Tag: Daily Life Stuff

Posted on

Moments that depress the hell out of me

A few nights ago I’m working out at the Y, when 97-Rock, a “classic rock” station in Buffalo, comes over the speakers with a song that sends a teenage girl on the machine next to me into a certain level of excitement. She begins babbling to the friend with her: “Oh wow, I know this song! My dad loves this song! He said they played it at my parents’ wedding!”

The song? “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”, by Poison. Which came out in 1988. When I was already older than that girl is now.

Ugh.

(Apropos of nothing, despite my love of 80s hair-band metal music, I never liked Poison. They were pretty much the Wonder Bread of 80s hair-bands, which is probably why crap like “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” still gets airplay.)

Share This Post

Posted on

An Easter Tale

I suspect this isn’t uncommon, but we have a logistical problem here at Casa Jaquandor on holidays which involve the visitation of our home by, shall we say, mythical beings who impart gifts and/or sweet edible items upon The Daughter. The problem is this: on such holidays, The Daughter tends to get up ridiculously early, which means that she inevitably discovers what Santa or the Easter Bunny have been up to.

Now, on Christmas morning, this isn’t that big a deal, since we get the gifts out on Christmas Eve after she has finally fallen asleep. But our Easter ritual is a bit more involved, owing to the existence of the Easter eggs. See, in addition to leaving a basket of goodies and a gift or two (this year, a stuffed animal and a jigsaw puzzle of Captain Jack Sparrow), our Easter bunny takes our colored eggs out of the fridge and hides them throughout Casa Jaquandor, requiring The Daughter to hide them.

Obviously we can’t hide eggs at night, because you can’t leave food out at non-refrigerated temperatures for that many consecutive hours. So the plan is always for us to get up before The Daughter gets up, and hide the eggs before she rises. Clearly, this plan tends to usually result in failure because she’s always up first, so our notion has been to posit that our Easter bunny comes while we’re attending our Easter morning church services. How does this work? Well, The Wife comes up with a rationale for lollygagging behind while The Daughter and I head out to the car: usually something like “Oh, I forgot that bag of stuff we’re donating, I’ll be right down.” Leaving the eggs out for two hours isn’t disastrous, even if it’s not the best food handling practice under the sun. OK then…

…except that this morning, I had forgotten to re-hide the jigsaw puzzle, so The Daughter found it and realized that the Easter bunny had been here, but also had not hidden the eggs as he was supposed to do. After a hasty conference with The Wife, we decided that our cover story would be that The Daughter had, in getting up early, startled the Easter Bunny before he could complete his task of hiding the eggs. Luckily, she bought this idea, and we executed things as we usually do: The Daughter and I headed for the car while The Wife lagged behind because she’d forgotten something. The Daughter never suspected. Heh, heh heh! And thus we went off to church, leaving the eggs safely scattered ’round the apartment for searching two hours later.

But.

On the way to church, The Wife whispered something fateful in my ear: “I hope the cats don’t play with the eggs.”

Uh-oh.

“You mean,” whispers I in return, “you didn’t place the eggs in such a way that they couldn’t get at them?”

“We colored twenty-eight eggs, dear!”

“You hid all of them?!”

“I only had three minutes to think this whole thing through!”

“Crap.”

So, two hours later, we get home, and show The Daughter that the Easter Bunny has, in fact, come back and hid eggs all over the place. She gleefully starts searching them out. At one point, she’s in another room, when The Wife, standing over the recliner, mutters, “Yeah…there was an egg here.”

That egg turned up on the floor by the computer table, intact but clearly not in its original spot. Now, not every egg fell beneath the claws of the mischievous felines, but about eight or nine of them were a bit harder to find than they should have been, and one of them almost completely eluded us. We couldn’t find that one egg anywhere. The Daughter looked everywhere, and we even used this as an excuse to get her to clean up a large pile of Daughter-related detritus that occupies a semi-permanent spot in our apartment, under the guise of “searching for the lost egg”. But still, no egg.

Until, half an hour later, The Daughter spots the egg, right here:

That’s the garbage can and the big bag of charcoal in our kitchen; note the blue egg on the floor. And upon picking up the egg, we discover that it’s not nicely intact as were its brethren. No, this egg was wickedly cracked, and covered with cat hair and dust. Clearly this egg bore the brunt of the kitties’ hours of fun. Here’s the poor egg, at the end of its eggly journey:

The moral of the story is clear: Cats are the embodiment of destructive evil.

Share This Post

Posted on

I’m a bad baseball fan.

In fact, I am such a bad baseball fan that I think I should stop claiming to be one. I’ve almost completely stopped paying attention to the game, since without cable, it’s nearly impossible to watch games until October, and since my favorite team, the Pirates, is one giant heap of suck. I don’t even know who the really good players are these days, and my once useful stash of baseball knowledge in my head is starting to erode. Case in point:

The Scene: The Store. The Players: Me, and a Co-worker who is a Mets fan.

COWORKER: Hey, I’ve got a chance this week to get the autograph of a former Met.

ME: Oh yeah? Who?

COWORKER: Our former closer.

ME: Oh wow! Julio Franco!

[beat]

COWORKER: John Franco. Julio Franco is a first baseman.

ME: Wow. I suck.

COWORKER: There there….

So yeah. It was nice being a baseball fan, back in the day….

Share This Post

Posted on

Oh noes!!!

It appears that I’ve annoyed a fan of Apple products. Oh well, that’s how things go, I guess, although I’m a tad baffled as to why the author over there seems to think there’s something faulty with my “sense of satire”. Did I miss some satire somewhere? Is there a dollop of satire on my shoe?

Anyway, back to my nice PC.

UPDATE: Apparently that site is devoted to satirizing the Apple cult, I guess. Based on just the post that linked me — which is all I read over there — the satire is pretty hard to detect, but there you go.

And again, back to my nice PC.

Share This Post

Posted on

Play that funky music, whiteboy!

I’ve seen this Stuff White People Like blog linked in a number of places, but Tosy and Cosh helpfully reduce it to a list, with commentary. Which means, you know, I’ll go all listy now as well. Basically I’ll do as he did and give a “yes” or “no” answer to each entry, with comment. I’m not so much doing this because I’m white (really, who cares) but because it’s a list. Note that this is not a “Bold the ones I like” list; I bolded them all to make the post easier to read.

(The original blog, by the way, has updated since I grabbed this from Tosy, so I’ll update this in a post down the line sometime.)

Anyway:

Graduate School

I never went, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not a fan. I figured that the world might not have needed another Ph.D in philosophy. Or something like that.

The Idea of Soccer

What is the “idea of soccer”? The notion of the world’s most popular spectator sport being a fairly boring game that has very little nuance? Bleeccchhh! You could pay me to watch soccer, since I’d do nearly anything for money, but I sure wouldn’t enjoy it. (Now, playing soccer is another story, since it’s a lot of running and kicking stuff. But things that are fun to do aren’t always fun to watch.)

Modern Furniture

Depends. Some modern-type furniture I find appealingly trippy, and a lot of actually is downright comfortable when you figure out how to sit in it. The library at my college (at the time – the library has since been rebuilt) had lots of sixties-era furniture, stuff that you might see lurking in the background of a scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I loved sitting in those chairs, reading.

Multilingual Children

I can’t really say as I have a tremendously strong opinion here. If we’re going to decide that our children should be multilingual, obviously it’s best to do that early, but I don’t really know.

Musical Comedy

You’d better believe it! I love a good musical comedy. And even some not-so-good musical comedies.

Bottles of Water

I drink tons of water, so bottles are cool. We buy bottles by the case at The Store, and then after drinking the water that comes in them, we re-fill them and re-use them until they become too worn out to be useful, and then we break out a few new bottles from the case. Few things refresh like good old water.

Threatening to move to Canada

This is what pansy, pseudo-leftie nitwits do. Stay here and fight to make your country better, you bunch of doofuses! (Until the Bills move there, and then I’m outta here!)

Oscar Parties

Not really; I don’t take the Oscars that seriously anymore. But to attend one of the “official” parties, when you win one? Sure, I’d love to be at one of those.

When I eventually win the Oscar for Best Screenplay (note to self: start writing a screenplay), my speech will begin with this joke: “We writers aren’t Governors’ Ball types, so as the winning writer, it’s my responsibility to host the Writers’ Oscar Party. That’ll be at my hotel, Room 337 of the Hampton Inn by LAX. It’s BYOB, but we’re writers, so we’ve all got our own B.” You read it here first. [Cut to tight shot of Jack Nicholson, grinning tightly because he doesn’t get it or doesn’t care.]

Gentrification

You know, I hear this word a lot, and I still have no idea what it means. Something to do with city neighborhoods becoming lame, I think. I dunno.

Study Abroad

Never did it, myself. I suppose it makes sense for certain fields of study, like foreign languages or clandestine military activity.

Being the only white person around

I’m not sure exactly what’s so great about this. I generally don’t care who’s around me. Of course, this probably refers to traveling to entirely different cultures, which is a cool idea that I’ve never done before.

Difficult Breakups

They make for good fodder in romantic comedies and such, but to go through one? Who in their right mind would enjoy a difficult breakup? Especially since as you get older, your breakups can only increase in difficulty as they tend to involve kids and lawyers?

Mos Def

I don’t know who he is.

Michel Gondry

I don’t know who he is, either.

Standing Still at Concerts

Nah. I prefer to listen to my Berlioz and Rachmaninov sitting down. (I have never once attended a rock concert of any type. I’d love to hear some live Celtic music one of these years, but the proper setting for such is a pub, and those have seats.)

Divorce

See above on breakups. This is one road I have absolutely no desire to travel down, whatsoever, nosiree Bob. I know plenty of divorced people, and they’ve all (mostly) moved on to happiness in their post-divorce lives, but still, one of these friends described the experience to me in these words: “If you want to feel like throwing up for six months straight, get a divorce, ’cause that’s what it feels like.” I have no use for that.

Co-Ed Sports

Sure, what’s not to like?

Recycling

I do it, but I’m not sold on it as a major part of the solution to our environmental problems.

Expensive Sandwiches

Oh yes! I love a good sandwich, made with good ingredients. I’m not sure about the “expensive” part; I wouldn’t be terribly interested in spending $50 for a burger made of Kobe beef. But ten bucks for a sandwich on artisan bread? Sure.

Knowing what’s best for poor people

Well, depends, I suppose. I seriously dislike the condescension and judgmental nonsense thrown at the poor in this country, and the constant refrain that it’s their fault, the lazy freeloaders. And I seriously dislike the notion that because we aren’t in their position, we somehow know what’s best for them. Nothing illustrated this to me more than the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Barbara Bush opined that the thousands of displaced persons living in the Astrodome in Houston had it pretty good.

All that said, however, there’s an extent to which any policy discussion over how to help the poor involves a discussion of what’s best for the poor. This kind of thing I find helpful.

Bicycles

Bikes rule. I need to get mine up and running this year.

Toyota Prius

I like the idea of the car, but I’m unlikely to be able to get one any time soon, so I’m personally ambivalent. What I really like is what the Prius represents: the notion that it’s our technological advancement that will be the largest factor in our solving our environmental problems. People who think that environmentalism translates to returning the world to some kind of medieval lifestyle annoy me.

Natural Medicine

There’s some good stuff there, but it does get difficult to separate out the complete nonsense from the stuff that actually works.

Japan

If only they’d ditch their creepy and disgusting addiction to whaling, Japan would be extremely cool. I would love to go to Japan someday.

Juno

Haven’t seen it yet, but soon will, and then I will report. I think that Diablo Cody is gorgeous, though.

Lawyers

Necessary and underappreciated, I suppose. The ones that I’ve met are usually decent people. But yeah, Shakespeare says to kill them all, so off they go!

Apologies

These seem terribly underrated. We really need to see a whole-hearted embrace in our society of the “Ahso Defense”.

Kitchen Gadgets

I love good quality cookware, but I find the vast majority of kitchen gadgets useless and stupid wastes of space. Why buy, for instance, a rice cooker when you can just learn to cook rice in a heavy saucepan that will have many other uses besides? Why buy an electric gizmo to grill a sandwich? All I need is some good pans, some good knives, and a few other items and I’m good.

Dogs

Meh. I’m a cat person. A dog can be OK if I get to know it. But it’s gotta be a dog. A Pomeranian is not a dog. It’s a yipping creature of ill breeding.

Sarah Silverman

I don’t know the first thing about her.

Living by the water

I’d love to live by water one day: a lake, a river, even a stream. Water is mythic. As it is, I live a few miles from one of the Great Lakes, which is good enough for now.

Irony

A powerful tool when used as that: a tool. I got very tired of the whole “Irony as overriding tone” thing that dominated everything in the 1990s.

Vintage

As you might expect, I own several pairs of vintage overalls, and I like to troll eBay for more, although the prices are often a bit out of reach for me. (A good pair of overalls will last forever if you use them for casual wear, as I do. No long days out in the fields for me!) It’s fun to look at brands that no longer exist with names like “PayDay”. I don’t have much interest for anything else vintage, though.

Whole Foods and grocery co-ops

Well, this is awkward. Given my occupation, Whole Foods is the enemy and must be destroyed. But that’s just a philosophical position, as Whole Foods does not exist in Buffalo, and I’ve heard no plans to attract them here. The big Buffalo co-op is the Lexington Co-op which I believe is in the Elmwood area somewhere. That’s a bit out of the way for me, so I’ve never been there. I do like the concept of local ownership of such businesses, and I’d probably shop at one at least occasionally if one was a bit closer to Casa Jaquandor. Price isn’t the biggest determining factor for me as to where I shop, as a rule, although it’s definitely a factor.

You know what I really love, though? Public markets like the famous one in Seattle and the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. Places like that are just wonderful.

Arts Degrees

I’ve got one: a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy with a minor in music.

The Sunday New York Times

I used to be a big fan, but nowadays I generally don’t have time.

Asian Fusion Food

I don’t know anything about it, but when I hear the term, I think of those stereotypical pretentious restaurants where an entree consists of a plate with three bite-size morsels of something upon it. Not a fan of that kind of thing: when I order food, I want a plate full of food. And my favorite Asian food is the stuff that you’ll find in Chinatowns like Torontos, something that an Asian person might actually eat as a part of their daily life.

Public Radio

Longtime readers will know that I am a huge fan of public radio. You just have to find your right show. I love Prairie Home Companion, Thistle and Shamrock, Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, Car Talk, and others. (I’m not a big fan of This American Life, however; something about Ira Glass’s voice makes me want to lapse into a deep coma.)

Plays

Yup! Especially the flea-flicker and the Old Statue of Liberty. Those are great plays!

Oh, that’s not what this means. I’ve enjoyed live theater when I’ve gone, and yet, I haven’t gone in many years, which seems a pity given Buffalo’s unusually vibrant theater scene (for a city this size facing the economic challenges it does).

Sushi

Yes! I love it. I’ve never had the “raw fish” stuff, but I find a nice meal of sushi pleasantly nourishing.

Indie Music

If it’s good music, great. If not, forget it. Being “Indie” is no guarantee against sucking.

Apple Products

I like apple butter, apple-pie flavor ice cream, and I miss apple-flavored Slice pop.

The Steve Jobs cult creeps me out, though. I’m not in love with the whole “design is everything” ethos, nor do I buy the notion that Apple stuff is that much more robust than anything else. I find the idea of watching movies on an iPhone or an iPod terribly silly; I loved the bit at the Oscars the other week when Jon Stewart was watching Lawrence of Arabia on an iPhone and says, “Wow, the cinematography of this movie is amazing! I should watch in in widescreen! [turns phone sideways] Ohhh! Those are camels!”

And the whole “iBricking” thing really turns me off.

Netflix

Neat idea. We were in Blockbuster’s knockoff program for a while, but we don’t watch movies frequently enough to make it really worth our while, especially with the public library’s movie collection constantly improving, and the access to that collection is free, which stomps all over Blockbuster and Netflix.

Arrested Development

Never watched it.

Renovations

Well, of what? Taking an old building and making it better, whether for a home or a business? Sure, that’s great. In fact, I wish more old buildings would get renovated than either torn down for new buildings or, worse, allowed to rot while new buildings are built across the street. But not everything needs to be renovated, of course. And renovations poorly done can be disastrous.

Breakfast places

You’d better believe it. My favorite breakfast places are always the ones that are owned and run by locals in any given town, such as the wonderful Charlie’s Diner in East Aurora, NY (I can’t recommend this place highly enough, and if you go in late spring, be sure to sit on the porch and eat). And we’re rapidly coming up on one of New York State’s best traditions, Maple Weekend. We’ll be going to Moore’s Sugar Shack, which is a fabulous little place in the hills south of Arcade, for all the pancakes with fresh maple syrup we can eat. Oh Mama!

The Daily Show / The Colbert Report

I don’t get to watch them very often, because they’re on very late where we live (but they’re nicely broadcast on a Canadian channel out of Hamilton, ON). I love Jon Stewart. I’ve never seen Colbert’s show, unfortunately, but I did love his speech at the Correspondents’ Dinner from a couple of years back, so assuming that’s what his show is like, I’d probably love it.

Architecture

Well, I don’t know much about it, to be honest. But Buffalo’s architecture is wonderful, so I love it on that basis.

Marijuana

I’ve never tried it, so I don’t know. I think it should be legal, though.

Vegan/Vegetarianism

Nope. I eat meat. Nothing ever eats that something else doesn’t die, and anyway, if God didn’t want us eating animals, he wouldn’t have made them out of meat! (I do think that we eat too much meat in this country, but that’s not the same thing as saying nobody should eat meat.)

Snowboarding

I’ve never done it, but it does look like fun.

Wrigley Field

I’m not a Cubs fan. Wrigley looks like a neat place on teevee, and I’m sure it’s a great place to take in a game. But to have to do so watching the Cubs seems like too high a price to pay, especially with Harry Caray dead.

80s Night

Where? At a bar? A dance club? A roller rink? I love the cheesy 80s pop music, myself, so I’d probably enjoy the occasional 80s night.

Not having a teevee

Nah. I watch significantly less teevee now than I ever have before, but still, we have to be able to watch movies and stuff as a family. It’s not like we can crowd around the computer or the laptop.

Marathons

Gahhh! I hate running. Never liked running and never will. For cardio, at the Y, I use the stationary recumbent bikes, and I love biking in general. But running? Ugh. I don’t like running 26 feet, so why would I want to run 26 miles?!

Manhattan (and now Brooklyn too!)

I haven’t been to New York City since I was twelve or thirteen. I really want to go back someday; we’d love to be on the street during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the Hayden Planetarium seems right up my alley, as does that bookstore that apparently has eighteen miles of books. But that’s all provisional, so I can’t say that I love Manhattan.

David Sedaris

Meh. I read through a collection of his essays once and while I didn’t hate him, I didn’t grok him either. I don’t understand the fuss over the guy.

Wine

I love wine, and I don’t drink enough of it. Port, sherry, Asti, Cava, Sauternes, Canadian ice wine, rieslings from New York, Valpolicella with pasta. Wine is wonderful and fascinating. (I’m a pretty non-sophisticated wine drinker, picking my bottles on the basis of price and on that of how pretty the label is. I also try to buy New York wines when I’m in the mood.)

Microbreweries

If the beer they make tastes good, then sure. If not, then no. I’m not of the view that microbreweries are inherently better than larger operations, but they have over the last couple of decades led to a more vibrant beer market, so that’s a good thing.

Having Two Last Names

With all due respect, who cares?! This is just silly.

Writers’ Workshops

I have no desire at all to attend one of these.

Being an expert on YOUR culture

I’m not, unless we restrict the concept of “MY culture” to those topics I write about on this blog, and even then I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on many of those topics, since blogging is in large part opining about that on which we know little.

Traveling

In the sense of “going other places”, absolutely. In the sense of the actual physical act of traveling, then maybe; it depends on the mode of travel. I don’t like flying; I find it unpleasant to begin with, and our air travel industry has made it a genuine pain in the arse. My favorite mode of travel is to pack some clothes and stuff, get in the car, and drive with one and only one rule: no Interstate highways. There’s magic to be found in this country that way.

Awareness

Too often “awareness” can seem an end in itself, but the way I figure it, if you can get one hundred people aware of something they might not have otherwise been aware at all, then maybe a few of them, or even just one, will go beyond awareness to activism, and that’s where change can happen.

Hating their Parents

Let me get this straight: we’re supposed to like divorce, messy breakups to our non-marriage relationships, and harboring negative feelings toward our parents? Wow, we’re quite the prize, aren’t we? I can’t believe we’re still single; who wouldn’t want to be around all this emotional angst and dysfunction?

Gifted Children

But it’s all good, because we like our children, as long as they read at a sixth-grade level when they’re in kindergarten or can speak two languages when they’re four.

Yoga

I’ve never tried it, but it can’t hurt, I suppose.

Having black friends

Why? So I can say “Some of my best friends are black!”? I like having friends.

Tea

Yup, I love tea. I recently acquired a nifty little device for brewing single servings of tea which I’ll post about some time. I don’t drink enough tea, actually; it’s really wonderful stuff. I love green tea and mint tea.

Non-profit organizations

This is too broad a category of things to like. The Discovery Institute is a NPO, and I find their existence embarrassing and annoying.

Asian Girls

“Girls”? Can’t we call them what we call them in this country: women? But yeah, Asian women tend to be really beautiful.

Wes Anderson movies

I’ve never seen one.

Making you feel bad about not going outside

What’s wrong with inside? Nothing. Outside’s cool, but does it need to be the subject of guilt? Not that I can see.

Barack Obama

If he wins the nomination, then you’d better believe it. If not, then thanks for playing and we’ll see you in 2012 or (to be hoped) 2016. In truth, I think that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would be infinitely preferable to John “The only solution to the colossal mess we’re in is to ratchet up George Bush’s awful policies to 11!” McCain.

Diversity

Again, it depends, doesn’t it? But on balance, I think that diversity tends to be a better thing than the lack of it.

Organic Food

I don’t know, really. I do know that organic stuff tends to cost more, so I avoid it pretty much on that basis alone.

Farmers’ Markets

Ach, I love farmers’ markets. The freshness you get is amazing. Here’s an example of a place where I find it worthwhile to spend a little more than usual on food. Corn on the cob from a farmers’ market, at the height of summer? Or blueberries picked that morning from a group of bushes less than ten miles from where you’re forking over your cash? Wonderful.

Assists

Ummm…not knowing much about basketball or hockey, I can’t say. But I do like the sentiment expressed by Crash Davis in Bull Durham on strikeouts versus groundballs: “Groundballs are democratic. Strikeouts are fascist.”

Film Festivals

I’ve never been to one.

Religions their parents don’t belong to

Does this mean my admiring Buddhism or Taoism is because my parents are neither Buddhists or Taoists? That seems a bit silly. Or is it, say, if I were to become an Anglican if my parents were Catholics (just to make up an example)? I don’t know, that seems silly to me.

Coffee

Otherwise known as “the magical elixir without which I become a complete jerk”. I love coffee. I adore coffee. I roll on the floor with coffee and massage its…oh yeah, sorry. (This year I’m trying to wean myself off sweetening my coffee. I’ve already cut in half the amount of sugar I put in it. I love sweet coffee, but I suspect that I don’t need that much sugar with my daily caffeine fix.)

And there we have it. I don’t like a lot of the stuff our “prototypical white guy” likes, and some of it, I really dislike. Am I still white?

Share This Post

Posted on

Happy Birthday My Love

Today is The Wife’s birthday.

We first started dating just days before her birthday back in 1991, so each time her birthday rolls around, it’s another year we’ve been together in one way or another. We’ve had some very wonderful times together when life was nearly perfect; we’ve had some utterly awful moments when life seemed completely worthless. But we’re still here, on both counts, and I don’t want it any other way.

Some things about my wife: her hand fits mine like it was custom made for me (or maybe that’s the other way around). She makes perfect Spanish rice and cornbread, amazing pancakes and astounding waffles, and she roasts a mean turkey. Her skill on the sewing machine astonishes me. Her strength during Little Quinn’s life was inspiring to me on so many levels. She loves to eat chocolate and drink rum with me. She’d never seen Star Wars when she and I came together. She rides horses and wants to help children with disabilities. I wish she liked whipped cream, but them’s the breaks; she probably wishes I liked asparagus. I’ve loved every hairstyle she’s ever had, and the one she has now makes me wild. She wears overalls because she knows I love the way she looks in them, and she looks great in them. She picked out two Persian kittens with me. I wish I could have pushed her in a wheelchair around Disney World for another week, as tiring as that was. (She hurt herself while there.) She loves to try new things. She loves Renaissance festivals and wants to go someday in costume. She loves a good laugh, especially when it’s at my expense, and I’m (usually!) only too happy to let her have those laughs on most occasions. She loves cats and dogs equally. She thinks the Patriots are evil. She doesn’t like baseball, but then, nobody’s perfect and with the Pirates looking to stretch their era of badness into a third decade in a few years I don’t much like baseball anymore either.

So yeah: The Wife. I’m a big fan.

Original photo locations: 1. Pumpkinville 07 029, 2. Pumpkinville 07 011, 3. Pumpkinville 07 010, 4. Pumpkinville 07 008, 5. Pumpkinville 07 003, 6. Sept Trip 07 005, 7. Sept Trip 07 003, 8. 092907_14221, 9. A very hippie Christmas!, 10. Sunny day at the Fair, 11. 005_2, 12. GAHHH!, 13. Cutest wife EVER, 14. Mother and Son, 15. Tifft Preserve May 06 (21), 16. The Wife, pensive, 17. GAHHH! part two, 18. biking, 19. Spot the non-family member!, 20. The Wife.

Mosaic created with Flickr Mosaic.

Share This Post

Posted on

Out Damned Spot!


Out Damned Spot!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

Out I say!

OK, so I didn’t actually murder the King of Scotland last night on the questionable advice of three old hags who hang out in this creepy hovel out in the rocks and heather. Actually, I did a batch of tie-dying last night, a batch which was way overdue (we’ve had this pile of white clothes next to our bed for several months now), and I forgot to bring home the one essential item: gloves. Oops. So now my hands make me look like I have this weird blend of jaundice, anemia, and Columbo-itis (that’s the look of your hands after you’ve committed the bloody crime but before the good Inspector comes along and just-one-more-thing’s you into admitting your guilt).

Anyway, the clothes are now individually sealed in Ziploc bags. Later on tonight I’ll open them up, rinse them out, cut off the rubber bands, wash each one twice, and then hang them on the dryer rack. So in a day or two we’ll have new tie-dyed clothes! Wheeeee!!!

I’m most nervous about how two large swatches of fabric that The Wife asked me to tie-dye turned out. I’m hoping that even with all the folds in that fabric, the dyes still managed to get into the interior. If you’re not aggressive with squirting the dye into the folds, your resulting garments can turn out with large white areas that don’t have any dye on them at all. That happened with my first batch of home-grown tie-dye.

I’ll have pics of the new stuff in a few days.

Share This Post

Posted on

AGGHHHH!!!!

So this morning, before work, I went online to check stuff like weather (I’ve never seen a winter this windy, and I spent four winters in Iowa) and whether the school had been closed for The Daughter (it had) and check e-mail. When I closed out AOL, it did that AOL thing it likes to do sometimes where it downloads its own new features (what these are, I have no idea) and requires you to restart your computer. So I clicked “Restart”, and headed for the bathroom to do my teeth and whatnot.

While I was in the bathroom, the power went out for a minute and then came back on. When I came out, I discovered that the restart had failed, and that a file with the ominous-sounding name “Config” had been corrupted. I can only surmise that the computer was trying to do something when the power failure to the apartment interrupted it before it was done, and it wasn’t able to recover itself once the power came back on.

So I’ve just completed the arduous task of running PC Recovery, which restores the computer to its “Out of the box” state. Which is fine, since I’m now up and running again, but it’s literally the “Out of the box” state. As in, everything I had on the hard drive is gone.

Now, this isn’t too disastrous, really; most of the important stuff, minus maybe a month’s worth of photos, was still available via my laptop and my USB flash drives, and even some of the photos I can grab again off Flickr. The music can all be recovered too, I suppose, although that will take some doing. But all of my bookmarks from Firefox are gone, including a giant folder I had of blogs that I hadn’t yet come round to blogrolling. This has happened before, and I’ve in the past been able to find some of those blogs again by memory, but for the most part, I expect that many of them will never be visited by me again, and that’s a shame, since there were some good ones there.

Oh well, nothing lasts forever…but really, hiccups like this are why I’m deeply suspicious of our society’s apparent decision that physical media are Teh Suck. (I’m sure there’s some way I could have saved some of the stuff on the hard drive — maybe there still is, and I’m all ears, folks — but I never have to undergo serious technical work for an entire afternoon to recover the music on a CD. I’m just sayin’.)

And the weather? Yeah. The wind this winter is making me batty.

Share This Post

Posted on

I’d have asked for her laptop

Mrs. M-Mv wonders if her reaction to someone asking for her newspaper is the normal one:

Can I read that?”

I looked up.

“That newspaper. Can I have it?”

I blinked.

“Are you reading it? Whose is it?”

“Mine. From home.”

“Well, are you reading it?”

I wordlessly handed the interloper the newspaper.

“Are you sure?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

“Thank you.”

Nonplussed is not an adjective that one can easily link to my name, but I assure you, I was nonplussed by this interaction. My socially gifted husband maintains that this sort of interaction is both normal and common among the gregarious, but I’m not so sure: The newspaper was clearly part of my stuff (i.e., it wasn’t on a seat beside me on the commuter train, for example). People person or no, you cannot tell me that it is commonplace for adults to ask for (all but demand in tone) access to what other adults possess, no matter how trivial the possession might be.

Or can you?

Well, kind of.

Assuming this transcript of the interaction is accurate (no reason to suppose that Mrs. M-Mv is making it up or embellishing), the request seems to have been made fairly brusquely, but in my experience, that’s not an uncommon thing. When people are gathered together in a boring circumstance, and one has a newspaper and another doesn’t, someone may ask if they can read the other person’s paper. Now, this usually comes with all kinds of extra verbiage, though: not “Can I read that?” but, “Hey, do you mind if I read your paper? I didn’t think to buy one.” If this is met with a skeptical glance, then one follows up with, “I’ll give it right back, and I promise I won’t fold it funny or do your crossword puzzle.”

In my experience, bringing a newspaper into a group of adults is not unlike a kid walking onto a playground with a ball when none of the other kids brought their own: somebody’s going to want to play with it, and they’re going to ask if they can. But it’s also my experience that this only applies to newspapers (or, more sporadically, popular magazines like Time or People). I’ve never sat in a waiting room with two books and had someone ask if they could read the one I’m not reading.

In short, newspapers aren’t seen as “community property” if someone walks in with one, but they are seen as something cheap that one shouldn’t feel ashamed to ask to look at for a moment. That’s my take, anyhow. Thoughts?

Share This Post

Posted on

Grief

I wrote this essay a few months ago, hoping to have it published in The Buffalo News, but they rejected it. Maybe it was too much of a downer topic, but anyway, since as the editor of Byzantium’s Shores I can accept my own writing*, here it is. The topic is, of course, grief, something I’ve had cause to think an awful lot about in recent years, and not just for the obvious reasons, either.

When a person we love dies, our friends and family surround us, offer us comfort, and pledge to do anything we ever need to get through the dark period. They laugh and cry with us as we remember the happy stories of the loved one we’ve lost, they put their arms around our shoulders and bring us meals because we’re too weak ourselves to cook, and they assure us that they are praying for us at their own home churches too. They come to the funeral, they pay their respects one last time, and then they go home. They have their own lives too, and life doesn’t stop for the living.

But what’s rarely acknowledged, or even realized, is that the for the bereaved, the funeral is just the beginning of grief. The funeral is easy. Everyone knows how to behave and how to talk to a funeral. We are not nearly as good at dealing with what comes after the funeral, when the grief settles in like an unwelcome guest.

These days, it’s hard to even notice that people around us are grieving. Gone are the days when rigid societal rules dictated how long grief would last, and when grief would be made obvious by the color of our clothes or of the drapes in the parlor. Sadly, also gone is our understanding that grief goes on not for weeks or months, but for years.

For we the grieving, it is not a temporary feeling but rather a semi-permanent state. It becomes a fact of who we are, which in turn becomes even more difficult in the face of a society that sometimes seems to believe that death and grief are not to be discussed any more than absolutely necessary. This leaves us feeling that our loved ones are best left unmentioned – or, worse, unremembered.

This is the worst of things. We want to talk about our loved ones! And not in the hushed or reverent tones best used for Saints, but in the messy tones of human feeling. We want to laugh anew at the happy stories, and we want to admit the things they did that made us so angry we could scream. We want to hear their names spoken. To know that they are still remembered, that their lives touched someone and continue to do so, is the best antidote to the sadness of grief.

So please, don’t avoid mentioning our loved ones for fear of unnecessarily reminding us of pain and anguish. Grief is not a wound we must forever fear re-opening.

And when we do cry, know that it is normal and natural. Put an arm around us and cry with us, in silence even; hugs given in silence are among the most underrated things we can do for one another. Don’t feel that you have to know the perfect thing to say, and don’t feel that you have to openly admit the inadequacy of the words that you do say. You can send a “Thinking of You” card with nothing more than just your signature inside.

Grief is probably the most burdensome of human emotions. But like all burdens, it is most easily borne when shared; and shared, it need not even be a burden at all.

End of sermon.

* You’d be surprised how often I write a post only to have my Inner Editor send me a nicely-phrased rejection letter.

Share This Post