Don't Kill Your TV

TV goes back into the mist of my memory.  I am on the younger end of the first generation of people in the U.S. who have never known life without television.  To those of us in that generation and younger, the TV is as much an integral part of a household as a stove or refrigerator.  I suppose that, in a similar way, kids today are the first generation to have never known life without a computer.

I owe a lot to television.  It really gave me a jump start on things.  As a young child with two infant siblings, the TV was a convenient distraction my mother could set me in front of for periods of time on days when going outside to play was not workable.  The first set I remember seemed huge to me, but was probably only about a 24” screen.  It had a very large and clunky dial for changing the channels, and when you turned it off, a tiny white dot remained in the middle of the screen for nearly a minute afterward.  That dot intrigued me, and the memory of it still does.  The set took about 30 seconds to warm up, and as a kid I remember how long those 30 seconds seemed, when you could hear something exciting on the TV, but it wouldn’t let you see it yet.  Patience wasn’t my strong suit, then or now.

We didn’t have a lot of channel selections back then, just the three major American networks (no Fox yet), public broadcasting and two Canadian networks.  Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, The Electric Company and Sesame Street were my shows, especially Sesame Street.  All four were solidly in the “educational programming” category, so I don’t think I was any worse for wear by my devoted viewing of them.  And when I wasn’t watching TV, I was running around like a bat out of hell, so I was not short of any physical activity either.

Sesame Street was my favorite of them all.  It was on twice a day on PBS (at breakfast time and just before dinner), and once on one of the Canadian channels (right around lunch time).  And I watched all three episodes, five days a week before I was in school.  By the time I got into kindergarten, I could read, write and count in three languages.  The Canadian version of Sesame Street taught French, just like the American version taught Spanish.  I couldn’t tie my shoes or eat without getting food in my hair, but man, I was literate!

Of course with so many academic hurdles already jumped, I found kindergarten a bit dull, like watching reruns.  Consequently, I tended to make my own fun, much as I still do today.  The difference is, I was not very subtle about it, and nearly drove my kindergarten teacher out of her mind.  Those were the days before Ritalin or academic enrichment programs.  My misadventures in school are beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say that Mrs. McLaughlin is still around, and even after all these years I still have a very hard time looking her in the eye after the run for her money that I gave her.

Captain Kangaroo was great too.  His show had been around for decades before me.  When I watched in the early 70s, he was like the crazy old grandfather everyone wanted but no one really had.  His puppet buddies Mr. Moose and Bunny cracked me up, especially when they dropped a whole raft of ping pong balls on his head.  I was nearly 7 before I realized ping pong balls were used for anything other than humiliating beloved TV characters.

He had human friends too.  Mr. Green Jeans and Baxter were always stopping by.  Mr. Green Jeans always wore the same pair of, well, green jeans, and was vaguely presented as a kind of farmer/handyman/sage.  Baxter was one of the few African-American men in mainstream children’s programming at that time.  He too was a vaguely defined character.  I remember him wearing cream-colored sweaters, sometimes eyeglasses, and coming across as an academic of some sort.  After I got a bit older, creepy Slim Goodbody joined the cast.  He wore a body stocking with internal organs painted on it and kept pushing his preachy message about food that I hated.  Creepy and preachy.  Major turn-off, then and now.

Sidenote: Captain Kangaroo’s show started at 7:00 every morning on CBS, and there was a huge controversy when the network pushed it back so they could start “The CBS Morning News” at 7 to compete with “The Today Show” and “Good Morning America”.  Kids across the country were in an uproar, and their parents probably even more so, as that meant their hour of relative peace and quiet to drink coffee and read the newspaper from 7-8 each morning was shot to hell.  The host of “The CBS Morning News” in those days was a very young Bob Schieffer, who is still working for the network.  At the time, I hated him with a deep, seething passion.  He was the guy who overthrew Captain Kangaroo in my mind.  I still bristle a little at some subconscious level when Schieffer comes on TV.  I believe that there is some credence to the idea that the CBS morning shows have historically done so poorly in the ratings because of “The Curse of Captain Kangaroo”.

Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was not so much about literacy as it was social skills and problem solving.  I suppose it’s not much good to be able to read and write if you can’t interact in society with some degree of success.  He was kind of an unusual bird in hindsight, but he was so sincere about what he did, and played an important role in the lives of many preschool kids, some of whom may not have had a lot of good models for behavior in their lives.  His show was the first one I remember outgrowing, as it started to seem “babyish” to my sophisticated kindergartner mind after I started school. Mr. Rogers has been parodied heavily over the years, and it always bothered me a little, like someone making fun of your favorite uncle. 

The Electric Company could best be described as groovy, psychedelic phonics lessons.  The show was just entirely too cool, and appealed to me more and more as I got older.  They had cheesy, live-action Spider-Man episodes, lots of bellbottom pants, afros, and Morgan Freeman.  The show stuck to message though.  No matter how weird it got, there was always a literacy angle to everything they did.  Spider Man could be rescuing silent “e” from some masked goon or Morgan Freeman might be interviewing a diphthong with great sincerity, but there was always some reading connection there.  I think it was The Electric Company that helped me see that all the reading stuff I was learning could actually be applied to fun stuff, and it was part of what led me to a lifelong love affair with books.

These shows were both a lot of fun and developmentally helpful to a very young me.  Kids growing up on Spongebob are really missing out.

It wasn’t all educational programming for me though.  I’ve got a future post cooking on the topic of Saturday morning cartoons in the era when they were a weekly tradition for anyone under 12.

Talking Top Trending Twitter Topics Today!

A few months back, I wrote about my thoughts on Twitter, as you may recall.  I still feel like the most clueless guy on there, but I am up to more than 300 followers at this point, so I must be doing something right.  Never mind that half of them are motivational speakers, for some inexplicable reason.  Do my posts and tweets sound like I need an emotional revving up?  Maybe I ought to get an electric Prozac diffuser or something.

One of the most entertaining aspects of Twitter is “Trending Topics”.  It’s a continually updated listing of the ten most popular phrases and hashtags on Twitter. Hashtags are key words preceded by a pound, (like #squidmuffins).  They help you see, and be seen by, others using that same hashtag, even if they don’t follow you.  If I want to connect with other Twitterers while a Red Sox game is being broadcast, for example, I’ll search #redsox to find out who is tweeting on that topic, and will include that hashtag on my own Red Sox-related tweets so it too can be seen.  It’s a good way to find like-minded people to follow, as well as to gain new followers.  Even if they are in this case Red Sox fans, a group only marginally more rational and articulate than a basket of rabid lemurs.

Without further ado, I am going to list and comment on the trending topics on Twitter in the United States, as of early evening, March 11, 2012.

·         #SXSW (Promoted): Like it says, this is promoted.  That means that no one really cares about it, but the people behind it paid Twitter biggish bucks to stick it at the top of the list.  I hate these trending topics, and would not search or comment with them if someone was hanging me upside down over a vat of live electric eels.

·         Kobe to Bynum: Like I mentioned, it is popular to tweet to fellow fans of a sport while watching a game.  Evidently, in the current game between the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers, Kobe Bryant is making a lot of passes to Andrew Bynum.  So much so that tweets about it have caused this phrase to trend.  As a Celtics fan, I feel that this #sucks #a #lot.

·         #SelectionSunday: Another sports trend.  I am speculating that this has something to do with the March Madness college basketball tournament, an athletic event I just cannot get interested in.  (Others include golf, tennis, and competitive dwarf-eating.)  I’ve tried to before, but the number of competitive college basketball teams overwhelms me.  It’s hard to get excited for East Overshoe Tech when you’ve never heard of them, don’t know any of the players or coaches, or even know where the school is. The whole event is just too big to get my head around.  Maybe I’m just bitter because my alma mater hasn’t had a winning season this millennium.  This is something I could use one of those motivational speakers to help me with, I think.

·         #twitter_movies: This is one of those fun “microfad” trends.  In this case, people rename popular movies so they relate in some way to Twitter.  You’ll see such things as "I Know What You Tweeted last Summer", and “A Tweetcar Named Desire”.  They can be fun, though when you read down through a list like this, if becomes abundantly clear that not everyone is born with the humor gene. Or the grammar gene.

·         Greg Gumbel: I’m going to go out on a limb here and surmise that Greg Gumbel is hosting the March Madness Tournament selection program.  Who would have guessed 20 years ago that Greg would be the most popular and visible Gumbel on TV today, and Bryant would be managing a car wash outside of Dayton?

·         Bracket Time: Another March Madness trend.  Are you seeing why this is the one sporting event that gets on my nerves?  I just don’t get it, and yet it is everywhere, making me feel like everyone but me understands and enjoys it!  (Maybe statements like this are why all those motivational speakers follow me.)

·         #GoForth: I have no clue what this trend is about.  Could be a reference to the biblical book of Genesis, but more likely it is a tagline from an advertisement for potato chips or a new car, western culture being what it is these days.

·         Steve Alford: Had to Google this one.  Mr. Alford is the coach of the University of New Mexico men’s basketball team.  The Lobos (that’s the team name) are probably going to the March Madness Tournament, if the other popular trends tonight are any indication.  You think the teams that the Lobos play refer to them as the Bozos behind their backs?  I bet they do.

        Kurt Busch: Kurt Busch is a mediocre-at-best NASCAR driver who is a master at self-promotion by using the method of having the mentality of an angry 13-year-old boy who hasn’t taken his Ritalin. He’s a creep, but he gets attention, hence this trending topic.

·         One Direction Giveaway: This is not a sponsored trend, but it is an example of marketers hijacking Twitter for their own purposes.  I guess I am okay with that, given how often I pimp this blog and my other projects on Twitter myself.  One Direction, and I had to Google this one too, are a British-Irish boy band who finished third on the seventh season of The X Factor in Britain.  Given that I have a strict policy of not listening to any musical acts whose combined age does not total that of my favorite pair of sneakers, I have obviously never heard of them.

Twitter is a lot of fun, and I have met some really great people on it.  If you haven’t tried it, go ahead.  Follow me at @countofbluecars, and I’ll be sure to mention you to all the motivational speakers following me.

Pour Some Sugar on Somebody Else

As a teenage boy in the 1980s, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard was required listening.  I was, and still am, a huge Def Leppard fan, and literally wore out my copy of Hysteria, the album from which the song came.

 

From YouTube.  Full disclosure: I used to wear jeans just like that.  On purpose.

While the song is one of the great rock anthems of my youth, I can’t say I join in its sentiment.  Essentially, it extols the virtues of confectionary ingredients as an aid in intimate activities in the bedroom.  (Hey, this is a PG-13ish blog, so I had to be kind of obtuse in my description.)  As I am writing this, the 1985 song “Sugar Walls” by Sheena Easton, which expresses a similar approach to boom-chicka-wow-wow as Def Leppard’s, just came on the radio.  Evidently, gooey love is a thing, or at least it was in the 80s. 

My problem is, I cannot imagine anything LESS sexy than sugary love!  I hate stickiness!  I really, really do.

After exhaustive research on Google for nearly three minutes, I have determined that there is no official phobia for fear of stickiness, so I am hereby dubbing it “stickiyuckyickychrisjusthatesitphobia”.  Those of you with hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia will just have to deal with it. (Google it.)  There is a known fear of slimy things, called myxophobia, and while slimy things aren’t very high on my list either, they don’t rise to the level of stickiness.

Now mind you, I am not obsessive-compulsive who stands at the sink for hours washing his hands.  I just do NOT like to be sticky.  If a utensil at a meal somehow becomes sticky to hold, I exchange it immediately.  If my hands get even a little bit sticky during said meal, I get up and wash them.  I’ve done it several times in the course of eating just a single cinnamon roll.  If I reach for something in the fridge and it is sticky, it gets rinsed off at once, as do I.  If I am working on some kind of project, like painting for example, and paint gets on any part of my skin, I cannot just leave it until later.  No way.  I have to stop and go scrub myself off.  There are plenty of sticky substances where I work at the animal hospital, but we wash A LOT, and I keep extra clothing on hand at all times.

Like many things, my case of stickiyuckyickychrisjusthatesitphobia probably goes back to my childhood.  I’ve mentioned in a previous post how my friends and I enjoyed getting high as kids.  High up off the ground, that is.  We were always climbing things to gain as much altitude as possible.  In the wilds of northern Maine, we practically lived in trees as kids.  It was one of many things we held in common with monkeys.  The thing is, many of those trees we liked to climb were pine trees, which exude the stickiest sap, called “pitch”, that you can imagine.  Pitch got on your skin and clothing and it just stayed there.  No amount of scouring with regular soap and water would get rid of it.  I remember how maddening it was to scrub and scrub and still be sticky.  And my mother was so fed up with me ruining my clothes with pitch that I actually had “tree-climbing clothes” as a subset of my “play clothes”.  Forbidding me to stay out of trees was like trying to forbid clouds from raining.

Once I got so sticky on so many parts of me from climbing pine trees one summer day that my mother sent me over to our neighbor Bob’s garage to wash up.  Neither she nor I could get it off adequately, and it was driving me absolutely bonkers.  Bob was an amateur mechanic (specializing in nerdy little AMC Pacers and Gremlins for some unknown reason), and had high-powered hand scouring substances that could take axle grease, pitch, and even some of the skin right off you if you weren’t careful.  The stuff smelled a lot like motor oil, and the evil scent lingered for hours after use.  But it did the trick.  Shortly after that, my mother inquired of Bob what some of the less-lethal of those products were, and kept some on hand at our house in case another pitch crisis occurred.

I don’t climb nearly as many trees these days, so pitch is not the problem for me it once was, but I do a lot of hiking and snowshoeing in deep woods.  There are few things as exasperating for me as being way out in the wilderness and putting my hand up against a pitchy pine branch, and having to live with the sticky until I can get back to a sink and some scouring stuff.  It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I have actually cut a hike short because I got pitch on my hands and couldn’t wait to scrub it off.  And don’t even get me started about swatting flies and mosquitoes with pitch-covered hands.  It’s disgusting.

Out to eat, I will actually avoid ordering certain things if they have a high sticky quotient, no matter how much I like them.  It’s one thing to run to the sink to wash every few minutes in my own home, but quite another in a restaurant.  It’s hard sometimes, because I am very fond of some sticky things.  A gooey Danish pastry at Sunday brunch is hard to beat.  A juicy navel orange goes great on a hot summer afternoon, and a soft-shelled lobster is one of the best culinary treats, especially here in Maine where they are as fresh as you can get.  Serve me one of those messy suckers outside at a picnic table while I am draped in a tarp and wearing goggles and rubber gloves, and I am good to go.  Serve me one in a place where I can’t easily wash up, and I’ll politely decline.  I’ll have the steak, thanks.  With extra napkins.

So if you and your sweetie like to take Def Leppard literally in the boudoir, then more power to you.  Have fun.  I’d need towels and a bucket of soap and water nearby if it were me though.

Anyone have any Wet-Naps?  Stickiyuckyickychrisjusthatesitphobia is a bitch.

Blog Tag-I'm "It"

In general, I am not much of a follower of trends or fads.  One look into my wardrobe would make that abundantly clear.  This is especially the case with Internet “pass it along” kind of things. Nonetheless, something has come along that has grabbed my attention.  Caroline from the Big Book Little Book Blog tagged me in this little game where they ask eleven fellow bloggers eleven questions.

The rules, as I am told, are as follows:

• Answer the eleven questions that were asked of you by the person who tagged you!
• Make up eleven new questions and tag eleven new people to answer them!
•  Let them know you tagged them!
• Use a lot of exclamation points! (Okay, I just made this one up.)

It's your round at the pub and I've asked you to surprise me. What drink would you buy me and why?

A glass of ice water.  Surprise! 

Okay, take two.  I am not much of a drinker, but I feel that everyone should have a pint of Guinness in an authentic Irish Pub on St. Patrick’s Day at least once in his or her life, as I have.  This is despite the fact that it tastes like motor oil that has been wrung out of dirty sweat socks.  So, enjoy! The restrooms are over there, by the way.

If you had to spend the day as a character in a book who would you be and why?

Aragorn, from The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, was just a total dude from his first scene to his last.  Noble, brave, loyal, intelligent, and leader of a badass army of ghosts…what’s not to love? 

What was the last thing you read/watched that made you cry? (Real tears, preferably with snot bubbles!)

I am concerned that answering this question will cause me to have to turn in my “man card”.  Let’s just say that about five years ago, I had an elderly dog that I loved very much, but whose health was in decline.  At that time, I made the mistake of reading the terrific canine tome Marley and Me by John Grogan, which ends in the manner most dog books and films inevitably do.  ‘Nuff said?

I don’t DO snot bubbles, by the way.

They say that you learn something new every day. What was the last thing you learnt?

I learned that you should never, ever, no matter how friendly you are with her, remark to a very pregnant woman she is “as big as a house, in a good way”.  Never.  Not even once.  Trust me on this!

Marmite: Love it? Hate it?

It’s a British thing, so being a bloody Yank, I had to look “Marmite” up.  According to www.marmite.com (really!), “Marmite is a nutritious savoury spread that contains B vitamins, enjoyable in a sandwich, on toast, bread or even as a cooking ingredient. You'll either love it or hate it.”  Considering that Marmite a) is actually a yeast extract paste with added vitamins, vegetable and spice extracts, b) is considered 100% vegetarian, and c) originates in Great Britain, then I’d have to say I am best suited for the “hate it” camp. 

I truly love you Brits, but you have to admit that your cuisine can be kind of suspect.  “Toad in the hole”?  “Bangers and mash”? Seriously?  If I ever go to the U.K., I’ll be bringing a whole suitcase full of PB &Js.

Which literary love interests would you snog, marry and avoid.

This response could be an entire blog post in itself, so I’ll it simple and brief.  Disclaimer: I didn’t put a great deal of thought into these.

• Snog
: Dr. Ellie Sattler from Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. (Don’t judge me, people!  I have a thing for smart women and for blondes, and not often enough do the twain seem to meet.)

• Marry
: An adult Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling. (After  she’s graduated from Hogwarts, has a terrific, high-paying job in the Ministry of Magic, and can both support my staying at home to write tripe like this and keep me from getting destroyed by evil.)

• Avoid
: Lady Macbeth from MacBeth by William “Crazy Willie” Shakespeare. (Wouldn’t you avoid that crazy chick too?)

What's your usual order from Starbucks/Costa?

It takes me a whole lot of mental preparation to offer a stranger cash in exchange something “tall and skinny”, for fear of being misinterpreted.  As it is, I go into higher-end coffee shops with intentions of ordering something rakish and sophisticated, but inevitably freeze, mumble “large hot regular with just creamer please”, and then pretend to become very interested in the napkin dispenser.  Meanwhile the barista is looking at me as though I just stepped off the set of “The Beverly Hillbillies”.  It’s hard to truly savor a $4 cup of java after a humiliation like that, so I usually get my coffee at the gas station near the interstate instead.

What is your oldest memory?

I remember sitting on my mother’s lap when I was three and she was pregnant with my first brother, feeling him kick and talking to her about the new baby coming.  At least, I think that’s what the conversation was.  I was three.  I might have been talking to her about whether dinosaurs ate cheese puffs.  It’s kind of hard to say from this vantage point many years later.  These days I’m lucky if I can remember what I heard on the radio five minutes ago.

Paperback, hardback or Kindle? Which of these is your favourite reading format and why?

E-books, totally.  I never thought I’d say that, but I am hooked.  I really wasn’t looking for one, but I got a Kindle for Christmas in 2010.  Once I started using it, getting comfortable with its features and its feel in my hands, I fell in love with it.  Since the Kindle stole my heart, I’ve read only four or five books for pleasure in paper formats.  The amount and variety of reading that I’ve done has skyrocketed though, thanks to the Kindle.

My major exception for e-books is instructional texts.  I still like to have pages to turn and margins in which to write for that kind of book. Plus, you can’t hide a comic book behind a Kindle in class. 

What is your favourite quote/saying?

“This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.” 
~Polonius, from Hamlet Act 1, scene 3, 78–82

The speaker at my high school graduation was a favorite English teacher of mine, who made this the centerpiece of her address.  Yes, I actually listened to the speech and have remembered what she said after all these years.  Someone once told me I am the only person who ever paid attention to a high school commencement speaker.  That’s probably true, but I am glad I did.  I’ve always tried to “keep it real”, and I think that Mrs. Stone’s advice passed on from Shakespeare has been there in the back of my mind as a reminder to do so.

If you could bring back any TV show for another series (season) what would you pick and why?

There was an animated program from Japan adapted for American TV which I watched religiously when I was about ten called Star Blazers.  The show was on our local ABC affiliate every weekday afternoon at 4:30, and it was “appointment TV” for my friends and I.  Everything stopped when Star Blazers came on.  The program was an early Japanese anime series, created for audiences there in the early 70s.  It was dubbed in English (not terribly well) and brought to the States in 1979. 

In brief, it was a sci-fi cartoon about the crew of a resurrected World War II battleship that has been retrofitted to become the most butt-kicking spaceship EVER! They are on a mission to save the Earth by traveling to the edge of the Solar System to retrieve a formula that would save the planet from annihilation by radiation poisoning.  The catch was, they had to do it in less than a year, and some really nasty outer-spacey guys, the ones who radiated Earth in the first place, were constantly trying to thwart their mission by blowing them to smithereens.

I recently saw some original episodes online, and man, does it look CHEESY!  I didn’t notice that at all when I was a kid, but then again, a lot of things I thought were terrific in the late 70s would fall into the cheesy category today.  With the advances in animation technology that have been made, I am sure that the already-totally cool Star Blazers could become even better if it was remade in 2012.  Of course, if that ever did happen, my mind would again be blown, as would those of hundreds of thousands of other middle-aged guys who were once wide-eyed Star Blazers fans like myself in the late 70s.




My questions:

• What would be your second choice for a book to take to a desert island, if your first choice was eaten by a beluga?
• MacDonald’s or Burger King, if you had to choose, and why?
• What was the last album (CD, MP3, whatever) that you purchased?
• What genre would you love to be able to write well in, but have never attempted?
• Would you eat green eggs and ham?
• What is worse for you than bending back a fingernail?
• Who do you admire that is not related to you?
• What is an alternate name for your blog?
• Where would you spend your dream vacation and why?
• What is your rejected pen name?
• Why did you decide to answer these questions?

Bloggers I am tagging:

• Larry Enright @LarryEnright
• Mike Wood- Blog of Wood
• Kit- Blogging Dangerously @blogdangerously
• Mayor Gia @MayorGia
• Thomas Wilson- Storyteller @StorytellerTDW
• Ruby Barnes- eBook Author @Ruby_Barnes
• Johnny Virgil-Fifteen Minute Lunch @johnnyvirgil
• Piper Bayard @PiperBayard
• R.S. Guthrie- Rob on Writing @rsguthrie
• Kathy Lynn Hall- Red Mojo Mama Musing @RedMojoMama
• Handflapper- Handflapping @Handflapper

The Accidental Coffee

I am in possession of an entire pot of accidental coffee this evening.

Here’s the thing: I am not worth a tinker’s damn when I first get up in the morning, so I typically prepare the coffeepot the night before in order to avoid unpleasantness at dawn.  I do it every night, like clockwork.  And I did it tonight.  However, instead of hitting the “AUTO” button so it will start on its own in the morning, I accidentally hit the “ON” button, and then proceeded to leave the room.  A half hour later, I walk back into the kitchen to be greeted by a full pot of coffee.  

Accidental coffee.

Now this is the kind of problem that seems to always find me.  Specifically, a weird one.  What in the world am I going to do with a full pot of coffee at this time of night?

Drink this accidental coffee, you say?  Well, I suppose I could.  Only I have a heck of a hard time falling asleep at night if I drink any coffee after 3:00 in the afternoon.  And this is a pot that my father would say “puts hair on your chest”.  I planned to tackle the next chapter in the book I am co-authoring in the morning, so I made this pot using the so-called “good stuff” (i.e.-not the everyday brand I typically use), and it’s extra strong and extra large.  If I start guzzling java now, I’ll be awake until dawn and be a mess tomorrow.  Plus, I’ll have to run to the bathroom every half hour all night.

 I toyed with the idea of inviting some people over for accidental coffee.  The trouble with that is that it’s fairly late in the evening, and most of the people I would invite are home and settled in for the night.  They have work or whatever in the morning, and going out in the mid-winter cold to have something that will keep them up all night would be about as appealing as a root canal.  So that’s out.

There’s always the option of just dumping this accidental coffee down the drain.  I hate to do this.  You see, I come from a long line of people who subscribe to Yankee frugality.  It’s just not in my blood to waste this much coffee, especially a whole pot of “the good stuff”.  Plus if I did, I am fairly sure that somewhere in Latin America, Juan Valdez would shed a tear.  His burro probably would too.  I would have a hard time living with the thought of that.

I could get creative, I guess.  Maybe I could pour all this accidental coffee into colorful cups, put bright ribbons around them, set them on a decorative tray and take them to my neighbors’ house with a note of appreciation for their being such fine neighbors.  I’d ring the doorbell, set the tray down, and run away.  Then this accidental coffee would be someone else’s problem.  The thoughtful presentation and the kindness behind it would be such that they would have no choice but to take it in and drink it.  Trouble is, I have no colorful cups, bright ribbons, or decorative trays, and my neighbors aren’t all that terrific really.  Their dog tries to bite me and they sometimes play country-western music too loudly.  So that’s out.

The thought of setting up a roadside stand and selling it crossed my mind.  Briefly.  However, the market for accidental coffee sold on the side of the road on a quiet suburban street late on a Sunday night in mid-winter is not really a jumping one, even if the price was right.

So, it looks like I’ll have to compromise.  I’ll drink some of it, but not so much that I’ll be awake all night, and then dump the rest down the drain. 

Sorry, Juan

Winter Un-Whined

A few weeks ago, I wrote at some length about my dislike for winter.  At the time, I noted how effortless it is for me, and many people I think, to slip into whining mode.  I personally find it easier to dwell on the negatives to emphasize the positives.  And it seems that our culture agrees.  Turn on the TV, and you’ll find it brimming with cynicism, condescension, and general gloominess.  This programming wouldn’t be so prevalent if it weren’t for one fact: it sells.

This is actually me, circa 1972.  My attitude toward shoveling hasn't changed much since then.

You’d think these would be halcyon days for someone like me with a longtime reputation as a sarcastic wiseass.  And I suppose they would be if my cynicism was a part of me that I was comfortable embracing. 

But I’m not.  Not really.  I’ve got a pessimist’s head, but an optimist’s spirit.  Admittedly, I let the cynical me have his way more often than I am proud of, but in this post, I am not going to.  I am going to write a counterpoint to my posting of a few weeks ago, and tell you about some upsides of winter, at least as they used to be.

I grew up the oldest child in a largish family in a smallish house, and many were the days when we kids were tossed outside to play and get out from underfoot.  This was before video games and DVDs, so when stuck inside my brothers and I could become bored and whiney nuisances in very short order.  Fortunately, there were lots of other kids living in our neighborhood, and their parents also subscribed to the “you kids go outside and play before I lose my mind” theory of child management.  Unless the temperature was well below zero or a hurricane of at least category three was sweeping through the area, there was typically a gaggle of kids in my neighborhood with some crazy plot brewing.  This was especially true during the snowy winter months.

Across the street from the house where I grew up is a large hill. It’s short but steep, and was the ideal spot for death-defying sledding.  Bear in mind that I was a kid while “The Dukes of Hazzard” was popular on TV.  Consequently, we not only wanted to go down that hill as fast as possible, but we also had a yearning desire to literally fly on our sleds.  Every winter we spent at least a third of our time there making and remaking snow ramps, sometimes at least four feet high, and another third coming up with outlandish and often dangerous stunts that all centered around the idea of hitting those ramps at top speed and going airborne.  There were many times when you would crash spectacularly and literally lie there seeing stars for a minute.  Then you’d somehow get to your feet, march up the steep hill, and do it all again.  We did this dozens of times in a single afternoon, for days and weeks on end.  Thank goodness young bodies are flexible and resilient, because ours were routinely put to the test on that hill.  Our sleds were not as flexible and resilient as we were however.  To this day, you can still find shards of plastic on that hill left behind from destroyed sleds.

As kids, we were constantly looking to get high.  Specifically, we wanted to be high up on a roof or in a tall tree.  The further off the ground we were, the happier we were.  Entire afternoons could be spent plotting ways to get onto a particular garage roof or into the higher branches of a tree in our neighborhood without benefit of a ladder.  Using a “borrowed” ladder was a possibility I suppose, but it would have been both too easy and too obvious.  The neighborhood adults tended not to be in favor of children on their rooftops, so a ladder would have no doubt raised their suspicions.

In the winter, tall banks of snow made it easier for us to get off the ground.  Oftentimes, they were high enough that we merely had to walk up them, give each other a boost, and there we were on a roof.  Of course one poor sap had to stay on the ground, because there was no one left to boost him.  Fortunately, there was one kid among us who was strong but not terribly fond of heights, and in return for giving us boosts, we didn’t razz him for being a chicken. 

Once we got onto the roof, there was only one thing to do after admiring the view, and that’s jump off of course. 

Most structures in northern climes are built with high, steeply pitched roofs to allow the large amounts of snow we get to come off easily.  In some cases, it was close to a 15 to 20 foot drop from near the peak.  Of course by the time jumping season came around, there was plenty of snow to cushion us.  The key to jumping off a tall roof into deep snow is to never, ever stick your landing.  Newcomers to the sport often learn this truth the hard way, and find themselves buried up to their armpits in snow, at the mercy of their friends to help them out of it.  And we usually did, after letting them squirm for a while.  As with many things in life it seems, bending your knees and being flexible were important.  Once you got the hang of it, backflips and somersaults soon followed.

In hindsight, it’s a miracle none of us were killed.  At the time, the danger barely crossed our minds.  Some of you might be thinking that nothing ever crossed our minds.

During particularly severe winters, which many of them were, the snow banks could become enormous.  While we kids would pitch a fit and carry on forever if we were asked by our parents to shovel a walkway or brush snow off the car, we thought nothing of digging into mountains of ice and snow for days on end, often with plastic shovels or our bare hands, constructing snow tunnels and forts.  By midwinter, the snow was pretty packed, and tunnels dug into them were pretty secure.  The coolest thing was when you could actually build a side tunnel off one that already existed.  We considered them “escape tunnels”, though we never really specified from what we would be escaping. 

The winter when I was about ten, we had riddled the largest snow bank in the yard with so many tunnels that we really couldn’t build any more without risking the integrity of what we already had.  Bored, we got the idea that throwing snow from them at passing cars would be fun.  Our tunnels were not easily visible from the street, though we had some small portholes that allowed us to see vehicles coming.  It was easy to see a car coming, decide if it was a worthy target, and fire away if it was.  We didn’t pack the snowballs very hard.  We didn’t want to do any real damage.   

In retrospect, it was an interesting sociological experiment, as we decided which vehicles to nail and which to spare.  Mrs. Johnson, the older lady who always had a bowl of candy close by when we around, was spared by unanimous vote.  Mr. Anderson on the other hand, a grumpy math teacher at the local high school, got bombed.  There was also a kind of unspoken understanding that we would not hit the vehicles of our own family members.

Needless to say, our snow sniper days did not last long.  Two days, and we were busted.  We made the mistake of hitting the truck of a man who lived up the street for a second time, a man whom my father had known since grade school.  He stopped his truck, then pulled into our driveway and caught us red-handed.  My father got an earful over the phone from him that night.  Our geese were cooked, and it was all I could do to convince my father not to have the plow guy totally dismantle our tunnel structure.

It was not all action and adventure in the winters of my youth, however.  One of the things I remember most fondly were the quiet times during a snowstorm, when I was either waiting for my friends to arrive or just after they had left.  I liked to lay flat on my back in the deep snow, while snowflakes fell onto my face.  It could get so quiet during a snowstorm.  Most people laid low during these times, and few vehicles were on the roads.  The newly fallen blanket of snow muffled most sounds that were made.  I remember listening to the sound of my own heartbeat and the barely audible taps of tiny snowflakes hitting my face and clothing.  Sometimes the wind would blow through the evergreen woods nearby, making a unique hissing sound that I associate to this day with those quiet moments in the snow.  Occasionally, a brave little chickadee would venture out into the snow from the woods nearby looking for some seeds in my mother’s birdfeeder.  In a snowstorm like that, you could hear the flap of their small wings as the passed by.  Curious by nature, it was not unheard of for a chickadee to land close to me if I stayed still enough.  I’d slowly turn my head to look at it, and it would cock its head at me as if I’d lost my mind.  I never had one land on me, but always wished one would.

So, no, I admit it, winter is not all bad.  It’s all in the perspective you take.  My days of flying through the air in plastic sleds and jumping off rooftops into snow banks are behind me (unless I want to take some medical leave from work), but there’s nothing stopping me from bundling up during the next snowstorm and flopping down in the snow to experience the beauty of it all.  Maybe the winters wouldn’t seem so long for me if I just took more time to listen to snowflakes falling and socialize with a chickadee or two.

Book Review: Asylum Lake by R.A. Evans

BOOK BLURB: The State’s second largest Psychopathic Hospital opened in 1917 on 600 wooded acres overlooking a small lake near Bedlam Falls, Michigan. Through its doors came the weak and the weary, the disabled and the discarded, the frail and the forgotten. But an open door is an invitation, and some visitors, once invited, are loath to leave. The hospital abruptly closed in 1958 under a cloud of mystery. It has remained empty and silent, save for the memories trapped both within its walls and far below the surface of the nearby lake that bears its name. At the bottom of Asylum Lake, the unremembered are growing restless. 

Brady Tanner is trying to outrun memories of his own. After the sudden death of his wife, Brady retreats to the small town where he spent the summers of his youth. But he soon learns small towns can be stained by memories…and secrets, too. As Brady is drawn into unearthing these secrets, as he discovers a new love in an old friend, he is also drawn into the mystery of Asylum Lake and the evil that lies submerged beneath its sparkling surface. What is the source of this evil – and what does it want with Brady Tanner?




I run hot and cold with so-called "horror novels", but for some reason was attracted to Asylum Lake by R.A. Evans. In essence, it is the story of a young journalist who returns to his hometown after tragedy befalls him, and becomes involved in supernatural happenings related to his late father and grandfather, a mysterious bracelet, and the abandoned insane asylum across the lake from his childhood home.

While there is no shortage of the requisite blood found in most horror fiction, R.A. Evans is clearly a smart writer, and builds a multi-layered story in Asylum Lake with characters in whom the reader genuinely becomes invested. Brady is a likable and believable protagonist, and the other characters are equally well-drawn. Evans makes great use of setting and effectively incorporates several horror motifs, especially "love interest/child/pet in danger". His pace is quick, but not frenetic.

I can always tell a terrific read by its ability to keep me up past my bedtime.  Asylum Lake did this for several nights. I highly recommend the book, and am looking forward to more from R.A. Evans.


This book was published in the summer of 2010, and the author is currently working on the follow-up.  His blog can be found here: http://www.raevanswrites.wordpress.com.com

FIVE STARS!