit and should have waited until this week to start the vacation, but I’m not sure that there will ever be a great time and I only have a few days back in Durham before heading out again for a work trip anyway.

Sunday was a wash given how tired I was. The itinerary called for very little time in Casablanca. The only stop was to tour what is the third largest mosque in the world, which was much more ornate than the only other mosque I’ve visited. This one has a minaret that is something like 200 meters tall and holds around 25,000 people inside. The scale was beyond what my tired mind could truly appreciate. Then it was off to Rabat, the capital city. A bit more touring and a seafood platter for a late lunch that involved far too many bones and I holed up in the hotel for the evening to sleep. I didn’t even go out for dinner.

Yesterday was a transit day (I’m writing this on Tuesday evening) to the northeast and into the Rif Mountains. The destination was Chefchaouen, a city I’d never heard of a few months ago when I decided to visit Morocco but one that the travel agency put on my suggested itinerary. It is the blue city of Morocco and has become much more visited in the era of Instagram. I arrived in the late afternoon, worked some, then ate a late dinner of a beef tagine with dates and plums that I chased down with the sour lemonade that I’ve now had on multiple occasions. It really should’ve been better than it was, but maybe it was because it was so late and didn’t really sate my hunger.

Today marked the first day when I felt like I was on vacation, for a while anyway. After a work session this morning, my guide drove me around the mountains into which Chefchaouen sits for a full day of hiking at Akchour. It was my sort of place—gravel crunching under hiking boots with few people around and limited cell service. Along with my guide, I walked first to God’s Bridge, a high natural arch over a river that offered a really nice view. Then we took a much longer walk to a series of waterfalls. Those were underwhelming, with the larger falls probably looking something like Bridal Veil Falls but there was only enough water for it to be a trickle. That is unusual for this time of year, but so it goes. Then we came back into the city and I had what is so far the best meal of the trip, a beef rib with some roasted vegetables. It was in a fancier restaurant and there was a guy playing mostly classic standards on the guitar. The song playing when I left was “My Way,” a personal favorite. Then as I walked back up the stairs towards my hotel, the call to prayer rang out for the final time today. It was quite a juxtaposition.  

By the time this newsletter goes out, I should have arrived in Fes. It will be my third different home thus far in Morocco. This trip marks a return to a faster-paced vacation format that I went away from during the past few years of spending roughly a week in one place before moving onto the next destination. It’s too early to know which format I’ll choose next, though perhaps my next travel vacation won’t be a solo one. Again, one can dream.

The new year brings reflection. As I’ve written previously, I’m not big on resolutions for the new year, but I will spend a few hours today looking back at my calendar and thinking about what I enjoyed most (and least) and what I might change going into this year. It may not be as glamorous or celebrated, but I’ve found it much more practical even if the exercise looks slightly different each time.

In comparison to the past few times January 1 has rolled around, there is much more stability in my life today. Two years ago, I changed my residence on New Year’s Day. Last year, I was a few months into my residence in Durham and celebrated with friends by watching the fireworks in London through the power of streaming television. If anyone has children who want to see fireworks for the new year, that is a handy trick. This year, I’m in the same apartment, there were thunderstorms on New Year’s Eve, and I was in bed by 10. Sure, my mood is not as dark as it was during the COVID years, but the hopeful expectation of positive change from the last couple of years is absent.

There are plenty of reasons why I should be excited—I’m coming off time with family, I have a well-positioned business, my social calendar is fuller than it was a year ago, and I have an upcoming extended vacation—yet I’ve felt morose these past few days, even on this bright and sunny morning. I’m sure I’m not alone in that, and it is my hope that reading this helps at least one of you know that you’re not alone if you are experiencing malaise yourself. After scheduling this to send, I’ll take a walk in that sunshine. 

With both Christmas and New Year’s Day falling in the middle of the week this year, there is an odd rhythm to the final weeks of 2024. I still have a few transactions scrambling to close before the end of the year and there is a scattering of conversations with prospective clients looking towards early 2025, but we have not had our normal internal meetings and won’t again until the new year. Our assistant has also been out so I’m getting a reminder of just how glad I am to have an assistant. Even sending the newsletter this week and next week will probably prove a challenge the workflow has changed since I last published it myself.

I’ll be traveling back to Durham today. We always celebrate the holiday early and there tends to be less traffic on Christmas Day. Then I’ll have something like a two or three day workweek depending on how I choose to spend my Saturday. I haven’t had one of those in a while, but I’m hopeful that a good work sprint will allow me to make progress not just on my outstanding matters but also on a few strategic planning initiatives that I’ve initiated for next year. Next week’s post will be more of a summary of the year. It has certainly had its ups and downs. This one is just a short missive before I gorge myself on breakfast food. I hope that each of you enjoys this holiday, whether you were awakened way too early this morning by excited children or will be traveling most of the day like me.

I’ve never been one to watch parades on television. Even this year, I left the room on Thanksgiving once the television came on. Saturday morning, after a trip to the grocery store, I walked to get my weekly blueberry muffin. This time, instead of returning back to my apartment I headed to meet friends at a prime viewing spot for Durham’s Christmas parade. Until Friday afternoon I didn’t even know that there was a parade, but it wasn’t as if I had alternate plans.

It was sunny, cold, and windy and there was a helicopter overhead that made quite a lot of noise, but my friends’ little guy wasn’t bothered by any of it. He was in his coat and standing in his wagon. And when he got out of the wagon he ran a few laps around a ramp for the building we stood in front of, hair all askew from being under a winter cap. Some of the other children were less enthused about sitting in the cold, but he had the best time of anyone there. The loud cars, the drums, the people, everything—he was smiling and bouncing in his wagon the whole time. People in the parade were drawn to that happiness and that created a virtuous cycle adding even further to his mirth. Then to top it off, there were fire trucks at the end of the parade. Fire trucks are his favorite and he wasn’t about to let a cold wind interfere with his enjoyment of their lights and sirens. I haven’t experienced that level of joy in months.

I could reflect more on the parade—my thoughts about the marching bands, the different civic organizations, two guys walking with a banner (which is what their banner announced), the Mesoamerican dance troupe, or the people handing out tins of sardines—but it was really just about watching the excitement on the little guy’s face.

I haven’t been for the past month or so, but reading fiction in the evenings has been a part of my evening shutdown routine during my better stretches this year. I’ve read mostly science fiction this year in the evenings, which brought a change from my previous habit of more classic literature. There was a short story collection that sparked a few thoughts, but the highlight of this reading was the Red Rising trilogy. I picked up the first one after hearing about it from a couple of the podcasts I listen to occasionally and ended up plowing through all three (there have been subsequent novels set in the same world too but I haven’t read those yet) in perhaps too short a period of time.

The first book starts on a partially terraformed Mars set at some indeterminate point in the future amidst a community of the lowest caste of a solar system wide society spanning from Mercury to the moons of the gas giants. There is interplanetary travel in the story, but there is nothing like hyperdrive and it can take months to traverse between different planets and moons. The main character, Darrow, is a young Helldiver operating deep in the mines of Mars. Then things proceed as Darrow navigates a world dominated by Golds (with a whole lot of other colors in between).

I won’t give a plot summary since I’m not interested in spoiling anything, but it is a wild ride. The action across the three novels is taut and fast-paced. I know that the mental image I have of some of the characters is wildly different than how they are described in the text, but that has never stopped me from enjoying a book before and there isn’t yet a film or television adaptation. The reader gets more of Darrow’s inner thoughts than those of the other characters, but there is a great deal of turmoil in him as he both shapes and is shaped by the events unfolding around him. This also isn’t a simple story of good universally triumphing over evil, and that makes it much more compelling.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, we celebrated my sister-in-law’s birthday. Some of our cousins were driving through on Saturday and so they stopped to surprise her. The older children were the flower girls in my brother and sister-in-law’s wedding, and they love pleasant surprises. I was part of their greeting party. The two older children were so excited to be part of the surprise, to the point of being giddy with their little hands shaking slightly. The youngest had just woken from a nap during the car ride and was carried into the house, but eventually he warmed up too and played various games with the little balls that were some of the only toys on offer. I hadn’t seen the kids or their parents for several months, and seeing the little ones is always a highlight.

The meal was decidedly kid-focused with tater tots and pulled chicken bbq. I sat with the older children during the late lunch and talked to them about school and new friends that they’ve made in their classes this year. The cake was red velvet so I didn’t partake, but everyone else enjoyed it and most ate seconds.

Then we were treated to a ribbon twirling performance set against a background of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus songs as the middle child was given her own birthday gift a few days early too (along with a matching one for the eldest to mitigate any envy). The music would not have been my first choice, but no one asked me and that’s okay. After all, it wasn’t my party.

I’m in Kentucky this week, to the slight detriment of my productivity but to the benefit of my soul. I extended my Thanksgiving stay this year in order to hunt deer last weekend. Independent of the success of the hunt, there is something invigorating about watching a sunrise bring a glow and warmth over a frosty field. There is life in a sunrise that is absent from staring at a computer screen. The sunset has its appeal too, but the sunrise evokes more in me since I see fewer of them due to the orientation of my apartment.

This annual hunt also offers a chance to fill my freezer (and my parents’ too) with venison. I’ll be taking a cooler full of frozen meat back with me, as I do almost every time I come to Kentucky. It is good lean meat that has been a staple of my diet since I was a child, even if I rarely serve it to guests.

I won’t go into any great detail here about the hunt itself, but it was a successful weekend. That means I’ll be able to take another cooler full of meat with me at Christmas when I return. We’re about to start the end-of-year sprint that is integral to our transactional legal practice, so even a short, dedicated time of being in nature should prove very useful.

Even though I walk on the campus on a regular basis, I have no affinity for Duke. Some feelings from childhood simply run too deep to overcome without a truly compelling reason to do so. Seeing a game at Cameron Indoor, though, is something I’ve wanted to do for some time. On Saturday, I got that opportunity.

One of the members of my men’s bible study is a law student with a season ticket in the graduate student section. For games with lower demand early in the season, he is able to get guest tickets. Wofford is exactly that sort of visiting team—a team that is projected to be bottom half of its mid-major conference—but is also my alma mater. I asked him if he could get me a guest ticket, something that I fear took more effort on his part than he let on given his class schedule, but eventually he got three. That meant that we were also joined by one of my Wofford classmates and his wife.

Law students are still able to access their parking lot on game day, so we had game parking as if we were top-level donors. Then we just followed our host, showed our IDs at the ticket booth, received pink wristbands, and were whisked through the entrance doors to our places on the baseline. I say places because there were no seats. This being a student section it was standing room only and two people to each bleacher platform, at least at the start before the crowd thinned later in the game. Then we stood and took in the pregame atmosphere, an atmosphere that hardly approached a fever pitch but was still more than most due to just how small the arena is.

Wofford won the opening tip and scored first to take a 2-0 lead. I jokingly told my friend to take a picture of the scoreboard. Sadly, the comment proved prescient. Wofford proceeded to shoot 2 for 20 from 3 point range in the first half and trailed 51-14 when the halftime buzzer finally sounded. Things like that can happen when plan B is just more of plan A. The second half wasn’t much better for the Terriers, but Duke was in cruise control so the lead didn’t balloon in quite the same manner (though the margin did ultimately exceed 50 after a goaltending call got overturned during the last media timeout).

I took a small step towards repaying the favor by introducing my law student companion to a breakfast place close to campus yesterday morning. He is about to go into cave mode in preparation for exams, the time of the first year of law school that proved most stressful for me. He seems to be in a much better place emotionally than I was at the same point, something I hope continues for him.

I participated in a church men’s retreat this weekend. It was great to get out of the city for a little while and to be out in some cabins in the woods. It was not quite the outdoor experience I would have had if I had gone to Kentucky for the opening weekend of deer season, but I made that scheduling decision well in advance.

There were plenty of ideas presented that could be fodder for rumination, but the one that I’ve been turning over and over is “What is success?” For the first time in several years, this is becoming a live issue for me again. Given the current trajectory of the law firm, we are going to receive more and more financial rewards and we are already experiencing a modicum of professional notoriety in our niche market (though I’m still nowhere near being used to being the “celebrity” in the parasocial relationships that can form when you listen to someone through a number of presentations). These are both good things, things I enjoy. But I already know that they won’t be enough to satisfy.

I don’t have an answer to the question at this juncture and I’m sure that the answer will change as I go through different seasons of life, but thinking about the question and talking about it with a few people over the past few days has pointed me to a few areas where I want to change. Paso a paso.