Because of politics in the post below, here’s a kitty.
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Where no cookie has gone before!
The Great Bird herself, the mighty starship Enterprise.
Made of gingerbread and stuff.
This is the handiwork of a place called the Blackmarket Bakery. And it is awesome.
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Presidenting always LOOKS cool, anyway
2014: The Year in White House Photography.
I continued to be fascinated by photographs of Presidents of the United States in their daily activities. Here are a few from 2014 (more at the link above):
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Some random Christmasy pictures and stuff
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Recent photographic dispatches from my little crazy corner of the world….
Dog shadow.
Yeah, we really need to find a natural predator for these little bastards.
I don’t know what I was drinking, but it made me happy!
These are…OK. Not awesome. I don’t regret them, but one package is enough.
The sun coming up over Casa Jaquandor.
Nice doggie. Nice. (I’m still not sold on this whole “dog” business, though.)
Reflections of a writer.
When this dog gets up a head of steam, it’s impressive to watch. Interesting, he was apparently a poor racer in his brief career, never placing higher than 7th!
No, I have no idea what makes a normal battery a QUANTUM BATTERY. I used this one at work for a wall clock, which seems an inadequate use of a QUANTUM BATTERY.
Leaving a pen in the work pants turns out to have not been the best thing in the world to do. Luckily none of my shirts were rendered unwearable, but some of them do sport a few dark spots that weren’t there before. Luckily they’re already dark, and in some cases the spots will be hidden when I inevitably wear those shirts beneath a pair of overalls.
Peanut-butter-filled pretzels. These things are like crack to me. Seriously, they should be a controlled substance with a street value!
Another sunrise at work. Morning skies are always amazing there.
Two brothers, looking out the back door.
Still working….
Cane has to smell my car whenever he goes for a walk. I don’t know why, but it’s the first order of business whenever it’s walk-time!
I took The Daughter to our favorite local outside burger joint the other night. That little white light behind the sign? That’s the moon.
The WNY countryside as autumn harvest time looms!
At long last, sweaters-and-overalls-and-scarves weather has arrived! I rather like the way this outfit looks, if I do say so myself. (I bought that pair of Dickies overalls twenty years ago, and they’re still going strong!) This was my outfit for our annual day in Ithaca, NY.
A little writing while The Wife gets ready to leave our hotel room.
My PF Chang’s fortune cookie says that I will be a successful writer. (Of course that’s what it means! And yes, it’s right! Never question the soothsaying cookie!)
Driving. Lots of driving yesterday. Next year we try to book two nights in our Rochester hotel, instead of driving all the way from Ithaca to Buffalo.
I was taking a photo of The Wife looking at Taughannock Falls, but she turned and looked at me at the last second. Oh well! (Isn’t she pretty, though?)
Taughannock Falls.
Fried chicken and waffles at Waffle Frolic, one of our favorite places to eat anywhere. Just a wonderful, wonderful meal!
The Ithaca Apple Festival. It’s a bit screwed up this year, because Ithaca is rebuilding its downtown Commons. It should be back to normal next year, though.
Behind the hubbub of the Apple Festival was this church. This entrance seems to me like something out of a Stephen King novel.
There was a terrific jazz band playing yesterday. I could have listened to them a lot more, and we did linger over them! I very nearly took a candid shot of a young couple, two college kids maybe, dancing as if they were all alone with the band in the world. I decided not to, though. Some moments should be left as memories in the hearts of those who experienced them.
And then, during the band’s break, the toilet paper mummy wrapping contest!
On our way home, we crossed from the Cayuga Lake valley into the Seneca Lake valley, in time for the skies to clear and the sun to shine on the waters of Seneca Lake. I adore the Finger Lakes region.
Morning coffee as I start the back half of my vacation. Aside from finishing my proofreading, what to do next!
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Time to disappear again down the photographic rabbit hole!
Let’s get the Flummoxing Felines out of the way first, shall we?
And then there’s some recent food and such. The Daughter nagged me into deep dish pizza (I already don’t make it all that often because it’s fairly labor-intensive, and I make it even less now that The Wife is on a gluten-free diet and this is a virtual memorial statue to gluten):
Ramen with fried egg. I only have Ramen a few times a year, because of the salt. But I do love it once in a great while. (Hey, you know what makes Ramen really awesome? Having it with some buttered rye crispbread on the side. You dip the rye crisp into the broth and it’s heavenly. That’s a combo I learned from my father, way way way back when. To really be emotionally authentic, it has to be the round rye crisp, with the hole in the middle. It comes wrapped in paper and you break off the piece you want. Not the nicely-cut rectangular rye crisp! That gives you the right flavor, but shapes matter, folks!)
I really love sugar-sweetened Dr. Pepper. It’s pricey (almost four bucks for a four-pack), but it’s a bit of a luxury. Just awesome stuff, though.
Labels on Asian food products make me happy.
The coming of fall means the reappearance of candy that isn’t easy to find other times of year, like Oh Henry bars.
The Daughter also confronted her first day of tenth grade with the requisite enthusiasm.
Fall is coming quickly! September was, like the months before it, cooler than usual (after an odd burst of hot weather to start the month). As the weather starts to turn cool, my fascination with the sky usually fires up a bit. I love the sky, and my normal shift at work starts each day when the sky is often doing some amazing things….
I don’t want the earth to feel neglected as I look up at the sky a lot, so here’s the ground.
I continue to do stick-figure doodles in my occasional free time at work. I make no claims to the genius of xkcd, but it’s a good way to make a few little points here and there. For instance, there’s a trope that shows up in fantastic fiction now and again that irritates the hell out of me:
(I’m looking at you, The Dark is Rising sequence!)
Diagramming the wisdom of Kenny Rogers:
I’ll be posting a review at some point, but this one sentence perfectly sums up my love of science fiction in general and my admiration for the series The Expanse in particular:
Patience, grasshopper!
I didn’t care for this book:
Our next door neighbors are doing construction on their house. Looks like they’re adding on so their elderly dad or dad-in-law can move in with them. It started with the removal of a couple of trees that would have encroached upon their house’s expanded footprint. Which meant…lumberjacks!
And let me tell you, folks, it’s always fun to listen to guys like this talk. No swearing, just a funny run of comment through the job. At one point, a fellow who has climbed thirty feet up and is cutting branches off shouts down, “Uh, I think I cut the wrong thing!” Whoops.
My next car will likely be something bigger than my current Buick Century sedan (although not monstrously huge, just a bit bigger). Still, if I had money right now, I’d find this jalopy enticing. It’s sitting at a VW dealership just down the road.
I sorted my washers and bolts. Actually, I didn’t sort all my bolts, just the quarter-inch, twenty-count thread ones, because that’s what I use the most at work. This is exciting shit, folks.
Here’s a screw I ran up against at work. I have a set of bits for tamper-resistant screws, which are basically normal screws with really oddball heads so they’re tamper-resistant simply by virtue that very few people own the drivers to budge them. This thing was even too obscure for me, though. I got it off using needle-nosed locking pliers and a lot of salty language. I don’t recall what it was on, but there was nothing about the gizmo that screamed out “Holy shit, we gotta keep the riffraff from removing this screw! Grab that center-pegged pentagon screw! That’ll stop ’em!”
I knocked off one major project at New Casa Jaquandor: replacing the dining room light fixture with something better. The old fixture was a perfectly nice fixture, but it was misplaced. It wasn’t well-suited for hanging above a dining table, being a low-hanging fixture with a single halogen lamp that shone straight down, casting a fairly small pool of light on the table instead of illuminating the room. No such problem with the new fixture, which is (a) awesome, and (b) so bright that the next big project will be converting the existing switch to a dimmer.
And, of course, there’s the usual stuff of my life…writing, overalls, writing in overalls, et cetera and so forth.
And these last, because even though I’ve posted them here already, I think I’ll need them in the future:
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Time for another photographic grab-bag from the last few weeks!
It’s always sad when you reach the bottom of the coffee cup.
Fortune cookies tell all, don’t they?
Yeah, that was a fun Monday:
I continue to recharge by frequently rewatching Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech from a year ago:
When the storms come in:
It’s mint harvest time! (For making mojitos.)
Leaving work under a sky like this is always nice.
Our attempts to teach Lester how to use a leash are not going well.
Single malt to celebrate the completion of major book edits!
Our “sensitive plant” develops these little flowers:
Once in a while at work I have to hang a neon beer sign.
Recent dinners include banana peppers which I stuffed with sausage and cheese and then roasted:
There’s always pizza at some point or other:
Smores. I can generally eat about two of these before I get that “OMG I just ate an entire hippopotamus” feeling.
Cranberry kisses are delicious!
(It’s a drink with spiced rum, Collins mix, and cranberry juice.)
Along Erie County’s back roads:
Cat-related stuff happens a lot.
In that last one, Lester is on my lap, watching Cosmos with me. Note his eyes reflected in my laptop screen, via the flash! I don’t think he understood the show’s scientific content, though. Oh well, even Carl Sagan can’t reach everyone.
Sometimes I offer great wisdom at rock-bottom prices.
Book production continues.
And here, from the comic strip Blondie, is my new favorite sentence:
And finally, for all who had good wishes and kind words on Little Quinn’s tenth birthday, thank you!
More to come in a couple weeks!
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Why I Am Terrible Today
A Feline Love Story
Yesterday morning I brought my computer down to the dining room table, where I did some work whilst enjoying my coffee. At one point I looked down, to my left, and saw that my parents’ Persian cat was hanging out on our porch, right outside our sliding glass door. (They live next door now.) Along came Lester, and the following transpired:
First, a meeting. Shared looks and stares. He’s looking eager, while she, ever the Lady, is playing it cool. She’s avoiding eye-contact, and doesn’t want to seem eager. But she isn’t going away, either.
At last the eye contact comes…but alas! The infernal glass door is still there, forever separating the two feline lovers!
The intensity of Lester’s smoldering stare becomes too much. She must look away, lest she be drawn into his web of kitty passion!
Finally Lester decides it’s time for a dramatic gesture, displaying what he thinks is his best feature, his enormous gray belly. Sadly, it is, in reality, far from his best feature.
Her reaction to this? “Um…yeah. I gotta go do something now.” And away she went, seconds later, to return to her own porch. But see, she loves our porch, likely because of the chipmonks who live beneath it. She’ll be back. And next time, it may be Julio!
She’s a vixen, that one.