Dressing for St. Paddy’s, and seeing Paul Reiser

My observation of St. Paddy’s Day this year was limited to what I wore, as luck had it. The Wife and I went out for fish fry at a favorite joint (Frank Gourmet Hot Dogs, if you must kn0w–photo here, though it’s not the best work I’ve ever done in terms of food photos), and then we went to Buff State to see Paul Reiser doing stand-up. (I love Paul Reiser and he’s been one of my favorite people since “This is not my locker!” from Beverly Hills Cop back in 1984 or so and if you don’t like him, well, feel free to not tell me so.) His performance was a delight and we’re so glad to have seen him. Mr. Reiser is not an edgy comedian who swears a lot (though he did a little!); his comedy is more…well, I’m not sure how to describe it other than “the comedian next door”. There’s nothing in his act to which I could not relate on one level or another, but given how consistently everyone was laughing throughout, I have to admit deep admiration of his craft because he made everything really funny.

Oh! And also, the fact that he could be funny for a long show–he was on stage for about 90 minutes, and there were several times when I was convinced the “Thank you, good night!” moment was upon us, only for him to take the mike back out of the stand and keep right on going for another bit–to me gives the lie to all those comedians who have been caterwauling the last few years about how “cancel culture” means you can’t be funny anymore. Meanwhile, there’s Paul Reiser, just going about his business of…being funny. He even dissed chicken wings! I love that the man rolled into Buffalo and took shots at the chicken wing in his act. He didn’t pretend to love wings; in fact, he openly cast aspersions on them, calling them too bony and needing all that sauce to cover up their deficiencies. Hey, I disagree, but it actually is kind of refreshing to have someone come in to town and not genuflect to the local contribution to world cuisine. (Now, at one point he also mentioned Tom Brady in a somewhat positive light, but nobody in the audience booed, so there’s that.)

Anyway, it was St. Paddy’s Day. Even though it is an option of mine, I did not wear green overalls. Instead I rocked regular vintage blue overalls, but a pair with a green tag! Ooooh! This I paied with favorite plaid fleece sweater, and a green scarf. I think I had the green well-represented. Erin go bragh!

The overalls are by a brand called Ely, another of the old overall-makers of yore; they are almost identical to the Dee Cee brand that I also like a lot, primarily for the difference in the styling on the bib pocket. (Lee also adopted this kind of bib styling in the 90s; I should blog about those at some point, too….)

Oh, it was also a zero-proof day! That’s right, we didn’t drink at all on St. Paddy’s Day. Not for any particular reason, really–mostly because by the time we got home it was pushing 11pm and at that point we’re just thinking, “Meh, let’s have a bit of ice cream and get to bed.” This was a good choice, as we did not rise this morning until 8:30am, which is way later than I usually rise on weekends these days (though not so early as I used to rise when we had a greyhound who always had to pee no later than 7am).

Anyway, after a stressful week on a number of levels, last night’s activities were a much-needed respite. And now, the lake-effect is trying to do its thing again, so there’s that. We’re not supposed to get much out of this one, but we’ll see. I have always maintained that St. Paddy’s Day is my personal cut-off point beyond which I am officially Sick Of Snow, but this winter has been weird: if you take out the three storms that walloped us, the last of which is almost three months in the rear-view-mirror, this winter was actually really puny in The 716. (I realize that this observation has a strong whiff of “Yes, Mrs. Lincoln, but aside from that, did you enjoy your night at Ford’s Threater?”)

Back at it, as they say….

 

Share This Post

Tone Poem Tuesday

An offering for Roger! Here is “Adagio and Allegro for Piano and Horn”, by Robert Schumann.

What’s the relevance to Roger? Look at the opus number. Happy birthday to one of the finer folks I’ve met online!

(BTW, I actually did a Google search for “List of Opus 71s”, and Wikipedia actually does this! Here’s a handy list of Opuses 70. I thought about the Prokofiev, but it’s late in the day as I’m getting around to this, that piece is 35 minutes, and I don’t like to post stuff without hearing it at least once, so the Schumann will have to do.)

Share This Post

Happy Birthday My Love

As I keep adding to this post every year, and with cross-posting it and importing it from my old blog to this one, I suppose it gets a bit more ungainly each year. Well, that’s just the way it is. Today is The Wife’s birthday, and I’m celebrating. As always, new stuff added at the end of the list; also as always, I don’t edit what I’ve written before or revise anything that’s out of date. Think of some of that stuff as growth rings on a tree…part of the reason of this post is to preserve memories.

 
Happy Birthday, my love!
The Wife and the Dee-oh-gee at Taughannock Falls. Aren't they beautiful! #wife #Cane #DogsOfInstagram #greyhound #taughannockfalls

Today is The Wife’s birthday! Onward and upward, as always!

A brief slideshow of photos (some of which are already on this post, but I like them and it’s my blog, so there they are again!) follows. The song is “Live Forever” by Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, a wonderful band.

Birthday video for The Wife

And now, my annual list of memories and things from our years together. (New items on the list are appended to Number 97, alphabetically. I do this because I’m too lazy to renumber all the stuff after that one every year.)

Happy Valentines Day to my beautiful wife! This was taken last summer. We probably need a photo of us with the dee-oh-gee....
Wife and Dee-oh-gee on a nice Christmas walk! #Cane #DogsOfInstagram #greyhound #ChestnutRidge #OrchardPark #wny #winter

Santa, the Wife, and the dee-oh-gee! #Cane #DogsOfInstagram #greyhound

We took the dee-oh-gee for his first ice cream. #Cane #DogsOfInstagram #greyhound

Posing with Patience (or is it Fortitude?)

The Wife and I at the Erie County Fair!

/PHOTO_20151129_213848
The Wife and the dee-oh-gee in Buffalo Creek, West Seneca. #wny #westseneca

I am reasonably sure that I was a placeholder all these years for the eventual dog.

Happy Birthday to Me! VI: The pies go in my face, Huzzah!

1. Her hand fits perfectly into mine, as though our hands were fit for each other.

1a. That said, there’s a good chance that she prefers the dog to me.

2. The first time she saw Star Wars was with me. And ET.

2a. The first time I saw Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty were with her.

3. She used to keep an aquarium before a bunch of moves made us give up the fish. Maybe we’ll do that again someday. But when we started dating, she had two fish, named Ken and Wanda, named after two memorable characters from A Fish Called Wanda. When Ken went belly-up, she called a friend and solemnly informed her, “K-k-k-ken d-d-d-died.” (One of the movie’s running gags is Ken’s stuttering.)

4. I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but I’ve converted her from someone who hated coffee into a regular coffee drinker.

5. For reasons passing understanding, she has always found Erik Estrada attractive. She and I used to have arguments over who could best the other in a fight: Agent Mulder from The X-Files or Ponch from Chips. (I think Mulder would have blinded Ponch with the beam from those giant blue-beamed flashlights he and Scully were always toting, and then beaten him into submission with his eternally-able-to-get-a-signal cell phone.)

6. One of the first things we cooked together was Spanish rice, which is to this day a comfort dish of ours. The first time we made it together was also the first time she’d ever cooked with actual bulb garlic, as opposed to garlic powder. The recipe called for a clove, but she thought the entire head was a clove, so into the rice the entire head of garlic went. That was the best Spanish rice ever.

7. A few years ago she baked a Bundt cake for The Daughter’s birthday, but the damned thing stuck in the pan, resulting not in a ring but a mound. So she just mounded it up, glopped the frosting right over the top, and called it a “Volcano Cake”. Now, every year at her birthday, The Daughter says, “Remember the Volcano Cake?”

8. Our first date was to see Edward Scissorhands. So, Johnny Depp’s been there since the beginning, from Edward all the way to Captain Jack Sparrow and beyond.

9. We used to go out for chicken wings and beer every Thursday night. We didn’t even miss our Thursday night wing night when The Daughter was born: her birth was on a Saturday, and we left the hospital on Tuesday, so at the tender age of five days, The Daughter entered a bar for the first time. This may have made us bad parents, but I don’t think so. A girl’s got to know how to handle herself in a bar, right?

9a. She’s not a huge fan of when I post photos of her sleeping.

Yes, I will get yelled at for this, but she's so cute when she sleeps...even when it's during her favorite teevee show!

10. She insisted on breastfeeding both The Daughter and Little Quinn, which in both cases required lots of pumping. Especially in Little Quinn’s case, since he was never able to eat by mouth. Every drop of breastmilk that entered his body went in via the G-tube, so for as long as her production held up, she pumped six times a day.

11. I’ll probably never completely understand how much of herself she sacrificed in fourteen months to keep Little Quinn alive and progressing. It seems, in retrospect, that every free day she had was given to him.

12. That same instinct in her kicked in again when Fiona was in danger. She didn’t question the necessity or possibility of spending months flat on her back with her feet inclined, if that was what it took. If commitment was all that was needed, Fiona would be here today. (Of course, if commitment was all that was needed, Little Quinn would be here and Fiona wouldn’t have happened.)

13. We used to associate certain teevee shows with the snack foods we’d eat while watching them. NYPDBlue was always chips-and-salsa. ER, when we still watched it, was often good ice cream. Now, good ice cream has been transposed to Grey’s Anatomy.

14. “Our” first teevee show was LA Law.

15. Subsequent teevee shows of “ours” included ER, Mad About You, The Pretender, Profiler, CSI, Firefly, and more.

16. On our first Internet account, we set up our combined e-mail identity after the two main characers on The Pretender. We were “Jarod and Miss Parker”. People familiar with the show wondered what that said about our relationship, since Jarod and Miss Parker aren’t allies. In fact, Miss Parker was initially a villain but as the show went on her character became much more complex.

17. She started roller blading, got me hooked, and then promptly stopped roller blading. Now she prefers biking.

18. It was almost without warning that I met her parents for the first time. We started dating late February 1991; a couple of weeks later was spring break, for a week, so I came home to Buffalo. At the end of that week I tried calling her, only to learn from the old lady she was renting a room from that she wasn’t home because of a death in her family. I remembered her saying something about a sick grandfather, and that’s what turned out to have happened; her grandfather had passed away from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. When I got back out to school, her entire family was there. So I met the future in-laws on the spot. Luckily, I seem to have made some kind of decent impression.

19. Our first long trip together was from Iowa to Idaho, to visit her family, a couple of weeks before school began in August of 1992. She had already graduated college, but I was in my senior year. While we were out there, the infamous Ruby Ridge Incident was taking place twenty miles down the road, so all week there were National Guard vehicles on the roads and helicopters overhead.

20. I am forever amazed at her ability to take some fabric and create a garment. This skill of hers looks like magic to me.

21. Her first pair of overalls were a gift from me. She thought the whole thing was goofy – maybe she still does! – but she wore them for years until at one point they became too small for her, and then a short while later they became too big for her. We didn’t start wearing overalls together until we’d been dating for about a year.

22. Back in the 90s, on two different occasions, we picked out Persian kittens. Both were wonderful cats, both are gone now, and we miss them both dearly. The first was a beautiful tortoiseshell Persian named Jasmine; the second was a red Persian named Simba. Both died in the year preceding this blog’s launch.

23. Adopting Lester and Julio was The Wife’s idea. I’m still unsold on these two giant lummox goofballs.

24. The Wife also took The Daughter to adopt Comet, when The Daughter was only two.

25. Shortly after The Wife moved to Western New York to be near me, she adopted a cat from the shelter she named Lilac. That cat never really liked me all that much. Lilac died a few months after Little Quinn passed.

25a. She is directly responsible for all the animals with whom we currently live.

Indulging Lester
Why they invented hotel rooms

Julio's favorite position

Cats and Wife. (And my left shoulder)

Snowmageddon '14, continued

Day 59: Clear wife, blurry dog. #100DaysOfHappiness #NewDog

The Wife is unimpressed with Julio's uninvited advances. (Notice Lester in the background.)
26. She loves to laugh, particularly at my expense. She is convinced I don’t think she’s funny, but that’s just not the case.

27. Things with which she has a deft touch include: a pair of scissors, a needle and thread, a kitchen knife, the mixer, bread dough, a screwdriver, a lug wrench, and a shot glass.

28. It irritates her that The Daughter has inherited my tolerance for sunlight — I tan, whereas The Wife burns.

29. The Wife likes to read, albeit not quite as much as I do. She always has a book going, and she reads every day.

30. She never used to use a bookmark, until I finally decided I was tired of watching her flip through a book looking for a passage that was familiar to her so she could find her place. I bought her a bookmark.

31. She loves nuts – except for walnuts and pecans, which I love. This makes it occasionally difficult find good brownies and similar items in bakeries, since many people default to putting pecans or walnuts in their brownies or other chocolate cookies.

32. When I first met her, she was a huge Anne Rice fan and read most of what Rice wrote until she decided that Rice’s output wasn’t interesting her much anymore. Since then she’s read a lot of other authors, including a lot of unfamiliar names whose books I’ve plucked from the stacks of offerings at library book sales over the years. Interesting how obscure even the bestsellers of yesteryear eventually become, huh? Currently she really loves Gregory Maguire, the Wicked guy.

33. When we first met, she was a Washington Redskins fan. So of course, the first Super Bowl we were together was the one where the Redskins knocked the Bills on their collective arse. Oh well, at least she hated the Cowboys.

34. She prefers her KFC “extra crispy”, where I’m an “Original Recipe” guy.

35. Movies that are particularly meaningful or nostalgic to us, in addition to Edward Scissorhands and Star Wars are Dances With Wolves, Titanic, The Lord of the Rings, Singin’ in the Rain, and the James Bond movies.

36. For some reason we didn’t take any pictures when we were on our honeymoon or when we were on our vacation to Disney a year later. I think we were between working cameras at those points…but lately I really wish we’d have addressed that at the time.

37. Things we did on our honeymoon to Cape Cod, Boston, and New Hampshire: road a boat out to sea to watch the whales; visited the New England Aquarium; ate dim sum in Boston’s Chinatown; bought lots of kitchenware at an outlet strip (don’t laugh, we still have some of that stuff); visited the Boston Science Museum. While doing two days in Boston we stayed at a hotel about forty miles out and road the train into town; on the second day, on the way back, we fell asleep on each other’s shoulders.

38. Our first argument as a couple resulted from a common misunderstanding between people when one is from Iowa and one is just living in Iowa for a while. I told her we’d meet for dinner, so she showed up at noon and got annoyed because I wasn’t there. Well, duh! I said “dinner”, not “lunch”. Except, remember, she’s a native Iowan, which means instead of eating breakfast, lunch and dinner like most (ahem) normal folks, she ate breakfast, dinner and supper. Thankfully, I’ve converted her since then. Whew!

39. Our first wedding anniversary saw us spending a week at Walt Disney World. What a wonderful time that was! Even if she managed to rip her toenail out two days into the trip, thus requiring me to push her around in a wheelchair the whole time after that.

40. She had long hair when we started dating, and I had short hair. Now we’ve reversed that.

41. Before we started dating, I had a beard. When I became interested in her, I shaved it so I’d look better. Then, I learned that she likes facial hair. So I grew the beard back a while later.

42. Foods I’ve tried because of her: asparagus, squash, rhubarb, grapefruit, and more that I don’t recall.

43. She loves George Carlin.

44. She bought me my first cell phone, and my second cell phone.

45. When we were at the Erie County Fair in 2001, she wandered off to look at the Bernina sewing machines. When I came by ten minutes or so later, she was in the process of buying a Bernina sewing machine. I didn’t complain; I just stood there, kind of looking shell-shocked.

46. Leading up to our wedding, she rigidly adhered to the notion that the groom should not see the bride in her wedding dress until she comes round the corner to walk down the aisle. So I didn’t see her until she came round the corner to walk down the aisle.

47. Starting a family was her idea. Not that I was against it; I figured we’d get there eventually. She just picked the “eventually”.

48. She picked The Daughter’s first name, so I got to pick her middle name.

48a. And now, this:

Old Photos of Little Quinn

49. Since Thanksgiving Break at college was only a four day weekend, I didn’t go home for T-giving my junior year; instead, I spent the weekend with her. We went to see her extended family out in Storm Lake, Iowa, which is on the other side of the state. Since she has family over there on both sides of the family, we ended up having two Thanksgiving dinners that day. Some part of me is still full from those two meals.

50. Iowa delicacies that The Wife and I share are pork tenderloin sandwiches and broasted chicken.

51. Some of our early dates were sufficiently cheap that we had to look for ATM machines that would dispense cash in five dollar denominations.

52. She bought Simba, the above-mentioned red Persian kitten, while we were on a shopping trip to Erie, PA. She fell in love with the kitten as soon as she saw him in the pet store; we then spent the rest of the day walking around the mall with me listening to her as she tried to talk herself out of buying him. (Persian kittens are pricey little buggers.) Finally, while we were at dinner at Red Lobster, she decided to pull the trigger.

53. Before Little Quinn, the most heartbroken I ever saw The Wife was the day we finally had to end Simba’s life. His kidneys were in failure.

54. Great gifts she’s bought me through the years: my current winter coat, a cupboard-full of drinking vessels of all types, candles, incense burners, the Star Wars original trilogy on DVD, my anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings with paintings by Alan Lee, my star sapphire ring, my current wristwatch, and many more.

55. The first thing she ever gave me: a stuffed bear, around whose neck she tied a lavender ribbon. I think she doused it with perfume. I named that bear “Bertrand”, after philosopher Bertrand Russell.

56. The first thing I bought her: a little two-inch high figurine of a laughing Buddha. I think this confused her a bit.

57. Despite my best efforts for a while, she’s never much warmed to baseball. That used to bother me, but these days that doesn’t bug me much at all. I’m pretty cool to baseball myself now.

58. For a few years we went to Cedar Point each fall. We haven’t been there in a long time, but I always found being there with her in the fall, in the cool air, pretty romantic. I loved riding the Giant Wheel after dark, sitting up there with her hand in mine, looking out over Lake Erie.

59. At Cedar Point, she decided that she liked this one coaster that does loops, so I stayed on the ground while she rode it. I’m terrified of those things.

60. Why don’t we play mini golf more often? We both love mini golf. The Daughter loves mini golf. What gives?

61. One day in 1996, we were eating lunch in Buffalo when we had “The Discussion”. Any guy who’s ever been dating the same girl for a period of time measurable in years will know what “The Discussion” is. So I agreed, it was time for us to take the “next step”. Later on, while she was having her eyes examined at LensCrafters, I bopped over to Penney’s to buy her a ring. I chose a nice emerald one that looked really pretty. Sadly, they didn’t have it in her size, so they had to order it, which would take three weeks. So I figured, OK, I’ll get the ring in three weeks and make this thing official. Yay, Me!

62. The next day, she proposed to me.

63. Three weeks later I showed up to get the ring. They had it, but they couldn’t find the paperwork, so some poor guy at the pickup counter at Penney’s spent his entire lunch hour trying to find the paperwork so I could give my already-fiancee her engagement ring.

64. I don’t remember exactly when we picked out her wedding rings, but we each have an Irish wedding band, and each ring is set with the other person’s birthstone. So my ring is set with four amethysts, which is her birthstone; hers is set with four sapphires, which is mine.

65. For years I wore my ring incorrectly. Apparently there’s one way to wear an Irish wedding band that signifies being married, and another that signifies being single. I was wearing mine the “single” way. I was alerted to this by a guy I worked with at The Store; he said, “Yeah, you’re telling all the women that you’re available.” I replied, “Yeah, and I’m beating them off with a stick.”

66. On our honeymoon, it was important to her that she at least get to dip her toes in the Atlantic Ocean. So she did. The water was very cold, though.

66a. She replicated this moment years later when we took a trip to the Jersey Shore.

To the sea!

66b. We returned two years later.

The Wife enjoys a bit of quiet. #CapeMay

67. It always bugged her mother that she saw Niagara Falls before her mother did. Later we took her mother to Niagara when she was out for a visit.

68. During the summer of 1991, when I was at home and she was still in Iowa, she came to spend a week with me. I took her to Buffalo and to Toronto, on the way to which we stopped to see Niagara Falls for her first time.

69. She was really confused the first time a Japanese tourist asked her to take his picture in front of the Falls.

70. At the time our beer of choice was Labatt’s. It’s pronounced “la-BATS”, but we had a family friend at the time who liked to say it “LAB-uhts”, which is how I said it at college just for fun and habit. So when she visited me that summer, we went to the bar where this friend hung out, and he was so impressed when she ordered a “LAB-uhts”.

71. Our favorite mixed drink in college was the sloe gin fizz. A few years ago I tried making these again, discovering that her tastes had changed and she now found them sickeningly sweet. I like them still, but yeah, they’re sugary. (And pink. When I told a friend at work who knows everything about liquor that I’d bought some sloe gin, he laughed and said, “Oh good! Now you can make pink drinks!”)

72. She taught me the right way to do laundry.

73. I taught her the right way to crack open crab legs so as to not mangle the meat.

74. Our first major mistake of parenting was taking The Daughter to a fireworks display on the Fourth of July in 1999. The Daughter was all of fifteen days old. This was the big display in Lakewood, NY, which is right on the banks of Lake Chautauqua. The Daughter did not respond well to the fireworks detonating right over our heads; the sounds were bad and for years afterwards The Daughter was very scared of loud sounds.

75. We always say that we should go camping. We never actually do go camping. We need to do more camping.

76. Once for dinner I made some frozen cheese ravioli with sauce, a favorite meal of ours that we hadn’t had in a long time. She said that she was looking forward to “eating some cheesy goodness”. Unfortunately, the raviolis were a bit on the old and tough side, and the cheese never got nice and melty, so after the meal, she commented, “That wasn’t really cheesy goodness.”

77. She likes eggs over-easy. I’m not a big fan of those, but I try to make them for her when she’s getting over being sick.

78. She makes fun of my over-reliance on boxed mixes in the kitchen.

78a. I’m much better about this now. Her main kitchen complaint about me is that I make way too big a mess when I cook.

79. In 1993, when Cheers aired its final episode, she bought pizza for my roommate and I.

80. She only swears when she’s really annoyed.

81. She is not happy that her nine-year-old, fourth-grade daughter is now the same shoe size as she is.

82. A while back she had her hair colored a brighter shade of blond than is her natural color. It was awesome.

83. Before that she experimented with red. I’ve tried talking her into doing that again, but no dice.

84. When my aunt met her the night before our wedding, she made a comment to the effect that I was to be commended for adding blond hair and blue eyes to our gene pool.

85. The Daughter has blond hair and blue eyes. So did Little Quinn.

86. I’m not sure there’s a variety of seafood she dislikes.

87. I love the way she looks when she’s just come home from work and changed into her PJ’s.

88. Adopting Lester and Julio was her idea, but she claims the upper hand on that anyway because she was helping out my mother.

89. For some reason, The Daughter and I like to bring up at the dinner table the fact that The Wife, as a kid, had to help the family out on Chicken Butchering Day. I don’t know why.

90. She thinks Orlando Bloom is really attractive. I don’t see it, myself, but you can’t argue these things.

91. For my birthday in 1992 she drove me to Dyersville, IA so I could see the Field of Dreams.

92. If I want to spoil her, all I have to do is buy her blush wine, cashews, olives and chocolate. Cake helps, too.

93. She spoils me by looking the other way when I go to Borders; by making me waffles or French toast or Spanish rice; by cleaning the kitchen after I’ve messed it up; by indulging my love of pie; and a thousand other ways.

94. I’m always game for a pie in the face, but I’m pretty sure nobody pies me like she does. Or better.

If you can't be ridiculously silly with the person you love, you're doing it wrong! Happy Valentine's Day, everybody!! #ValentinesDay #pieintheface #overalls #splat #SillinessIsAwesome
Splat! The meeting of Pie and Face

Patrick Starfish is surprised by my fate. #PatrickStarfish #pieintheface #overalls #splat
95. I know I’ve found the perfect girl for me when she describes our Thanksgiving in 2006 as being perfect because, after dinner, we went to see Casino Royale. In her words: “We had a big turkey dinner, and then we watched James Bond kill people.”

96. We both love laughing at David Caruso on CSI Miami.

96a. Sadly, CSI Miami is long gone, but now we thrill to the adventures of Team Machine on Person of Interest, of Castle and Beckett on Castle, and we enjoy Alton Brown’s delicious brand of pure evil on Cutthroat Kitchen.

97. One time when we were working out at the Y, and she got so engrossed in what she was doing that when I approached her, she didn’t recognize me at first.

97a. She loves lilacs.

Rochester Lilac Festival. #LilacFestival #Rochester

97b. She loves sushi, so for a while our Saturday night dinner tradition was I’d buy her sushi at The Store, and she’d eat that while I had a “charcuterie” plate of my own. (I think we can all agree that “charcuterie” is the fancy-schmancy word for “cheese and crackers,” yes? Kind of like how “grits” turned into “polenta” at some point and started commanding $15 a plate?) But she’d eye my cheese and ask for a bite or two. Over time this morphed into her and I both having the cheese plate.

But she still loves the sushi, and I still have to buy it for her! It just becomes her lunch at work on Mondays. No escape!

97c. While driving once:

ME: Huh.
HER: What?
ME: I know I’ve heard this piece but I don’t know what it is.
HER: [into phone] What is this song? [holds phone to speaker, then looks at phone] It’s the fourth movement of Mozart’s Eine kleine nachtmusik.
ME: Wow, I didn’t know your phone could do that.
HER: I’m pretty sure it’s standard now! Your phone can do it too!
ME: Whoa….

See? She teaches me things.

97d. For years she worked in the restaurant biz, which meant working just about all of the major holidays and struggling just to use her allotted vacation time. Now, she’s in banking, so not only does she get the holidays off, she gets off all of them, including the ones I don’t! (I have to work MLK Day, Presidents Day, and the other “lesser” holidays that are still “No mail and no banks” days. She gets ’em off now.) She is not shy about gloating about this.

97e. She continues to make fun of my previous claims that I “am not a dog person”. To my recollection I never made any claims along those lines, just that I was unfamiliar with dogs, not that I disliked dogs. She just shakes her head and keeps on being amused at how much Cane and Carla like me. What can I say!

97f. Her, a few years ago: “Hey, there’s this event where people who own greyhounds all meet up in the Finger Lakes and then we all tour around to wineries and taste wine and have fun with our dogs! Wanna go?” We just got back from our fourth time on that trip the day before yesterday.

97g. This last year has been different, I’ll say that. We’re eating out a lot and staying home and watching movies in bed and so on. Aside from our not being able to go out to eat or to see movies, and the cancellation of several of our favorite festival events, this crisis really hasn’t impacted our lifestyles much at all. I’m glad she’s the one I’m enduring the pandemic with!

97h. Exploring Oahu with her at my side was wonderful. We both kept getting amazed by the same things!

97i. Sometimes it’s hard to find a teevee show that she likes, but when I do find one, it’s a blast as references from those shows will creep into our vernacular.

97j. We tend to get mutually weepy over the more emotional reveals on The Repair Shop.

97k. This last year has had some difficulties of its own, over and above the COVID struggles, but we’ve weathered all of it and continue to weather it all.

97l. Our opinions differed wildly on No Time To Die. Hey, it happens! Kinda like her distaste for coconut. (Which is weird, let’s be honest.)

New for 2023! 97m. She’s had a couple of surgeries in recent years that led to some recovery time and bed-rest, which meant she watched a lot of streaming shows. I didn’t realize what kind of stuff she was streaming until one night we were watching Saturday Night Live and she started laughing knowingly at this sketch. I asked, “Are you watching a lot of murder shows these days?”

97n. On weekends I usually get up before she does, so I’ll come downstairs and make my coffee and get hers set up to go. My signal that she is getting up for good is when she actually opens the blinds in the bedroom; when I hear that, I’m to get up and turn on the coffee. (Sometimes I’m listening to music on my earbuds and I don’t hear the blinds and then she comes downstairs and gives me the “No coffee?!” look. Fellas, try to avoid the “No coffee?!” look.)

97o. No, it doesn’t bother me at all that Carla prefers to sit with her on the love seat when we’re watching teevee at night as opposed to sitting with me on the couch. Harumph.

97p. If I could go back in time and make exactly one change to our wedding day? Yup. We’re all doing the “Rock the Boat” dance made famous by Derry Girls.

97q: Related to 97n above, I’ve been up for 45 minutes while she was trying to doze a bit more. This was thwarted by our cats, who decided to have rompies all over the upstairs, including the bed with her in it. As I write this she has just come downstairs, called the cats assholes, and is now making her coffee.

97r: Stay tuned, but she has started the ball rolling for adopting another greyhound. Yes, I’m on board, but this one’s going to have some pretty big pawprints to fill. (This weekend is a little bittersweet because this is when we’d be on our annual greyhound-meetup excursion to the Finger Lakes wine country.)

97s. Maybe I mentioned this above someplace, I don’t know, but I love how she has chosen to approach her dietary restrictions with a sense of adventure and discovery. We have found more great places to eat and discovered more terrific foods to cook in the years since her celiac diagnosis than we did before, and it’s not like we were dull sticks-in-the-mud in the food department to begin with! She’s always loved trying new foods and spicing things up, which is a real blessing if you’re at all familiar with the Monument to Blandness that is the usual Iowa spice rack.

97t. I’ve come to really like coming home from work, looking up as I pull into the driveway, and seeing her in her home office. Sometimes there will be a dog looking back down at me, which is also cool.

97u. Apparently she takes some of the chocolate from the home supply that I maintain to her desk at work, and some of her coworkers know she has a chocolate stash, so sometimes that gets shared around. I do the “I’m not feeding all the kids in the neighborhood!” thing, you know, the one where your kid wants to grab a dozen freezy-pops from the freezer for all the friends on a hot summer day and despite your protest you let it happen. Because hey, it’s chocolate and that increases the net happiness in the world.

97v. Our last cinematic disagreement came after watching Top Gun: Maverick, which I really liked (despite my general lack of enthusiasm for the original movie). She was distracted by the impossibility of Tom Cruise having perfectly brown hair at this point in his life. I’m hoping this doesn’t hurt our enjoyment of the upcoming Mission: Impossible flicks….

97w. We have developed a way of simultaneously groaning wistfully whenever an unexpected reference to Hawaii shows up on teevee, like the Netflix show we’ve been watching about American street food, and at the end of one episode the preview for the next said, “Next time: Oahu!”, with a big shot of Waikiki.

97x. Bam! The future of rock and roll! (No, this has nothing at all to do with The Wife, but come on, now.)

98. Maybe this is a personal failing on my part, but I can’t bear it when she cries. It kills me inside. But I’m trying to get better at this, since as Gandalf said, “Not all tears are an evil.”

99. I wish we were living lives that didn’t include so many tears.

100. I love her more than I did last week at this time.

101. Number 100 on this list will be equally true next week at this time. And the week after. And so on.

102. She makes me happier than I thought possible.

103. She…oh, I guess that’s where I need to stop. I love you, honey!

Chilly morning at the Farmers Market. I had to buy The Wife a coffee. #wife #EastAurora #wny
Day 65: Tried taking a photo of my Beautiful Wife looking at Taughannock Falls, but she turned her head toward me at the last second! #100DaysOfHappiness

The Wife, with horse. #eriecountyfair #Wife

Pumpkinville: Happy wife, irritated Daughter

Erie County Fair: A couple

Share This Post

Sounds of Ice

We had a big ice storm rip through The 716 the night before, and it had the usual effects of ice storms: thick coatings of ice on everything, resulting in tons of power outages from lines collapsing, or tree branches collapsing onto lines, and so on. We were without power at home for thirteen hours, starting about 1am Thursday morning. Luckily I slept through a chunk of that, and then I went to work, so when I got home the power was back on.

Oh, and that modification I made a few months back to our back-up sump pump? It worked! My extra-long pipe discharged the water far enough away from the house that for most of the outage we avoided the recirculation problem and thus the backup was actually able to cycle, rather than run continuously. Eventually, however, that amount of water still started making its way back in, so I added the other ten-foot length. And even that eventually wasn’t able to discharge the water far enough away to keep it from making its way back into the pit, so we’ll need to make a permanent fix at some point and tie the backup sump discharge into the main storm line. That’s a problem for another time, though.

Meanwhile, the landscape itself after the ice storm took on a quality we don’t see all that often, since we don’t get ice storms like this too frequently. Some of the trees started to look like something out of Doctor Zhivago. And everything sounded differently, too! I actually thought to record some of this, hence the video below. First, my feet, stomping not through snow but a thick crust of ice. Second, removing the ice shell–more than 1/4-in thick–from the railings of our deck. And third, from late last night, when I went to let Carla out for her last bit of outdoor business before bedtime. It sounded like it was pouring out, and she tried to come right back in, but I gritted my teeth and stepped out with her…to discovered it wasn’t pouring or raining or anything at all. That was the ice in the trees, breaking through and raining down.

I’m not a fan of ice storms, but they do make the world look and sound very different….

 

Share This Post

President Carter

I’m sure we all know by now that former President Jimmy Carter is accepting hospice care, rather than continuing to seek treatment for various health issues. Carter is 98 years old; he was elected President over 46 years ago, and he left office over 42 years ago. Carter’s presidency did not go smoothly, but his post-Presidency has been amazing to behold as he has tirelessly championed democracy and other humanitarian causes for decades since leaving office. I expect the historical verdict on Jimmy Carter will likely remain some variant of “Not a great President, but a great man nonetheless.”

Jimmy Carter is the first political figure of whom I was genuinely aware, although admittedly with a very immature understanding of anything at all. I remember hearing about him from my kindergarten teacher and thinking “A peanut farmer wants to be President! Cool!” I had no idea what a “President” was; I vaguely recall asking one of my parents that very question, and getting a response that “He’s the boss for the whole country.” I pictured someone like my school’s principal, going all over the country telling people what to do.

President Carter also angered me as a young sci-fi geek when he chose the evening of ABC’s broadcast of the premiere episode of Battlestar Galactica for the signing of the Camp David Accords. I mean, when you’re a kid sitting down to watch a highly-hyped teevee show with explodey-spaceshippy goodness, nothing throws you into a state of infuriation quite like the screen going dark and suddenly the words “ABC NEWS SPECIAL REPORT” coming on. I’ve made my peace with this more recently, though. (“Harumph,” though, says my inner 7-year-old.)

All was forgiven, though, just a couple of weeks later. At this time we were living for a year in Elkins, WV, and the town’s annual festival, the Mountain State Forest Festival, was coming right up, in early October. That year we learned that President Carter himself was coming to Elkins to walk in the parade. We were in the stands along the main street that day, and finally, after what felt like hours (it might have actually been hours), the parade began, and suddenly, there he was: the President of the United States himself, walking in the street and waving, beaming that famous smile of his. Then he climbed into his limousine and I thought “That’s it?” But up he popped from the sun roof, waving some more. Not long after he was gone. I actually found the President’s briefing book from that day–apparently he gave a campaign speech that morning for one of WV’s senators, before driving in the parade–and by late afternoon, he was back at Camp David. I also found these two photos from that day:

Looking at this, I can’t believe how close those spectators were allowed to get to the President!
Not sure if the guy in the tan overcoat is a Secret Service guy or not; he kind of looks like Hamilton Jordan, President Carter’s White House Chief of Staff.

To this day, President Carter remains the only US President I have ever actually seen. The closest I’ve come since? A campaign rally in Erie for Michael Dukakis in 1988, and a couple of times when Presidents Bush the Younger and Obama flew into Buffalo, and I saw Air Force One from the parking lot of The Store.

Anyway, best wishes to President Carter as he begins this journey with as much grace as he seems to have pursued all of his previous journeys.

 

Share This Post

On “Phneh” and manufactured outrage

So, America’s right-wing has been complaining about an AI chat-bot gizmo the last day or two. Why? Because someone got the idea to hit the AI chat-bot gizmo with a hypothetical situation: there’s a ticking time bomb and when it goes off it will kill millions! But it can be defused by simply calling it a racial slur.

And the AI chat-bot gizmo said, “No.”

Cue the colossal weirdos. Here’s a good and satisfyingly pithy summation of this lunacy.

So much of what passes for “outrage” nowadays is purely manufactured outrage. It’s people not being actually outraged by something outrageous, but rather choosing to be outraged at something they have interpreted through tortured logic into something outrageous.

I have an actual example of this that I remember from my college years.

I was a Philosophy major, and we often delved into some very esoteric topics; and like any group of people studying the esoterica of a given field, we occasionally invented jokes that were probably the extreme version of “You had to be there.” One such bit of philosophy humor came in my Senior year, when I took “Contemporary Analytic Philosophy.” This class was devoted to the Philosophy of Language, as shaped by figures like Bertrand Russell in the early 20th century. Without getting too deep in the weeds here, one issue we discussed was the relationship between words and meaning: do words have inherent meaning, or do they only mean what we decide they mean? Putting this as a thought experiment: Just after the Big Bang, when the universe was just a week old, did the word cat still mean the four-legged beast we all know?

Yeah, I get it. Esoteric stuff. Boring, even, if you’re not a kinda-sorta wannabe 21-year-old intellectual.

But a friend and I decided that there should be a word that has no meaning. None. And not in the sense that “it can mean what you want it to mean!”, like a linguistic wild-card: the word has no meaning. Any time you utter this word, you have expressed no meaning at all. It’s like a linguistic version of the empty set.

The word we coined? Phneh.

We thought this was the funniest thing. We actually spread this around our circle, as only college kids can do. We discussed how even the linguistic representation of Phneh was unable to truly capture the meaninglessness of Phneh, which we illustrated through a notion ripped from Zen: “The finger pointing at Phneh is not Phneh itself.”

Look, you had to be there, OK?

It was all fun and games of the pseudo-intellectual sort until I took a marker, scrawled Phneh on a piece of paper, and stuck it on the bulletin board in the student lounge of the music building.

People would see it and say, “What is that?” And I’d explain the concept. Most people got it and if they didn’t see the goofball 4th-year Philosophy student humor of it, they at least went “Oh, OK” and wandered off, ignoring it.

One guy, however, did not.

This guy got really bothered by Phneh.

Like, really bothered by it.

It just annoyed the shit out of him that I would dare put a piece of paper with a meaningless word up on the bulletin board. So he started tearing it down.

I, of course, seeing an opportunity to take jabs at an easily-annoyed person’s tender spot, kept right on putting our meaningless word back up on the bulletin board, and he kept tearing it down. I figured he’d get bored with the whole thing–by this point the joke had likely well exceeded its sell-by–but not only did he not get bored with his fight against a meaningless word that had literally just been made up a month or two before by a couple of philosophy dweebs, he actually ratcheted it up. He started posting hand-written warnings of his own about the improper use of the bulletin board; then one day he showed up in the lounge with his girlfriend’s laptop (this was 1993, when laptops weren’t anywhere near ubiquitous, so to show up someplace and use one visibly was mostly showing off at that point) to type up a Very Official Memorandum in which he cited some actual shit from some college rulebook someplace about the use of bulletin boards and the required permission needed to post anything at all.

At this point some other folks were starting to think he was making an ass of himself; one person asked, “So unless we have official permission, I can’t post something about a party my housemates and I are hosting next Friday?” or “Do I hafta take down my ‘available for tutoring’ notice?” And he’d offer mealy-mouthed justifications as to why those were OK but Phneh was not. It was plainly obvious that his weird crusade, now being carried out under some kind of quasi-official (at least in his own head) banner, was directed at one thing and one thing only.

Eventually, though, someone asked him the money question. It might have even been me that asked, but I don’t recall, honestly. But someone did ask him: “If it’s a meaningless word, why are you so bothered by it?”

His response: “If it’s meaningless then I can interpret it as being offensive, which means it is offensive.”

That is, as near as I can recall, his verbatim response. And in all honesty, this response just stopped me in my tracks. I’ve never been a good verbal debater; I’m not often quick with a response, especially when the logic I’ve just been offered is so obviously bad that it takes me a bit of time just to wrap my head around the notion that someone has offered up their argument at all, much less processing all the ways it’s bad. All I could manage, when I recovered my wits enough, was to ask, “So…when you encounter something and you don’t know what it means, you first assume it’s ‘offensive’ until you learn otherwise?” He had a mealy-mouthed reply to this that I did not commit to memory.

Later on I related all of this to my former classmate with whom I had coined Phneh in the first place; in the meantime he had left that college to go to another that offered a drama program. When I told him this story, he laughed so hard I thought he was going to fall on the floor. He found the whole thing hysterical, and when he stopped laughing he said, “Why would you voluntarily offend yourself?”

That was really the heart of it, wasn’t it? The guy was offended, obviously. But equally obviously, he wasn’t offended by anything I had said or done, because there was literally no offense to be found there. He had manufactured his offended state, all by himself. All I gave him was the impetus to get offended, but I gave him nothing to be offended about.

So yeah, that was my first experience with manufactured outrage. This guy in college got himself worked into a holy lather that he manufactured out of whole cloth, over a completely meaningless thing that I and a friend had in turn manufactured out of equally whole cloth. The whole episode was one of the weirdest damned things I remember from my college years. I am shaking my head in disbelief as I write this about it. That incident has, as the kids say these days, lived rent-free in my head since 1993.

But that really is what manufactured outrage is, isn’t it? It’s exactly like what all those right-wingers got all upset about last week when a computer program couldn’t be tricked into saying the N-word. It’s amazing how much gets decided, policy-wise, on the basis of manufactured outrage. And not just policy: in his book On Writing, at one point Stephen King discusses all the angry mail he got when an evil character in one of his novels killed a dog. And he’s thinking, “The guy is evil and he does evil things, it’s kind of the whole point of that novel, and also, the guy isn’t real and the dog isn’t real!” (Bad example for me, maybe; for obvious reasons I am now much more sensitive to the fate of fictional dogs.)

So how did the whole Phneh crusade turn out? Well, I guess he won, because ultimately I got bored and moved on to other things and there’s only so much amusement to be gained from poking someone in their sensitive spot, even if the spot is only sensitive because they got up that morning and decided they were sensitive about it. But a few days after the last conversation about all this, the Music Building’s secretary expressed exasperation to me: “I shouldn’t have to field complaints from people about a nonsense word!” As if it was all my fault. (Well…maybe…but anyway) I responded, “Is it people, or is it one person? And you yourself just said it’s a nonsense word, so why are you taking the complaints seriously?” She didn’t have a good answer to that, either. But that’s when I decided to start hanging out someplace else for a while, having decided that maybe I shouldn’t wear out my welcome through use of a word that literally had no meaning.

It’s always worth asking ourselves, though, when we feel our outrage meter rising, “Is this a real thing that I should be getting outraged about?” Because the answer might well be, “No.”

Share This Post

The deer next door

Our next-door neighbors have taken to feeding the local deer from the woods behind our neighborhood. It’s nice to see them over there in their yard, eating away. Our Carla, of course, thinks they are Big! Scary! Beasts! that need to be shooed away with much barking, but I think they’re getting used to her because where she used to be able to scare them all off, now only a few go when she goes running out there. (Our yard is fenced, so she can’t actually get at the deer.)

(The photo’s resolution isn’t great because I used the 10x zoom on my phone, as opposed to the optical zoom on my good camera.)

Share This Post

A Preference in Weather

I will take 26 degrees and snowy over 46 degree and rainy.

After our blizzard and lake-effect storm ten days or so ago, just about all of it has been melted away by warm temps and rain.

We have a two-month period of warm temps and rain coming up. It’s called “the first two-thirds of Spring.”

Yuck.

Share This Post

Farewell, trusted companion through many breakfasts….

For Christmas 1990, a friend of the family gave me…a toaster oven. I was in college, and this was a gift that had never once been on my radar as something I wanted or needed. But off to college it went, whereupon my room-mate at the time saw it. This exchange, or something like it, happened:

HE: A toaster oven?
ME: Yup.
HE: We have a toaster oven?
ME: Yup.
HE: Did we need a toaster oven?
ME: Maybe? I mean, we can make toast now.
HE: Is that something we’ve been missing until now?
ME: Maybe it’s one of those things we didn’t know we were missing?
HE: Huh….

Anyway, we set up the toaster oven. I don’t recall how much we used it at the time, in our dorm room (given we were college students, probably small cheap frozen pizzas), but it did become more useful the next year when we were living in a rented off-campus house.

That toaster oven lived through college, and then…it kept on going. And going. And going. It stopped serving that roommate and I, and eventually served The Girlfriend when she moved out to Western New York, and it served us both again when we got married and she became The Wife.

And this morning there it was, that old toaster oven, still in our kitchen. I made toast in it just this morning.

But…this is the last day for that old toaster oven. Thirty-two years of a toaster oven. I’d say I got our old family friend’s money’s worth out of that toaster oven.

Now, why is it the last day for that toaster oven? Well, we’re upgrading. What to? Well…that’ll be a post for later this week, I hope!

(oooh, wait! A random memory of my grandmother’s toaster. I don’t know if it was specifically a toaster oven, but it looked like one. When you went to open it to put bread in it, the wire rack would actually slide out at you, and when the toast was done the door would open and the wire rack would pop out to give you your toast. That, for six-year-old me, was magic. A lot cooler than those boring toasters where you drop your bread in through the top….)

 

Share This Post