EDIT: And now, individual post links don’t load, so you can only read what’s here on the main page. I am getting so close to killing this blog.
Well, it looks like I can at least post again reliably, which is nice. I still have some back-end functionality stuff that is still not right, and I will be contacting my hosting service in the next couple of days to politely request that they give me a refund or discount since a malfunction on their end resulted in loss of functionality and a loss of actual data, which is not acceptable to me. I’m not going to lie, folks, all of this has really sucked out a lot of my enthusiasm for this notion of doing content creation…and it also has me questioning my whole strategy on that score, anyway.
In any event, I’d like to move beyond the mess and get some actual content going again, so, here are this week’s Sunday Stealing questions, and this time they’re actually kind of unique and interesting:
1. What celebrity would you never want to meet?
You know what’s funny about social media these days? Over the last few years the social media landscape has actually fractured into a bunch of different platforms and services, each one with its own flavor, and each one with its own lore and controversies and whatnot. What’s more, you can hang out on one platform and never see a hint of a major thing that’s all the rage at another platform. My main hangouts are Threads and Bluesky now, in terms of the kind of short-post stuff that used to be Twitter before Elon Musk made it his unique brand of shitty, and there have been a bunch of weird controversies that have erupted on Threads that nobody on Bluesky seems to recognize or even be aware of. This amazes me.
What does this have to do with the current question? There’s an actor named David Krumholtz who has been around for years. Look up his career and he’s been in a ton of stuff going back to the 1990s, which I would usually interpret as, “He’s a reliable and professional guy who gets cast a lot on that basis.” Well, after some recent activity on Threads, it turns out that Krumholtz is a really weird guy who has quite a misogynistic streak going on, and he behaves accordingly on social media and in fact has done so for years. Just this morning someone posted receipts about abusive, stalkery behavior of his going back to 2014, so that’s my current choice for “celebrity I wouldn’t want to meet.”
More generally, I don’t think I’d want to meet any celebrity who aligns on the MAGA side of things. I’m just not interested.
2. What do you label yourself as?
In my video content, I’ve landed on “Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer” as my self-description, and I think I’m going to keep that.
3. You can only have one sandwich for the rest of your life. You have every sandwich-making ingredient known to man at your disposal. What sandwich do you make?
Like, all of my future sandwich activity is limited to a single kind of sandwich? Or, I can literally eat one more sandwich and then I am forever forbidden from sandwiches? And to what degree are we considering certain sandwich-adjacent foods to qualify as sandwiches? Am I allowed to continue consuming wraps? Are we considering hot dogs and sausages-in-a-bun as sandwiches, for the purposes of this hypothetical? Is a burger considered a sandwich? Nobody ever lists burgers as sandwiches; I’ll see menus at restaurants with a “burgers and sandwiches” section, but I don’t recall ever seen burgers listed as sandwiches. So: I will assume that burgers, hot dogs and other meats-in-buns, and wraps are exempt. It’s just easier. That leaves us with the first two policy clarifications, so if I’m allowed to keep eating a sandwich but it has to be the same one, I’m going with a cappicola-and-provolone sub, on a toasted sesame roll, with mayo, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and banana pepper rings. If it’s one-and-done and this is my last sandwich ever, then I’m making a Monte Cristo: ham, turkey, and swiss on sourdough, dipped in egg and fried, and served with a ramekin of maple syrup for dipping.
4. An angel provides you with a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. What’s it gonna be?
Gold rum. That one’s easy.
5. Have you ever built a snowman?
As a kid, almost certainly. We spend a lot of my childhood when snowman-making would have been a thing in places where there was never enough snow to actually do it, though.
6. If you could ask your future self a question, what would it be?
“Please tell me he doesn’t live much longer than this.”
And thing is…you might be wrong about who this is referring to.
7. Have you ever baked your own birthday cake?
I haven’t, no. I’ve made cakes on occasion, but not very often; we just order one from our favorite local bakery, especially in the last 12 years or so since we learned The Wife was celiac.
8. Which are cooler: dinosaurs or dragons?
Fictionally? Dragons. Real world? Dinosaurs. I think. You know, I tend to think of dragons as fire-breathing dinosaurs, so there’s that. But then there are all the wonderful dragons of Asian culture, the ones who aren’t breathing fire. Komodo dragons are fascinating, and recent science seems to be leaning into the whole “dinosaurs as big proto-birds” thing, to the point of suggesting that T-Rex made sounds more like chirping than the terrifying roars we heard in Jurassic Park, so…I guess I’ll stick with dragons.
9. What do you like about babies?
Ummm…huh. Not really sure. I haven’t been around any babies in a long time, and that’s not likely to change. I guess I like how when there’s a baby nearby and it’s not screaming its head off people tend to be in a happier mood. Like, the presence of a happy baby (or at least a sleeping one) tends to somehow enhance the moods of the non-baby people around it, so that’s nice.
10. You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. What’s the first rule you put in place?
I honestly don’t know if I should be trusted with making my own society. First, just the idea of a literal society being mine is a strange one, and I wouldn’t want to enforce my personal tastes by fiat upon anyone. So I think residence in my island society would be voluntary, and it would come with a few recommendations: a predilection for overalls and a willingness to participate in an occasional pie fight, perhaps.
And that’s the quiz…now to hit the “publish” button, which is turning out to be a crap shoot the last bunch of weeks….
No. I can roll my tongue, though. Apparently that’s a genetic thing that only some people can do.
2. What foreign language did you study in school? How much of it do you still remember?
French. I don’t remember much, verbally, but when I encounter written French I can pick my way through it, kinda-sorta. I’m able to discern what the road signs in Canada are telling me, if I look to the French side. I do wish sometimes that I had kept up with it more, particularly when I’m listening to music by Berlioz and watching Emily In Paris.
(Yes, I watch Emily In Paris and I love it for all its goofy soap-opera glory.)
3. What recipe did you most recently prepare? Where did you get the recipe and how did it turn out?
Goodness, I’m honestly not sure! It might be the Pastitsio I made for The Wife’s birthday. I don’t cook directly from recipes a whole lot these days; you get to a point where you can pretty much throw things together most times. In fact, the Pastitsio might not even count, since I’ve made that dish so many times over the years that I never need to even consult the recipe I learned anymore. Maybe it was when I made waffles last; I use Alton Brown’s waffle batter recipe, and I never remember the exact measures of the things in it. I love cooking from recipes, though! I need to take some time and figure out some future recipe exploration.
4. What song have you listened to over and over and over again?
Oh, how many! I do try to vary up my music selections, but I also do go into “play that again, Sam! And again! Again, Sam! You know what, Sam, just keep playing it until I tell you to stop!” mode on occasion. Some songs that have received this treatment over the years are (and here I’ll just do songs, because if I include filmscore tracks or classical pieces we’ll be here all day):
“Dreams”, Van Halen “Human”, The Killers “Last Dance”, Donna Summer “Gentle On My Mind”, Glen Campbell OR The Band Perry “Love’s Been Good To Me”, Frank Sinatra “Midnight Train to Georgia”, Gladys Knight and the Pips “It Always Happens This Way”, Toulouse
5. Are there currently any pets in your household? Are you considering adding another?
I’ve written many times of the little menagerie we have going on here! Dogs Hobbes (greyhound) and Carla (staffie mix), and cats Remy, Rosa, and Daisy.
6. As an adult, have you ever performed with a drama group? (Student productions don’t count.)
No. This is a thing I’ve never much felt like exploring, in all honesty.
OK, let’s get back into this “blogging kinda-sorta regularly” thing, shall we? In fact, I need to get back to the schedule that I established earlier this year after I took a couple weeks OFF the schedule to regroup. Regrouping is good, but so is getting back to it. So I’m going to do last week’s Sunday Stealing now. Here we go:
1. Is your phone Apple or Android? What about your laptop?
Android! I am currently a happy Samsung user. My phone is a Galaxy s21 Ultra (named “Ophelia”), and my laptop is a Galaxy Book Pro 2 360, or something like that. The naming and numbering conventions of devices gets a bit annoying to me, in all honesty. My laptop can be folded all the way over for use as a tablet, which is nice though I must admit that I don’t use that functionality nearly as much as I once thought I would.
I’m likely “due” to upgrade both items, to be honest; my phone is nearing 5 years old and I think it runs out of Samsung support updates soon. But I’m pretty firmly a “use it until I need to upgrade it” kind of person, so we’ll see. My laptop is also doing just fine, especially as a writing machine. It’s a bit slow for photo editing (and, I expect, video editing, which I currently do mainly on my phone anyway), so that might end up being the main reason to upgrade it.
2. Can you say “thank you” in more than one language?
I don’t doodle at all. Really, I don’t. I’m terrible at drawing to the point that I don’t even doodle. (I have a video in mind about my inability to draw and how it’s impacted my relationship with the visual arts.)
4. Which do you enjoy more, Scrabble or bowling?
Scrabble? I haven’t done bowling since I was a kid. Bowling looks fun, though. It would have to be a “retro” alley, though.
5. Can you juggle?
I maxed out at one. I’ve never tried learning to juggle, really.
6. Have you ever worn pajamas in public?
No, though I suppose my sweat pants in college counted. I have long since ditched sweat pants, though; I might own one pair, but I wouldn’t even know where they are.
7. Was your best subject in school the one you enjoyed the most?
Music and English, probably. I wasn’t a great student, in all honesty.
8. When you’re offered the senior discount before you ask for it, are you offended or grateful?
I’ve never been offered a senior discount yet, so I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Getting AARP stuff in the mail was certainly something, though. (Retirement? That’s cute.)
9. Do you agree that with age comes wisdom?
One hopes it works that way, but it’s one of life’s great ironies to live long enough to discover that it does not.
10. Do you consider Sunday the first day of the week or the last day of the weekend?
Last day of the weekend, I suppose. I’ve seen calendars that put Monday at the start of the week, and I honestly have no beef with that!
I never skipped the entire day, no. I did, however, skip the occasional class. A few times I got in trouble for this. From the vantage point of 35-40 years later, I find it hard to care.
Lettered in a school sport?
Ha! No way. Though, the swim coach made occasional noises about me trying out for the team. I kind of wish I’d have attempted that.
Made a prank phone call?
Yes, in college. Just once or twice, though. It really wasn’t my thing and I didn’t honestly think it was funny. Plus, it was pretty damned obvious who I was, so the next day there were ramifications. Not a fan of that sort of thing.
Paid for a meal with coins?
Ha! Yes! More than a few times, actually, back in the day when scrounging together coins was a nice little windfall. And here’s a dirty secret: If you count out the coins yourself and present them to the register person at the restaurant in a respectful way, they do not mind. They like having change on hand. It makes their lives easier. Just don’t walk up with a handful of assorted change and dump it on the counter and make them count it out. (Also, it’s less of a big deal in Canada where the $1 and $2 denominations are coins already.)
Restaurants will be especially forgiving if you pay in coins early in their hours, before they’ve had a chance to build their cash supply on hand. Restaurants tend to start the day with limited ability to make change. One time at Pizza Hut, some snot-nosed teenage boy came in with his girlfriend (I actually hope it was their first date and she saw what a schmuck he was), and they ordered a medium cheese and two waters. Total bill was something like $8.50. This little prick flicks a $100 at me, when all I had on hand was fives and ones. I asked if he had any smaller bills, and he smirked and said, “No.” So I sent that little shit off with $91 in singles, and then for the next few hours every time my servers had waited on a few more tables and had a few more in tips I yelled, “Cash ’em in!”
Laughed until some sort of beverage came out your nose?
Oh yeah. In fact, I was the lucky kid who was abnormally susceptible to The Giggles, and the other kids damned well knew this, so a lot of times the lunch period was “Get Kelly to laugh while he’s drinking milk” time. Fun bunch, those.
Most times these quizzes are themed in some way. Not this week! These questions are random as shit! Here we go!
1. Did you/will you have coffee or some other form of caffeine today?
I literally just downed the last sip of Coffee Number One. Shortly I will get up to brew Coffee Number Two. And later on, when we have Sunday Popcorn, I will wash it down with a lovely Coke Zero. (Sundays tend to be a lazy day for us, when we do household stuff like laundry and a bit of cleaning and maybe some food prep and stuff…in the afternoon if we’re home we stop for popcorn and a bit of relaxation.)
2. Who did you last have a text conversation with and what was it about?
Heh! So, I rarely remember my dreams, which is why it was so weird that I remembered one yesterday morning from the night before (Friday night into Saturday). In this dream, a friend at work and I were arguing with a store manager who hasn’t been the store manager for 16 years about…napkin dispensers in the Cafe. I don’t recall the substance, but my friend and I were really fired up about this. I remember at one point part of my brain thinking, Why the hell am I so fired up about napkin dispensers? Who gives a shit? Then that same part of my brain kicked in a little more and thought, Wait, this is a dream! We’re dreaming about work! Abort! Abort! Ahhh-OOOOO-gah! (That last thing is the old style horn they used to have on cars, remember?)
3. Are there regular trains in and out of your town/city?
My general city? Yes, Buffalo has trains! The Amtrak here can take you to Toronto or to NYC going the other way. I don’t know about any other destinations. (The state of rail travel in this country is insanely bad.) Buffalo also has the MetroRail downtown, which I like to use when I’m on photo walks in the city. They’re actually finally talking seriously–as in, doing the environmental impact stuff and looking for funding–to extend the MetroRail for the first time since it was built in the late 80s. I would dearly love if this region had light rail connecting the various suburbs to the city.
4. Have you ever been hospitalized due to dehydration?
See? This is what I call “conversational whiplash”. Anyway, no. (At my age I’m thinking I may be jinxing it by saying this, but I actually have not yet been hospitalized in my life.)
5. Someone texts/IMs you just as you’re about to go to sleep. Do you reply?
Depends on what the subject is, doesn’t it?
6. Do you grind your teeth?
Not really. I hope not, anyway.
7. When you listen to music with headphones, do you keep the volume low enough to hear surrounding noise, or do you blast it?
Somewhere in the middle, I think. A lot of my earbud listening is classical music, and the dynamic changes can make the volume settings hard. I need to be able to hear the pianissimos over the ambient noise, but then sometimes that makes the fortissimos a bit on the “GAHHHHH TURN IT DOWN, THE MUSIC IT BURRRRRRNS” side. I rarely use the “noise canceling” on my main earbuds. (I have two pairs of earbuds, my Samsung ones that are the main ones I use, and the older Soundcore ones that don’t have noise canceling but do have longer battery life so those are the ones I use when I’m on a photo walk. In that case I’m not listening to classical music, because I don’t want to be listening to music that has a lot of dynamic changes. That’s when I listen to rock, techno, Celtic, and other genres.)
8. Are you wearing nail polish?
What?! I’m a DUDE! Dudes do NOT wear nail polish!!!!
OK, they do and it’s totally fine, that last bit was not sincere. I have zero problem with men wearing nail polish, and the fact that I don’t boils down to that it’s just a bit of effort that I don’t really want to go through. Plus, the nature of my job, in which I often have my hands inside pieces of kitchen equipment or other mechanical places, makes nail polish unwise. But anyone out there who does, rock on!
9. Do you have an ice maker in your refrigerator door?
No. I’ve never had that feature, and I’m not sure if I want it. When we stayed in Hawaii, our fridge did have one though, and it made the evening’s drinking a lot easier, so….
10. Do you have a friend named James?
No, but I do have a manager named James, and a former coworker named Jim whom I like a lot. He retired a couple years ago, though.
First, the announcement: I sent out a new installment of the newsletter the other day! This one was in remembrance of actor/director/playwright Tom Noonan, who died recently. Please check it out and subscribe! I try to send it twice a month, with usually a long piece or essay.
Now, for the weekly quiz-thing that I don’t always do weekly but this week I am because it’s prompt-based, which is interesting. Here’s the details:
This week we’re playing word association as suggested by a blogger named Dawn Camp. She said these words “tickled her fancy,” and let’s see if they inspire you. Feel free to answer with either a single word or a thought/memory. It’s up to you.
Word Association. Share what comes to mind when you hear the word …
OK, this sounds interesting! Here we go!
1. Biscuit
OK, where to go with this one? I love biscuits…here we’re talking about the American kind, the fluffy pastry-layered ones with wonderful buttery saltiness. But I learned quite a while back that this is not what British people mean by “biscuit”…but right now, I’m actually thinking of something I read many years ago in a book called The Musician’s World, which is a collection of excerpts from the correspondence of great composers. One of Richard Wagner’s letters, to poet Mathilde Wesendonck (with whom he was cheating on his first wife, Minna), thanks her for a gift of biscuits. Now, this is in translation, so I’m still fuzzy on what exactly Wagner is describing here, food-wise, but here’s an excerpt of the letter. I like this because it shows how weirdly capricious creative people can be about what enables them to get the work done:
Child, child! The biscuits did help; they suddenly jerked me out of a bad path where I had been stuck for a week, unable to go further. Yesterday my attempts to work were miserably unsuccessful. I was in a shocking humor, and gave it vent in a long letter to Liszt in which I informed him that I had come to the end of my composing days…
When the biscuits arrived, I realized what I had been lacking; the biscuits I had here were much too salty, so they could not give me any sensible ideas; but when I took the sweet ones I had always been accustomed to, and dipped them in milk, everything suddenly fell into place. And so I threw aside the revision and went back to composing, on the story of the woman physician from far away…Heavens, how much can be achieved by the right sort of biscuits! Biscuits! that is the proper remedy for composers when they get stuck–but they must be the right kind.
Richard Wagner was a really strange dude…but I’m lying if I didn’t admit that my own creative juices are not sometimes jump-started by some food or another.
2. Crayon
People my age may remember that the big box of Crayolas (the 64-pack, the one that came with the sharpener in the back of the box) would include a color called “Flesh”, so you could color the people in your pictures with the proper flesh color…making certain specific assumptions, obviously, as to what a “proper” flesh color is.
Well, more recently, this seems to be the way of things now:
Not everything is getting worse!
3. Warmth
It’s late February in Buffalo. Warmth is an envied commodity! My main need now, in terms of warmth, is a pair of gloves that (a) keeps my hands comfortably warm, and (b) allows for easy operation of the buttons and dials on my camera. I haven’t looked too deeply for this sort of thing yet, but I imagine I will sometime next year as the temps start falling again. I have a pair of warm gloves that have fingertips that allow for operation of touchscreens, but they’re not super reliable on that score, and I have another pair of gloves that is super reliable on that score, but they’re not particularly warm. I also have a pair of mitten-gloves: the mitten part is actually a flap that folds back, exposing your fingers if you need access. This is currently my best option. I have seen gloves optimized for photographers where the individual fingertips open up and fold back, allowing for operating camera controls, but I haven’t tried them. We’ll see.
4. Flip
Wilson?
Or the cocktail? A flip is apparently (I’ve never had one) a mixture of a spirit, egg, sugar, and spice. (Add cream and you have a nog.) I don’t know that these are made much these days; I’d have to look them up. But I remember reading about the original flip, in a history book I have that centers rum (God, I love history writers!). The original flip was a mixture of beer, rum, and sugar, and you served it hot after heating it by sticking a red-hot iron in it! Yes, that sounds gross. Yes, I would taste it if offered, but I wouldn’t pay for the pleasure.
5. Slush
This will be the dominant landscape feature of my region starting sometime in the next three or four weeks, and likely remaining so until May. Stupid WNY spring, I hate it.
6. Wing
What else?
These are the wings (well, some of them, I fried up a 5-lb bag containing 40-some pieces of wingy goodness) I made on Super Bowl Sunday. And we don’t even watch the game! But being non-observant doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy the same kind of yummy not-that-good-for-you food that that day brings to all. No, these aren’t Buffalo-style wings; I don’t make those at home. No particular reason, really, other than the fact that everybody around here makes good Buffalo wings, so why make here what I can get when I go out? Maybe I’ll write a post on how these got made sometime soon…or maybe it’ll end up in video form, I did make some footage. We’ll see. But these were very tasty. The wing is a wonderful part of the bird! (In terms of home wing making, I prefer grilling to deep-frying.)
7. Candle
OK, here’s a random Star Trek word association! There’s an episode from the seventh, and final, season of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Sub Rosa” in which Dr. Crusher falls in love with a ghost who was her grandmother’s lover, or some such thing. It’s a very strange episode that is sufficiently disliked by fandom to often be cited as a good example of the worst Trek stories. I’ve only seen the episode one time, when it originally aired, and I remember it being a really goofy episode indeed. And because this is Trek and there’s nothing truly supernatural in Trek, the ghost is an alien who lives inside a candle. In the first part of the episode, there’s a Scottish groundskeeper–I swear I am not making this up–who tells Dr. Crusher several times, in warning, and also in a really exaggerated Scottish brogue, “Dinna light that cahhhhn-dle!”
To this day I often think of that guy when I go to light a candle.
8. Cinnamon
Oooooh, I love cinnamon! I just love it. It’s probably my favorite spice after black pepper and maybe garlic, if we’re considering garlic a spice. (Technically garlic isn’t a spice, but in most culinary uses it functions as a spice.) I like to add it to the coffee grounds to add flavor to the brew, or also dose my applesauce (we buy the natural stuff with no added sugar) because apples and cinnamon were clearly invented to go together. One reason we love Pastitsio so much is that it contains cinnamon, and I exceed the recipe’s specified amount by a lot. More recently I’ve started taking cinnamon supplements because I’m told that cinnamon is good for blood sugar, and though I’m not generally a fan of black tea, I’ve recently discovered this stuff, following a recommendation by YouTuber Faith Connally:
I really really REALLY love this tea, and I have actually started drinking a mug of this on weekends after my initial cup of coffee, instead of having two cups of coffee.
Goodness, this one turned more extensive than I expected it to!
OK, I’m a bit behind on my posting this week because I usually write at least some of my posts ahead of time on the weekend, especially Sunday, and this week we went to Rochester for a day of fun and buying stuff at Trader Joe’s. (Yes, we have a Trader Joe’s in Buffalo. We actually have two Trader Joe’s, but we don’t like the main one (actually the store itself is fine, but its location on Niagara Falls Boulevard is really a pain to get to) and we haven’t been to the new one that opened a few months ago yet.) So for tonight’s post, I checked Sunday Stealing to see if it was an easy one…and it is! Five things I love that start with S! How hard can that be?
[taps chin]
[drums fingertips on the table]
[looks up at the ceiling]
Well, maybe this one’s a little harder than I thought…but let’s see what we can come up with. As always, I have no compunctions about cheating on Internet quizzes.
1. STARS.
This is no secret, right? I love the stars…particularly the stars of winter. Here’s my boy Orion the Hunter, shrouded by clouds, taken just last week.
2. Symphonies!
I should get back to featuring full-length symphonies here. There’s no doubting that my favorite long form in music is the symphony. A great symphony is a musical world unto itself, regardless of how long it is; Mozart’s 40th is as magnificent a journey as Mahler’s 1st, even if the former is half as long as the latter.
Sunday Stealing has a quiz that imposes a rule: One word answers only. Well, I’m going to ignore that: Five-word answers only. Every answer will be five words (and yes, I use the hyphen to cheat a little). Got it? Here we go!
1. Tell us about a time when your family got a newfangled invention (your first air conditioner, color TV, VCR, microwave, computer, etc.).
Ooooh, which one to choose! I remember our first microwave, and our first computer (a Commodore VIC-20), and even our first crockpot (which is still around, in the things that belonged to my mother).
Let’s go with the VCR. We got it in, I think, 1985. I don’t remember the brand, but it loaded through the front (many initial VCRs had the tape going into a carriage that popped up from the top of the machine). The machine had a bank of manual channel buttons running across the front where we selected the channel when we were watching through the VCR, and there was a programming process we had to go through to do it. (I don’t recall if our VCR came before we got cable down our road, or after.) It was a VHS machine; this was when people were still choosing between VHS and Beta. (For those who don’t know what this is about, with the rise of home VCRs, there were two major formats that were duking it out for market share. VHS became the standard, and Beta faded.) The first thing we recorded was an episode of Riptide, an NBC private-eye procedural show. The first movie we rented was Raiders of the Lost Ark. This was even before movie rental stores were much of a thing; that rental was from a local stereo and teevee equipment seller, and to rent a movie you had to leave a deposit of 50 bucks that you got back when you returned the tape. Later on, our town’s first actual video store opened…and they made no effort at all to classify or organize the movies in any way! You literally had to wander the entire store in hopes of seeing the movie you wanted, if you were there for a specific title. Those were fun times. I’m not particularly nostalgic for them, but I remember them with some fondness. There was a time when watching movies on clunky videotapes, forced into a 4:3 aspect ratio on low-resolution teevees (think YouTube twenty years ago), was a technological marvel. Wow.
2. Is there a particular song that sparks a childhood memory?
I’m not usually one to lock music in my mind to specific moments in time that I remember, but I will never not hear any rendition of “San Antonio Rose” and not think of my father. He loved that song and it was often on his lips.
3. What is something an older family member taught you to do?
Back in my college days, the local Hy-Vee store in Waverly would run a drawing for free turkeys every year for a few weeks before Thanksgiving, something like “Get a ticket for the drawing for every ten bucks you spend”, and one year I actually won a turkey. It was just a small 10-12 pounder, but still, hey, free turkey! My roommate had actually won one the week before and donated it, but this one I decided to actually roast up for our friends and The Girlfriend (now The Wife). But I had no idea how to do it, so I called Mom at home and got her detailed instructions as to how to make a turkey dinner. It turned out pretty good, too!
4. Back in the day, what name brands would we have found in your family’s kitchen?
Ooooh, that’s kind of tough. Campbell’s, obviously. We always had cheap Ramen on hand, but I don’t recall the brand. My parents shopped generics and store labels pretty religiously…and by generics, I mean exactly that. Rice Krispies were in a white box with black lettering that said “Crisp Rice Cereal”. There’s a brand called Shur-Fine that was in a lot of stores, if I recall correctly. The best frozen pizzas back then were by Totino’s. (I have a feeling that if I were to revisit those, I’d be grossed out big-time!) My mother always had coffee on hand; it was a staple for her while Dad hated coffee, but I don’t know what brand she used. For a while it was likely generic.
And then there was beer. My father loved beer and drank…well, in retrospect, there might have been something going on there, but some closets are best left unopened, right? I will note that even in times when money was tight, there was always money for beer. Make of that what you will…but it wasn’t like Dad was drinking the expensive stuff all the time, and this was the 80s, when the “expensive beer” was (a) harder to find out in the sticks like we were, and (b) still well in advance of the craft beer craze. Brands I remember were Stroh’s, Utica Club (this stuff came in little squat bottles), and Genny Light. I also recall a time when Dad somehow got wind that the Park-and-Shop store (this was a local chain of small grocery stores, larger than convenience stores, smaller than supermarkets) in Portville, NY had got in a shipment of Yuengling beer. (Yuengling is much more well-known and widely distributed now, but back then it was a local Eastern PA thing, and for it to show up in WNY was pretty rare). Now, I’ve just looked it up on Google Maps, and to drive from home to that store in Portville was about 25 miles, round-trip. And we did it, a few times, so Dad could buy up as much as he could get. And it was somehow my job to unload all this from the truck and stack it in the garage.
5. As a child, did you collect anything (rocks, shells, stickers, etc.)?
I had a stamp collection! I wonder if it’s still knocking around somewhere. Stamps were an interesting way to learn about history. Also comic books; I still have those someplace. For a short while, for some reason that baffles me now, I gathered up travel pamphlets. We road-tripped a lot and we also moved a lot, which meant lots of opportunity to grab a pile of pamphlets from someplace. That phase didn’t last long, but it was kind of fun. I also had a small rock collection for a bit, but that kind of fell by the wayside too.
No, I didn’t collect overalls at the time. Never even occurred to me. I did have a pair that I only wore in my room with the door shut because I was embarrassed by it (why? How the hell do I know? I was 8.). I did take notice of overalls brands as I saw them out in the wild, noting differences and whatnot…and there was even one time I saw someone wearing a specific outfit involving overalls that I have since replicated…but more on that another time!
And now, reading all this, I’m suddenly thinking that I had a kind of strange childhood….
Well, here we go: it’s time for my annual look back at the year that has just ended. On a personal level, I didn’t have that bad a year at all. Which is nice, because I don’t just exist on a personal level, now do I?
Let’s get right to it:
Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I have entered every year for the last, oh, ten or so with the intent to get better at planning and structuring my life. This has always been a struggle, and I can report that I am, in fact, getting better at this. Late in every year I buy a new planner for the year to come, and every new year I start using that planner, only to peter out at some point and then come back to it and peter out again. But, over the last several years, the “peter out” phases of this cycle have become (a) shorter, and (b) less frequent! So I am getting better. Maybe 2026 is the year I actually “put it all together”! We’ll see.
When it comes to resolutions, I’m not really a fan of those. I’m more about setting goals, and maybe (or maybe not) achieving them. So, goals this year include:
A bit of weight loss (not much, we’ll get back to this below)
Trying a bunch of new recipes
Eating vegetarian/pescatarian for a whole day, at least once per week
Stop allowing the chairs and the desk in my library to become collecting points for stuff
Starting The Song of Forgotten Stars, book six
Get my damnable sweet tooth under control (this is the struggle of my life…I have a wicked sweet tooth and a brain that refuses to take a sensible approach to serving sizes, so this will be a thing)
Relaunching my newsletter (likely on a different platform because Substack has issues)
Take 10,000 photos (Why 10,000? I dunno, it’s a nice big round number. I don’t know if this one’s really going to be doable, but we’ll see. The main thing is I will be shooting a lot, even more in 2026 than I did in 2025, and I shot a lot in 2025.)
Focus my reading life on books I already own (and as I write this, it’s the day after I went to the library and checked out nine books, so, yeah)
Reading: 52 books, 200 poems.
Creating content, including more video. (I’ll have more to say about my new approach to social media in an upcoming post!)
Selling photography prints
That sounds like a lot, and you might think, “Wow, maybe you should do one thing at a time.” Well, as characters often say in Aaron Sorkin scripts, “I don’t have time to do one thing at a time!”
Did anyone close to you give birth?
No, unless we count a number of people I follow on social media. It’s funny: I’ve seen several instances lately of a reliable content creator going dark for a bit, and then resurfacing with a video in which they say something like “Hi everyone, I’m so sorry for disappearing, but now I think it’s time to come back and tell you what’s been going on….” And then they stand up and turn to the side, revealing their “baby bump”. That’s always nice.
Did anyone close to you die?
No, thankfully.
What countries did you visit?
We went to Canada last April and we hope to go again this spring!
What would you like to have this year that you lacked last year?
I wouldn’t characterize it as a “lack”, but I’m strongly considering making a big upgrade this year in terms of my camera gear. I feel like I’m achieving consistency with Miranda that indicates that I have, in fact, leveled up a bit. I’m excited by this prospect.
What was your biggest achievement of the year?
It turns out that 2025 wasn’t really a year of “big achievements” for me. It was more a year of moving the needle slowly toward where I want to be. And that’s not nothing!
What was your biggest failure?
I endured something of a “crisis of confidence” in terms of my writing life, to the point that I was wondering if I was still a writer at all. More recently, I’ve come to the new-ish realization, alluded to above, that what’s at work here isn’t a lack of confidence in writing, or a loss of desire, but a lack of clarity about how to fit writing into a creative life that just three years ago at this time I didn’t see expanding the way it has. And that’s where the “structure” mentioned above comes into play. I will likely have more to say about this, moving forward.
What was the best thing you bought?
I don’t think I’ve written about them yet! Weird…I need to get on that. I even have the content in mind, but I’ve done it a few times on video and not shared it yet. Anyway, there’s a specific pair of vintage overalls that I bought back in April that make me really happy. Also, a pair of white overalls by the Hisea brand that I got this year. And some new shirts. It wasn’t a big year for buying stuff. Oh, I did get a new shoulder-sling bag that I like a lot. It’s not specifically designed for cameras, but I may be able to make it work as such when I upgrade my camera kit, which I’m hoping to do in 2026.
Whose behavior merited celebration?
Americans who continue to resist and oppose what often feels like the relentless march toward an end of democracy and the dawn of authoritarianism in America.
Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
The people who are marching in lockstep with the administration.
Where did most of your money go?
Food, drink, new overalls and shirts, and gifts and stuff along the way.
What did you get really excited about?
Going to Toronto in April was an absolute thrill. If I were guaranteed a decent living in a city outside of America and I had to go there and never return, Toronto would be my choice.
Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?
I don’t mean to be wishy-washy here, but…both. And I’m not joking! Seriously, it’s both. Aspects of life are getting better, and other aspects are getting worse. I imagine that balancing act isn’t sustainable for life, but, as the Zen master said, “We’ll see.”
Thinner or fatter?
You know what, this one’s kind of funny: based on my official weight last time I visited my doctor (just a month or so ago), the answer is, neither! My weight has stayed basically the same, literally within no more than a pound or two, for over a year now.
Richer or poorer?
Richer, I suppose, but not by much.
What do you wish you’d done more of?
Photography, reading, listening to music, going places with The Wife, hanging with The Kid, and any pie-throwing at all would have been nice!
What do you wish you’d done less of?
You know, a day’s gonna come when I actually don’t have to think about Donald Goddamned Trump at all. I keep hoping for that day to come.
How did you spend Christmas?
Quietly, with family. Basically the way we do every year. Sometimes I envy people with large families and relations close by…but mostly, I don’t.
As James Bond once noted, “That’s not the sort of question a gentleman answers.”
What was your favorite TV program?
Shoresy and Resident Alien are ruling the roost right now.
Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
If there is, they’re probably a Republican of whom I was unaware a year ago.
What was the best book you read?
Guy Gavriel Kay’s latest novel, Written on the Dark.
What was your greatest musical discovery?
No one specific artist or composer, really…but I’ve been listening to a few playlists of music that was heard on the show Shoresy of late, and it’s a lot of Canadian rap and techno and dance music. Some of it goes right through one ear and out the other, but some of it…really does hit. It “slaps”, as the kids say. (Are they still saying that? How the hell do I know?)
What did you want and get?
The Kansas City Chiefs faceplanting in the Super Bowl, and then having a crappy season this year. Also, I got a lot more experience with the camera and I got a lot of shots that make me very happy.
What did you want and not get?
Any conclusive sign that America is shifting toward sanity, a Super Bowl championship for the Bills, a new owner for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and a pie in the face.
What were your favorite films of this year?
We didn’t watch it until 2026, but Wake Up Dead Man, the new Benoit Blanc mystery movie, made us happy.
It occurs to me that in 2026 I need to do a lot better job recording what we actually watched, because as I write this, I’m drawing a blank and I’m kinda too lazy to go look up the “watch history” on Netflix….
What did you do on your birthday?
We always celebrate my birthday by traveling to Ithaca and the Finger Lakes region for the Apple Harvest Festival and some wine tasting and other fun, which we did this year as well…but this is the first time those events actually coincided with my birthday! We set out for our three-day-weekend right on my birthday, which was nice.
How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2019?
Overalls Conquers The World. Or, when I wear my favorite white poofy shirt under a pair of hickory-striped overalls, “Bridgerton Plus Trains”.
What kept you sane?
Good lord, I have no idea. I’m not sure anything did. Creative pursuits, maybe. Walking around a lot with a camera in my hand or hanging around my shoulder.
Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
I’ll go a little off-kilter here: I’ve been following Luke of the Outdoor Boys YouTube channel for a few years, and I’ve liked his no-nonsense and enthusiastic approach to exploring his nook of the world and his pursuit of his passions and his explanations for why and how he does what he does. At the end of one of his videos, about how to dig a snow cave for yourself and survive in the wilderness in a deep freeze, he says that you should do your homework and your research: “I’m just a guy on the Internet who has managed to not kill himself yet. What do I know?” Luke pretty much ended his own channel in 2026, mainly due to burnout and the physically draining nature of the content he made for years, and I salute his work.
What political issue stirred you the most?
Climate change, the loss of democracy, trans rights, human rights of all sorts, racism, sexism, the strife in Gaza and the inescapable twinge of anti-Semitism, and who should be mayor of Buffalo.
Who did you miss?
Mom and Dad. Always. (Dad isn’t gone yet, but I haven’t written about him yet…so I’ll just note that I’m not sure there’s anything sadder than dementia.)
Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned last year:
There’s usually a big block of stuff I paste in here every year, but 2025 was different (and as I write this, 2026 is not off to a promising start). This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lord of the Rings movies, and this speech by Samwise Gamgee at the end of The Two Towers is a great one. I just wish it wasn’t so constantly applicable.
Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.
You know what? I was just about to call this answer done and actually publish the post, but I just remembered something. There’s a brilliant creator named Amanda Nelson who posts a lot on various social media platforms. I believe she’s a historian by training, but I’m not sure on that point. She is always thoughtful and measured in her content, and what I strongly appreciate about her is how even-keeled she is; Ms. Nelson will point out that yes, we’re in a really bad spot, but she’s still not particularly given to the kind of “We’re doomed” rhetoric that often dominates my side of the aisle. At one point this year, and I cannot for the life of me remember in which video she said this and she makes so much content that I have no intention of taking the time to find it, she said something that I have thought myself in various ways, but never put so succinctly. This really hit me between the eyes:
“America is not a thing that happens to us.”
Think about that.
If you take selfies, post your six favorite ones:
I’m going to relocate these to the concluding 2025 Photography Recap post, which will appear tomorrow. I’m doing this for one very important reason: WordPress’s “block” format gets a bit unwieldy with long posts like this, and I don’t feel like struggling with it anymore this morning! Harumph.
Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
This one has been tripping me up for a while, but I think I got it. You see, finding a song to sum up 2025 is tough, because 2025 was a year of serious absurdity, in which some of the most consequential things of my lifetime, events and policies that will define life for decades to come, are being imposed and enforced by complete idiots. Seriously: we are being governed by people who, without exception, think and believe things that are simply false, objectively untrue, and therefore utterly stupid. I keep coming back to this moment from the movie Glass Onion:
So, what kind of song could possibly align to times like these? It wasn’t a good year at all, but to note that it wasn’t a good year isn’t enough; the year was made un-good by people who aren’t serious, who aren’t smart, and who have never had any kind of genuine human feeling (other than hate) or any kind of genuine human thought. Everything about this time in which we’re disastrously living is just dumb and absurd and just…pedestrian. That’s what irritates me the most about these times: our villains are pedestrian dullards.
Thus, I needed a song that’s kind of pedestrian and somehow absurd. And that’s where my train of thought stopped.
And then, as Ray Romano once noted, “Sometimes, material presents itself.”
First, the song. There was a one-hit wonder in the mid-2000s that you may remember. This song was everywhere. For a while you couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it at least once, someplace, and American Idol used it for its “Goodbye” segment every week when someone was eliminated. The song was, of course, Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”.
Yup, that’s where I’m going, because in 2025, America had a “bad day”.
But where’s the absurd part, the fact that our collective bad day was brought upon us by a giant collection of nitwits and nincompoops?
Enter a content creator I’ve been following for quite a while now, first on Instagram and now on Tiktok. She goes by “Capture Calliope”, and the other day I saw this recent video of hers:
So, there it is. What song lyric and song makes me think of 2025? Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day”, as performed by Alvin and the Goddamned Chipmunks. That’s the kind of freaking year 2025 was.
“Because you had a bad day, you’re taking one down You sing a sad song just to turn it around You say you don’t know, you tell me, don’t lie You work at a smile and you go for a ride You had a bad day, the camera don’t lie You’re coming back down and you really don’t mind You had a bad day You had a bad day….”
Yeah. Tell us about it.
Anyway, here we go, into 2026. As I write this we’re ten days in and ICE has already murdered someone and the usual suspects are telling us that she had it coming. Another year in America.
