Tag: Daily Life Stuff

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Close to Home

Two news stories of personal interest to me happened over the last couple of days. I won’t provide any links, since you can all Google this stuff if you really need to:

:: The city of Cedar Rapids, Iowa has suffered massive flooding. I looked at the photos, and my jaw dropped. Cedar Rapids is about ninety minutes down the road from where I went to college, and both towns share the Cedar River, with Waverly being a hundred miles or so upstream. We drove through Cedar Rapids many a time between 1989 and 1993. We never spent a whole lot of time in Cedar Rapids itself, but we did stop there a few times for pit stops or shopping; and of course, since Cedar Rapids is Iowa’s second-largest city, I had a number of friends from that area. How many of those old friends still live there, I don’t know, but I hope they’re all well if they’re still there.

That’s downtown Cedar Rapids there, all flooded out. That image astonishes me. That large bridge there, the third one up the river from the bottom, is Interstate 380, which runs northward from Iowa City, through Cedar Rapids, to Waterloo. That was the road we took through the city each time (when we drove that way; sometimes we took Route 20 east out of Waterloo toward Dubuque). Cedar Rapids always struck me as a lovely and pleasant town, and I dearly hope the place can withstand this disaster. All my best to those living there, as well as in all the other flooded locations in Iowa. (I think I may have a regular reader there, if I remember correctly from my referral logs.)

:: Tim Russert is dead. I personally tend to think of him more as Buffalo’s current most famous native son on the national stage than a journalist; I was never a fan of his interviewing style, which seemed more geared toward confronting people with inconsistencies in their record and making them squirm than in actually discussing policy questions. I always felt as if a public figure’s goal was more to “survive” an interview with Russert, and he also struck me as being, well, selectively tough on people. (Matthew Yglesias wrote the definitive article on the Russert approach.) However, as unenthusiastic as I was about Russert’s approach, it still remains that Russert himself was a very likable guy, and it really does sadden me that now we don’t have anybody on the national stage willing to say, “Yeah I’m from Buffalo and Buffalo rules and bite me if you don’t like it.” Anyway.

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Germs: not my cup of tea.

Sorry for the lack of content here the last few days, folks, but all through Thursday I felt the unmistakable signs of a head cold coming on, and by Thursday night, it had blossomed into a full-on head cold, complete with sore throat and mucus secretions that could have sunk the Bismarck. I’ll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say this: God bless whoever invented the Neti pot.

So, after staggering through Friday feeling like absolute hell (as I noted to my best friend, I, being a guy, tend to behave during routine head colds as if I’m suffering from the last stages of terminal malaria), and recovering Saturday, I didn’t start to feel normal again until today, and even now I’m not at 100 percent. Tomorrow should be back to normal, so that’s when regular posting will resume.

(And let me resume now my expressions of love for the fine folks who decided to put the pseudoephedrine behind the counter. Good call, guys. DayQuil doesn’t work nearly so well anymore, but we’ve got those meth-hounds on the run now!)

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In Memory

Know, all who see these lines,
That this man, by his appetite for honor,
By his steadfastness,
By his love for his country,
By his courage,
Was one of the miracles of the God.

— Guy Gavriel Kay

“The Green Field of France”, by Eric Bogle

Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?

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Where She Resides

It was one year ago today that our second daughter, Fiona Quinn, was born. Her life spanned little more than two hours. How I wish she could have lived the way she was supposed to have lived; she would have had a wonderful big sister to show her the way. I wonder what gifts she would have had and what loves would have been hers. Alas, now she only resides with us as memories of two hours of life in a hospital room, of memories of dreams, and as precious ashes we keep in a music box.

“On My First Son”, by Ben Jonson

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy ;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
Oh, could I lose all father now ! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon ‘scaped world’s and flesh’s rage,
And if no other misery, yet age !
Rest in soft peace, and, asked, say, Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.
For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much.

Happy Birthday, Fiona Quinn.

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No matter what else, I had a good day.

And how do I know that I had a good day? Because I helped out a family today.

All those babies couldn’t get themselves up onto that curb; they’d jump up but fall back down. A minute or two later, with me standing to one side to keep cars from coming along and taking them all out, the mama came back down and led her young to the water down over the rise.

So yeah, I helped out a family. I’m happy.

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AMPERSAND DOLLARSIGN BACKSLASH ASTERISK EXCLAMATION POINT !!!!!

Last night something went haywire with the main computer here at Casa Jaquandor, so for the second time in six months I had to re-format everything and start from scratch. Grrrrr. So, once again, all of my Firefox bookmarks are gone. I had a lot of blogs I was following in a bookmarks folder; they’re all gone. I can remember some of them, but not all, so if yours is a blog I may or may not have been reading before this happened and now I won’t be reading at all, sorry about that. (But hey, feel free to leave recommendations in comments.)

I have no idea what happened this time. Last time, a series of rapid-fire power outages in the middle of a thunderstorm were the culprit, but this time, something just went belly-up in the course of a restart. Luckily, in March I had to renew my subscription to Norton Security, which at the time meant upgrading to the most recent version. The current version includes automatic backing up of files to their servers (you get 2GB to start and can buy more; so far, the 2GB is fine but I may buy more later). I’ve been re-downloading my own files for about four hours now, as of this writing. It’s about 93.1% finished now, so hopefully after that I’ll have all of my old files back, except for the music and video stuff that I can just re-download anyway. (I don’t keep much music at all on the main computer, since I don’t use it for listening. That stuff is all on the laptop, which is working just fine.)

My next major electronics purchase, though, is almost certainly to be a portable hard drive. Then I won’t have to worry about this kind of thing much at all.

(Also, I’m in the first day of a rare four-day weekend for me, so posting will be light until Sunday.)

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Bloggus Domesticus

Sorry about the recent silence, folks, but real life has been hectic of late and not terribly conducive to blogging, for many reasons. This may continue for a few more days, or it may not. With me, you never know. Heh heh heh. Anyhow, here’s a bit of what’s been going on:

:: We, the Family and I, spent a few hours last weekend at Knox Farm State Park in East Aurora. If you’re looking for a great place to have a picnic lunch and then a nice walk with your clan and/or loved ones, this is yet another of the Buffalo area’s great places to do it, and it’s free to get in. I can’t recommend this place highly enough. Add it to the list of great places in this area that you don’t have to pay to get into. I put some photos up on Flickr, but here’s one that The Daughter took of The Wife and I. My hair’s all messed up there, but note that I’m not wearing overalls. It was pretty hot that day.

:: I’ve been going through the archives of xkcd, one comic at a time, and bookmarking all of the ones that I particularly enjoy in a special folder. Why? Because xkcd rocks, that’s why.

I’m especially tickled that I get the joke on this one:

Hee hee!

:: I’m slowly converting Casa Jaquandor into a home completely illuminated by compact fluorescent light bulbs. I bought my first CFL bulb way back in 1992, for my main lamp in my college room, and I remember that one being fairly harsh in tone, but they’ve improved immensely since then, and aside from the waiting for them to warm up to full brightness, I don’t miss the incandescents one bit (except for the two lamps we have that can’t be converted, due to the types of bulbs they require). And really, that wait for full brightness can be a nice thing, actually; a good example thereof is when one uses the bathroom in the middle of the night. At that point it’s nice that one can turn on the lights without becoming blinded.

:: Jesse L. Martin’s off Law and Order. I don’t really care about L&O, but I like Martin a lot. For me, his most memorable turn is in the X-Files episode “The Unnatural”, where he plays a baseball player in 1947 who turns out to be an alien. I tried finding my favorite clip from that episode on YouTube, but no luck. (It’s a nice dialogue scene that takes place on the team bus, and ends with Martin’s character, Exley, singing a spiritual with some of his teammates. I love that episode.)

:: Does anybody know of any online musical notation applications? I just want to plunk down some notes on a stave and save the results.

:: Mary Kunz Goldman, classical music critic for The Buffalo News, has a blog. I’m not the biggest fan of hers; her writing style is, shall we say, a tad mockable — but hey, it’s a new voice in the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan, and I’ve always found MKG at her best when she’s writing about classical music.

:: Shakespeare’s birthday was the other day. In a couple of hundred years, this will be a major holiday in the Klingon Empire.

:: Hey! Wanna see a hilarious photo? Here you go. Whoopsies!

:: In a boring note from mundane existence that nobody will care about, I have now decided that I like cottage cheese. Yes, this was a lame attempt to pad out an already boring post, so I’ll leave off there. Posting will probably be light for another few days, but you never know.

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