Posts Tagged ‘anniversary’
May 22nd, 2013 | 
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By demand from Island Rambles. I mean Shooting Parrots asked for it, but IR INSISTED!
When I was forced to get rid of my microwave by my lovely bride after we got married and moved in together, one of the things I most missed was making microwave popcorn. Now Carol would say, “Oh, you can make popcorn on the stove.” Well, no; maybe SHE could, and occasionally/rarely she did, but I could not, unless you considered creating a smoky and scorched pot, oddly filled with burnt popcorn AND unpopped kernels, “making popcorn.” I used the oil, even moved the pot as instructed but to no particular success, unless the goal was to make a mess without having a satisfactory culinary outcome. It’s OK to mess up a lot of pans if there’s a payoff, but without one…
I must have mentioned me missing this appliance at a gathering of her birth family, around Thanksgiving or Christmas of 1999. When we all got together for Mother’s Day the next year, they brought ME a box of microwave popcorn, which I accepted graciously. This was just the wrong response for them.
What I was SUPPOSED to do is kvetch, “But we don’t have a microwave! What am I to do with this?” At that point, they were going to then give us a microwave, which we could use in the new house, where we were going to move into the following week, and there would as room for it. Instead, I figured to just use the microwave popcorn at work.
Finally, the following weekend, they brought us the new microwave, as a first anniversary/housewarming present, disappointed that they did not have a little fun at my expense. Indeed, inadvertently, I had some fun at THEIR expense, and I wasn’t even trying.
AND, after very little practice, I almost NEVER burn the popcorn.
LISTEN: Buttered Popcorn by the Supremes
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I was flicking through the TV channels a couple weeks ago and discovered there’s some new reality show about newlyweds that’s going to be airing soon. Couldn’t tell you the name of it – and truth to tell, wouldn’t bother to look it up – but the clips were full of Sturm und Drang, because doesn’t that sound entertaining?
The running joke The Wife and I have is that we’ve been happily married 13 years; we’ve been wed 14 . The skill of fading memory makes that first 12 months not feel THAT bad. Read the rest of this entry »
eight
To be sure, occasionally it was just a single YouTube video, but even then, it almost always had a soupçon of contextual verbiage. (Here’s a question for you all – how does one type a ç from a standard US typewriter? The one in the previous sentence I cut and pasted.)
One of the ways I have maintained whatever level of sanity I have is that I don’t blog here nearly as often as I used to. Some days early on, I would blog here more than once a day. I’ve tried very hard not to do that anymore. Read the rest of this entry »
Did I mention that I was always appreciative of the fact that my parents were wed in 1950? It was always easy to remember how long they had been married; the math was easy. I was a five-days-early third anniversary present to them, my mother used to say.
I wish I could find this particular photo of my parents on their wedding day. Actually, there are a couple of them. One is of them cutting the cake, which is nice. The other, though, was one taken in the living room of my maternal grandmother. There’s the smiling, happy couple, plus Mom’s mother Gert, her aunt Deana, her uncle Ed, and her Uncle Ernie, all looking sullen. Also in the photo, Ernie’s wife Charlotte, looking like myopic people sometimes looked in photos, and their kids, Raymond, ten years to the day younger than my mother, and Frances, looking mildly bored as tweens (a term that didn’t exist then) were wont to do.
Fran was interviewed in 2005, as I noted here in 2010. Fran believed that my grandma’s family’s resistance to my father was because of his skin color. Read the rest of this entry »
Around 1981, my mother took a cooperative extension course near her home in Charlotte, NC; I don’t even know what the topic was. What my sisters and I DO recall, though, is that it had a profound, and, from our point of view, negative impact on her.
The message she received from the class was that she was a bad mother. She worked outside the home most of the time when we were growing up. She left her children Read the rest of this entry »
Happy New Year! We begin 2013, a year of a mere 365 days, unlike last year.
Here are some 2013 movable holidays. Note: the ones marked # begin at sundown on the day before they are listed.
February 10: Chinese New Year, the year of the snake
February 13: Ash Wednesday
February 24: Purim#
March 10: Daylight Saving Time begins in the US
March 31: Easter Sunday (Western) Read the rest of this entry »
I started my current job as a business librarian on October 19, 1992. It’s the only librarian job I’ve ever had, though I was a page at the then Binghamton Public Library for seven months back in high school.
After I quit FantaCo, and spent a miserable year at Blue Cross, I started being nagged by not one, but THREE people, two librarians and a lawyer, insisting that I should go to library school. I didn’t want to; I had tried graduate school a decade before, in public administration; didn’t much like it. Having no better idea, though, I capitulated.
I found that I enjoyed it greatly. My work study project for the dean, the late Richard Halsey, included doing a demographic study of the students enrolled in the program. Of the 104 folks in the program, the average age was 37, which was MY age! This was extremely comforting. Read the rest of this entry »