There are a few professions out there where it’s very difficult to separate the individual person from the job.

While conversing with my business coach Julia about the release of my book, “The Promise I Kept,” as well as a class I’m developing to help others write their stories, too, we got down to the usual stalemate in our planning: discussing price.

“Do you realize the minute we talk money, you freeze?” Julia said.

Much has been written about the difficulties of would-be home buyers in Silicon Valley. But what about the angst of sellers?

Preparing my mother’s house for sale was like getting an aging movie star ready for her close-up. It’s an older home in a perfectly splendid location – at the end of a cul-de-sac, on a low-traffic street, backed by a natural creek, with a majestic heritage oak tree sheltering a spacious patio in back and other mature oaks and pines in the front yard. The landscaping is low maintenance, and the flower beds are bursting with bulbs.

I was hesitant to even pursue writing this column, given its delicate nature and the fact that I’m, well, male.

But the Town Crier is paying me exorbitant wages to have an opinion, so I figured, what the hell, may as well dive into the Me Too topic.

Everyone knows that Julia Child enjoyed a good meal. In her girlish tones and sing-song cadence, she praised well-cooked, well-served food, rejoicing as she ate. But behind the scenes, she was no lady. Child would go to any length to get that kind of meal to her table: hack through bone and gristle, decapitate a chicken, ram a blade into the head of a shellfish or, better yet, throw it straight into a pot of roiling water and boil it to death.

My dog, Eloise, feels the same way about socks. Any sock – women’s or men’s, laundered or unlaundered, multicolored or monotone. She devotes herself to the task of retrieving one, straight out of your hand if need be, but more often by dashing into an open closet door, diving into a hamper full of clothing, yanking out a single sock and then racing out of the room like a bat out of hell, seeking out the first person in the family she can find to prance around in triumph with a sock dangling out of her mouth as if it were her first kill on a hunting expedition for small prey.

I had scattered some literature about the goals of our women’s group around our meeting table. The youngest and newest member of the group picked up a card and read it aloud: “We love Title IX – Fair play on and off the court.”

She looked at me in surprise. “Are we still talking about that? Look at the coverage the women’s basketball and volleyball teams get at Stanford. Isn’t the Title IX thing a battle that has been won?”