Category: Occasional Quizzes

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This quiz oughta take up some time….

Sometimes the Sunday Stealing is really short, and sometimes it’s…not….

The Alphabet Meme

Answer these questions with anything from a single word to a paragraph or two. It’s up to you.

A is for Age.

50-mumbly-mumble.

B is for your Booze of choice.

Rum. Or bourbon. Or scotch. Tequila’s nice on occasion. Gin works, as does vodka (though I prefer flavored vodkas). And I love me some orange liqueur! (I actually don’t drink nearly as much as my booze roster suggests.)

C is for Career.

That’s what you do instead of the thing you really thought you’d actually be doing. Nothing wrong at all with Facilities Management at a large retail store, but it’s not really a job anyone sets out to do, is it? Meanwhile, writing and photography remain tantalizing possbilities.

D is for your Dog’s name.

Carla and Hobbes. I should post some new-ish photos of those two one of these days….

E is for Everyday Essentials.

Water, vitamins, daily meds, coffee, and overalls.

F is for your Favorite Food.

Burgers. Or pizza. Sausage is lovely, in many ways. Waffles! Chicken in so many forms. Special appreciation for the wings. Cake, cookies, ice cream. Pie.

G is for your favorite Game.

I honestly play very few games. I’d like to play more, but I dare not allow myself to become a videogamer. Tabletop would be fun, but I need other players….

H is for your Hometown.

Let’s just go with Buffalo.

I is for an Instrument you play. 

I used to be a really good trumpet player. Those were the days…and I often think that if I could re-do one decision, leaving music would be the one.

J is for your favorite Jam or Jelly flavor.

Grape. Or strawberry. Or blueberry. I just bought a jar of bacon-onion jam yesterday, I’ll have to report when I open it and put it on something. And hot pepper jelly is oooooh Lord where has this been all my life!

K is for Kids.

One living.

L is for the Last show or movie your watched.

Last night we watched Riding in Cars With Boys, a memoir-type movie starring Drew Barrymore. It was pretty good, for a movie where everybody in it is an ass in one way or another.

M is for your Most prized possession.

Honestly, I’m not sure. I have a lot of stuff. I should probably start looking to wind down on stuff someday in the not-too-distant future.

N is for the Name of your first crush.

There was probably one before her, but whatever, she’s the first one I remember and this was third grade in 1980, in Hillsboro, OR. What are the chances? Beth Kornegay was cute as hell, if I remember correctly. (No, I have not investigated her at all, nor do I plan to, nor do I want anyone else do so in my stead. I’d be stunned if she had any memory at all of who I was, especially since we moved away a year later.)

O is for what you Observe from your window.

Oh look! Carla wants to come in. [reaches over to pull open the sliding door so Carla can come in]

P is for Phobias.

I love to swim, but I have to be able to see the bottom. Deep water where the bottom is out of sight? Nope. 

Q is for your favorite Quote.

I’ll name a different one each and every time I’m asked this, so right now I’ll go with the first one that pops into mind: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” (Groucho Marx)

OK, fine, one more, a bit more cynical but I come back to it a lot these days: “I believe if you vote, you have no right to complain. People like to twist that around. I know, they say, they say: “well if you don’t vote you have no right to complain”. But where’s the logic in that? If you vote, and you elect dishonest, incompetent people, and they get into office and screw everything up, well you are responsible for what they have done, YOU caused the problem, you voted them in, you have no right to complain.” (George Carlin)

R is for Regret. 

Oops, I mentioned that up above. Leaving music. I really think I should not have done that.

S is for Sweets.

Too damn many, I tell you what.

T is for the Time you wake up.

Too damn early, I tell you what. I’m almost never up any later than 7, and during the week I’m up right around 6.

U is for Underwear.

What about it? It’s there.

V is for your favorite Vegetable.

OK, don’t be getting all biological on me here, got it? I know it’s technically a fruit, but I’m going with tomato. Onions are also awesome, as are peppers of many, many varieties. Potatoes are lovely. Corn, too. I’ve even come to like asparagus, though only if it’s grilled. Brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and grill it? Ooooh, that’s good.

Broccoli and cauliflower can be ejected into the sun.

W is for your Worst habit.

I have a terrible sweet tooth, and I swear like a sailor. Also, I often have sufficient difficulty just getting motivated to do stuff that I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be well-served getting tested for something like AD-HD.

X is for X-rays. 

I had them for my teeth a few times, and for my collarbone when I broke it in school. (By the way, a dental tech discovered the hard way that I have a really sensitive gag reflex when she stuck her fingers in my mouth to put the X-ray film in place without explaining first what she was doing. I have never once felt any guilt over that.)

Y is for your Yummiest recipe.

Pastitsio, which I make once or twice a year to this day. (I thought I did a more recent post of the recipe but I’m not sure where it is; this link is from the very early days of this blog when it was still on BlogSpot.)

Also Buffalo Chicken Soup. As soon as the weather starts getting the slightest bit cold, my family starts clamoring for this stuff.

I cook and make a lot of stuff; maybe I should do more of that content along the way…I also make a lovely whipped cream pie, but honestly, while you probably could slice it and serve it, it’s actually designed for a different use entirely….

Z is for your Zodiac sign. 

Libra, though I do not truck with astrology at all. It’s fun, but it’s total nonsense. (Year of the Boar in the Chinese zodiac, by the way.)

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Sunday Stealing

It’s early and I’m waiting for The Wife to get up so we can go do something fun, so I’ll pass the time by doing the Sunday Stealing! I haven’t done one of these in a few weeks and this one’s pretty easy. Technically it’s a FAB quiz (Film, Audio, Book) with one extra question added:

1) If you could attend a 4th of July fireworks display anywhere in the United States, where would you choose?

I’m not nearly as entranced by fireworks as I once was; I guess that comes from living with dogs and seeing how all the booms can affect them. But I do still like seeing them if I’m from a distance…and there’s just something about seeing fireworks exploding over a beautiful vista that can still excite me. I’d love to stand on the edge of Brooklyn, looking toward Manhattan, and seeing this:

Another great spot is a lot closer, though: Fireworks over Niagara Falls is amazing to behold. They launch them from the Canadian side. Amazingly, it’s been nearly ten years since the last time we were up there at night! I made a video from that visit, which you can see here (if the following embed doesn’t work super well, embedding Flickr videos can be wonky).

I think that’s the key to fireworks: seeing them from a distance, and over a spectacular vista. I wonder if they ever launch fireworks over the Toronto skyline…obviously not for July 4, but that city is spectacular.

2) What book are you currently reading?

I’ve just finished a re-read of a children’s book that I loved as a kid, one my mother picked out for me, called Paddle-To-the-Sea, which traces the adventures of a wood-carved Native American in a canoe that a young boy whittles and then sets free on the waters of Lake Superior, to float all the way to the sea. Mom had me read this book not long after we moved to WNY back in 1981, and it really shaped my perception of the Great Lakes region ever since.

I am also reading a novel called Where the Sea Lavender Grows, by Kitty Johnson. This is not a novel I’d likely ever have chosen had it not been part of a curated list, in this case the monthly offering of free “First Read” novels that are offered as part of my Amazon Prime subscription. The novel tells the story of two women, living decades apart, who live in the same cottage in England. So far I’m not sure what to expect of it, but I’m enjoying it thus far.

I’m also starting Ways of Seeing by John Berger, which is a book about visual art. With the new influence photography is having on my life, I’m finding myself engaging with visual art in a way that I never was able to before (more on that to come, I have a whole video and newsletter on the way about it), and I’m reading more and more books about art. And you know, if I have to have a “midlife crisis” where I decide to sink my attention and time into something, art is a pretty good one. I’ll take it.

I also checked out the newest edition of Tom Ang’s How to Photograph Absolutely Everything, which I read in a previous edition three years ago when I was just starting out with the camera. I do like going back to “Photography 101” kind of content, because while I’m getting better and better, I still think it’s a good idea to go back and brush up techniques that I haven’t tried much yet and remind myself of things I can do that I haven’t done yet.

Recent books completed: You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming (I think I only have two Fleming books left, one novel and one story collection), When the Moon Hits Your Eye by John Scalzi (I hate to say this, but I increasingly think Scalzi just isn’t for me anymore, in terms of fiction), The Uncool by Cameron Crowe (Crowe’s memoir of his youth as a precocious music journalist; good book but it meanders a lot toward the end).

3) What have you been listening to?

In addition to all the music I listen to for presentation on this site, I’ve been listening to an album called Revel In Time, by Star One, which is a progressive rock/metal project band created by Arjen Anthony Lucassen, a Dutch musician. I will eventually write about this, but I don’t feel like I have the current vocabulary to do so. (I honestly don’t know how rock critics, the Lester Bangses of the world, can write cogently about an album after just one or two hearings. I have to live with an album for quite a while before I feel remotely qualified to write about it.)

4) What shows or movies have you been watching?

Right now we’re plowing through Season 3 of Sneaky Pete, a crime series featuring Giovanni Ribisi as a conman who gets out of prison and basically finds himself out of the frying pan and into the fire. It’s a really entertaining show with heists and conmen and found family that doesn’t realize it’s been found and a really engaging cast of characters. I’m also surprised to learn how good an actor Ribisi really is; he’s been on my radar forever and I’ve never thought him bad, at all, but here he’s magnetic.

We’ve also been watching Rizzoli and Isles, for our weekly murder-procedural fix, as well as slowly making our way through Blindspot (this show is bonkers) and a few others.

Movies? Oh, remember that data failure that cost me six weeks of content here? That also killed six weeks of updates to the post I was maintaining in which I wrote briefly about every movie we’ve watched this year. I suppose I should go back and reconstruct that, but the enthusiasm is lacking. We’ll see. But a couple of standouts are Remarkably Bright Creatures and Voicemails For Isabelle, both of which I recommend.

What’s going on in your worlds, folks?

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Sunday Stealing….

EDIT: And now, individual post links don’t load, so you can only read what’s here on the main page. I am getting so close to killing this blog.

Well, it looks like I can at least post again reliably, which is nice. I still have some back-end functionality stuff that is still not right, and I will be contacting my hosting service in the next couple of days to politely request that they give me a refund or discount since a malfunction on their end resulted in loss of functionality and a loss of actual data, which is not acceptable to me. I’m not going to lie, folks, all of this has really sucked out a lot of my enthusiasm for this notion of doing content creation…and it also has me questioning my whole strategy on that score, anyway.

In any event, I’d like to move beyond the mess and get some actual content going again, so, here are this week’s Sunday Stealing questions, and this time they’re actually kind of unique and interesting:

1. What celebrity would you never want to meet?

You know what’s funny about social media these days? Over the last few years the social media landscape has actually fractured into a bunch of different platforms and services, each one with its own flavor, and each one with its own lore and controversies and whatnot. What’s more, you can hang out on one platform and never see a hint of a major thing that’s all the rage at another platform. My main hangouts are Threads and Bluesky now, in terms of the kind of short-post stuff that used to be Twitter before Elon Musk made it his unique brand of shitty, and there have been a bunch of weird controversies that have erupted on Threads that nobody on Bluesky seems to recognize or even be aware of. This amazes me.

What does this have to do with the current question? There’s an actor named David Krumholtz who has been around for years. Look up his career and he’s been in a ton of stuff going back to the 1990s, which I would usually interpret as, “He’s a reliable and professional guy who gets cast a lot on that basis.” Well, after some recent activity on Threads, it turns out that Krumholtz is a really weird guy who has quite a misogynistic streak going on, and he behaves accordingly on social media and in fact has done so for years. Just this morning someone posted receipts about abusive, stalkery behavior of his going back to 2014, so that’s my current choice for “celebrity I wouldn’t want to meet.”

More generally, I don’t think I’d want to meet any celebrity who aligns on the MAGA side of things. I’m just not interested.

2. What do you label yourself as?

In my video content, I’ve landed on “Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer” as my self-description, and I think I’m going to keep that.

3. You can only have one sandwich for the rest of your life. You have every sandwich-making ingredient known to man at your disposal. What sandwich do you make? 

Like, all of my future sandwich activity is limited to a single kind of sandwich? Or, I can literally eat one more sandwich and then I am forever forbidden from sandwiches? And to what degree are we considering certain sandwich-adjacent foods to qualify as sandwiches? Am I allowed to continue consuming wraps? Are we considering hot dogs and sausages-in-a-bun as sandwiches, for the purposes of this hypothetical? Is a burger considered a sandwich? Nobody ever lists burgers as sandwiches; I’ll see menus at restaurants with a “burgers and sandwiches” section, but I don’t recall ever seen burgers listed as sandwiches. So: I will assume that burgers, hot dogs and other meats-in-buns, and wraps are exempt. It’s just easier. That leaves us with the first two policy clarifications, so if I’m allowed to keep eating a sandwich but it has to be the same one, I’m going with a cappicola-and-provolone sub, on a toasted sesame roll, with mayo, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and banana pepper rings. If it’s one-and-done and this is my last sandwich ever, then I’m making a Monte Cristo: ham, turkey, and swiss on sourdough, dipped in egg and fried, and served with a ramekin of maple syrup for dipping.

4. An angel provides you with a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. What’s it gonna be?

Gold rum. That one’s easy.

5. Have you ever built a snowman?

As a kid, almost certainly. We spend a lot of my childhood when snowman-making would have been a thing in places where there was never enough snow to actually do it, though.

6. If you could ask your future self a question, what would it be?

“Please tell me he doesn’t live much longer than this.”

And thing is…you might be wrong about who this is referring to.

7. Have you ever baked your own birthday cake?

I haven’t, no. I’ve made cakes on occasion, but not very often; we just order one from our favorite local bakery, especially in the last 12 years or so since we learned The Wife was celiac.

8. Which are cooler: dinosaurs or dragons?

Fictionally? Dragons. Real world? Dinosaurs. I think. You know, I tend to think of dragons as fire-breathing dinosaurs, so there’s that. But then there are all the wonderful dragons of Asian culture, the ones who aren’t breathing fire. Komodo dragons are fascinating, and recent science seems to be leaning into the whole “dinosaurs as big proto-birds” thing, to the point of suggesting that T-Rex made sounds more like chirping than the terrifying roars we heard in Jurassic Park, so…I guess I’ll stick with dragons.

9. What do you like about babies?

Ummm…huh. Not really sure. I haven’t been around any babies in a long time, and that’s not likely to change. I guess I like how when there’s a baby nearby and it’s not screaming its head off people tend to be in a happier mood. Like, the presence of a happy baby (or at least a sleeping one) tends to somehow enhance the moods of the non-baby people around it, so that’s nice.

10. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. What’s the first rule you put in place? 

I honestly don’t know if I should be trusted with making my own society. First, just the idea of a literal society being mine is a strange one, and I wouldn’t want to enforce my personal tastes by fiat upon anyone. So I think residence in my island society would be voluntary, and it would come with a few recommendations: a predilection for overalls and a willingness to participate in an occasional pie fight, perhaps.

And that’s the quiz…now to hit the “publish” button, which is turning out to be a crap shoot the last bunch of weeks….

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While we wait for coffee to do its thing…

…let’s do this week’s Sunday Stealing, shall we?

1. Can you touch your nose with your tongue?

No. I can roll my tongue, though. Apparently that’s a genetic thing that only some people can do.

2. What foreign language did you study in school? How much of it do you still remember?

French. I don’t remember much, verbally, but when I encounter written French I can pick my way through it, kinda-sorta. I’m able to discern what the road signs in Canada are telling me, if I look to the French side. I do wish sometimes that I had kept up with it more, particularly when I’m listening to music by Berlioz and watching Emily In Paris.

(Yes, I watch Emily In Paris and I love it for all its goofy soap-opera glory.)

3. What recipe did you most recently prepare? Where did you get the recipe and how did it turn out?

Goodness, I’m honestly not sure! It might be the Pastitsio I made for The Wife’s birthday. I don’t cook directly from recipes a whole lot these days; you get to a point where you can pretty much throw things together most times. In fact, the Pastitsio might not even count, since I’ve made that dish so many times over the years that I never need to even consult the recipe I learned anymore. Maybe it was when I made waffles last; I use Alton Brown’s waffle batter recipe, and I never remember the exact measures of the things in it. I love cooking from recipes, though! I need to take some time and figure out some future recipe exploration.

4. What song have you listened to over and over and over again?

Oh, how many! I do try to vary up my music selections, but I also do go into “play that again, Sam! And again! Again, Sam! You know what, Sam, just keep playing it until I tell you to stop!” mode on occasion. Some songs that have received this treatment over the years are (and here I’ll just do songs, because if I include filmscore tracks or classical pieces we’ll be here all day):

“Dreams”, Van Halen
“Human”, The Killers
“Last Dance”, Donna Summer
“Gentle On My Mind”, Glen Campbell OR The Band Perry
“Love’s Been Good To Me”, Frank Sinatra
“Midnight Train to Georgia”, Gladys Knight and the Pips
“It Always Happens This Way”, Toulouse

5. Are there currently any pets in your household? Are you considering adding another? 

I’ve written many times of the little menagerie we have going on here! Dogs Hobbes (greyhound) and Carla (staffie mix), and cats Remy, Rosa, and Daisy.

6. As an adult, have you ever performed with a drama group? (Student productions don’t count.)

No. This is a thing I’ve never much felt like exploring, in all honesty.

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Sunday Quiz Time!!!

OK, let’s get back into this “blogging kinda-sorta regularly” thing, shall we? In fact, I need to get back to the schedule that I established earlier this year after I took a couple weeks OFF the schedule to regroup. Regrouping is good, but so is getting back to it. So I’m going to do last week’s Sunday Stealing now. Here we go:

1. Is your phone Apple or Android? What about your laptop?

Android! I am currently a happy Samsung user. My phone is a Galaxy s21 Ultra (named “Ophelia”), and my laptop is a Galaxy Book Pro 2 360, or something like that. The naming and numbering conventions of devices gets a bit annoying to me, in all honesty. My laptop can be folded all the way over for use as a tablet, which is nice though I must admit that I don’t use that functionality nearly as much as I once thought I would.

I’m likely “due” to upgrade both items, to be honest; my phone is nearing 5 years old and I think it runs out of Samsung support updates soon. But I’m pretty firmly a “use it until I need to upgrade it” kind of person, so we’ll see. My laptop is also doing just fine, especially as a writing machine. It’s a bit slow for photo editing (and, I expect, video editing, which I currently do mainly on my phone anyway), so that might end up being the main reason to upgrade it.

2. Can you say “thank you” in more than one language?

“Merci beaucoup”, “Domo arigato”, “Hannon le”, “Spacibo”, “Danke”, “Grazie”. Yay!

3. What do you draw when you doodle?

I don’t doodle at all. Really, I don’t. I’m terrible at drawing to the point that I don’t even doodle. (I have a video in mind about my inability to draw and how it’s impacted my relationship with the visual arts.)

4. Which do you enjoy more, Scrabble or bowling?

Scrabble? I haven’t done bowling since I was a kid. Bowling looks fun, though. It would have to be a “retro” alley, though.

5. Can you juggle?

I maxed out at one. I’ve never tried learning to juggle, really. 

6. Have you ever worn pajamas in public?

No, though I suppose my sweat pants in college counted. I have long since ditched sweat pants, though; I might own one pair, but I wouldn’t even know where they are.

7. Was your best subject in school the one you enjoyed the most?

Music and English, probably. I wasn’t a great student, in all honesty.

8. When you’re offered the senior discount before you ask for it, are you offended or grateful?

I’ve never been offered a senior discount yet, so I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Getting AARP stuff in the mail was certainly something, though. (Retirement? That’s cute.)

9. Do you agree that with age comes wisdom?

One hopes it works that way, but it’s one of life’s great ironies to live long enough to discover that it does not.

10. Do you consider Sunday the first day of the week or the last day of the weekend? 

Last day of the weekend, I suppose. I’ve seen calendars that put Monday at the start of the week, and I honestly have no beef with that!

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Sunday Stealing (Monday edition)

I don’t know what happened, but for some reason this post did not go live on Monday even though I scheduled it to do so.

Here we go!

Have you ever…

Skipped school?

I never skipped the entire day, no. I did, however, skip the occasional class. A few times I got in trouble for this. From the vantage point of 35-40 years later, I find it hard to care.

Lettered in a school sport?

Ha! No way. Though, the swim coach made occasional noises about me trying out for the team. I kind of wish I’d have attempted that.

Made a prank phone call?

Yes, in college. Just once or twice, though. It really wasn’t my thing and I didn’t honestly think it was funny. Plus, it was pretty damned obvious who I was, so the next day there were ramifications. Not a fan of that sort of thing.

Paid for a meal with coins?

Ha! Yes! More than a few times, actually, back in the day when scrounging together coins was a nice little windfall. And here’s a dirty secret: If you count out the coins yourself and present them to the register person at the restaurant in a respectful way, they do not mind. They like having change on hand. It makes their lives easier. Just don’t walk up with a handful of assorted change and dump it on the counter and make them count it out. (Also, it’s less of a big deal in Canada where the $1 and $2 denominations are coins already.)

Restaurants will be especially forgiving if you pay in coins early in their hours, before they’ve had a chance to build their cash supply on hand. Restaurants tend to start the day with limited ability to make change. One time at Pizza Hut, some snot-nosed teenage boy came in with his girlfriend (I actually hope it was their first date and she saw what a schmuck he was), and they ordered a medium cheese and two waters. Total bill was something like $8.50. This little prick flicks a $100 at me, when all I had on hand was fives and ones. I asked if he had any smaller bills, and he smirked and said, “No.” So I sent that little shit off with $91 in singles, and then for the next few hours every time my servers had waited on a few more tables and had a few more in tips I yelled, “Cash ’em in!”

Laughed until some sort of beverage came out your nose?

Oh yeah. In fact, I was the lucky kid who was abnormally susceptible to The Giggles, and the other kids damned well knew this, so a lot of times the lunch period was “Get Kelly to laugh while he’s drinking milk” time. Fun bunch, those.

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Random Questions from Sunday Stealing

Most times these quizzes are themed in some way. Not this week! These questions are random as shit! Here we go!

1. Did you/will you have coffee or some other form of caffeine today? 

I literally just downed the last sip of Coffee Number One. Shortly I will get up to brew Coffee Number Two. And later on, when we have Sunday Popcorn, I will wash it down with a lovely Coke Zero. (Sundays tend to be a lazy day for us, when we do household stuff like laundry and a bit of cleaning and maybe some food prep and stuff…in the afternoon if we’re home we stop for popcorn and a bit of relaxation.)

2. Who did you last have a text conversation with and what was it about? 

Heh! So, I rarely remember my dreams, which is why it was so weird that I remembered one yesterday morning from the night before (Friday night into Saturday). In this dream, a friend at work and I were arguing with a store manager who hasn’t been the store manager for 16 years about…napkin dispensers in the Cafe. I don’t recall the substance, but my friend and I were really fired up about this. I remember at one point part of my brain thinking, Why the hell am I so fired up about napkin dispensers? Who gives a shit? Then that same part of my brain kicked in a little more and thought, Wait, this is a dream! We’re dreaming about work! Abort! Abort! Ahhh-OOOOO-gah! (That last thing is the old style horn they used to have on cars, remember?)

3. Are there regular trains in and out of your town/city? 

My general city? Yes, Buffalo has trains! The Amtrak here can take you to Toronto or to NYC going the other way. I don’t know about any other destinations. (The state of rail travel in this country is insanely bad.) Buffalo also has the MetroRail downtown, which I like to use when I’m on photo walks in the city. They’re actually finally talking seriously–as in, doing the environmental impact stuff and looking for funding–to extend the MetroRail for the first time since it was built in the late 80s. I would dearly love if this region had light rail connecting the various suburbs to the city.

4. Have you ever been hospitalized due to dehydration?

See? This is what I call “conversational whiplash”. Anyway, no. (At my age I’m thinking I may be jinxing it by saying this, but I actually have not yet been hospitalized in my life.)

5. Someone texts/IMs you just as you’re about to go to sleep. Do you reply? 

Depends on what the subject is, doesn’t it?

6. Do you grind your teeth?  

Not really. I hope not, anyway.

7. When you listen to music with headphones, do you keep the volume low enough to hear surrounding noise, or do you blast it?

Somewhere in the middle, I think. A lot of my earbud listening is classical music, and the dynamic changes can make the volume settings hard. I need to be able to hear the pianissimos over the ambient noise, but then sometimes that makes the fortissimos a bit on the “GAHHHHH TURN IT DOWN, THE MUSIC IT BURRRRRRNS” side. I rarely use the “noise canceling” on my main earbuds. (I have two pairs of earbuds, my Samsung ones that are the main ones I use, and the older Soundcore ones that don’t have noise canceling but do have longer battery life so those are the ones I use when I’m on a photo walk. In that case I’m not listening to classical music, because I don’t want to be listening to music that has a lot of dynamic changes. That’s when I listen to rock, techno, Celtic, and other genres.)

8. Are you wearing nail polish?

What?! I’m a DUDE! Dudes do NOT wear nail polish!!!!

OK, they do and it’s totally fine, that last bit was not sincere. I have zero problem with men wearing nail polish, and the fact that I don’t boils down to that it’s just a bit of effort that I don’t really want to go through. Plus, the nature of my job, in which I often have my hands inside pieces of kitchen equipment or other mechanical places, makes nail polish unwise. But anyone out there who does, rock on!

9. Do you have an ice maker in your refrigerator door?

No. I’ve never had that feature, and I’m not sure if I want it. When we stayed in Hawaii, our fridge did have one though, and it made the evening’s drinking a lot easier, so….

10. Do you have a friend named James?

No, but I do have a manager named James, and a former coworker named Jim whom I like a lot. He retired a couple years ago, though.

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Sunday Stealing, and an announcement!

First, the announcement: I sent out a new installment of the newsletter the other day! This one was in remembrance of actor/director/playwright Tom Noonan, who died recently. Please check it out and subscribe! I try to send it twice a month, with usually a long piece or essay.

Now, for the weekly quiz-thing that I don’t always do weekly but this week I am because it’s prompt-based, which is interesting. Here’s the details:

This week we’re playing word association as suggested by a blogger named Dawn Camp. She said these words “tickled her fancy,” and let’s see if they inspire you. Feel free to answer with either a single word or a thought/memory. It’s up to you.

Word Association. Share what comes to mind when you hear the word …

OK, this sounds interesting! Here we go!

1. Biscuit

OK, where to go with this one? I love biscuits…here we’re talking about the American kind, the fluffy pastry-layered ones with wonderful buttery saltiness. But I learned quite a while back that this is not what British people mean by “biscuit”…but right now, I’m actually thinking of something I read many years ago in a book called The Musician’s World, which is a collection of excerpts from the correspondence of great composers. One of Richard Wagner’s letters, to poet Mathilde Wesendonck (with whom he was cheating on his first wife, Minna), thanks her for a gift of biscuits. Now, this is in translation, so I’m still fuzzy on what exactly Wagner is describing here, food-wise, but here’s an excerpt of the letter. I like this because it shows how weirdly capricious creative people can be about what enables them to get the work done:

Child, child! The biscuits did help; they suddenly jerked me out of a bad path where I had been stuck for a week, unable to go further. Yesterday my attempts to work were miserably unsuccessful. I was in a shocking humor, and gave it vent in a long letter to Liszt in which I informed him that I had come to the end of my composing days…

When the biscuits arrived, I realized what I had been lacking; the biscuits I had here were much too salty, so they could not give me any sensible ideas; but when I took the sweet ones I had always been accustomed to, and dipped them in milk, everything suddenly fell into place. And so I threw aside the revision and went back to composing, on the story of the woman physician from far away…Heavens, how much can be achieved by the right sort of biscuits! Biscuits! that is the proper remedy for composers when they get stuck–but they must be the right kind.

Richard Wagner was a really strange dude…but I’m lying if I didn’t admit that my own creative juices are not sometimes jump-started by some food or another.

2. Crayon

People my age may remember that the big box of Crayolas (the 64-pack, the one that came with the sharpener in the back of the box) would include a color called “Flesh”, so you could color the people in your pictures with the proper flesh color…making certain specific assumptions, obviously, as to what a “proper” flesh color is.

Well, more recently, this seems to be the way of things now:

Not everything is getting worse!

3. Warmth

It’s late February in Buffalo. Warmth is an envied commodity! My main need now, in terms of warmth, is a pair of gloves that (a) keeps my hands comfortably warm, and (b) allows for easy operation of the buttons and dials on my camera. I haven’t looked too deeply for this sort of thing yet, but I imagine I will sometime next year as the temps start falling again. I have a pair of warm gloves that have fingertips that allow for operation of touchscreens, but they’re not super reliable on that score, and I have another pair of gloves that is super reliable on that score, but they’re not particularly warm. I also have a pair of mitten-gloves: the mitten part is actually a flap that folds back, exposing your fingers if you need access. This is currently my best option. I have seen gloves optimized for photographers where the individual fingertips open up and fold back, allowing for operating camera controls, but I haven’t tried them. We’ll see.

4. Flip

Wilson?

Or the cocktail? A flip is apparently (I’ve never had one) a mixture of a spirit, egg, sugar, and spice. (Add cream and you have a nog.) I don’t know that these are made much these days; I’d have to look them up. But I remember reading about the original flip, in a history book I have that centers rum (God, I love history writers!). The original flip was a mixture of beer, rum, and sugar, and you served it hot after heating it by sticking a red-hot iron in it! Yes, that sounds gross. Yes, I would taste it if offered, but I wouldn’t pay for the pleasure.

5. Slush

This will be the dominant landscape feature of my region starting sometime in the next three or four weeks, and likely remaining so until May. Stupid WNY spring, I hate it.

6. Wing

What else?

These are the wings (well, some of them, I fried up a 5-lb bag containing 40-some pieces of wingy goodness) I made on Super Bowl Sunday. And we don’t even watch the game! But being non-observant doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the same kind of yummy not-that-good-for-you food that that day brings to all. No, these aren’t Buffalo-style wings; I don’t make those at home. No particular reason, really, other than the fact that everybody around here makes good Buffalo wings, so why make here what I can get when I go out? Maybe I’ll write a post on how these got made sometime soon…or maybe it’ll end up in video form, I did make some footage. We’ll see. But these were very tasty. The wing is a wonderful part of the bird! (In terms of home wing making, I prefer grilling to deep-frying.)

7. Candle

OK, here’s a random Star Trek word association! There’s an episode from the seventh, and final, season of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Sub Rosa” in which Dr. Crusher falls in love with a ghost who was her grandmother’s lover, or some such thing. It’s a very strange episode that is sufficiently disliked by fandom to often be cited as a good example of the worst Trek stories. I’ve only seen the episode one time, when it originally aired, and I remember it being a really goofy episode indeed. And because this is Trek and there’s nothing truly supernatural in Trek, the ghost is an alien who lives inside a candle. In the first part of the episode, there’s a Scottish groundskeeper–I swear I am not making this up–who tells Dr. Crusher several times, in warning, and also in a really exaggerated Scottish brogue, “Dinna light that cahhhhn-dle!”

To this day I often think of that guy when I go to light a candle.

8. Cinnamon

Oooooh, I love cinnamon! I just love it. It’s probably my favorite spice after black pepper and maybe garlic, if we’re considering garlic a spice. (Technically garlic isn’t a spice, but in most culinary uses it functions as a spice.) I like to add it to the coffee grounds to add flavor to the brew, or also dose my applesauce (we buy the natural stuff with no added sugar) because apples and cinnamon were clearly invented to go together. One reason we love Pastitsio so much is that it contains cinnamon, and I exceed the recipe’s specified amount by a lot. More recently I’ve started taking cinnamon supplements because I’m told that cinnamon is good for blood sugar, and though I’m not generally a fan of black tea, I’ve recently discovered this stuff, following a recommendation by YouTuber Faith Connally:

I really really REALLY love this tea, and I have actually started drinking a mug of this on weekends after my initial cup of coffee, instead of having two cups of coffee.

Goodness, this one turned more extensive than I expected it to!

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Let’s do a quiz and cheat on the rules!

Sunday Stealing has a quiz that imposes a rule: One word answers only. Well, I’m going to ignore that: Five-word answers only. Every answer will be five words (and yes, I use the hyphen to cheat a little). Got it? Here we go!

1. Where is your cell phone?

It’s sitting right here. Why?

2. Tell us about your hair. 

I wish it was thicker.

3. What’s your favorite thing? 

Nesting-doll of a sailor’s family.

4. What room are you in?

Dining, I guess? Near kitchen.

5. Where did you grow up?

All over. Mostly Allegany, NY.

6. What aren’t you good at?

I cannot draw. Essay forthcoming.

7.  Your favorite drink?

Mojito, Manhattan, Cuba Libre, Margarita

8. Where do you want to be in 10 years?

Retired, photographing, writing, overalling, pie-throwing.

9. Your mood.

I am feeling defiantly OK.

10. Last time you cried.

Probably Stranger Things: Eleven’s fate.

That was fun! And I only hyphen-cheated twice!

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Sunday (last Sunday, actually) Stealing!

Now for Sunday Stealing’s quiz from last week, because I liked the questions.

1. Tell us about a time when your family got a newfangled invention (your first air conditioner, color TV, VCR, microwave, computer, etc.).

Ooooh, which one to choose! I remember our first microwave, and our first computer (a Commodore VIC-20), and even our first crockpot (which is still around, in the things that belonged to my mother).

Let’s go with the VCR. We got it in, I think, 1985. I don’t remember the brand, but it loaded through the front (many initial VCRs had the tape going into a carriage that popped up from the top of the machine). The machine had a bank of manual channel buttons running across the front where we selected the channel when we were watching through the VCR, and there was a programming process we had to go through to do it. (I don’t recall if our VCR came before we got cable down our road, or after.) It was a VHS machine; this was when people were still choosing between VHS and Beta. (For those who don’t know what this is about, with the rise of home VCRs, there were two major formats that were duking it out for market share. VHS became the standard, and Beta faded.) The first thing we recorded was an episode of Riptide, an NBC private-eye procedural show. The first movie we rented was Raiders of the Lost Ark. This was even before movie rental stores were much of a thing; that rental was from a local stereo and teevee equipment seller, and to rent a movie you had to leave a deposit of 50 bucks that you got back when you returned the tape. Later on, our town’s first actual video store opened…and they made no effort at all to classify or organize the movies in any way! You literally had to wander the entire store in hopes of seeing the movie you wanted, if you were there for a specific title. Those were fun times. I’m not particularly nostalgic for them, but I remember them with some fondness. There was a time when watching movies on clunky videotapes, forced into a 4:3 aspect ratio on low-resolution teevees (think YouTube twenty years ago), was a technological marvel. Wow.

2. Is there a particular song that sparks a childhood memory?

I’m not usually one to lock music in my mind to specific moments in time that I remember, but I will never not hear any rendition of “San Antonio Rose” and not think of my father. He loved that song and it was often on his lips.

3. What is something an older family member taught you to do?

Back in my college days, the local Hy-Vee store in Waverly would run a drawing for free turkeys every year for a few weeks before Thanksgiving, something like “Get a ticket for the drawing for every ten bucks you spend”, and one year I actually won a turkey. It was just a small 10-12 pounder, but still, hey, free turkey! My roommate had actually won one the week before and donated it, but this one I decided to actually roast up for our friends and The Girlfriend (now The Wife). But I had no idea how to do it, so I called Mom at home and got her detailed instructions as to how to make a turkey dinner. It turned out pretty good, too!

4. Back in the day, what name brands would we have found in your family’s kitchen?

Ooooh, that’s kind of tough. Campbell’s, obviously. We always had cheap Ramen on hand, but I don’t recall the brand. My parents shopped generics and store labels pretty religiously…and by generics, I mean exactly that. Rice Krispies were in a white box with black lettering that said “Crisp Rice Cereal”. There’s a brand called Shur-Fine that was in a lot of stores, if I recall correctly. The best frozen pizzas back then were by Totino’s. (I have a feeling that if I were to revisit those, I’d be grossed out big-time!) My mother always had coffee on hand; it was a staple for her while Dad hated coffee, but I don’t know what brand she used. For a while it was likely generic.

And then there was beer. My father loved beer and drank…well, in retrospect, there might have been something going on there, but some closets are best left unopened, right? I will note that even in times when money was tight, there was always money for beer. Make of that what you will…but it wasn’t like Dad was drinking the expensive stuff all the time, and this was the 80s, when the “expensive beer” was (a) harder to find out in the sticks like we were, and (b) still well in advance of the craft beer craze. Brands I remember were Stroh’s, Utica Club (this stuff came in little squat bottles), and Genny Light. I also recall a time when Dad somehow got wind that the Park-and-Shop store (this was a local chain of small grocery stores, larger than convenience stores, smaller than supermarkets) in Portville, NY had got in a shipment of Yuengling beer. (Yuengling is much more well-known and widely distributed now, but back then it was a local Eastern PA thing, and for it to show up in WNY was pretty rare). Now, I’ve just looked it up on Google Maps, and to drive from home to that store in Portville was about 25 miles, round-trip. And we did it, a few times, so Dad could buy up as much as he could get. And it was somehow my job to unload all this from the truck and stack it in the garage.

5. As a child, did you collect anything (rocks, shells, stickers, etc.)?

I had a stamp collection! I wonder if it’s still knocking around somewhere. Stamps were an interesting way to learn about history. Also comic books; I still have those someplace. For a short while, for some reason that baffles me now, I gathered up travel pamphlets. We road-tripped a lot and we also moved a lot, which meant lots of opportunity to grab a pile of pamphlets from someplace. That phase didn’t last long, but it was kind of fun. I also had a small rock collection for a bit, but that kind of fell by the wayside too.

No, I didn’t collect overalls at the time. Never even occurred to me. I did have a pair that I only wore in my room with the door shut because I was embarrassed by it (why? How the hell do I know? I was 8.). I did take notice of overalls brands as I saw them out in the wild, noting differences and whatnot…and there was even one time I saw someone wearing a specific outfit involving overalls that I have since replicated…but more on that another time!

And now, reading all this, I’m suddenly thinking that I had a kind of strange childhood….

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