Tag: Daily Life Stuff

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2022: Yeah. Glad THAT’s over.

And it is time at last for my annual quiz-retrospective on the year just ending. Let me be honest here, folks: 2022 was, for the most part, pretty much of a struggle. It felt like the kind of year where I started to feel things not so much ending, but starting to get chipped away, bit by little bit. I hope that’s not how most years are going to feel, moving forward.

Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

“Read a lot, write a lot, live healthier.” I did OK by those, to be honest. I try to keep my “resolutions” realistic and in keeping with the life I’m already trying to live, after all.

Did anyone close to you give birth?

No.

Did anyone close to you die?

Oh, yes.

What countries did you visit?

Another year of never leaving the USA…but we are hoping to visit Toronto in 2023!

What would you like to have in 2023 that you lacked in 2022?

A whole lot less knowledge of Elon Musk.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

This was one of those years where “getting through it” was an achievement in itself. But I did finally get the first draft of Forgotten Stars V done, which is a thing.

What was your biggest failure?

I’m not sure that anything this year was really a “failure”. Lately the whole success-failure dichotomy is seeming less and less like a real thing, and I’m starting to see the wisdom in the tale of the Zen master and the little boy that Philip Seymour Hoffman spends much of Charlie Wilson’s War trying to tell Tom Hanks.

What was the best thing you bought?

Probably my newest laptop (described here). And as always, I bought a lot of lovely jewelry for The Wife.

Whose behavior merited celebration?

American voters who stood up to say that maybe this “democracy” thing still has life in it yet.

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

American right-wingers and Republicans. At some point these people have to return to Earth, don’t they?

Where did most of your money go?

Same as always: Books, booze, food, gifts, vintage overalls, some other nifty clothing items, gifts for family and a few friends, and a trip with The Wife to the Finger Lakes.

What did you get really excited about?

That trip to the Finger Lakes!

Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

Well…yeah. Definitely sadder. Not by much, but 2022 was not a year that boasted happiness in great supply.

Thinner or fatter?

Very likely right about the same, maybe just a bit heavier. Higher hopes for a pivot back in the right direction soon, though!

Richer or poorer?

A little richer. Not much, but a little. Which isn’t bad these days, considering.

What do you wish you’d done more of?

Honestly, reading and writing. External factors contributed to a number of slumps in both areas this year. I’m determined in 2023 to push both of those back the other way.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

Worrying about things.

How did you spend Christmas?

Well…due to the Big Storm that hit The 716 from December 23 until December 27, it was a tough Christmas to get through. We never lost power and were safe and warm, but it’s hard to relax and focus when the wind outside sounds like a freight train for 48 hours straight. Someone asked me at work this week how my time off was (I took six days of time off for Christmas), and I replied: “The parts of it that were Christmas were absolutely lovely and a joy. The parts of it that weren’t Christmas were stressful as hell.” I stand by that.

Did you fall in love in 2022?

How could I not?

How many one-night stands?

Pshaw!

What was your favorite TV program?

Abbott Elementary is a delight (even if I’m tiring a bit of the “mockumentary in a workplace” genre), as is Ghosts (which may supplant Newhart on my rankings of shows about quirky couples who buy an inn someplace and have to deal with the really weird locals). But the best teevee we watched this year are the Canadian comedies Letterkenny and its spinoff Shoresy. We are actually rewatching all of Letterkenny right now, less than a year after we started watching it the first time.

Oh, and a shout-out to a couple of wonderful Netflix competition shows: Blown Away, which is a competition about glass-blowing, and Drink Masters, which is a competition about mixology. These are interesting shows, beautifully made, in which you learn a lot of stuff. As Hell’s Kitchen more and more phones it in every year, I like these new shows a great deal.

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

A year ago I didn’t know shit about Elon Musk. How I wish that was still the case.

What was the best book you read?

In no particular order:

Happenstance, Steven Frug
Ballad for Sophie, Felipe Melo
All the Seas of the World, Guy Gavriel Kay

What was your greatest musical discovery?

I spent some time exploring the sound-world of composer Alfred Schnittke, who wrote some fascinating music!

What did you want and get?

We got a new air-fryer/convection oven! Next: clearing out a space and setting it up. Cool! Oh, and the afore-mentioned new laptop, which continues to be a delight to use after the honestly-annoying performance of my last Dell laptop.

Oh, and how could I forget? A car! (Which may not qualify, as I didn’t exactly want a new car at the time, but I wasn’t unhappy with that purchase, either.)

Also, I started up a newsletter! But there are some more recent developments regarding Revue, my chosen newsletter platform…and I’ll write about that soon, once I’ve ironed out what’s going on. (Short version: Revue is owned by Twitter, and since Elon Musk sucks, Twitter is killing Revue.)

What did you want and not get?

Competence from many political figures. I’ll leave it at that.

Oh, and if we’re keeping track, I did not get pied this year!

What were your favorite films of this year?

We watched a lot of movies that left zero impression on me, I have to say; in a lot of cases it’s a struggle just to remember what hell we actually watched. We enjoyed Crazy, Stupid, Love a bit, and also To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. Enola Holmes 2 was an absolute delight. Most recently we loved Stay the Night, which I chose on recommendation by Sheila O’Malley, so that one might be the winner…although technically, the year is not out, and tonight we’re planning to watch Glass Onion, the sequel to Knives Out, so…this answer may be subject to change!

What did you do on your birthday?

As usual, not much actually on my birthday, but a few days later we made our annual trip to Ithaca for the Apple Harvest Festival (our first one since 2019, actually). As this was just a few weeks after we lost Cane, there were a lot of bittersweet feelings along the way.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2022?

My approach now seems to be “What else can I wear with overalls?” This year, I found linen shirts to be a joy.

As for overalls specifically, I finally gave in and added Liberty brand overalls to the collection, and since then I’ve wondered why I waited so long. Currently I only have the Hickory-striped pair, so I may be looking to add a blue pair at some point.

What kept you sane?

Books and music and dogs and cats and overalls. Also, good food and, yes, rum.

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

We haven’t seen Avatar 2 yet, but I really do admire James Cameron’s approach to this project: “I’m going to do what I want to do, in the way I want to do it, and if it takes me a dozen years, so be it.”

What political issue stirred you the most?

Keeping democracy, and more recently, restoring competence to local government.

Who did you miss?

Cane. That one’s going to be a “forever” one, I suspect.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2022:

Leaving last year’s answer intact:

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!”

If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:

If you have a blog or other online writing forum, share some of your favorite work from this year:

Tony and Patsy: In Memoriam
On Lee overalls from the 1990s
An Addendum to the Matter of the Poofy Shirt
John Williams at 90
Pizza Thoughts
Thoughts on No Time To Die

Twenty Years a Blogger
Four Days in the Finger Lakes
When in Rome (the Buffalo market shootings)
Ryan Fitzpatrick for the Hall of Fame!
Thoughts on “Come On Eileen”
History is not a “Feel-good” story
Do you remember America?

Harrison Ford at 80
The 2nd Amendment as a piece of writing
A learned hatred in the service of a small God
The odd pathology of the politician’s mind
They don’t make Coliseums like they used to
Stayin’ Alive! (On the opening of Saturday Night Fever)

Post 10 comes to town!
Thoughts on Scrivener
A Tale of Two Buildings, and other thoughts on the Christmas Blizzard

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

This song doesn’t sum up my year at all! But I first heard it this year, courtesy the wonderful Letterkenny. It’s by a band called Toulouse, which seems like Canada’s answer to ABBA back in the late 70s and early 80s. I listen to this song a lot. The best songs really shape themselves to our lives, don’t they?

Oh, and it’s mostly in French. And I don’t think it matters one bit.

Comme un été, comme une imageJe sens que tout va recommencerHier, l’hiver, je me suis ennuyéeJe ne savais vraiment plus quoi faire

Baby, oh my babyJe crois que j’ai trouvé l’amourBaby, oh my babyI think I’m falling in love
(Baby)

Comme un vautour qui tourne autourTu t’envoles avec mon amourTu m’as laissé, tu m’as oubliéC’est toujours à recommencer

Oh baby, oh my babyJe crois que je t’aimerais toujoursOh oh oh baby, oh my babyYou know it always happens this way
Oh oh oh oh baby, oh my babyJe crois que je t’aimerais toujoursBaby, oh my babyJe crois que j’ai perdu l’amour
Baby, oh my babyI think I’m falling in loveOh oh baby, oh my babyYou know it always happens this way
Oh baby, oh my babyJe crois que je t’aimerais toujoursOh oh baby, oh my babyJe crois que j’ai perdu l’amour
Oh oh baby, oh my baby

I thought about posting just the song above, but I went with the actual Letterkenny clip because I think–even if you haven’t seen the show at all–the choreography and character work in the clip stands out. This scene may well be when this show turned the corner for me from being a good and funny show to something much more than that.

And with that, I bring this to a close…and my blogging efforts for 2022. I hope 2023 is better, for everyone! Especially you. That’s right, you.

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How much sump would a sump pump pump if a sump pump could pump sump?

The title of this post has been in my head for years. I think it came from a comic strip years ago…For Better or For Worse, maybe….

Anyway, let’s talk sump pumps.

Well, not quite. It’s more a drainage thing.

When we moved into this house, the sump pumps on both sides of the duplex needed replacing, and we got it done. At the time there was a back-up sump system that was battery powered, but the guy who replaced the main pumps switched out that system with a back-up called SumpJet, which is powered by the municipal water supply. Both pumps reside in the pit, with the main electrical pump doing its thing periodically as normal. But if the main pump doesn’t work–usually because of a power outage–a float attached to the back-up pump rises, and when it gets high enough, it opens a valve which allows municipal water to flow through a dedicated line, and as that stream passes the pump, the speed of the water moving through a valve creates a pressure differential that the pump uses to suck water up and out of the pit.

No, I do not entirely understand the physics there. It’s called a Venturi Effect, I think.

But we had a problem with drainage.

The plumber back then (whom we don’t use anymore, because he re-focused his business) actually dug up and replaced all of our storm drain lines, and he connected the main sump pump directly to that storm drain, so that water just goes all the way away. The back-up, unfortunately, he set up to simply discharge right outside the house. This, it turns out, was the wrong thing to do; if you discharge your sump water right by the side of your house, the water sinks right down the side of the foundation to find its way right back to the sump pit. Not only is this bad for your foundation, but rather than evacuating water completely, the back-up pump ends up running continuously as it is now actually recirculating water, not removing it.

That recirculating did result in a minor bit of basement flooding one time, when the power was out long enough that the pit accumulated more water than the back-ups could vacate. Eventually we got the back-up pump on my parents’ side connected to the storm drain on their side, but the one on our side still discharges incorrectly.

That is, until now!

Here’s the discharge set-up in a kinda-sorta “before” shot. I say “kinda-sorta” because I didn’t think to take a photo before I cut the drain pipe. The piece lying on the ground was a part of that truncated pipe, and you can see here that the water discharged right there, just inches from the foundation.

What I did was pretty simple: I cut the pipe and then I used a flexible coupling to attach a ten-foot length of PVC to the discharge, so now if the back-up pump operates, the water will be dumped ten feet from the house. Here’s the new set-up:

I really hope this works. I don’t want to have a power outage to find out, but…well, the weather report seems to indicate that this is a particular weekend where I really want to have this particular repair in the rear-view mirror. We’ll get this fixed “correctly” some day, probably in spring or summer, but for now I’m hoping this leads to some peace of mind.

(What’s funny about sump pumps is that I never thought of them at all until we lived in a house that has one. I swear sump pumps were invented by a cruel sadist.)

 

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Goodbye, snow!

A week after our epic snowstorm ended, much of it is finally gone! Of course, we got so much that much of it remains, but what’s left is slowly going away, and I expect we’ll be snowless again within a few days–possibly by the end of the week. After the snow finally stopped falling last Saturday (or was it Sunday?), we saw a quick warm-up where every day has been in the upper 40s, and today we had some heavy rain as well, which only helped melt the stuff away.

Also, the town got in on the act, sending front-loaders and dump trucks around to literally scoop the snowbanks lining the streets back several feet; the sum total of this is that my street–which was one lane for the first few days after the storm, and was later one-and-a-half lanes–is now two lanes again.

Here you see one of the dump trucks, escorting the snow to…somewhere. I don’t care where, actually. It just isn’t here.

If the prevailing weather holds up, we’ll all be wondering if we’re going to have a white Christmas, huh?

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Thankfulness in 2022

Sunrise over the back yard and the forest beyond, Thanksgiving Day, 2022

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Twenty-twenty-two has not been the easiest year I can remember…but here we are, still gathering. As I write this, I’m on my Second Cup Of Coffee, we have the Macy’s Parade on teevee (it’s WAY better in person, we’re kind of wistful that we’re not in NYC for it as we were seven years ago, and it occurs to me that it took eleven days in Hawaii to knock our five days in NYC in 2015 out of first place on our “Favorite Vacations” list), and later on, we’ll get a feast going.

There’s always something bittersweet about Thanksgiving, and I suppose it’s just the nature of life and the march of time that this quality grows each time out. The fact that we won’t be sharing turkey with Cane this year hits particularly hard…but there’s still a lot to be thankful for, a lot to honor.

Happy Thanksgiving, indeed.

Here’s a poem, Thanksgiving, by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

We walk on starry fields of white
And do not see the daisies;
For blessings common in our sight
We rarely offer praises.
We sigh for some supreme delight
To crown our lives with splendor,
And quite ignore our daily store
Of pleasures sweet and tender.

Our cares are bold and push their way
Upon our thought and feeling.
They hand about us all the day,
Our time from pleasure stealing.
So unobtrusive many a joy
We pass by and forget it,
But worry strives to own our lives,
And conquers if we let it.

There’s not a day in all the year
But holds some hidden pleasure,
And looking back, joys oft appear
To brim the past’s wide measure.
But blessings are like friends, I hold,
Who love and labor near us.
We ought to raise our notes of praise
While living hearts can hear us.

Full many a blessing wears the guise
Of worry or of trouble;
Far-seeing is the soul, and wise,
Who knows the mask is double.
But he who has the faith and strength
To thank his God for sorrow
Has found a joy without alloy
To gladden every morrow.

We ought to make the moments notes
Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
The hours and days a silent phrase
Of music we are living.
And so the theme should swell and grow
As weeks and months pass o’er us,
And rise sublime at this good time,
A grand Thanksgiving chorus.

 

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Updates….

First: As of this writing (I’m writing this Tuesday evening, even though the post isn’t going live until Wednesday), we’ve done the major portion of shoveling ourselves out in the important ways. All doors are cleared and accessible; the mailboxes are accessible (by foot, there’s no way the mailperson is driving up to our mailbox any time soon); all the cars are out. Wow, this was quite an event.

This weekend we’re supposed to have rainy days in the mid-40s, so that will certainly help.

Second: There’s a new social media thing called “Hive” that I’m trying. I believe it’s mobile-only, but if you’re on there, look me up!

Third: Meh, there is no third. Just those.

Later, y’all!

 

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Seventy-seven

Oof.

I don’t measure our snow, because…meh, I don’t need numbers. You reach a point where they’re not helpful…but here’s a sobering bit of numerical reflection. I just Googled Orchard Park’s average annual snowfall, and apparently it’s 114 inches, according to one site.

So, in the space of about 36 hours, we have received two-thirds of what we average for the entire year, in terms of snow.

Oof, indeed.

Luckily, we’re in good shape! I took the storm seriously as the forecasts started coming in. I loaded up on food and coffee and, yes, booze. We have power* and a comfortable house. We’re supposed to get another few inches overnight tonight as the weakening snow bands shift south again, and then this whole thing will be over sometime tomorrow. We’re forecast above freezing for the next bunch of days. Everything will be fine…eventually.

And that, combined with this from our County Executive, makes me think about something else:

There are problems in many streets and major roadways around here because people who insisted on attempting to drive someplace inevitably got stuck. Obviously this screws up all manner of important operations: plows, trucks moving the snow (when there’s this much, you really can’t just plow it to the side, it has to be trucked and dumped someplace), and the emergency vehicles that have to respond to calls. It’s not just people in regular cars; in advance of the storm, Governor Hochul closed major local expressways to commercial traffic, so now we have truckers getting stuck on major local boulevards as they attempt circumventing closed thruways. All of that can be partially chalked up to capitalism in some degree; we just can’t let business shut down for a day or two, can we?

But looking at County Executive Poloncarz’s tweet, I note his wording: “Please hunker down for a bit longer.”

This storm started in earnest around 8pm on Thursday night. It’s now Saturday morning as I write this, so we’ve been hunkered down for…not even two days yet.

So, my question is: Why do we as a society get cabin fever this quickly now? Is it “car culture” baked into our brains in 2022, where we get antsy to go out after just a few hours at home? Have we allowed our lives to become fast-paced to so great a degree that the very idea of spending a few days in our homes is somehow alien to us? I am by no means immune to this. I keep thinking, Wow, I really gotta suit up and get our cars dug out! I gotta get out there! And then I remind myself, Why? There’s no place that we have to be. We’re not even allowed to drive right now anyway. We have everything we need, right here, and we can go days without running into a NEED that has to be addressed. We’re good. Just take turns shoveling for a few minutes at a time, and meanwhile, just sit and be warm. Why own a personal library, if not in part for days like this!

So yeah, we really do need to do better as a society at living–really, actually living–in our own homes. We need to make our homes into less of a “base of operations” for our lives and more into actual homes. A home should not be a place where we find ourselves not wanting to be after just a short while. At least, that’s not what it seems to me a home should be.

* Oh, I didn’t mention that we lost power for about five hours yesterday morning! That sucked. Apparently a transformer at our local substation blew. Luckily, the NYSEG folks were almost dead accurate in their estimated restoration time: they forecasted power to come back on about 1pm, and it did, at 12:53pm. Nice. Our backup sump pump kept up just fine (though some work is needed in that department; more on that another time). It was fine, really…but a power outage on top of being in the middle of an epic snowstorm was more use of my brain-cycles than I really wanted to expend yesterday. When I finally crashed last night, around 10pm after my bedtime reading of about a page and a half, I crashed hard. Anyway, life marches on!

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Fifty-four

At last report, a trained weather-spotter in our town reported snowfall of 54 inches to one of the local news stations.

This is what it looked like out my front door this morning:

That was nearly twelve hours ago. It has been snowing continuously since, dumping multiple inches an hour. We’re not due for any relief for another five or six hours, apparently.

I’ve never seen anything like this. Not even “Snowvember”, the big event that socked us for a week back in 2014, was like this. Or maybe it was…but Snowvember unfolded over two or three days. This is like that entire event, packed into a single day. I have made no attempt at shoveling out front; all of my shoveling has been in back, to give Carla a place for relief and so I can get at the furnace vents and keep them clear. And even that feels like a losing battle, because I’ve run out of places to throw new snow.

But I’ll have to go out again, at least once more this evening.

After Sunday we have a week of temps in the high 30s and low 40s, so we’ll be able to melt some of this off. But for now…I’m rarely one to indulge thoughts of moving to places where it doesn’t snow. As natural hindrances (not sure I’d call it a ‘disaster’) go, I’ll still take snow over wildfires, earthquakes, tornadoes, extreme heat, hurricanes, the likelihood of entire regions getting reclaimed by the sea as levels rise, and living in the company of many folks who vote for Ron DeSantis. But right now, all I want is for the snow to stop.

Just…stop.

I can take two days to dig, but only if it stops!

 

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Ambient Noise!

Do you like using ambient sound generators at all? These have been around for years–I remember gizmos you could buy that made “running water” sounds that you could play softly overnight, and as these got more sophisticated you had choices: You could have a “babbling brook”, or “waves on the shore”, or “rainfall”, and the like, all in the same gizmo.

Now, of course, all of this is digital and you can do it anywhere, just with your computer or even your phone. It’s even better if you have a bluetooth speaker with decent sound. For the last few weeks at work I’ve been using the engine sound of the starship Enterprise-D, which gives my work room a pleasant rumble underneath everything else going on. Another benefit is that when playing a six- or twelve-hour long sound video, your speaker stays on. The bluetooth speaker I have at work has a time-out that’s really short, and if it plays nothing in that time frame, it shuts off. That’s kind of annoying. Playing the ambient sound doesn’t hinder my playing music; I just open YouTube in a second tab and play away. I might have to dial down the volume on the Enterprise, but that’s fine.

There are a lot of ambient sound videos on YouTube beyond the Enterprise. Here’s one I started using today, because it suits my mood this time of year: Ancient Library Room. This one has a crackling fireplace, it’s raining outside with occasional thunder, and you can even occasionally hear someone writing with a scratchy pen or quill. I like this one. I might pair it sometime at home with some pine-scented incense I have someplace.

And there are so many more! Like water? There are streams of varying roughness. There are ocean sounds, and you can make your workplace sound like a coffee shop, if you want. I love this stuff and it does help me focus a little, if mainly by shutting down some of the other persistent sonic interruptions and helping to ground my brain a bit.

 

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The sky, over about an hour

I had to leave for work early today, and the stars were still visible through wisps of cloud.

Then, once I got to work and we were starting on the project that required my presence a bit early, I noticed the sunrise forming up behind The Store.

Buffalo has some gorgeous sunrises and wonderful skies.

 

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