NOTE: I’ve had this post in drafts since last Tuesday, when 2024 was still going OK. Then, things started going awry very quickly, hence the lack of posting much since then. I’m not going to write just yet about what’s going on now, but my immediate family and I are just fine. This country, however, is a mess, and yet another way is how hard we make elder care.
Anyway, here’s the rest of the post, which I’m finishing on Saturday morning.
—
But first, a joke that I heard years ago at Summer Music Camp, when a counselor needed to cheer up a girl who had had a very bad day:
Two little boys, Timmy and Joey, twins about five years old, are going to bed, when Timmy comes up with a plan: “Hey Joey, tomorrow we’re gonna talk to Mom like we’re grown-ups. That means we’re gonna use some of those words Daddy uses. When she asks us what we want for breakfast, I’m gonna say, ‘I want some damn Cheerios!’ and when she asks if you want Cheerios too, you say, ‘You bet your ass I do!'”
And Joey agrees to this plan, and they go to bed.
Next morning, Mom gets them up and brings them to the table. Mom asks Timmy, “What do you want for breakfast?”
And Timmy replies, “I want some damn Cheerios!”
Mom gasps, and then she shouts, “We do NOT use language like that in this house!” And she slaps Timmy and sends him crying back to his room. Then she turns to Joey and asks him, “Joey, what do you want for breakfast?”
And Joey thinks for a moment and replies, “You bet your ass it’s not Cheerios!”
Why am I remembering that joke so randomly? Because lately I’ve been eating Cheerios for breakfast. I was never a big fan of them before, but we have a big box on hand after I needed some for a recipe and there are a ton of them left over (turns out I greatly overestimated what size of a box I needed to get three cups out of it). Is this part of some larger attempt to eat more healthy-like? Who knows…I have no problem with it, if that’s the case. (I do, though, need to sprinkle them with a bit of sugar, which isn’t ideal, but so be it!)
So, anyway, let’s talk ideas about 2024.
Writing: I’ve been plugging away, slowly and steadily, at the first round of edits on Forgotten Stars V: Wow, Is This Still A Thing?, and now I’m starting on applying the edits to the manuscript to generate the second draft, which will go out to betas and friends who are also bright editors. I’d like to be able to get the book out this fall. Other hopes: editing two other books that I’ve had in draft for several years, with an eye to getting them out soon-ish, and resuming drafting on The Adventures of Lighthouse Boy and then starting Forgotten Stars VI: Another Undiscovered Country.
Photography: More of that to come, much, much more! My decision to really start learning photography last year is turning into quite a passion, and I’m looking forward to featuring more and more of my work here and elsewhere. One particular goal is to shift to shooting in RAW format and editing in Lightroom, which is what the pros do, after all. Another is setting up a photo gallery, hopefully on this site, but I first need to investigate whatever might be the best way of doing that.
All of this photography is likely to lead into….
Vlogging/video content creation: Yup, I think it’s time for that as well. I’m not sure what frequency of video work I plan to follow at this point. I’ve already shot one video but I haven’t edited any of it together yet. My video content will probably be as all-over-the-map as my content here, obviously; that’s hard-wired into me and I can’t see doing any different just because it’s video. I’m going to progress slowly on that front at first, because I know that video content can be very time-consuming to produce, and I’m not terribly experienced on that front.
What other goals do I have in 2024? Well, mostly it’s about finding the way through the current set of problems and then, hopefully, figuring out whatever the new “normal” is going to be. As of right now, it does not appear that the upheaval of 2023 is stopping…but eventually it will. It always does. (Again, sorry to be a bit cryptic, but I’m not entirely comfortable writing about some of this yet. I reiterate that I, The Wife, and The Daughter are fine.) But on a less…aspirational? Vague?…note, I want to keep learning how to cook things. One of my Christmas gifts was a wonderful My Neighbor Totoro-themed ramen bowl, and I think it’s time to learn how to cook ramen that’s a step up from the $2-a-pack ramen kits that have enough sodium in them to stop a clock. (I should also figure out gluten-free ramen soon!) That’s just one cooking adventure I have in mind.
I had hoped to start getting some more travel on the docket, but I’m not sure right now if that’s a viable short-term goal. Maybe, maybe not.
Finally, I’m trying to use a planner again. Or rather, I’m once again on one of my attempts to use a planner consistently. This has been a struggle of mine for, well, all of life! But the last bunch of years have a usual cadence: I buy a planner, I start using it on January 1, I eventually fade away from the planner and neglect it, I remember the planner, I again miss a few days that turn into weeks, lather rinse repeat. But, I do get better at planner use each year, so maybe this is the year I turn the corner? It does seem to me that organized planning of my time, at least way better organized planning of my time than I’ve ever had before, is key to my achieving all of the various goals I keep setting for myself. So…here we go, planning away.
Again, I’m sure I’ll write about the current difficulties that we are experiencing at some point. For now, I’m going to try to not do that. We’ll see how that goes.
In terms of content creation, I have motored right along on this site, after migrating from BlogSpot almost a year-and-a-half ago. What follows is a selection of posts from this year I particularly like (hey, writers! It’s OK to like your own writing!):
Two sentences each on some movies we watched (I think I may adopt this format for writing about movies in general next year, as not every movie we watch really warrants an entire post. Also, reading that post, I described one movie as “a rom-com you won’t remember the next day, and damn that was accurate, because I just looked it up and I have zero recollection of watching that one!) Why write bad reviews? A metamorphosis begins… …and ends! (These last two go together, and what a joy that was!)
I wrote a lot about my explorations of photography this year; those posts can be found all tagged together, here.
Events of 2023 made it hard to keep my newsletter, Dispatches from the Forgotten Stars, updated as much as I would have liked, but I wrote some good stuff there, too, exploring specific pieces by Rachmaninoff (and I still have to write about one more work of his), a farewell to an old friend, and more. Please check it out and subscribe! (Yes, it’s on Substack, and yes, I’m aware of the current issues and controversies surrounding that platform. No, I have not made any decision yet as to whether or not I’ll migrate to a different platform.)
And now, a more general exploration of What 2023 Meant To Me:
I don’t recall off the top of my head if I’ve ever dropped an F-bomb on this site. I swore like a sailor on Twitter, and I’ve continued to do so on Threads, but for some reason, I try to stick to PG-13 here.
So it means something when I say that if ever a year was going to make me drop the Big F on this site, left and right and up and down, it was going to be 2023. This year was fecking awful. (See what I did there?)
So, here is my final summation of a year that I’m more than happy to see in the rear view mirror…but you know what? As I look back, it was astonishingly not all bad. In fact, there was some real good in 2023. If I can sustain the good from 2023 and eliminate the crap, then maybe it’ll be a good year.
Let’s see how it ended up, with this: my annual Year’s End Quiz. I’ve been answering these questions about the ending year every year for…well, a whole bunch of years now.
Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
My resolutions never change much: “Read a lot, write a lot, eat healthier, walk more, listen to more music.”
Whew. Yes, I read a lot. Did I write a lot? I guess. I’m not thrilled with my output, but I didn’t dry up completely. Walk more? Eventually. Losing Cane in 2022 made it hard to go back to some parks, but go back, I did. And I’ve been walking a lot more since the one big development in my life this year, but we’ll get to that.
That leaves “Eat healthier”, and…no. It’s not been a great year for healthy eating, for many reasons. I was amazed that at my last doctor appointment, I had actually lost two pounds. That was a couple months ago, and I don’t think I’ve gained much back at all, but all the salty crap I’ve been eating has led to a frequent feeling of bloat, which is not pleasant. And even though I haven’t gained very much weight at all, a few times this year I found it necessary to loosen the shoulder straps on various pairs of overalls, and that’s never something I’m happy about.
Did anyone close to you give birth?
No, but there are several co-workers who had babies, so, yay!
Mom finally died on November 11, after a year full of struggle and strife. I’ve been undecided as to how much to write about it, and if I do it will be a while, but right now all I’ll say is that dealing with the health problems that eventually turned into Mom’s final downward spiral consumed much of 2023’s mental and emotional energy.
What countries did you visit?
We actually left the country! After an unacceptably large number of years away, The Wife and I finally made it back to Toronto. I love that city deeply and I hate that I’ve been there only four times in the last fifteen years. I wrote about our visit here and here.
What would you like to have in 2024 that you lacked in 2023?
Inner peace? A return to routine? Better literary focus? All of those, I suppose.
And not once did I receive a pie in the face in 2023. Zero pies. What gives!
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I started learning seriously about photography! This was a rather surprising development to me. It started with a vague sense that I should upgrade my old point-and-shoot camera with a newer point-and-shoot camera, and it turned into me getting a very sophisticated “bridge” camera and starting to really learn about how to compose photos, how the “exposure triangle” works, and more. It was a fun hobby that suddenly morphed into a significant passion in my life, and given everything else that’s been going on, that new-found passion has been a needed place for focus.
What was your biggest failure?
I can’t really count it as a “failure”, but the way my mother’s passing ended up transpiring, there’s simply no way to look back once in a while and wonder if there’s something I might have been able to say or do to maybe stave off what eventually happened. I don’t think there is, and I am not beating myself up about it, but it was something of a failure.
A bigger failure that I didn’t catch, unfortunately, was the toll it was taking on my mental life, until one of my bosses at work felt it necessary to sit me down for a “Come to Jesus” talk. And he was right. Happily, more recently he was able to sit me down just a couple of weeks ago to praise the degree to which I’ve been able to turn all that around, but I am still annoyed with myself that I let it get to that point in the first place.
What was the best thing you bought?
It’s not really a contest:
That’s my Lumix FZ1000ii, which I first wrote about here and here. Learning to use it, and hopefully starting to use it well, has given me a place to center my brain…the old “idle hands” thing, and I’m always a believer in learning new things. See those dials and buttons? I still haven’t used half of them! I’m particularly interested in this camera’s video capabilities…but hopefully more on that in 2024.
The camera isn’t all I bought, though! Of course I picked up some new overalls, my favorites of which are a vintage pair of hickory-striped Key overalls with really neat elastic shoulder straps.
I’ll never forget getting three compliments for that outfit in one day. That made me very happy.
Whose behavior merited celebration?
Oof. Not a great year for asking that question, huh. American voters do seem to be less-than-sold on the creeping fascist behavior of the Republican Party, though.
Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
They neither appall, depress, or surprise me anymore, but if you can look at the Republican Party in 2023 and not realize there’s just no bottom for them, I don’t know what to tell you.
Where did most of your money go?
Books, booze, food, overalls, and that camera.
What did you get really excited about?
Getting that camera and using it!
Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
You know, I think I’m just going to punt this question for this year. Not that it’s a slam-dunk that I’m sadder, as you might think, but because it’s so complex that I literally do not know how I’m feeling these days.
Thinner or fatter?
See above! Not really either, but it doesn’t feel thinner.
Richer or poorer?
Richer, though not by much. I’m hoping to start doing things that might lead to good things later down the road!
What do you wish you’d done more of?
Everything.
What do you wish you’d done less of?
Eating badly, second-guessing myself, and lots of things. More relevantly, though, I wish I hadn’t had to do as many of the things I had to do in 2023. There’s no getting around some of that, though; the cards landed the way they landed.
How did you spend Christmas?
With my father. It was a low-key and bittersweet Christmas.
Did you fall in love in 2023?
I tried to.
How many one-night stands?
Even if I had any, I wouldn’t tell you.
What was your favorite TV program?
The Repair Shop continues to be a balm in hard times. We also found Bridgerton delightfully trashy.
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
I don’t like to do hate, but Republicans make it so hard.
What was the best book you read?
Here are a few I rated highly this year:
The 1619 Project, various The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, Patrick Bringley No Name in the Street, James Baldwin The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
What was your greatest musical discovery?
My God, this was not a good year for musical discovery. I listened to a lot of old favorites, and mostly just that.
What did you want and get?
That camera!
What did you want and not get?
My mother’s health to improve.
What were your favorite films of this year?
We didn’t see much at all that was new this year, and what we did see, we saw via streaming; we only went to the theater three times in 2023 that I remember, and those were for re-releases: Casablanca, Grease, and Return of the Jedi. I recently had a long discussion with a friend on social media about this, but for me personally, the movie theater experience in and of itself is not of sufficient value to prioritize movies at the theater over movies at home.
Also, I have always been bad at seeing (or reading) the New Thing in the time of its being the New Thing.
That said, movies that stand out that we did watch this year are: Love at First Sight, Always Be My Maybe, and Bullet Train. Oh, and Gucci. That was a very interesting movie.
What did you do on your birthday?
We made our annual trip to Ithaca, and a great time was had by all.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2023?
More poofy tops with the overalls? I almost wonder if I should retire this question. I have, though, found myself increasingly able to stomach hot weather, which means I’ve been able to wear overalls through the summer. Time was when I would basically retire them completely from roughly June 15 to September 20, but the last two years, I’ve been able to wear overalls to the Sterling Renaissance Faire and to the Erie County Fair!
What kept you sane?
Writing and photography. Seriously, you can NOT underrate how helpful it is to have something new to learn when everything else is going all cattywumpus. (There’s a word I don’t normally use! And apparently I’ve misspelled it. I’m not looking it up.)
Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I’m honestly not sure. This was not a fantastic year for celebrities and public figures, in all honesty.
What political issue stirred you the most?
Abortion, climate change, and America’s ongoing flirtation with shitcanning democracy.
Who did you miss?
My mother. I really, really, really wish her last months hadn’t been what they were.
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2023:
I always recycle this, plus some things I added last year:
Read a lot, write a lot. Listen to music. Go for walks and look at sunsets. Take all the pictures you want. Learn new things and try new stuff. If you have a dog, take him for walks. Buy books for your daughter, even when she complains that she likes to pick her own books (let her do that, too). Nothing fits your hand so well as your lover’s hand. Eating out is fine, but learn to cook things, too. Have a place to go where they know you and what you order. Don’t be afraid to revisit your childhood passions now and again; you weren’t always wrong back then. Overalls are awesome, it’s OK to wear double denim, and a pie in the face is a wonderful thing!
To this I’d add: The United States of America desperately needs to re-embrace rational and collective thinking, and ditch its mythologies about rugged individualism and the eternal wisdom of “the Founders”.
And, via Letterkenny: “More hands makes less work!”, and “Pitter-patter, let’s get at ‘er!”
For 2023, I would add: Take pictures. Lots of pictures. And if all you have is the camera on your phone, who cares? Take the pictures!
If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
If you’ve held on through all of this post to this point, you’re probably looking at this last question and thinking, “How on Earth is he going to boil down his 2023, which seems to have been one 365-day exercise in yin-and-yang, to one song?”
Obviously…I’m not. This year gets two songs. The first is the sad one.
Feel it,
You feel it all around you,
and I see it;
I can’t be the one
to tell you how it ends
or how it’s gonna be
but it’s gonna get
better….
I’ll hold you
when there’s too much
to face and you feel empty
and everything unravels
and you let it out
and fall apart again
but it’s gonna get
better
That’s from “Better”, a single released in 2023 by Canadian singer-songwriter Shannon Dooks. I’ve been following her and her music for several years now. She writes the kind of searingly personal songs, grounded in relatable emotions, that I find deeply appealing at this point in my life. “Better” speaks to the hope and faith that things will, in fact, not be forever as bad as they are, even in the face of one’s own powerlessness to force it in that direction. It’s a gorgeous song. She put two versions into the world, a studio version and an acoustic version, and I love both equally, so I present them both. The studio version also includes a short film surrounding the song.
It’s probably obvious what it was about 2023 that made “Better” an anthem for much of the year for me, and it’s probably also obvious what about 2023 makes this next song appeal. Learning about photography wasn’t just about getting a new camera and learning about ISO settings and aperture values and shutter speeds; it was about finding new people, a new community, to start connecting with. It was about, in part, at least in a new way…finding my people.
You gotta find your people The ones that make you feel alright The kind you want to stay up with all night You got to find your people The ones that make you feel whole That won’t leave your side when you lose control The ones that don’t let you lose your soul
Here’s “Find Your People”, by Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors:
“Better” and “Find Your People”. Wow, was 2023 a trip or what.
Happy New Year, everyone. Let’s face 2024 together, shall we?
NOTE: I’ve had this in drafts for-EVER (I started this post in August 2022!), and I think it’s now time to go ahead and finish it, because it’s that time of year again. Not the time of year indicated in the opening paragraph, obviously: if that paragraph were written today, it would go like this: “It’s early November, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain that it’s not Christmas yet, wait until Black Friday at the absolute earliest, so on and so forth.” But the rest of the post stands.
It’s late August, which means it’s time for an increasingly dreary annual tradition: people posting on social media to complain about the arrival of Pumpkin Spice items in the stores and elsewhere.
First of all, there’s the usual proviso: Let People Like Things! No, your summer isn’t any shorter because the Pumpkin Spice stuff is showing up. No, you’re not being forced into cold nights or flannel shirts or raking the leaves (by the way, raking leaves is dumb and you should stop doing it) or going back to school any earlier. Just relax. The clock is not actually affected by the arrival of the Pumpkin Spice stuff.
But on the other hand…I get it, to an extent. It’s all driven by Big Retail’s cost-control and inventory-management strategies. That’s the only reason all the seasonal stuff always shows up freakishly early and seems to be gone when the actual season is in full swing. Big Retail’s problem is that it wants to sell the popular seasonal stuff to the people that love it, but retail doesn’t want to get stuck with leftover stuff if they make too much of it after the season is over. Thus you have the inherent absurdity of seasonal merchandise hitting the market well before the actual season starts, and then–and this is the part that pisses me off–disappearing from the market before the actual season has even ended.
I guarantee you this, folks: for the most part, Pumpkin Spice stuff will have completely disappeared sometime in the first half of November at the latest, except for whatever hanger-on items exist because they just didn’t fly off the shelves as planned. So when Thanksgiving Week rolls around and you’re actually thinking, “Wow, I am really in the mood for a pumpkin spice item right now,” you will be out of luck. Because the Christmas stuff, with the eggnog and the mint flavorings, will have touched down.
And that will keep on going! Because you’ll try to hit the store up to buy some last-minute Christmas candy, maybe on December 23, and you’ll be out of luck, because the stores will have sold it all down and put out the stuff for that noted holiday for which everybody on earth is known for shopping for way in advance, Valentine’s Day.
That’s just how retail thinks, and yes, it’s deeply annoying. It’s the exact same mindset that leads to the absurdity of it being really hard to find a nice winter coat in February or a new swim suit in late July.
Another dirty secret of all this is that for a lot of specifically seasonal merchandise, stores can’t even re-order. They get one giant shipment of it all at once, and then they work through it until it’s gone. If you’ve noticed that the Halloween candy is already showing up at stores? And you’re thinking, “Geez, we’re still more than two weeks from Labor Day!”? Well, that stuff arrived at the stores almost a month ago. Yup.
Businesses can claim this is all about “market forces” and it’s just what the market wants, but that’s a lot of special pleading; what’s really at work is the desire to sell what one might while also not being stuck with what one can’t. And I don’t know what the solution to that is, but that is the problem you need to solve if you want the Christmas stuff to at least not be on display until November 15 and the Pumpkin Spice stuff to sit in reserve until September. What it all boils down to, as always in our Capitalist society, is profit. And it has been determined that this is the road to maximizing profit.
As I’m thinking of this, though, I remember my earlier thoughts from about thinking of the year less in terms of being punctuated by holidays and more like being a series of festivals, not unlike the old church calendar. I’m not much of a liturgical person, but I do think the church calendar from the Middle Ages did represent a relationship with time that might have been in ways more healthy than the one we have going on now. We seem to approach holidays grudgingly, don’t we? We make sure to limit our holidays to one day, and then the day after, it’s time to put it all away and get back to work. Holidays in America are occasional interruptions in the real important thing: working and ensuring profit for somebody (almost always not ourselves). Our approach to holidays, all of them, is of a piece with our approach to time off from work in general. We take less vacation time than anybody else on Earth, and when we do take vacation, we get back to work to an overflowing inbox that makes the mere act of taking earned vacation feel like something that merits a punishment.
And all of that is baked into our general societal distrust of pleasure and leisure, which is a bigger topic than I’m going to solve right here…but I do like the idea of framing our calendar into a series of festivals. Here’s how I would break it all down:
September 15 through November 1: Autumn Harvest. This is the Pumpkin Spice period. Flannels, earth tones, pumpkin, big pots of chili, falling leaves. Also Halloween! I know that lots of people, including some dear friends of mine, would straight-up make this entire Festival Halloween, but not everyone is into the spooky/supernatural scene as strongly. It would definitely have a strong presence, though.
November 1 through The Night Before Thanksgiving:Winter Gathering. I call it this because this is usually when a lot of us start loading up on things we expect to need soon: food for Thanksgiving, or heating pellets, or whatever. It’s colder, but not actually winter yet.
Thanksgiving through January 2: Winter Lights. I dunno, I might come back and change the name of this…I thought about just calling it “Christmas” and making that into a whole Festival, because that’s how I see it, but that’s not especially inclusive, is it? A whole lot of religions have winter celebrations, and it would be nice if our societal calendar was maybe a bit less centered on the trappings of Christendom.
January 3 through February 15: Winter Meditation. This is when winter gets quieter, more reflective. But not always! This period includes Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl, so…yeah. Generally, though, this period can be for refocusing, thinking things through, and just plain living.
February 16 through March 17: Spring training. Because there’s a sense that things are starting to shift a bit once the pitchers and catchers report!
March 18 through April 30: Reawakening. Obviously this includes the Vernal Equinox and Easter. In most places in this country this is when Spring really takes place. (Not in my neck of the woods, sadly…spring in Buffalo is generally awful, but we’ll see what our old friend Climate Change does for that….)
May 1 through June 20: Beltane. Yes, I’m co-opting an ancient Celtic festival name for this period. By this point spring is well underway, baseball games actually count toward the standings, and hockey and basketball are starting to work toward their respective championships.
June 21 through July 31: High Summer. Yup, this is summer proper. Grilling, campfires, trips to the beach, yada yada yada. It’s also generally my personal least favorite time of year, after spring (again, this is just because of the nature of where I live), but I do acknowledge that I’m liking it more with each passing year, as my body does that thing that most peoples’ do as the years accumulate: feeling cooler every year. I wonder why this happens….
August 1 through September 14: Golden Summer. There’s a term in photography: Golden hour, which indicates roughly the hour right after sunrise and the hour right before sunset, when the sun’s angle in the sky is low and thus the light is less harsh and, well, more golden. This is the hour when the day tends to be its most beautiful, just in terms of the light that’s in the air. And yes, it’s a magical time for taking photos. Well, I think that this particular stretch of time is when summer is its most beautiful. By this point it’s still warm and bright, but the summer days feel less like a thirteen-hour bath in hot blazing sunlight. This is the time of cooling and fireflies in the woods and the campfires blazing under actually darkening skies.
And that brings us back to Autumn Harvest.
Nothing here suggests the replacement or abandonment of specific holidays, mind you! But I really do tend to see the calendar as a grouping of “times of year” than of specific dates, and I even go a bit broader than what I outline here: In my life, I tend to see “Golden Summer” and “Autumn Harvest” as not-entirely-distinct periods that begin with the Erie County Fair and last up to, and even beyond, our annual trip to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes in late September or early October. And I really do mentally file all of November and all of December and the first few days of January into one big “Christmastime” season. I just don’t see why every holiday has to be its own unique and separate atomic entity whose celebration is a complete in-and-of-itself kind of thing.
The first snows of the 2023-2024 winter season have fallen.
Yes, I know it’s not winter yet, technically…in the astronomical sense of the Winter Solstice having come and gone. Nor is yet Meteorological Winter yet; that begins on December 1. But I submit that it is now Emotional Winter, because that’s determined by when the snow first falls. What’s interesting about Emotional Winter and Actual Autumn is that they can both hold sway at the same time.
Anyway, the local social media was, of course, loaded with all manner of whining and wailing and rending of teeth and gnashing of garments, but…I love snow and to me, the world was beautiful this morning in a very special way.
Poor guy. Because Hobbes is hurt, he wasn’t allowed on the Buffalo Bills’ team plane to London, even though he is the Official Greyhound of the Buffalo Bills. (Yes he is! Look at his cast! He has to be! I’m sure we’ll get the official notification from the team any day now!)
He went into the vet on Friday to get the leg re-wrapped, which he’ll have to have done weekly moving forward; in five weeks he gets new X-rays to see where he is with healing. So far, he seems more annoyed and frustrated than anything else. He really wants to play with Carla and go running in the backyard, and now we can’t just let him out to do his business, so that’s getting old.
But he seems to be coming right along. Sigh. These dogs….
When we moved to WNY way back in 1981, my grandmother visited and noticed that our new backyard had a lot of milkweed in it. She told me that milkweed is a preferred plant for Monarch butterfly caterpillars, and we should go out and see if we could find any. And we did! Quite a few, even. She helped me modify a jar (by punching holes in the lid), and after picking a few milkweed leaves and stalks, we had ourselves a habitat for a caterpillar. In this way she showed me how to nurture a caterpillar all the way to the formation of its chrysalis, and then to monitor the chrysalis for the shifts in color at the end that indicate that a butterfly will soon be emerging. At that point we would open the jar and put it outside so the butterfly could escape when the time came. I never did get to actually witness the moment of emergence, but it was still an amazing bit of participation in the natural world. It was also, I imagine, the kind of participatory lesson that is passed on from generation to generation, not unlike catching fireflies in a jar for a bit or learning to fish. (I never learned to fish, by the way. Not every lesson gets learned by everyone. And no, that’s not a complaint. Fishing looks like a lovely pastime, but it’s not one where I feel like I’ve missed out.)
Why do I bring any of this up? Well, a few years back a milkweed plant managed to seed itself in the mulch bed right outside our front door. We’ve let the milkweed grow each year, and this year it finally happened. This past Saturday we met this individual:
And then our friend disappeared. We wondered where the beastie got to…and then, yesterday when I got home from work, I found the beastie’s new digs. Right on the siding. I wonder why (s)he built there and not in the safety of the milkweed…but I suppose it’s fine.
The other day I was having a conversation with a manager at work:
SHE: I have a passion for [activity that can actually be really lucrative], and I’m really good at it!
ME: Really?
SHE: Yes!
[She shows me photos of her work in said activity, and DAMN, she IS really good at it.]
ME: Wow, you could make really good money doing that instead of this!
SHE: Yeah, well, if I do it every day, I’d end up hating it.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
When exactly did we internalize the notion that what we love and what we do shouldn’t necessarily be the same thing? I know that sometimes “I want to” can suffer from too much “I have to”, but…it really does seem to me that we’ve gone way to far in normalizing a disconnect between what we do for a living and what we do while living.
This newfound habit of mine, in which I post here on Monday through Thursday and then don’t post at all Friday through Sunday, is not an intentional habit at all; it’s just one of those seeming habits that gets dictated from without by external realities. In this case, it’s that we left town Saturday and did not return until Sunday. The reason for our trip was our annual visit to the Sterling Renaissance Festival. I took a lot of photos on this trip, and you can see them all at the Flickr album here (I’ll have more to say on the general topic of photography later this week, I hope), but here’s a small selection:
God save the Queen!The Falconer’s owl
Melee!I think this photo captures best the feeling I love so much about the Renaissance Festival.The jousting fieldEnd of Day Revelry: the pub sing!I got NO sauce from my turkey leg on my white shirt. Victory! (And no, I didn’t get any on the overalls, either.)
The Sterling Renaissance Festival remains one of our favorite getaways of the year, and this year’s was especially delightful because we all hadn’t been able to attend since 2019, before COVID. The Festival was canceled in 2020 and I’m not sure if it happened in 2021 or not, but that year we couldn’t go anyway, because of Reasons. In 2022 we were able to go and we pre-ordered three tickets, for The Wife, The Daughter, and myself–but then The Wife had ankle surgery in early summer, and that ruled out her attendance. The Festival is a ton of walking, and it’s rustic walking, with the Festival grounds occupying the side of a forested hill. Getting around the Festival for an entire day is tiring for a fully healthy adult, believe me!
We did notice that the Festival is showing some signs of wear around the edges, if that makes sense: buildings in slightly greater disrepair than usual, some decorations in desperate need of re-painting, and some vendor booths and buildings actually empty (though some of those boasted signage that their particular vendors would be joining the Festival later in the year). And the crowds were definitely smaller…but that did make for a bit more enjoyable time. I do hope that none of the above was indicative of a Festival in decline, and that they’ll be back up to full strength moving forward. It’s a quirky and fun way to spend a day, even if it costs quite a bit of money. Most things do, nowadays.
Instead of driving all the way home, we stayed overnight in Palmyra, NY, after having dinner at our favorite fried chicken joint in Webster, NY. One note about staying overnight in Palmyra: that town is literally holy ground for the LDS Church, so you will almost certainly be surrounded by Mormons. This doesn’t bother me particularly, but it might bother some…and who’s to say if I bothered the Mormons! I’m not usually attuned to people staring at me, but it was hard not to notice some of them being somewhat flummoxed by a long-haired bearded guy in overalls and a poofy-sleeved shirt walking through the lobby of the Best Western by the Hill Cumorah site.
Anyway, getting out of town and doing something fun was a delight–and as it happens, this year it felt like a necessary delight. (More on that…someday, perhaps.)
(NOTE: I am aware of the controversy that has erupted in recent weeks surrounding the Sterling Renaissance Festival, the people who own it, and one employee there. My comments section is not the place to litigate that situation, and I will approve no comments referencing it.)
