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new stuff added at the end of the list; also as always, I don’t edit what I’ve written before or revise anything that’s out of date.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

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There’s a bright thing in the sky! Has anybody contact NORAD about this?! I kid, obviously…and complaining about the lack of sunshine this time of year is just a thing we WNYers do, along with bemoaning the latest Bills playoff loss, noting how crappy the Sabres are, or speculating on what our favorite MLB team’s Opening Day roster might look like, since pitchers and catchers report soon. But really, this particular “Long Gray Slog” has certainly felt, well, longer and grayer and sloggier than usual. This is likely not really the case and it only feels so because of the wayDown the rabbit hole….

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If you’re at all familiar with what’s been going on in the Buffalo Niagara region lately, you probably already know why I took an unplanned hiatus from blogging this week: Lake Erie decided this was a good time to remind people in this area of its presence. Cue…the lake-effect snowstorm. And then…the next lake-effect snowstorm. As storms go, this one was not as bad as some of the more famous ones we’ve suffered lately…but that’s like saying “I dropped a brick on two of my toes, which isn’t as bad as when I dropped one on my entire foot.” Plus,Down the rabbit hole….

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“I cannot help but be touched. I, of course, remember you.”–Khan Noonian Singh, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan I’m thinking of that quote because after several weeks of a very mild start to our winter, this week winter decided to show up. It began with a big storm that barreled by us the other day, in such a way as to give us very strong winds from the southeast, which is extremely unusual here. That storm, on Wednesday, knocked out our power at home for eight hours. And now, as I write this (about 5:40pm on Saturday), another storm system is blasting pastDown the rabbit hole….

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  Yesterday saw a big storm push through…well, lots of places. I have to be honest, I didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention to this one, beyond what its forecast effects in Western New York were going to be. In this case, the storm did something very strange: it hit WNY with very strong winds from the southeast. When we get high winds around here, it’s almost always west or northwest winds that pound us…or even southwest winds that come up the lake. This was different. I’m used to how things sound at work when there are high windsDown the rabbit hole….

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NOTE: I’ve had this post in drafts since last Tuesday, when 2024 was still going OK. Then, things started going awry very quickly, hence the lack of posting much since then. I’m not going to write just yet about what’s going on now, but my immediate family and I are just fine. This country, however, is a mess, and yet another way is how hard we make elder care. Anyway, here’s the rest of the post, which I’m finishing on Saturday morning. — But first, a joke that I heard years ago at Summer Music Camp, when a counselor needed toDown the rabbit hole….

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This is the LAST POST on this site! For 2023, that is. In terms of content creation, I have motored right along on this site, after migrating from BlogSpot almost a year-and-a-half ago. What follows is a selection of posts from this year I particularly like (hey, writers! It’s OK to like your own writing!): On Sweaters “Inedible”: a linguistic pet peeve The Indecision of Mr. Gooddell The “Greatest” comeback? On Manufactured Outrage 60 of 23 (he’ll never be 45 to me) President Carter At least I didn’t speak ill of marjoram (in which I offended the Bay Leaf Gods)Down the rabbit hole….

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NOTE: I’ve had this in drafts for-EVER (I started this post in August 2022!), and I think it’s now time to go ahead and finish it, because it’s that time of year again. Not the time of year indicated in the opening paragraph, obviously: if that paragraph were written today, it would go like this: “It’s early November, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain that it’s not Christmas yet, wait until Black Friday at the absolute earliest, so on and so forth.” But the rest of the post stands.Down the rabbit hole….

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The first snows of the 2023-2024 winter season have fallen. Yes, I know it’s not winter yet, technically…in the astronomical sense of the Winter Solstice having come and gone. Nor is yet Meteorological Winter yet; that begins on December 1. But I submit that it is now Emotional Winter, because that’s determined by when the snow first falls. What’s interesting about Emotional Winter and Actual Autumn is that they can both hold sway at the same time. Anyway, the local social media was, of course, loaded with all manner of whining and wailing and rending of teeth and gnashing of garments,Down the rabbit hole….