Tag: Daily Life Stuff

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Oh, the glorious carbs!

One of my favorite places nowadays is Panera Bread. Yeah, it’s a chain restaurant, but I don’t think that “chain” equals “bad”, and in any case, some chains know what they’re doing, and Panera seems to have their act down.

Case in point: I’m writing this post at 7:00 pm on Friday night at Panera Bread in my hometown (Orchard Park, NY). Every so often I get the chance to be by myself on a Friday night, and I usually end up coming here (or the one over by McKinley Mall). Why? Well, there’s the obvious: food and the free WiFi. But I also love the atmosphere, especially at the one nearest Casa Jaquandor.

I walk in at 6:00, and the dining room is reasonably full. Now, an hour later, the place has emptied out a bit, but it hasn’t gone dead. The music is pleasant jazz, and the tables are all comfortable. In warm months there is outdoor seating, but I haven’t used any of that yet. The dining room is cast in warm colors — oranges, blues, mustard yellows and the wood of the chairs, and there are differing styles of tables: a few “intimate” booths, a few booths that aren’t quite so intimate, a couple of large round tables beside a gas fireplace, and so on. It’s not at all like sitting in a McDonald’s, where every table feels the same. (Was there ever anything so bizarre as the old people who sit in the same table at McDonald’s every morning?)

What I like best of all about this joint is the mix of people eating here, though. Over here is a table of teenage girls, all laughing giddly as they eat. Over there is an older guy who looks like Leonard Bernstein and who is doing the crossword puzzle so quickly that I half suspect he’s just filling in random letters. There’s a family over there, mom dad and two kids, with the younger kid jabbering excitedly about how good the tomato soup is. A really pretty girl just walked in with her date, who looks like a complete dork. There’s an older couple just two tables over, who are reading books. The wife is reading the book the husband just finished, apparently, because he’s taunting her with spoilers. There’s a man in his fifties who is sipping coffee and reading some magazine about art, and there’s a tall girl with long dark hair who is very skinny and is already wearing her Daisy Dukes. She’s tucking into a turkey sandwich, so no metabolism problems for her. And later on, I listen in as the manager on duty gives the incredibly nervous-looking sixteen year old employee his performance review. It’s probably the first one of his life. Welcome to the real world, kid.

I’m sitting at a table right by the front window. The sun’s not down yet, but it will be soon. It doesn’t matter, since the path of its setting precisely lines up with a bunch of tall pines in a row across the street, so I’m not getting blinded (or, worse, suffering glare on the computer screen). It’s one of those spring nights where the air is almost crystalline, and the number of clouds in the sky is the number required to call it “partly cloudy”, minus one. Earlier, even though the sun was shining, there was a five minute downpour as the cloud overhead apparently decided it could hold back no longer. The sun is now shining on the puddles on the sidewalk which are smaller every minute.

It’s a nice night, here at Panera Bread.

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Journalism FAIL

An article from today’s Buffalo News regarding last night’s performance in Buffalo by the Dead commits a bunch of sins.

The Scott Street lot, near Michigan Avenue, was turned into a staging ground Tuesday for hundreds — perhaps thousands — of fans waiting to see a concert at HSBC Arena by The Dead, former members of the Grateful Dead minus the late Jerry Garcia.

Which is it? Hundreds? Thousands? A bunch? A few?

But the crowd of young jam-band enthusiasts and aging hippies — thought to be particularly environmentally conscious — left behind a parking lot strewn with beer and wine bottles, cans, bags, pizza boxes and hundreds of balloons used to get high with nitrous oxide.

Wow. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen more negative stereotyping and tut-tuting packed into a single sentence.

But after we’ve spent that long castigating Those Dirty Hippies, here comes the money quote:

Noticeably absent were any trash cans that could have given people a place to throw things away.

Huh. I wonder if that was a factor in all the garbage being tossed all over?

Nah, couldn’t be. Must’ve been the dirty hippies.

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Interviews….

The other night, while IM’ing on Facebook, Belladonna asked me to wish her luck in her job interview the next day. I did, but as many longtime readers of this blog know, my luck tends to be, shall we say, questionable, so Belladonna apparently had a rough time of it in the interview. Alas…but she also asks for tales from readers of their own experiences in interviews, so here is a repost of a post I wrote back in 2003 when I got home from a highly odd interview for a job while we lived in Syracuse. I don’t normally do reposts, but this one seems appropriate.

(And reading all those old posts sometimes makes me cringe a bit. Some of those posts are awful.)

Anyway, the old post, revisited:

Clear your mind, if you will. I would like to take you on a journey.

Imagine you’re going to a job interview. First, imagine that when the guy called to set up the interview in the first place, you asked him what his company does, since it wasn’t clear from the newspaper ad. He tells you, “We’ll discuss that at the interview.”

OK. Now you’re walking into the place. It’s in a not-run-down, but not particularly nice office complex out in one of the older suburbs. You notice that the company name on the door you’ve been directed to is not the same as the company name in the advertisement you answered. This is probably the reason why, in the phone call, the boss-guy told you to go to the door with a picture of a rhinoceros on it. (Forget the rhinoceros. No explanation is ever forthcoming.)

You walk in the front door, into the reception area. Here you are greeted by a receptionist who looks barely old enough to drive or vote, and she is bundled up just shy of still wearing her parka because the office is kept quite cold, despite the sounds of air blasting from the vent overhead. Her desk appears to have nothing on it save one (1) binder, a few file folders and clipboards, a fax machine, and a phone. No computer, no photos of the dog or boyfriend or goldfish or mother or parish priest.

You look around at the reception room. There are some chairs — standard waiting-area chairs that will be found in any dentist’s office or LensCrafters. There is a table with the requisite selection of magazines, none younger than one year and none remotely interesting. There is a single potted tree that looks like it needs water, and the sole decoration is a map of the United States from National Geographic, complete with fold-lines, pinned to a dingy-looking bulletin board. The map sports a collection of pushpins inserted over every major metropolitan area in the United States, conveying the impression of a wide-ranging, national company. And yet, this office has no company literature of any kind to be found anywhere. Nor is there a logo to be seen.

The receptionist has you fill out an application. Fair enough. When you finish that, you give it back to her and ask to use the rest room. She directs you to the “girl’s room”, because “the boy’s room is broken”. (Those are exact words. You note “girls” and “boys”, not “women” and “men”.) So you obediently use the women’s room, noting that (a) the fluorescent light does not turn on all the way, but merely flickers at half-light; (b) there is no toilet paper; (c) there are no paper towels; (d) the hand-sink has no soap. You finish your business and go back to the waiting and reception area. where you sit and await your 1:00 interview, for which you were on time although it is now 1:10.

While passing the time between 1:10 and 1:25, you observe the arrival of five other people to fill out applications for open positions. Busy place to be doing all this hiring, and sure enough, the receptionist takes a lot of phone calls from people apparently answering the ad in yesterday’s paper. (You had answered an ad two weeks prior.) The receptionist answers a LOT of these calls, and only later do you realize that in the roughly 30 minutes you were in her company not once did she field a call from a customer of whatever company this is.

So, the boss-guy finally comes out and greets you for the interview, apologizing for the 25 minute wait and claiming it’s because of his heavy interview schedule that day — which is odd because (a) you have noticed no one leaving his office, and (b) he later confirms this by informing you that you are in fact his first interview of the day. Ever the professional, you don’t give the obvious rejoinder that he is off to a great start, even though it is painfully obvious that he is at least six years younger than you. (This, too, is later directly confirmed.) He takes you into his office, where you again notice the complete lack of personal items on the desk. He does have a picture of Derek Jeter on his wall, but this does not necessarily imply that he’s a Yankees fan, because said picture has one of those inspirational business-world slogans that are all the rage these days. What’s more, his desk doesn’t have a computer either, and you’re wondering just what kind of business this guy is running with no computers at all.

During the interview, you are never asked a single question about your background or work experience, other than the standard “I see you’ve worked at X, Y and Z companies.” No “What did you like best about those companies”; no “Tell me about your responsibilities”; no “Tell me about a problem you faced and solved”. Then you get to hear the boss-guy’s background, which involves him buying his favorite college bar, running it for three years and eventually selling it, and then joining this company, the name of which he still has not said. The only reason you know it is because you read it on the door coming into his office. The receptionist doesn’t even use it when answering the phone.

The interview process, as described by boss-guy, involves a preliminary interview — that’s today’s interview — followed by a second round with the “top candidates”. This seems perfectly normal, although you wonder how much of an impression he’s forming given that he is not asking any questions. But then he describes that the second round involves candidates coming back in to spend an entire day on the job with this guy, essentially performing job duties so that he can decide who he wants to hire permanently. This strikes you, a former manager who is no stranger to staffing and selection processes, as very odd. After all, when hiring a server at a restaurant you managed, you never brought a potential candidate in to wait tables for a day before hiring him/her.

So you leave after ten minutes of being talked to by this guy, and he seems perfectly pleasant and nice….but you still have little idea of what the job entails. At no point has he mentioned things like wages, hours required, duties…he does indicate that all the people now flooding the reception area are prospects for his warehouse positions, which is further confusing because this place is certainly no warehouse. It’s a run-down office suite with exactly one office apparently in use.

So you leave, sit in your car for a moment basking in the warm air issuing from the heat vents (which after 45 minutes is still warmer than the air inside the office suite), marveling over the surreal job interview you’ve just experienced. Then you shake your head and drive off, a bit flummoxed and thinking of that scene in “The Fugitive” where Tommy Lee Jones gets annoyed over someone’s use of the word “hinky”.

And you certainly don’t hold your breath waiting for the call for your “trial day”.

Yeah, that was a weird one. Despite my use of the second person here, all of these things really did happen.

UPDATE: Of course, this is the canonical weird job interview:

Hee hee!

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Yee-oww!!!

Well, it finally happened the other day: my first power-tool related injury. Yay, me!

No, I didn’t lose any digits or suffer significant blood loss. But the middle finger of my left hand has seen better days, let me tell you! What happened was this: I was cutting a small piece of wood on the miter saw. Unfortunately, I failed to note the presence of a nail in the piece I was cutting, which was my major mistake on this procedure. Of course, the whirling blade of the saw hit the nail, causing the tiny piece of wood to buck. One piece, on the opposite side of the saw from me, shot off in a straight line, while the other attempted to shoot off in the exact opposite direction. Its trajectory was blocked, however, by the tip of my middle finger.

The impact actually caused my fingernail to split right down the middle about a quarter of an inch, and of course there was some bleeding. It didn’t hurt much, though — it went straight from normal to “really numb”. I quickly ascertained that nothing was broken inside there, as I was able to wiggle the finger without any pain, but I could already see the large bruise forming underneath the nail, and within an hour, the whole tip of that finger was starting to swell. I cleaned it out nicely, bandaged it, and went about my business. And I still had to get that wood cut down to what I needed for a job, so it was right back to the saw. Hey, if the horse throws you, you get right back on, no?

Over the next day or two, my finger proceeded to do this really neat thing where it slowly shifted colors from normal to red to blue to purple to black-and-blue and then started to fade back toward normal again. It was like having part of my body acting as a mood-ring, but where all of the colors stood for “Ouch”. By the second morning after the mishap, the finger had started to revert to normal size after some pretty impressive swelling, and now it pretty much feels normal except for the front part of the nail, which is still split, of course. Nothing to do about that except wait for that part of the nail to grow out. If the nail weren’t split, I probably wouldn’t even be wearing a bandage on the finger at all, but I discovered that the problem with having a nail split like this is that if it’s not bandaged, the jaggy split in the middle tends to snag on stuff, which is exactly as unpleasant a sensation as it sounds.

The upshot is that having this bandage on my finger makes typing a bit more of an adventure than it usually is. I’m hitting ‘backspace’ more often than usual. (For instance, in the just-concluded sentence, I originally had an ‘r’ in ‘often’.) Oh well, it’s the perils of the job, no?

But hey, I got the job done. Because, hurt finger or no, I’m a pro.

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Gadgets and Gizmos

It’s been a bit eventful here at Casa Jaquandor; we’ve done our part to stimulate the economy by purchasing stuff. We’re just about done, but we now have:

:: A 32-inch flatscreen teevee. This is wonderful. Just wonderful. This week, we will celebrate our first Family Movie Night with the new teevee by watching something that looks cool on a big teevee. I’m thinking, something with rocket ships and space princesses. Yay!!!

:: We had to get a new digital camera to replace the other one, which has gone fritzy, unfortunately. That old Kodak EasyShare served us well for more than two years, and we got more than our money’s worth out of it, since we paid about eighty bucks for it two years ago. It amazes me how electronics prices evolve: the replacement camera (same brand) was the same price, basically, as the old one, and it has twice the megapixels and twice the storage capacity.

:: We have a replacement computer monitor on the way. The old one died, and we’ve been using this awful dinosaur of a monitor for a few months.

:: Finally, I got an MP3 player. It’s a small one, only 4GB of storage, but I don’t need a lot of space on it. It’s cheap and basic, but that’s all I really need: just something to hold and play a few hours of music when I’m on the go. Fun!

And that’s about it. As I noted, it’s now up to someone else to get the economy moving. We’ve done our part. (And frankly, given how we were able to afford some of this stuff, I think we’d much rather have not come into a small bit of money in quite this way. In other words, thanks, Mom-in-Law.)

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All it needs is a laser

As a proud Maintenance Man, at The Store I have a nicely impressive tool bag, full of all manner of nifty hand tools and whatnot. Someday I’ll post pictures of my tools, just because I think tools are cool (I’ve come to the point where walking into Lowe’s or Home Depot gives me much the same feeling that walking into a toy store did when I was a kid). I actually have two tool bags, both of which I push around The Store in a shopping cart (we have a new style of cart, two-tiered but shorter, which are ideal for this purpose), along with my 18V DeWalt cordless drill, a Stanley hardware box, and a small electrical repair kit (which I have yet to use, as I know nothing about electrical repair — but I keep hoping).

However, there are also several other tools that I don’t keep in the bags but rather right on my person, so if I encounter a quick fix, I’m all set. I always have a 30′ tape measure clipped to my belt, a utility knife and a Swiss Army knife in one pocket and a small flashlight in the other (this flashlight is uncommonly bright, actually, since it has twelve LED bulbs. I always carry a small notepad, a pen and a mechanical pencil, and a telescoping magnet in my back pocket. The telescoping magnet is incredibly useful. Also, I carry a pair of wire-cutters, or diagonal pliers, as they’re technically known (also called “dikes” by old-timers).

But the real important tool that’s always on my person — my Walther PPK, my wand from Ollivander’s, my lightsaber — is my multi-driver. It’s made by Klein Tools, and this thing has saved my life (figuratively, obviously) on many occasions. Now, way back when, I sang the praises of Klein tools and their 10-in-1 driver, but now they’ve pushed the envelope a little farther: the 10-in-1 has been supplanted by the 11-in-1. This thing has two Philips tips, two slotted screw tips, two square-drive tips, two Torx tips, and three nut drivers.

Oh yeah. I am the Tool Master.

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Happy Birthday, My Love

UPDATE: An annotated version of this photo appears on my Flickr stream, here.

Today is The Wife’s birthday, a day which will be filled with much celebration and joy. And, later on tonight when she gets home from work, cake. And maybe some rum. And then…well, that’s none of your business.

She and I actually had our first date just four days before her birthday, on February 21, back in 1991, so each time her birthday rolls around, it also means that we’ve been together in some fashion for another year. She has now been in my life for eighteen years. That is longer than anyone else in my life, save a few college friends who were around a year earlier (we started dating when I was a sophomore), Matt Jones, and my family members. Next year, we’ll reach the point where she will have been in my life for more than half of it. And after what feels like more than our fair share – way more than double – of toil and trouble, we’re still going strong.

Here, now, is the official Byzantium’s Shores celebration of The Wife, in my typical form: a list. One hundred things about the woman I married: memories, observations, things I love about her. In truth, I could probably write ten of these lists and still be less than half done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

26. She loves to laugh, particularly at my expense. She is convinced I don’t think she’s funny, but that’s just not the case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

43. She loves George Carlin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

62. The next day, she proposed to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

94. She doesn’t think it’s too weird that I love it when she hits me in the face with a pie. And if I’d known how good she is at it, I’d have asked her to do it to me a heck of a lot sooner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

102. She makes me happier than I thought possible.

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

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The thoughts that come

A couple of thoughts that keep occurring to me, in the wake of last night’s plane crash in Buffalo:

:: While we were hanging out at baggage claim, just miles away people were perishing in a fireball. There was absolutely no sense in the airport that anything was amiss at all.

:: Some of the people who were hanging out in the ticketing area, just outside the security checkpoint, were waiting for people to walk off a plane that would never arrive. I wonder what goes on when this happens: what do they put on the teevee “Arrivals” screen? Do they make a PA announcement of what’s happened, or do they just say “Would anyone waiting for Continental Flight Whatever please report to the Continental ticketing desk”, or do they say nothing and just wait for people to learn as they will? How does this happen?

What a sad day this was.

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Exhale….

The Wife is home, safe and sound.

The Daughter and I picked her up on schedule last night, no problem, no fuss, no muss. But on the way home from the airport, we did notice five or six police cars and emergency vehicles speeding, lights flashing, past us on the eastbound lanes of I-90. We didn’t really think much of this…until this morning, when I learned that within fifteen minutes of The Wife’s plane landing, another plane went down about five minutes out from the Buffalo Niagara Airport.

What a strange mix of horror and relief. But for anyone reading this blog who might have seen notice of a plane crash in Buffalo, The Wife was not on that plane.

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