Remember the short story where the Prince aspires to the Princess’s hand, so the King has the Prince stand before two doors, one of which leads to the Princess and marriage whilst the other leads to a really hungry tiger? And how the story ends as the Prince chooses his door and opens it? And how the story leaves unanswered the question as to which door he opened?
No?
OK, forget it.
(On a more boring note, I’d love to be able to wear these overalls in public, but there’s a hole in the butt. No, I didn’t split them, they came that way when I bought them on eBay.)
In accordance with my complete lack of interest in what constitutes “fashion”, I have apparently been committing a possible fashion no-no for years, in the form of the “Double Denim”. This is a denim top coupled with denim pants. I, of course, take it one step farther by wearing the denim shirt under denim overalls (albeit hickory striped, in this case). But in general, I fail to see what this woman is doing wrong by pairing denim with denim…or this one (dance step aside)…and then there’s…well, you get the idea.
Generally, I like the way denim feels, so why not pair it? Double denim rules!
UPDATE: I would later don double denim — this same denim shirt with another pair of overalls — for my 40th-birthday pies in the face. Double denim still rules!
I don’t do this sort of thing very often at all…in fact, I almost never do it. I’m talking about sneaking photos of complete strangers when I’m out and about…and especially not when I’m at work. It just always seems a bit underhanded to do that, although lots of folks do it so maybe it just falls under the category of “people watching”. But anyway, I was at work the other day, wandering about The Store taking care of maintenance issues, when I saw these two guys doing their shopping, I suppose for stuff for Christmas dinner or some such. And, well, my jaw dropped, because…well….
It turns out that I’m not the only long-haired wearer of overalls in the Buffalo area. Huzzah!!!
(Yeah, could be they were just in town, visiting from someplace else. It’s not like I was gonna charge up to the guy and start quizzing him, because I’m not a creepy stalker type. Unless George Lucas, Gillian Anderson, or Sela Ward walk in. Then, all bets are off.)
:: Some years ago — I don’t recall how long — I read the first few volumes in Lois McMaster Bujold’s series of books on the adventures of a man named Miles Vorkosigan. I’m not sure that the series has an “official” name, so for my purposes, I’ll call it the Vorkosigan Chronicles. I’d been hearing about these books for years; it consists of a long series of self-contained novels about Miles Vorkosigan and the people around him, and every time a new book in the sequence would come out, I’d see a flurry of discussion in various forums online as fans of Bujold’s books devoured her latest offering.
This is one of those series where there tends to be a bit of diverging opinion as to the “best” order in which to read the books. One can read them in “story order”, meaning, reading the books in the order that the events within take place; or, one can read them in the order in which the books were published. In truth…I’m not sure which order I went with. Baen Books has reprinted the novels over the last few years in omnibus editions that gather two or three at a time, making it easy to read the books more-or-less in story order, or so I think. Anyway, I started with Cordelia’s Honor, which gathers two novels, Shards of Honor and Barrayar, which tell the story of how Miles’s parents come together and have their famous son. So I read a book consisting of two books, out of publication order.
You can see how this gets a bit confusing.
Anyway, this was the second time I had read Cordelia’s Honor. The first time, I liked the book just fine…but I wasn’t sure I understood the wild love that fans have for the series. I found it genial enough, but I wasn’t overwhelmed. I later read The Warrior’s Apprentice, the first actual book about Miles himself, as part of the omnibus Young Miles. That one, too, I enjoyed…but wasn’t overwhelmed.
So why did I decide to return to the Vorkosigan Chronicles? Well, even though I wasn’t wowed by it, I did like it, and always meant to get back to it. But I’d waited long enough that I figured I pretty much didn’t remember enough of it to keep going, so I figured I’d best start over at the beginning. Which meant going back to Cordelia’s Honor. And this time, I was wowed by the book.
I’m finding that this happens a lot for me when I return to books some years later, especially SF books that I either didn’t dislike but also didn’t find fantastic the first time around. I chalk this up to the fact that I’m a more experienced SF reader now than I was even five, six, seven years ago. I find it easier to pick up on certain SF tropes now than I used to, which makes it a lot easier to read some of these books.
But maybe this shouldn’t have mattered so much in the case of Cordelia’s Honor, as the book is very character-driven. At no point did I get a feeling that I was reading the unfolding of a plot, but rather following the actions of a group of characters, some of whom are deeply sympathetic and some of whom are…deeply not. As the book opens, Captain Cordelia Naismith is commanding a scientific expedition on some planet when her group is attacked by soldiers from the militaristic world of Barrayar. Left behind by her fleeing co-workers, she finds herself depending on the similarly-stranded Barrayaran officer Aral Vorkosigan for her survival. Cordelia is from Beta Colony, a rival world of Barrayar, and as the two work together to survive, they discover plots afoot…and increasingly complex feelings for one another.
I don’t want to give away much, since the story twists and turns in a lot of fascinating ways, but it’s no spoiler to note that eventually Cordelia gives birth to young Miles Vorkosigan, who will be the hero of all the books and stories in the series to come. Miles, though, is not without his own set of challenges; for reasons outlined in Barrayar, Miles is born with his growth stunted and with extremely brittle bones that are constantly breaking. In short, Miles is the last kind of son a man would wish to have in a heavily militaristic society. I look forward to reading how Miles overcomes these challenges in the books ahead; just from the two volumes presented in Cordelia’s Honor, I can tell that Bujold’s approach is to create engaging, sympathetic characters and then put them through hell.
:: Another book that I probably should have read long before this is Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, which was published in 1962 and won the Newbery Award. [CORRECTION: Until just today, I always thought that the famed award for Childrens’ Literature was spelled “Nerberry”. It’s actually “Newbery”. Thanks to the reader who pointed this out — that reader being none other than my retired librarian mother. Thanks, Mom!] I had no idea at all what to expect from this book, but even so, it defied the few expectations I had. I expected fantasy, but the book is much more strongly science fictional than fantastic in nature (even taking into account the forever-shifting dividing line between SF and fantasy). As with many books involving children as protagonists, the heroes are misfits — generally unpopular at school and not understood by anyone except for a couple of their peers. They are whisked away on an improbably adventure, this one to rescue their father, who has been missing for years and whom most believe to have basically run off, either with a mistress or for some other reason.
What makes A Wrinkle in Time compelling, in addition to well-done characters, is the ominous tone struck throughout the book, and the fact that it’s so overtly SF. Among books published today, I don’t see a whole lot of SF for kids, but there’s so much in Wrinkle that is SFnal that I end up wondering anew when it was that kids turned away from SF, or had SF turn away from them. Nowadays, it seems that the only real SF-type stuff kids ever see aimed at kids are a lot of Star Wars materials and superhero stories.
Anyway, I’m not sure how A Wrinkle in Time managed to elude me all these years, but I’m glad to have it off my “I should read that sometime” list. Now to track down the others in the sequence.
:: Way back when we were in college, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) bought a goofy book called 14000 Things to be Happy About. And that’s exactly what it is: a giant list of 14000 things you should be happy about.
Obviously you don’t just read this thing cover to cover. That way, madness lies. Instead, you dip, here and there, finding things you’re already happy about, or that you should be happy about, or things that you’d be happy about if you were certifiably insane.
Of course, I’d be silly to read anything into this, but it tickles me nonetheless to see two of my favorite things on the same page, out of 14000:
Of course, I’m ambivalent about unbuttered green beans, and I’m not sure why I should find appeal in the rattling of garbage cans, but bib overalls and pie throwing? I’m there!
More book notes, as always, as I read more books….
Christmas has come and gone for another year, as it always does. As always, it was full of a lot of beauty and a little stuff that wasn’t so beautiful, but we’ll concentrate on the good, OK? Because I’m sure that none of you were naughty this year.
Or something like that….
The Christmas season for us began, as it does for a lot of folks, on the weekend after Thanksgiving. After an activity-filled Black Friday, we continued with the next day, traveling to my “ancestral” home in Allegany, NY, where my parents live.
This is the house where I grew up — at least, from June 1981 onward. The house didn’t always look like that; when my parents bought it there were no trees on the lot at all, and the house still had its original siding. In those first few years my parents did a lot of tree-planting. That big pine there, the one that dwarfs the house? My parents bought that at my request one day at some nursery when I decided that I wanted a tree, too. They further humored me by planting it right outside my bedroom window. Now that tree is so enormous that you can’t even see out that bedroom window anymore.
After that, the holiday season settled into a bit of routine, but it was pretty busy. There were a lot of church functions to attend: potluck dinners, Christmas pageant rehearsals for The Daughter, Christmas parties, and so on. Here’s our church’s roof after the first big snowfall of the year:
And there was the quarterly Used Book Sale at the library:
This stack is just what I bought for myself. The total I spent on these, plus books for The Wife and The Daughter? Fourteen bucks. God, I love the library book sale!
There was the sudden realization that I needed to buy new work boots:
I spent some time this Holiday season wondering about the aging process. Part of this is natural — I am almost 40, after all — but part of it was brought on by an odd lady at the library who actually asked me if I had kids approaching me thinking that I’m Santa. Huh?
I know that a gray or even white beard is on the way, but I’m not there yet! And I keep my beard fairly short. Portly guy plus beard of any color equals Santa? Huh? Should I therefore suspect that if I were to lose a lot of weight, I could look like Jesus?
Well…what else? There was one day when we were driving home and the sunset was behind us:
And there was the day I had to drive home through Bills-game traffic, including a bus destined for wherever “Test Pattern” is:
And of course, no matter how busy the Holiday season gets, one must always take time for kitties.
I spent a muchly-deserved, muchly-anticipated long weekend over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a great time. Details and photos and such after the break. This is a “daily life” type of post, with a bunch of photos. But there’s also a punchline at the end which you may find amusing, if you’ve ever thought I warranted some kind of “just desserts”….
Thanksgiving Morning here at Casa Jaquandor is a lazy affair. The Wife and I are often quite tired heading into this particular weekend, as our jobs both tend to pick up and become very hectic as the Holiday Season approaches. We’re always grateful to have a morning that consists of lazing about, watching the Macy’s Parade, drinking coffee, and eating donuts. It’s especially relaxing because…we don’t cook T-giving dinner.
For the last five or six years, our tradition on Thanksgiving has been to eat out. With my parents not really feeling like cooking the massive meal anymore, and with their drive to our home being about an hour, we’ve decided it’s best just to go to a local restaurant. We tried a couple of different places early on, and were disappointed, but then The Wife and I discovered Danny’s a few years back. We first went there on an October night several years ago, whereupon we discovered that they were open for Thanksgiving with special meals, including a turkey dinner. We loved their set-up, and we had a winner. So that’s where we go. This year, they did away with the “special Thanksgiving menu” and instead set up a buffet line, with all the usual Thanksgiving selections. (Almost all, actually — The Wife didn’t get her beloved green bean casserole.)
After the mid-afternoon meal (when we sat down, the Lions led the Patriots 17-10, but when we left, the Patriots had won 45-24), my parents absconded with The Daughter for a couple of days at their home, allowing The Wife and I some quality time together. This was extremely welcome! The Wife and I have, in the past, found it entirely too easy to lose sight of making time for one another — especially since for years we’ve worked opposite shifts at our respective jobs — so now, we tend to aggressively plan our time together and make the most of it when it comes. And we crammed a lot into the 48 hours we had together!
After T-giving dinner, it’s become our own little tradition to go to a movie. This year we selected Unstoppable, the runaway-train movie with Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. But since the show-time was still ninety minutes away, we were able to run home and change into more comfortable clothes.
Among the many virtues of bib overalls is that of all pants, they are by far the most comfortable to wear in the hours following an enormous meal.
So we went to see Unstoppable, which we loved. I’ll have a full review of the movie up sometime soon, but I do want to note that the Regal Cinemas in the new addition at the Walden Galleria Mall is a great place to see a movie. They’ve somehow made the concept of stadium seating even better, with seats that rock a bit and armrests/cupholders that swing up and out of the way, which makes for easier hand-holding with one’s sweetie during a movie. Yay! (We tend to like the action pictures on T-giving Day. Not sure why.)
The next morning, of course, was Black Friday. We’re not the types who go out at four in the morning to find the best deals on stuff; we do go out shopping a bit, but later on, after more morning relaxing and coffee.
Later on we ventured out to do some shopping. JCPenney (clothes for the kid), Barnes&Noble (book ideas for the kid — but none purchased), JoAnn Fabrics (sewing supplies for some of The Wife’s projects), Home Depot (bought a Dremel 4000 rotary tool, huzzah!), and a few other stops. We had lunch at Panera Bread, where I looked kind of bored:
We also planned to make a nice dinner that night of steak, and squash, so it was off to a grocery store to pick up those items among a few others, including…three coconut cream pies.
More on the pies later….
But amidst all of this, we were also having some frustration with a local tire dealer. Our minivan needed new tires, and to make a long story short, The Wife got a quote for new tires several weeks ago, and then, in the intervening period, the tire place changed managers. This new guy proceeded to muck things up to the point that next time we’ll just go someplace else. (For the locals: it wasn’t Dunn Tire. Not going there in the first place was probably our first mistake.) This manager guy started off by telling us he would honor the quoted price, then said that he could only honor the quoted price if we got the same identical tires as last time (which weren’t in stock), then told us he couldn’t honor that quoted price unless we could prove, with receipts, that we’d had the previous tires properly rotated every…however long it is you’re supposed to allow to transpire between tire rotations.
Anyway, The Wife got more and more angry until the guy finally got all apologetic and offered a $100 discount for the “miscommunication”, but we’re still unhappy and do not plan to go back. I love it when management people blatantly screw up and try to blame it on a “miscommunication”. Ugh!
During all of this, lake-effect snows started to move into the region, for the first real snowfall of the winter.
To give an idea of how quickly the snow bands can move at times, this intersection — about 2 miles from Casa Jaquandor, the corners of Southwestern Blvd. and Milestrip Rd. — looked like this ten minutes after I had driven through it the first time. That’s what can happen in Buffalo, folks! It’s been a very mild winter thus far — the one day before this that we “had snow”, a couple weeks ago, it was an overnight dusting that had already melted by the time we got up.
Now, however, the “blustery” has arrived.
Our other main shopping destination that day was the Orchard Park Antique Mall, which is a big store that is full of antiques, offered by different dealers. We spent close to two hours there, that’s how big and fascinating a place it is — you can find everything there from beautiful antique jewelry to vintage action figures to old books to old furniture. Just an amazing place.
And in any antique store, you can find lots of questionable stuff as well. At one point we saw a set of glow-in-the-dark plastic figurines from the Casper the Friendly Ghost movie that came out in the 1990s. The Wife and I recoiled in horror, because these figurines were a tie-in item when we worked at Pizza Hut. Aieee!
And then there are things which are well-nigh inexplicable:
I do not want to know.
After that — about five o’clock — we went to pick up the completed minivan and returned home for our steak dinner. Later on we drank some wine, we watched The Man with the Golden Gun…and we attended to the matter of those three coconut cream pies.
Obviously we couldn’t eat three entire coconut cream pies — not just the two of us, at any rate. So, to what use did we put them? Where did those pies end up?
Well…here’s where they ended up:
Yup. All three, in my face.
What can I say? I’m a sucker for a pie in the face. This is a fate that befalls me every once in a while, and as my good friend Belladonna once said, “It’s a bit of a rediculous tradition I suppose, but it has been fun and keeps me from taking myself too seriously!”
The holidays can be a deeply emotional, and for some folks, troublesome time of year. I find that getting hit in the face with a pie is a good antidote to that. Yes, I believe in “pie in the face therapy”. Hey, it can’t be any less effective than some other “therapies” out there!
Here’s how it went down:
I hope your Black Friday was as much fun as ours (new tires notwithstanding)!
UPDATE: No, this wasn’t the first time I’ve been pied. My last pieing can be found here. (Ignore the date on that post — I backdated it to keep it hidden as a kind of “easter egg” for people who went digging around for it. Now, I figure, why hide it?)
Well, basically, today was for me just another day out and about…but even a bit of online funnery called International Overalls Day made it more enjoyable, in some weird way. So here’s how I spent the day (after initial coffee):
Well, there was a load of laundry to do. Yeah, whee! Except it’s always fun to dump a basket of warm laundry on top of one of the cats, in this case, Julio:
And then there was the drive to the grocery store, with my head apparently swiveling back and forth fast enough (checking to see if I could pull out yet) that it actually blurs.
Shopping on the Saturday before Thanksgiving is a major chore. The place was packed, which meant lots of waiting around in certain spots.
And more waiting at the checkout.
After loading the groceries in the car and heading out, I was able to sneak a photo of the kid as she was trying to keep sun out of her eyes!
She likes to thwart my attempts to take photos of her, so I’m glad I got this one.
Later on, it was off to Regal Cinemas to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. (More on this to come in another post.) Here I am, staring at the movie screen.
No, I didn’t take this during the movie. Not even during the previews. I took this during the commercials they run in between screenings. (And by the way, based on the trailer, I can’t wait for Green Lantern next summer.)
Later on, after the movie, it was back home, for dinner and hanging out and finally wrapping up the day with a beer and a book.
All in all, it was a terrific day! But in many ways it was a totally normal day for me — going to a movie is a Special Event for us now (I don’t care how long it’s been since I was a kid, I am still simply not wired to spend $16 to get into a movie), but laundry and groceries and a beer and a book at the end of the day are all perfectly normal things. So is it perfectly normal for me to do all this stuff in overalls. So why the special day?
Well, it’s not a big “We want to be taken more seriously!” kind of thing, because, let’s face it: bib overalls do not merit being taken “seriously”. They’re too goofy and fun and even whimsical for that, when worn by folks who aren’t actually wearing them as work clothes. I’ve noticed that overalls have become a popular choice of garment for clowns; and not to suggest that those of us who love overalls are clownish by nature, but it says something that overalls are fairly popular with the pie-in-the-face set. (Of course, I myself am no clown, but I do love a pie in the face. Not sure what that means, but there it is!)
And I don’t think it’s totally a sense of trying to resurrect something that’s out of fashion, either. I’ve written before on what I think of the idea of “fashion” before, so I won’t rehash it except to note my disdain for the notion of a few people in some industry collectively deciding what’s “in” and what’s “out” and the rest of us merrily going along. But through all my life, overalls haven’t really been a fashion “out” until just this past decade. They were common in the 70s, when I was a kid; they became less common in the 80s but still never went away. They came back big in the 90s with grunge and the baggy look that I’ve always preferred; but it’s only in the 2000’s that they’ve become distinctly unpopular. I’m sure they’ll come back, if they’re not starting to already. But that’s not what today was about, anyway.
It’s just a sense, I guess, of community amidst some people who tend to have fairly quirky and fun outlooks on life. Certainly none of the folks I’ve met in the whole “online overalls-wearing community” strike me as stodgy or dull; quite a few are artistic or creative by nature, and all are kind and nice by temperament. Am I saying that people who wear overalls are nicer people? No…but maybe!
No, I don’t think that a dip pen is likely to slow down an encroaching zombie. Sure, it’s nice and sharp so maybe I could use the pen to stab the zombie in the brain, but I’m not sure it would penetrate through the skull into the zombie’s brain on one shot, and I’m not sure the pen is strong enough to retain its shape and sharpness for a second stabbing attempt. Or maybe I could pour the rum from my hip flask onto the zombie and then use the matches to set the beastie aflame, but there’s less than eight ounces of rum in there. Not sure that would make an effective enough, or large enough, flame to bring the zombie to a stop.
I have a feeling that if a zombie cornered me at my desk, I’d be seriously out of luck.
