The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Some photos from a recent trek to Knox Farm….
One of my favorite things about walking in the woods is the way the sunlight breaks through in spots, dappling the forest floor in pools of golden light while other spots remain shrouded. Here are several shots of just that:
Two shots of the Dumas Bridge, first from the southeast end, and then from the northwest. Same place, same camera, but two different vantage points make for very different moods in the photos!
Every couple I’ve ever known, of every combination of people, has a hot one and a cold one.
This isn’t about looks, but about reactions to temperature. Every couple has one person who always thinks it’s on the cool side, while the other always thinks it’s on the warm side. The cold person wants to turn up the thermostat in summer, still sleeps under three blankets in July, wears layers consistently through August. Meanwhile the warm person kicks aside all the blankets except maybe the sheet, aims a fan at themselves while sleeping, and will wear exactly the right amount of clothes to keep from getting arrested for indecent exposure and not one layer more.
Conversely, in winter time, the cool person is in their element! They are comfortable most of the time and always feel fine with a light amount of clothes on, unless maybe it gets really arctic in January. This person might even wear shorts in winter and longs for the cool nights of late September and October, often trying to get their partner to let them leave the bedroom window overnight well into November. Meanwhile, the cold one? They’re unhappy, temperature-wise, from that same late September all the way to April. They will huddle under blankets while watching teevee in the living room, they will wear handwarmers and fingerless gloves while working inside in December, they will plot trips to Florida and warmer climes, and it will seem like soup is on the menu each and every time it’s their turn to make dinner.
One or the other.
Some of these depictions may seem extreme, but I know couples even more extreme than what I’ve outlined here.
Which one are you?
Here at Casa Jaquandor, I used to be Hot One while The Wife always used to be the Cold One. She’d be hankering the close the windows in October, while I’d be the one who spent the entirety of July in heat-related misery. She’d be the cold one in February, never venturing outside unless it was under the protection of a giant coat, where I’d usually just put on a t-shirt and thick sweater under my trusty overalls and call it a day.
And now, recently, we’ve switched places.
I’m not entirely sure when this started, but it’s been going on roughly a year now. I haven’t shifted quite as strongly as she has, but there are often times now when I’ll be feeling slightly chilly and she announces it’s too warm inside. She puts up a lot less argument about me running the fan at night or having the central air going in the hotter days of summer; we’ve even had a few days so far this year where we have the windows open and the air is turned off and she comes into the room I’m in and asks, “Wow, are you really not turning the air on? I figured you’d be miserable!”
Strange, huh?
And it’s not just her! Time was when I’d go from, say, Memorial Day to Labor Day and only wear overalls a handful of times. Now? Well, as I write this it’s in the upper 70s and I’m wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt under blue denim overalls. And earlier I walked the dogs! So far this summer I’ve barely worn shorts. This blows my mind. It’s not just that my tolerance for heat has improved; I’ve found that long sleeves versus short sleeves doesn’t really make a difference in my degree of misery from the heat, and I’m kind of finding that long pants versus short pants isn’t much of a factor either. Plus, overalls aren’t belted so there’s more internal air flow, I guess is a nice way to phrase it. Now, I’m not going crazy here: I won’t be wearing flannel or any of my denim shirts any time soon, and the summer is young and climate change is going to have its way with us. July is just beginning, and in my heat-hating days, July was always my least favorite month of the year. We’re due to attend the Sterling Renaissance Festival in three weeks; I’d love to be able to wear overalls with one of my poofy Renfest shirts (which are made of really light fabric) to the Faire, which is located on the side of a forested hill. We’ve only gone there once when it was well-and-truly sweltering, so…we’ll see. Fingers crossed! (And also for rocking overalls at the County Fair in August.)
Meanwhile, as I write this, The Wife is upstairs in bed, under the blankets, watching something on Netflix. (Oh, she’s recovering from a minor surgical procedure on her foot from a week ago. Nothing horrible, just tendonitis that wasn’t going to heal without surgery.) Earlier I indicated that it might get warm enough later in the afternoon to warrant turning on the A/C; she responded, “We’re not there now?!”
How about you all? Is there a Hot One and a Cold One in your relationship? And have you ever flipped the poles, as it were?
Hey folks!
Sorry for the lack of posting the last few days. June was a rather difficult month–not bad, mostly (except for matters of national import, of which I must honestly admit that our last good month as a nation is in the rear-view mirror), but difficult. June was full of daily-life stuff that occupied a lot of my brain cycles, and as the month drew to a close, that level of activity increased to the point that I just had to shut down my writing brain just to get through.
We’re all caught up now, though! Again, none of this was bad, but it was all at once and it all absorbed a lot of mental energy, and I’m finding that mental energy isn’t as easy to come by as it used to be. I can prop it up for a while by upping my caffeine and sugar intake, but that only works for a little while and I always feel like crap for 36 hours after doing that–and I have every suspicion that the 36-hour recovery for that behavior will become 48 before too long, and then even longer.
Anyway, I’m on a three-day weekend now, getting some R&R in, and there will be more of that in the future. Onward and upward! Zap! Pow!
And now, here’s one of our cats, touching Carla’s butt.
Until yesterday, I had never walked through Delaware Park.
In Buffalo, this is almost a kind of heresy. Delaware Park is Buffalo’s equivalent to New York City’s Central Park: it is the biggest of Buffalo’s public parks, the one with the most variety in terms of things to do and see, all of it tucked into an energized urban environment. I’ve driven through or around Delaware Park many times (among other things, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is on the park’s western edge), but somehow, in all my years of living in The 716, I’ve never actually stopped to spend a bit of quality time in Delaware Park.
Until yesterday.
What was more is that The Dee-oh-gee and I were there shortly after sunrise.
I am not a morning person–at least, I am not a sunrise person. We were all up that early because we had to whisk The Wife to a local medical facility for a scheduled procedure (she’s fine, just tendonitis in a foot that wasn’t responding to physical therapy), and of course we had Cane ride along with us; after depositing The Wife at the hospital where the thing was being done, I decided to take Cane someplace for a walk before heading home. I thought to go to Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, but I was in the vicinity of Delaware Park, and as I drove through it, I thought, Hey, why not walk right here?
Living in Buffalo’s Southtowns, Delaware Park is far enough off my normal beaten path that it simply has never been a destination of its own. That should probably change, and soon. For now, though, I’m happy to have been there on an early morning in June. It had been a cool night but was warming up, which made the waters misty in the golden light.
In light like that, even a distant cloud of gnats or whatever insects these were can be beautiful, as they catch the sun:
Geese:
And many magnificent trees:
The best thing I saw yesterday was a great egret. We kept interrupting this bird as we walked along the path. There it would be, fifty feet or so ahead of us, and then it would fly farther down the lake as we approached. This happened several times until finally it took wing and flew all the way back down the length of the lake; we didn’t see it again after that. But what an impressive bird this is!
We walked along the southern edge of Hoyt Lake and then we turned around and headed back. It was very quiet and serene, with only the sounds of a few joggers breaking the spell of nature and, beyond it, the sounds of traffic and a city waking up. We also saw the stage for Shakespeare In Delaware Park, which we have likewise never attended; I suppose we’ll have to see for ourselves someday if that cockpit can indeed hold the vasty fields of France.
On the way back, I stopped to pluck a single blossom, and after taking in the rising sunlight one last time, Cane and I headed home. We got back just a few minutes before my normal work day, had I worked yesterday, would have begun.
Not a bad way to pass a morning, even if I am still quite sure that I will never be a sunrise person.
[A few weeks ago….]
ME: Hi, I was wondering if you can get my 2012 Kia Soul in for service? It needs an oil change and the ‘Check Engine’ light just came on.
MY MECHANIC: Sure, I can get ‘er in tomorrow!
[EDITOR’S NOTE: This car has a long history of the Check Engine light coming on for a day or two and then going off again for six months. This time, not so much.]
[The next day….]
ME: (on phone, around noon; our mechanic is a “drop it off in the morning and then he calls us when he’s got something to report unless we call him first” kind of guy) Hey, just checking in on my Kia Soul?
MECHANIC: Oh, hi. [I’m already sensing bad news] So the oil change is done, but the Check Engine light log referred us to an oxygen sensor. When I checked that out, I found that the flange for the catalytic convertor is rotting out…[my brain doesn’t process much of what follows because we all know what it means when the mechanic refers to your catalytic convertor in ANY context]…estimated repair cost of $2100.
ME: Huh.
[end of scene]
Some years ago I started up a dedicated savings slush fund just for car repairs, after one large repair on a previous vehicle cleaned out my entire personal savings account. This practice has proved wise over the last few years: having the money already set aside to cover stuff like a brake job or a faulty sensor will save you so much emotional and mental anguish, I can’t overstate it. My Kia Soul, though, as noted, was a 2012 model, so I’ve been aware for a while that its time of replacement was coming up sooner rather than later. I’ve also been fortunate the last two years to have no major repairs crop up, so I was able to convert some of the Auto Repair Fund to a Future Vehicle Down Payment Fund. My hopes were to make it to 2024 before starting to look around seriously for the next vehicle, but as you can see by the Dramatic Rendering above, the Car Repair Gods had other plans.
The Wife had to buy a new car herself two years ago, and she liked the sales rep at the local dealership she dealt with a great deal, so she contacted him. And that dealership is literally at the end of our street. So, appointments were made and test drives were done and long story short, yada yada yada, exeunt the 2012 Kia Soul which was originally my mother’s car. Enter my new 2019 Buick Encore!
Two previous cars of mine were Buicks, both of which I liked enormously, so I was predisposed to like this one. We did our test drive due diligence, though we only got to test out two vehicles (the other being a Chevy Trax). I did some online research, and this particular vehicle was a gem in the waiting, having only had a single owner and only 14000 miles on it. Not bad, considering! I’m quite happy with what I got.
But man, is this a bad time to be forced into the car purchase racket, folks.
I’m sure we’ve all heard about inventory problems and supply-chain issues, but the long and short of it is this: new cars are simply not out there in any appreciable volume, to the point where new cars are literally being made to order, with really long lead times. I know a guy at work who ordered his new pickup truck last August; he finally got his new truck a month ago. My sales rep told me of a guy who ordered a new truck of his own, just a standard bells-and-whistles Chevy pickup, with a lead time of a year. All this puts enormous pressure on the used car market, driving inventories down and prices up.
While I did get a good deal with which I am quite happy, I was very much constrained by low inventory and, therefore, fewer options. I put the question out to Facebook when this all started, and I got a lot of recommendations for good cars in response; few of those were available in my price range at all. (And while I do like buying used, because let’s be honest, you can easily replicate the New Car Smell and these days a three-years-or-less used car might as well be new anyway if the previous owner wasn’t a shit and your dealer isn’t a shyster.) I feel strongly that I was lucky to get a car I’m happy with this quickly.
(Now, I had some time; my Kia Soul wasn’t undrivable. But its issues meant that it would not pass its next New York State Inspection unless the catalytic convertor and the exhaust system were replaced, and my inspection was up in July. If the inspection had had until September, then I would have had more time to play with, alas.)
I asked my sales rep if he saw any light at the end of this tunnel any time soon, and he bluntly said, “No, I think it’s gonna be this way for a long time to come. If you think you’re going to need a car, you either need to order it early, or accept being at the mercy of existing inventory when the time comes.” Ouch.
My attitude on cars, shared by The Wife, has always been to drive them until ongoing maintenance costs make little sense. This particular repair need gave me pause, because I could have had the Kia fixed! I could have afforded it, quite painlessly. I could have bought another few years in that car. Maybe. But you never know, do you? The last brake job I had done on that car was four years ago, so that would almost certainly be coming up soon–and quite possibly before I had a chance to save up for that.
And all of that would have depleted my ability to make the down payment on the next car.
So, yes, I thought about just having the Kia fixed. But in the end–and this was a decision quickly made–it just didn’t make financial sense for me to put over $2000 into a ten-year-old car.
That Kia Soul was a good car. We had a lot of good times in that car…or, we drove to a lot of good times in that car. The Soul was never a car that I would have chosen for myself had I been buying new; it was just a bit small for my tastes. But it was reliable and comfortable (for me, anyway; The Wife had other opinions) and The Dee-oh-gee liked it a lot. Here’s hoping the new Encore serves as well. There’s a solid chance–maybe just this side of unlikely, but still within possibility–that this vehicle sees me through to retirement. We’ll see.
(What would I have purchased had inventory and money not been factors? Either a Subaru Outback or a Crosstrek. I’ve long been a Subaru fan.)
(Oh, and not long ago I considered a ‘Reverse Camera’ a gimmick. Now? I love it!)
(Kudos to my sales guy for always being willing to listen to “Yeah, I don’t like this.” He openly said, several times, “Look, you gotta like your car!” And another time, “I am not the kind of guy who wants to put you in a car you don’t like because I get a sale.” That meant a lot. One model Trax he showed me didn’t come with cruise control; I said before I got in the car, “Yeah, I need cruise.” He said, “OK, this car’s out, then.” I don’t use cruise control all the time, but I want it there for when we’re doing long stints on the monument to ennui that is the New York State Thruway. I am surprised to learn that you can still buy cars without cruise control! I have to admit that by this point, I consider cruise control and air conditioning standard to the point that they’re just assumed. Like, I don’t know, wheels.)
(Are you self-conscious about your signature? Buy a car. You’ll get over that shit real quick. Holy shit, that was a lot of signing!)
As I write this, it’s a little after 9:30 am on Saturday morning, April 16, 2022. Though it has now stopped, this was the scene about an hour ago as I looked over my back yard.
Were I to look out back and see this in late October or early November, I’d be thrilled. But in the back half of April? Sigh….
Here’s the scene in my back yard, Sunday, March 27:
Ayup.
It’s funny about this area: we always get snow this late in the year. One recent year we actually got snow on Mother’s Day, which is still six or seven weeks away. This is not unusual. Granted, snows this late in the year don’t generally pile much on (unless you live in the hillier climes downwind of Lake Erie, areas which are ten to twenty miles south of Casa Jaquandor), but as much as I really do like snow, generally by St. Patrick’s Day I’m emotionally done with the stuff.
Being vexed by snow this late in the year is one thing, but what always gets me is how surprised a lot of people in this region are by it. Every year, we get our first post-equinox snow forecast, and I hear a lot of “Oooooh, I thought we were done with it for this year!” It amazes me that people can live in a place for years and still be caught by surprise by something that happens every year. Weird.
I continue to believe that Buffalo’s winters really wouldn’t get nearly the bad rap they do if spring here wasn’t like this: two months of mostly gray-and-muddy, punctuated by a random stray 50-degree day here or there and more often by a snowfall. We don’t start seeing real, honest green around here until mid-May, and I think a lot of people just mentally combine the cruddy two months of spring into the actual winter. And yes, it does get old. So I look out on our new fresh bed of snow, and all I can muster is, “Well, at least we don’t have to wipe off muddy dog paws today.”
Here’s the same photo from above, with a Prisma filter applied. Just because.
And I’ll probably get to take another just like it before long!
(Revised and greatly extended below.)
I am currently sitting in the vestibule of a restaurant waiting to be seated. The wait is 45 minutes, and we’ve been here 15. We’ve never been here before, so here’s hoping! The fact that the place is full of locals is encouraging; this is what Anthony Bourdain always advised travelers. When in a new city, go eat wherever all the locals are. If nothing else you will get competent food, since nobody stays in business, much less packs the place, by giving their customers food poisoning.
It’s fish fry night. Further updates as events warrant!
UPDATE: The hostess missed us, crossed our name off, and put us right in front of the live band when we asked why everybody but us had been seated. Oy.
Oh, that table by the band? That wasn’t happening. Now we’re in the bar. Over 75 minutes after walking in the door, we have finally ordered food.
UPDATE II: The place was jammin’ for a Friday night, so we were told a 45 minute table wait. No problem, we put our name on the list, went and sat down. Now, this place is a converted house with a large addition, so the floor layout is pretty convoluted, and the waiting area consists of two small adjoining rooms, only one of which is actually in the line of sight of the hostess. We waited in that room.
(Also, just as we arrived–and the place is packed even before this–a party of nineteen is being seated.)
The hostess somehow managed to seat someone in our place, crossed our names off and went about her night. By the time we realized what was going on, we emerged into the other waiting area to find nobody at all waiting except us. The hostess pops up and smilingly greets us like we just walked in. The Wife leans over, points to our crossed-off names, and says, “That’s us. Can we please get a table?” The hostess obliges…putting us in this big room with an amped-up Irish band, at a table about six feet from the stage.
(Also in the back room with the band is the afore-mentioned nineteen-top, the ones who got seated an hour ago, and they don’t have food yet. Again, local mom-and-pop joint, packed on a Friday night. We have long-since tempered our expectations as far as quick food delivery, but we did not factor into our plans a frankly dumb hostess.)
(Yes, I stand by that. She was bubbly and barely apologetic even when we pointed out that she’d basically screwed us out of our turn in the queue.)
This doesn’t work. We sit for five minutes until the server finally arrives. The Wife talks to the server. I can’t hear anything at all. The Wife finishes her talk with the server–they’re shouting into each other’s ear, and I still can’t hear anything–and she texts me from across the table. It’s a small table, by the way. Server’s looking for another table. Server comes back and moves us to a high-top in the bar. Yay.
We order food and drinks. Off the server goes. Five minutes later, back the server comes, with The Wife’s draft cider but without the yummy-sounding Bailey’s-based cocktail I’d ordered, because they’re out of something to make the drink with. I order another drink that I’m less enthused about, but when it comes, it’s OK. It’s a Screwdriver made to look green with the addition of Blue Curacao. It’s fine, not a bad drink at all! But by this point we’re pushing 90 minutes since we walked in the front door.
There’s another large party, a twelve-top, seated next to us. They’re having loud fun, which is fine, it wasn’t bothering us. A guy comes over to greet us and says something like “Are we too loud for you?” We assure them that no, they’re not…and he says, “I know how it is, you come out looking for a nice dinner together on a Friday night and these three Irish hooligans start playing music in your ear.” Oh…this guy isn’t from the large table next to us, he’s from the band, which is taking a break. We assure him they’re not, just that our evening to that point had been rough.
Another guy comes by about fifteen minutes later, seeing us nursing a couple empty drink glasses and our waters, and asks cheerfully, “How was everything?”
Our awkward answer: “We…haven’t been served yet.”
The guy’s face falls instantly and off he shoots to the kitchen. Back he comes a minute later, assuring us that our order will be out in about five minutes. We tell him that’s fine, OK, but we’ve been in the joint since 7:00pm and it’s now 8:45. His mood gets even sadder.
Server comes back to tell The Wife they’re out of baked potatoes. The Wife, who really wanted a baked potato, is disappointed but orders sweet potato fries.
(Oh! We’ve ordered two fish fry dinners, The Wife’s being gluten-free. The whole reason we’re trying this restaurant is that they have a gluten-free beer-battered fish fry. The only other places we’ve found in the region that offer this dish are either on the other end of the Buffalo region, or far enough outside Buffalo to not even be considered part of the Buffalo region at all.)
Off the server goes to confirm this. No sooner is she gone through the door to The Wife’s rear than a food runner appears from behind me, bearing our dinners. With The Wife’s baked potato. Now we’re finally eating, though we’re confused by the potato thing. Server returns a minute later; turns out that the servers don’t do the actual running of the food to the tables, so it can be a bit of a dance to keep track of which table is going to be affected by the restaurant running out of things as the night progresses. We’re cool; we have food.
How was the food? It was really good! Now, a fish fry is kind of like pizza: even a bad fish fry is still OK. The standard is beer-battered haddock, and though some places change this up for seasoned panko or the like (especially places that offer a gluten-free version), generally a Western New York fish fry is the same kind of offering anywhere you get it: the piece of fish, a potato of some kind (I always get fries), and one or two cold salads. (Here they were macaroni salad–omitted from the GF version–and coleslaw.) Sometimes there’s bread (this place didn’t do bread, I did not miss it). One common flaw with the fish fry is the batter being too thick, so it gets a bit doughy in spots, and the side that’s served down on the plate gets, well, wet. This flaw did not exist at this joint. The entire piece of fish was crispy in the batter department and perfectly flaky in the interior fish department.
By the time we got our food we had long since reached the point where hunger was no longer “the best sauce” but would actually be an impediment to flavor since we’d be eating out of hungry spite rather than genuine enjoyment. However, the food was good enough to win us back over, and after the first few bites of “Just gimme something to eat, anything, I don’t care“, we were both back to “Damn, this is really good!” (I was smart enough to hasten this point by eating half my fries and mac salad before I even touched the fish. Which came out hot, by the way, so it’s not as if our plates were sitting under a warm pass-over for any length of time.)
We’re eating our fish fry dinners* when the guy who looked like we’d kicked his puppy when we told him how long we’d been here shows up. He turns out to be the owner of the place, the one with his name on the front of the building. And he feels genuinely terrible about how it’s all gone, and without us even saying a word he tells us our entire meal is on him that night. There are more apologies throughout, but we finish eating and by now we’re back to being somewhat happy.
Feeling a little guilty when we’re all done–and the owner has not only picked up our meal but given us his card and told us to call him personally when we decide to come back and try the place again–we decide to stick around and listen to the band a bit, because they really do sound quite good and we feel a bit bad about the whole “asking for a different table” thing. We’re just in time to hear “Danny Boy”, a couple of reels, and one other song with suggested-but-not-actually-ribald lyrics. (You know the kind, where the rhyme scheme suggests strongly that you’re about to hear something dirty but then they use a completely different non-rhyming word instead.)
It’s after 9:30 by the time we’re finally heading back to the car, and the place is still busy, though not quite as busy as it was at 7:00. Having worked in restaurants, I remember how once in a while you’d have a party for whom everything went poorly, and I have to give them all credit (minus the clueless hostess) for doing what they could to salvage the situation. I also assume that this was by no means indicative of their typical level of service, because the place was packed. No restaurant-slash-tavern enjoys that level of business by being bad at service. We were just the unfortunate souls at the poker table, sitting on a pair of three’s. It happens.
So yes, we’ll go back at some point. They do have a good fish fry there, and I really do like the atmosphere of the place. Next time we’ll try to not go there on St Patrick’s Day Weekend, though. (In this area, the St Paddy’s Day festivities are never limited to St Paddy’s Day.)
(No, I’m not naming the place because I’m not a restaurant critic or a food blogger and I don’t want to throw rocks at a place that bumbled a bit on our first trip there.)
*Here’s something that always bothers me: What would the plural of fish fry be? Because it’s an entire dinner, so fish fries doesn’t really feel right–that seems to imply something like fish sticks. Fish frys just looks bad, as does fish fry’s. It’s a common verbal thing: “Hey, let’s go get some fish fries tonight!” But written out I have no idea how to spell it, hence awkward usage like “fish fry dinners”, which sounds stuffy as hell.
Last week a local person graciously cited me as a creative person worth following online, which was a compliment I greatly appreciated! But what really took me back was the description:
https://twitter.com/MeyersMusings/status/1498029014023352322
Two decades? Really?
That’s when it hit me: Last month marked twenty years of me blogging.
I launched Byzantium’s Shores on BlogSpot back in February of 2002. I almost made it to twenty years of maintaining that same exact blog, but last year I went ahead and pulled the trigger on migrating to this space, because owning one’s own space online is really the way to go as corporate interests become more and more vested in controlling the content that is posted in the spaces that they own (and then, oddly, entrust the moderation of said content to badly-programmed AI bots that confuse tone and do things like require a certain popular commenter to take down a post the AI had labeled as “hate speech”, when all it did was post verbatim an official statement by the 45th President).
Looking back at 2002 and my road to blogging, some of it seems pretty clear and some of it is kind of foggy, like anything would be when viewed from so long a distance. I’d been a prolific poster on a few Usenet newsgroups at the time, but I was already chafing at wanting to write about stuff that wasn’t really on topic for those few newsgroups where I was a regular. Then a Google search for an old friend’s name turned up an interesting-looking website of his, which looked like basically an online journal, and shortly after that, I remember reading an article in an issue of TIME or NEWSWEEK about this new thing: “blogs”, short for “web log”, which are exactly what my friend was doing. He was maintaining an online journal and writing his occasional thoughts about…things.
I started looking around for blogs–
(OK, an aside here: I have ALWAYS hated the word ‘blog’. Can’t stand it. It’s the word we’ve settled on, but I really wish we’d called them e-journals instead. That would fit better with e-mail and e-books, and connotatively, ‘e-journaling’ sounds a bit less nerdy than ‘blogging’.)
–and after I figured out how to set one up, using Blogger and its hosting site BlogSpot, off I went.
Functionality back then was really bare-bones. Permanent links to posts were a total crapshoot as to whether they’d work or not. There was no photo hosting of any kind, and back then “hotlinking” photos on other sites was a big no-no. Google was still several years away from buying Blogger, so the service didn’t have very deep pockets. Unless you knew at least a little about HTML, you were locked into a few basic templates and you couldn’t even change your typeface on your blog. Unless you paid Blogger for the “pro” version, every blog had a toolbar with ads splashed across the top.
Here’s one of the first blogs I ever followed, back in the day. This one closed up shop a year and a half after I started blogging, and I’m honestly a bit surprised that it still exists online at all. I found that one, if memory serves, via a “Randomly Featured Blogs” sidebar that would show up on the main Blogger site. Blogs at the time were so new that you pretty much found new ones by following links back and forth and bookmarking the ones you wanted to keep reading when you found them. If you really liked another blog, you’d put it on your “blogroll”, the list of links to other blogs that you maintained on yours. The more times you got listed on others’ blogrolls, and the more times popular blogs linked yours, the more traffic you’d get. There was a “process” to “going viral” back then.
I didn’t post under my real name initially, as this was still the era–a waning era, to be sure, but it was still the thinking–that you shouldn’t share your real name online. Gradually this became less and less workable and less and less of a big deal, so the old screen name “Jaquandor” is now pretty much of a personal anachronism that dates back to my AOL days of posting on Usenet.
The tone of blogging back then was wild and wooly. When I started, 9-11 was less than six months in the past; I’m not even sure that the dust had even stopped settling, literally, at the World Trade Center site. As the nation reeled from that attack and as other powers started pushing for a war that was cast as a response to that attack (but I think we all know by now had almost nothing to do with it, along with another war that was a response but instead led to twenty years of bungling), so the online discussion turned mainly to matters of politics and war. Even then the general political tone polarized quite a bit, with bloggers skeptical of the war on one side, and bloggers vociferously for the war on the other.
I read a lot on both sides back then, and when I say that the folks for the war were for the war, I mean, they were FOR that war. They wanted it badly. There were times when I could almost sense their glee when the first bombs started falling. My own feelings on the war were mixed at first, but I quickly soured on the whole idea as it became clear that the whole thing was an exercise in chest-thumping triumphalism (“Mission Accomplished!”, the banner read, after just weeks of combat in a large independent country) and masculinity-run-amok.
The “blogosphere” at the time was an eerie forerunner of what we see in a lot of social media today, in a more prolix era, a time when people weren’t limited to 280 characters, or even 280 words. Anyone who remembers a blogger named Steven Den Beste will remember some really wordy screeds cheerleading the war. Den Beste was a strange dude whom I found weirdly compelling, kind of an intellectual tire-fire from which I couldn’t divert attention. He was a former engineer who retired to a blogging-from-his-apartment lifestyle, and he would often start his very long posts in an interesting fashion, describing some issue in science or from his old engineering life or whatever. This was always kind of interesting, until he’d inevitably reveal how the thing he was talking about was really a metaphor to support yet another argument of his for why bombing Iraq back to the days of Nebuchadnezzar was really the best thing for the region. Den Beste would later abandon politics on his own site and recast his blog as an anime-fandom blog, though he contributed more and more political screeds to other sites. He often insisted that he didn’t like labels and that he had no real political “home”, but as the years went by, it was increasingly clear that he was a mainstream right-winger. I eventually stopped reading Den Beste entirely when he expressed feelings of schadenfreude toward those who felt that George Zimmerman’s acquittal in killing Trayvon Martin was a travesty. A year or two ago I suddenly remember Steven Den Beste and searched his name, wondering if he was still out there cranking out anime reviews. Turns out he died in 2016.
I don’t mention him now to throw rocks at him, but Steven Den Beste is one of my main memories of the tone of the “early” blogosphere (which I preferred to call “Blogistan”), at least on the national or worldwide scale. He even linked me a couple of times, once with bemusement when I responded with what I hoped was obviously fake outrage at his negative review of Attack of the Clones. I think he got it: his link to my response was something like “Kelly Sedinger comments here, and he might want to calm down a little!” If nothing else, Den Beste was more than willing to engage people who thought he was full of crap. Again, I don’t intend to single him out negatively, but I mention him at length precisely because he was a memorable voice back then, in a time when even then there were a lot of voices, many of which were saying the same things in the same ways.
Blogging had a more local focus as well, and once we resettled in the Buffalo area after our brief stay in the Syracuse region in 2002-2003, I started connecting with local bloggers, some of whom focused on politics and others who focused on other things. A small but fun community arose, and we even had several meet-ups out in the “real world”, the first of which was at a brewery-bar in downtown Buffalo. The local blogs brought up local issues, and national issues, and not just politics as well: I remember debates about the merits of various styles of pizza, which of the Democratic candidates in 2008 might be able to win, what the Bass Pro plaza in downtown Buffalo should be like (what a hoot!), and so on. If that sounds like all the kinds of things you see now on Facebook and Twitter, well…there’s a reason for that, isn’t there? But the Buffalo blogging community was a cool one, and though many of those folks have long since abandoned their blogs, they’re still online in social media and I still follow many of them.
People like to scoff at the idea of an online “community” being any kind of community at all, but…when Little Quinn died, a bunch of people I only knew online showed up at his wake to pay respects. I will always remember that.
Blogging now, in 2022, has changed and has remained the same, in a lot of strange ways. Facebook and Twitter have taken over many of its main functions, and for people who still want to do long-form work that is ill-suited to those platforms, there are paid platforms for monetization like Patreon, Substack, and others. The essence of blogging is still out there but is largely decentralized. Maybe that’s a good thing, as blogs never really seemed to break through into the general awareness in the way that Facebook and Twitter and others later would, even if a lot of that functionality still exists. Locally I remember that a few times a year the Buffalo News would report on blogs, and each time the tone was pretty much the same: “Hey, there are these things called ‘blogs’! What are they? Let’s find out!” And the article would feature a few local bloggers. I was never one of them. Yes, this annoyed me.
It is interesting to see the “essence” of blogging come back, albeit in the form of paywalled newsletters and content-aggregators like Substack and the rest. I’m of mixed mind on this, to be honest. People should be able to get paid for their work, but I do miss the wild-and-wooly nature of the “early Blogosphere”, which was kind of a free-for-fall. And I continue to be irritated that the paid-content model is almost entirely subscription based. There are many times when I’ll find something I’m interested in reading…but I am not interested in signing up for a year of access for a single article in which I may be interested. This is not just a problem with paywalled news sites; I’m now seeing it on sites that are basically all but blogs in name. Just this week there’s been an in-depth article making the local rounds about the now-infamous “13 seconds” in the recent Bills-Chiefs playoff game; this morning I went to check that article, only to find that after reading ten paragraphs, the rest is cut off by a “This article is for paid subscribers only” notice. Look, content-creators of the world, I have to be honest: never say “never” and all that, but I have not once, to this point in my life, found a paywalled article online that I wanted to read so badly that I upped for a subscription to a site. The solution here is some kind of pay-by-the-article micropayment system, which is often suggested but so far never created. One waits and hopes.
Blogging also cemented overalls as a major piece of my online identity, as it were! Blogger finally added photo-hosting services sometime in the mid-aughts, so I added a profile pic, in which I had happened to be wearing overalls. The photo was a terrible one (no, I don’t think I still have it, and no, if I find it I won’t share it), which I took using an old Polaroid Instamatic camera and then scanned in using our old flatbed scanner (geez, just typing that description of the process makes my eyes glaze over!), and someone joked about me resembling an axe-murderer! (It was a terrible picture! But it was my first attempt at such a thing, and if anyone knows how much I hated having my picture taken as a kid, that was a really big corner to turn.)
So anyway, here I am, still blogging away, now on ForgottenStars.net, still holding forth on many of the same topics as always, along hopefully with some new ones. When I started blogging, I was still eight or nine years away from really starting work on Stardancer, after a few “trunk” novels (one of which I posted online as a blog itself before taking it down a while back). It was four living spaces ago, The Daughter was still in her “terrible twos”, The Wife and I were only approaching five years of marriage, and a whole lot of friends and life and stuff ago.
A lot of people have come, gone, and come again in the time I’ve been blogging. Some I discovered at some point and have followed ever since (her, her, him, him) Many bloggers have given up the habit but are still friends online; many more have vanished completely. Some I have sadly outlived (Messrs. Mannion and Teachout, for example). I remember regular readers who fell away over time–I hope this was a function of life and not a shift in my writing!–like a woman who lived in Winnipeg and another named Michelle who was a fellow candle in the dark in a time when the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy was still deeply unappreciated. And if my blog has never been widely read, at least I also have never much had to deal with obnoxious trolls.
And to think, when I started Byzantium’s Shores in February 2002, I figured that maybe, maybe!, I’d have about a year’s worth of things to say before I wrapped that little sub-hobby up and moved on. Little did I know. As ever, I continue marching on, for however long I feel like doing this.
…and if you’ve been reading (or have read me at any point along the way), I thank you!
