Seventeen years

Posted on November 28, 2022 by ksedinger

Gone this day, 2005.

I will always wonder what kind of person he might have been.

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Goodbye, snow!

Posted on November 27, 2022 by ksedinger

A week after our epic snowstorm ended, much of it is finally gone! Of course, we got so much that much of it remains, but what’s left is slowly going away, and I expect we’ll be snowless again within a few days–possibly by the end of the week. After the snow finally stopped falling last Saturday (or was it Sunday?), we saw a quick warm-up where every day has been in the upper 40s, and today we had some heavy rain as well, which only helped melt the stuff away.

Also, the town got in on the act, sending front-loaders and dump trucks around to literally scoop the snowbanks lining the streets back several feet; the sum total of this is that my street–which was one lane for the first few days after the storm, and was later one-and-a-half lanes–is now two lanes again.

Here you see one of the dump trucks, escorting the snow to…somewhere. I don’t care where, actually. It just isn’t here.

If the prevailing weather holds up, we’ll all be wondering if we’re going to have a white Christmas, huh?

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Have some links before you hit the stores!!!

Posted on November 25, 2022 by ksedinger

Our Thanksgiving table. The VAST majority of the food was on various sideboards.

Desserts: Apple crisp with French vanilla ice cream, and pumpkin pie with whipped cream. Yay!

Good morning, y’all! It’s Black Friday! Yes, I’ll be going out later. Briefly. I do like getting out of the house a little on Black Friday, but generally the extent of my tolerance of the crowds is a quick jaunt to Barnes&Noble. Gotta start shopping sometime, right?

I hope you all had the very best Thanksgiving possible. Most people I follow online seem to have done all right by their Thanksgiving holidays, though I did see a brief discussion about meal times. When do you all eat Thanksgiving dinner, anyway? In my family, it’s always been an evening meal, sometimes hitting the table on the early side (between 4 and 5) or more regularly between 5 and 6; last night’s was around 6:15. It’s dinner, after all! I remember the first Thanksgiving I spent with The Wife’s family members (not her immediate family, who were too far away, but relatives who lived in Iowa) when we were first dating, and that aunt of hers had dinner on the table at noon. I didn’t know how to process this. It was a fine meal, though. I’m guessing this is why the “post-Thanksgiving meal nap” has never been much of a thing in my world.

A pre-meal nap is a thing, though: that lull in the action when the cooking prep is on hold while things bake, roast, or simmer. Also oddly, as much as I cook at home, I generally have little role in the Thanksgiving meal prep beyond lifting heavy items like the turkey itself. I’m not sure why it’s evolved thusly, but I can do other useful things, like walk the dog while others are cooking.

And now for some open-tab clearance:

::  I meant to link Roger’s list of songs about thankfulness earlier in the week, and then I forgot to. Hey, I had stuff on my mind! Who has time to be thankful when you’re digging out your house from 80 inches of snow! (OK, that’s the last time I’ll use that lame-o excuse.)

Anyway, I’m not one to complain much about Christmas music showing up before Thanksgiving (related post on that forthcoming), but it does seem to me that making more space for songs about being specifically thankful wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

::  What state is “Take Me Home, Country Roads” actually referencing? Apparently it’s not actually clear, even though the song actually specifically name-checks West Virginia! (I was going to link a piece from Defector.com here, but that site is aggressively obnoxious about paywalling its content, and I, for one, am getting very tired of everything being paywalled.) “Country Roads” is more than just a favorite song of mine; it’s one of the songs of my life. I literally do not recall a time when that song was not part of my personal musical soundscape.

::  Wine coolers are making a comeback! I remember wine coolers with…well, maybe fondness is a bit of a stretch, but in the late 80s, they were my main introduction to the world of, well, drinking. Especially in college, when I took my time transitioning to beer. I always figured that wine coolers were a fad product that vanished when the fad died, thus explaining their disappearance from the market…but it turns out that Congress played a big role in killing them. Interesting.

I’ve little to no plan to start sampling wine coolers again, but never say never, you know?

::  Cory Doctorow on the American right-wing’s new focus on killing libraries. You want to get me marching in the streets? Trying to kill my library might do it.

::  Toss your copies of Gibbon, folks: they’re worthless now! (No, not really, but it’s always amazing to me to see how many lives are notable in their time and are then lost to memory for centuries until a random coin or two show up someplace…and then those very coins are deemed fakes…and then those same coins are deemed genuine….)

OK, that’s all I got for right now. Enjoy your shopping or your staying home or even your days at work, folks!

 

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Thankfulness in 2022

Posted on November 24, 2022 by ksedinger

Sunrise over the back yard and the forest beyond, Thanksgiving Day, 2022

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Twenty-twenty-two has not been the easiest year I can remember…but here we are, still gathering. As I write this, I’m on my Second Cup Of Coffee, we have the Macy’s Parade on teevee (it’s WAY better in person, we’re kind of wistful that we’re not in NYC for it as we were seven years ago, and it occurs to me that it took eleven days in Hawaii to knock our five days in NYC in 2015 out of first place on our “Favorite Vacations” list), and later on, we’ll get a feast going.

There’s always something bittersweet about Thanksgiving, and I suppose it’s just the nature of life and the march of time that this quality grows each time out. The fact that we won’t be sharing turkey with Cane this year hits particularly hard…but there’s still a lot to be thankful for, a lot to honor.

Happy Thanksgiving, indeed.

Here’s a poem, Thanksgiving, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.

Our cares are bold and push their way
Upon our thought and feeling.
They hand about us all the day,
Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives,
And conquers if we let it.

There’s not a day in all the year
But holds some hidden pleasure,
And looking back, joys oft appear
To brim the past’s wide measure.
But blessings are like friends, I hold,
Who love and labor near us.
We ought to raise our notes of praise
While living hearts can hear us.

Full many a blessing wears the guise
Of worry or of trouble;
Far-seeing is the soul, and wise,
Who knows the mask is double.
But he who has the faith and strength
To thank his God for sorrow
Has found a joy without alloy
To gladden every morrow.

We ought to make the moments notes
Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
Of music we are living.
And so the theme should swell and grow
As weeks and months pass o’er us,
And rise sublime at this good time,
A grand Thanksgiving chorus.

 

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Updates….

Posted on November 23, 2022 by ksedinger

First: As of this writing (I’m writing this Tuesday evening, even though the post isn’t going live until Wednesday), we’ve done the major portion of shoveling ourselves out in the important ways. All doors are cleared and accessible; the mailboxes are accessible (by foot, there’s no way the mailperson is driving up to our mailbox any time soon); all the cars are out. Wow, this was quite an event.

This weekend we’re supposed to have rainy days in the mid-40s, so that will certainly help.

Second: There’s a new social media thing called “Hive” that I’m trying. I believe it’s mobile-only, but if you’re on there, look me up!

Third: Meh, there is no third. Just those.

Later, y’all!

 

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Tone Poem Tuesday

Posted on November 22, 2022 by ksedinger

Sticking with my new discovery, Russian-Jewish composer Alfred Schnittke, I’ve already learned that he composed music for films…including a version of Kipling’s mongoose story, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. This prospect initially excited me, because an animated version of that story used to show up on television once in a while, and I remember liking it a great deal as a kid. Digging farther, it turns out that Schnittke’s version was not the animated version I recall fondly (and rightly so, it was made by Chuck Jones), but rather a Russian live-action version. And there was an earlier animated version, also Russian–so what was with all this Rikki-Tikki-Tavi content in the mid-70s? I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll read the story and find out.

Meanwhile, here’s a suite of Schnittke’s music for that live-action version of the story It’s melodic and very dramatic (there are some unfortunate sound drops in the later few minutes), and highly compelling. Battle music indeed, for a mongoose battling a cobra to the death!

 

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Meanwhile, cats.

Posted on November 21, 2022 by ksedinger

Lazy good-for-nothin’s!

 

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Stayin’ Alive!!!

Posted on November 20, 2022 by ksedinger

Oy, I don’t want to talk about snow. Let’s talk about the opening of Saturday Night Fever!

And yes, I’m serious, because it’s one of the best movie openings ever, and not just because it has a few famous shots or it uses one of the greatest songs by The Bee Gees. It establishes the film’s setting and a key facet of the lead character’s personality, all in the space of just a couple of minutes as the opening credits roll.

Here’s that opening:

Now, most people remember this for John Travolta’s cocky, almost arrogant strut down that sidewalk. His hair is perfectly coifed, and his outfit–leather jacket with red open-collared shirt and matching shoes with perfect shine–combine to create that image, don’t they? This is a guy you don’t mess with. The song’s lyrics seem almost to be describing this specific man, don’t they?

Well, you can tell by the way I use my walkI’m a woman’s man, no time to talk

But digging a little deeper…the movie doesn’t open right on Travolta walking. No, we get a shot of Manhattan, looking over the Brooklyn Bridge…and then the camera pulls back. Manhattan recedes, as if to tell us no, we’re not going there, that place is a dream. There’s a fade and suddenly we’re seeing another bridge, the Varrazano Narrows. We’re still in NYC, but Manhattan is world’s away, we’re being told. The camera drops us into one of those neighborhoods all the way on the other side of the city, with all of Brooklyn between our movie’s setting and the place where NYC dreams come true. An elevated train stops, and then do we finally cut down to street level, where our man, Tony Manero, is walking.

But we don’t even see him walking, first! He’s stopped to check out the shoes in the front window of a shoe store. So before anybody has said a single word, we know that we’re far away from Manhattan, and our main character is serious about his appearance. Then we see him walking: first that famous shot of his feet, walking in step with the music playing, and then the camera pans up to show us Tony Manero.

And for all the confidence of his strut and it’s mirroring in the music, his face is anything but super confident. Travolta’s eyes dart back and forth, in the self-conscious way of someone who is wondering if people are looking or laughing at him. The expression Travolta wears here is not the expression of someone walking as if he owns the sidewalk. (There’s also the fact that he’s walking that way, dressed this way, while carrying a can of paint.)

Then we get the movie’s first dialogue: cut to a pizzeria where a worker is pulling a pie from the oven as Tony waits at the carry-out window. She doesn’t address him like he’s a big-wheeling hot-shot guy; she smiles and says a friendly, “Hiya, Tony, two or three?” Because he’s a regular. And when he orders, he doesn’t give a confident “Two!” or a silent holding-up of two fingers. Travolta gives the order quickly, but repeats himself: “Uh, two. Two, yeah, two. Two’s good.” Cut to Tony, walking again, paint can in one hand and his two slices, stacked together in the other.

So now we know that Tony’s world is just a few miles from Manhattan but might as well be worlds away, and that the outward appearance that Tony obviously cultivates very specifically and very carefully is something of an act, a veneer he has put on a more tender inner life. Both of these facts will become key thematic elements in the movie to come.

That, folks, is a great movie opening.

 

 

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Seventy-seven

Posted on November 19, 2022 by ksedinger

Oof.

I don’t measure our snow, because…meh, I don’t need numbers. You reach a point where they’re not helpful…but here’s a sobering bit of numerical reflection. I just Googled Orchard Park’s average annual snowfall, and apparently it’s 114 inches, according to one site.

So, in the space of about 36 hours, we have received two-thirds of what we average for the entire year, in terms of snow.

Oof, indeed.

Luckily, we’re in good shape! I took the storm seriously as the forecasts started coming in. I loaded up on food and coffee and, yes, booze. We have power* and a comfortable house. We’re supposed to get another few inches overnight tonight as the weakening snow bands shift south again, and then this whole thing will be over sometime tomorrow. We’re forecast above freezing for the next bunch of days. Everything will be fine…eventually.

And that, combined with this from our County Executive, makes me think about something else:

There are problems in many streets and major roadways around here because people who insisted on attempting to drive someplace inevitably got stuck. Obviously this screws up all manner of important operations: plows, trucks moving the snow (when there’s this much, you really can’t just plow it to the side, it has to be trucked and dumped someplace), and the emergency vehicles that have to respond to calls. It’s not just people in regular cars; in advance of the storm, Governor Hochul closed major local expressways to commercial traffic, so now we have truckers getting stuck on major local boulevards as they attempt circumventing closed thruways. All of that can be partially chalked up to capitalism in some degree; we just can’t let business shut down for a day or two, can we?

But looking at County Executive Poloncarz’s tweet, I note his wording: “Please hunker down for a bit longer.”

This storm started in earnest around 8pm on Thursday night. It’s now Saturday morning as I write this, so we’ve been hunkered down for…not even two days yet.

So, my question is: Why do we as a society get cabin fever this quickly now? Is it “car culture” baked into our brains in 2022, where we get antsy to go out after just a few hours at home? Have we allowed our lives to become fast-paced to so great a degree that the very idea of spending a few days in our homes is somehow alien to us? I am by no means immune to this. I keep thinking, Wow, I really gotta suit up and get our cars dug out! I gotta get out there! And then I remind myself, Why? There’s no place that we have to be. We’re not even allowed to drive right now anyway. We have everything we need, right here, and we can go days without running into a NEED that has to be addressed. We’re good. Just take turns shoveling for a few minutes at a time, and meanwhile, just sit and be warm. Why own a personal library, if not in part for days like this!

So yeah, we really do need to do better as a society at living–really, actually living–in our own homes. We need to make our homes into less of a “base of operations” for our lives and more into actual homes. A home should not be a place where we find ourselves not wanting to be after just a short while. At least, that’s not what it seems to me a home should be.

* Oh, I didn’t mention that we lost power for about five hours yesterday morning! That sucked. Apparently a transformer at our local substation blew. Luckily, the NYSEG folks were almost dead accurate in their estimated restoration time: they forecasted power to come back on about 1pm, and it did, at 12:53pm. Nice. Our backup sump pump kept up just fine (though some work is needed in that department; more on that another time). It was fine, really…but a power outage on top of being in the middle of an epic snowstorm was more use of my brain-cycles than I really wanted to expend yesterday. When I finally crashed last night, around 10pm after my bedtime reading of about a page and a half, I crashed hard. Anyway, life marches on!

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Fifty-four

Posted on November 18, 2022 by ksedinger

At last report, a trained weather-spotter in our town reported snowfall of 54 inches to one of the local news stations.

This is what it looked like out my front door this morning:

That was nearly twelve hours ago. It has been snowing continuously since, dumping multiple inches an hour. We’re not due for any relief for another five or six hours, apparently.

I’ve never seen anything like this. Not even “Snowvember”, the big event that socked us for a week back in 2014, was like this. Or maybe it was…but Snowvember unfolded over two or three days. This is like that entire event, packed into a single day. I have made no attempt at shoveling out front; all of my shoveling has been in back, to give Carla a place for relief and so I can get at the furnace vents and keep them clear. And even that feels like a losing battle, because I’ve run out of places to throw new snow.

But I’ll have to go out again, at least once more this evening.

After Sunday we have a week of temps in the high 30s and low 40s, so we’ll be able to melt some of this off. But for now…I’m rarely one to indulge thoughts of moving to places where it doesn’t snow. As natural hindrances (not sure I’d call it a ‘disaster’) go, I’ll still take snow over wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, extreme heat, hurricanes, the likelihood of entire regions getting reclaimed by the sea as levels rise, and living in the company of many folks who vote for Ron DeSantis. But right now, all I want is for the snow to stop.

Just…stop.

I can take two days to dig, but only if it stops!

 

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