Sunday Stealing — Back to Bed

sarcophagus

Man with sleeping mask and earplugs in bed

Welcome to Sunday Stealing, Back to Bed.

“Last week, we shared questions about your bathroom. This week, with questions stolen from Manic Monday, we’re moving to the bedroom.”

1. Let’s say your alarm wakes you up with music. What would be the worst song to hear first thing in the morning?

It doesn’t matter. Any song with words is irritating to wake up to, even songs I like. 

2. How many pillows do you sleep with?

Two. One doesn’t cut it at all.

3. What size mattress do you sleep on?

I share a queen with my wife. 

4. Do you always sleep on the same side of the bed?

Yes, to my wife’s left, near my dresser. 

5. Do you make your bed every day?

No. My wife often does. Back in the 1980s, I visited my sister in California. After I didn’t make the bed for a couple of days, she made it and said, “Won’t that feel better?” NO! Being in a well-made bed is like being in a sarcophagus. I’ll kick out a hospital corner in minutes.  

6. Do you keep water on your bedside table?

No, I’d almost certainly knock it over.

7. How often do you change your sheets?

Once a week.

8. What’s under your bed?

A couple of bins of clothes, I think.

9. Do you sleep in total darkness or like to have a light on?

It’s mostly darkness. There’s a night light on the baseboard in the hallway, so I can see if I wake up in the middle of the night, which happens about two-thirds of the time. 

My childhood room

10. What do you remember about your childhood bedroom?

Growing up, we lived on the first floor of a small two-story house owned by my maternal grandmother. I probably slept in the same room as my sister Leslie until my sister Marcia arrived. 

There was no other room as such. In the middle room, my father built a wall that ran from the kitchen entrance about 2/3 of the way into the room, then another wall at a 90-degree angle from the first, leaving about an entrance to my room the size of a standard door, though I did not HAVE a door. Then he built a solid piece of wood – one large shelf – held up by the two new walls and the existing wall to serve as the frame for my “bed”. On top of that was a foam mattress.

I did have room for my stuff under the bed, including a very low dresser. Around the corner was my bookcase, filled with my Golden Book Encyclopedias, World Almanac, and other books.

One of those books described the solar system and gave the relative sizes of the sun and the planets. So my father painted the solar system on the ceiling in my room—a giant sun and the various planets, including their known moons at the time. I remember that according to the book, Jupiter had 12, Saturn 9, Neptune 5, Uranus and Mars 2 apiece, and Earth and Pluto 1 each.

Since the walls my father built didn’t reach the ceiling, a single ceiling light illuminated the middle room/my room. Anyone coming to visit us who went into the kitchen or bathroom was likely to see at least this massive star on the ceiling.

The Bed from the Broadway musical HAIR

Sunday Stealing — Bathroom Break

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

The Bathroom Break meme of Sunday Stealing is unusual. “First, we’re stealing from a blogging couple: Jeff and Charli Lee. You don’t see married boggers every day. Second, they appear to have come up with this idea themselves. No theft involved! Let’s see how it goes.”

The Bathroom Meme

1. Do you shampoo once or lather, rinse, and repeat?

Once. There just isn’t that much hair to shampoo. 

2. Do you use conditioner a) daily, b) when you need it, c) never?

When I think of it, which is about once a month, if it happens to be in the shower.

3. What’s your shaving cream preference: foam or gel? 

Neither. I haven’t shaved in decades, and back then, I don’t recall anything except foam. I initially grew a beard out of preference and the pain of ingrown facial hairs. It’s also because my vitiligo is strong on my lower face. 

4. Is your toothbrush manual or electric?

Electric. Apparently, I don’t do it well enough for the manual brush, according to my dental hygienist.

5. Dental floss, soft picks, neither, or both? 

Soft picks.

6. Do you use mouthwash a) daily, b) when you need it, c) never?

Roughly daily.

Bathroom mags

7. Are there magazines in your bathroom?

Yes, but there would be more if it didn’t irritate my wife. I grew up reading magazines in the bathroom, mostly Reader’s Digest and The Ladies Home Journal, specifically the Can This Marriage Be Saved column.  Here’s a 2014 piece from Huff Post berating said column. 

8. Is there bar soap or liquid soap on your bathroom sink? 

Liquid and bar. I use the former.

9. What kind of soap is in your shower?

Liquid and bar. I use the latter, but I like that hotels use refillable body wash dispensers.

10. Now for the most important question: Does the toilet paper drape over or under?

As the Dave Clark Five sang, Over and Over.

Incidentally, the picture above is from our 2015 bathroom renovation, which I wrote about here.

Sunday Stealing — Time Travel

COVID phone calls

from the Oddity Mall

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. “Here, we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. “Here’s Time Travel.

“I can’t trace back where these were stolen from. So sue me.”

 What were you doing …

1. Twenty years ago? This is shockingly easy because I just wrote about starting my blog two decades ago. I was still figuring out what the heck I was going to discuss. At my job at the NY SBDC, we will start a blog later in the month. I think I was working at 41 State St. That 7th-floor suite was the best office I’ve ever worked in. I loved that I had a door, yet I also had a window to look out onto the main space.

2. Ten years ago? I was involved in the ABC Wednesday meme, possibly running it, or being Mrs. Nesbitt’s lieutenant. The SBDC was in Corporate (frickin’) Woods, which I hated. I was getting allergy shots regularly. My daughter was opting out of the core curriculum test; her choice.

2020

3. Five years ago? This was the early days of COVID. My church, specifically my wife, the membership chair at the time, worked on this project where members would call other people from the church, letting them know we were thinking about them. I took the premise and started calling different people, some of whom I used to see and others I hadn’t talked to in several years. It was an exciting experience. “Roger called me out of the blue!”  I started watching a few things online; it’s not my favorite way to see movies, but that was what was available. I applied to work on the 2020 census, which I would do in July through September.

4. One year ago? Nothing unusual. Find speakers for the Friends and Foundation of the Albany Public Library talks on Tuesdays, and sing in the choir.

5. Yesterday?  I went to Earthworld for Free Comic Book Day. The choir sang at the very emotional funeral of Christy Harris D’Ambrosio, then went to the gathering afterwards. I watched the replay of the Kentucky Derby.

Bonus! What will you do tomorrow? I’m going to find out whether I strained my left Achilles tendon or tore it.

Sunday Stealing — Interview with Gale

Barbados

Richard, Otis, Eddie, Melvin, Glenn, David, Dennis

Why Interview with Gale for Sunday Stealing? “Back in 2007, a blogger named Harmonica Man posted five questions for Gale at This Was Me. Well, now we’re turning the tables and interviewing you.”

1. What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever done? Did it take physical or emotional courage?

I wrote about it here, starting with A Story. But briefly, “I started climbing up [a mountain] just to get a better view” in Alta, UT, in the fall of 1994. I got to the top. 

“Now the descent. I tried to brake myself from going too fast. I got maybe a third of the way down, and I began sliding. But I wasn’t too worried until my left leg got caught in a hole, while the rest of my body weight was going downhill.

“My left knee started hurting, a LOT. Somehow, I crawled the rest of my way down, then the few dozen meters to where we were staying.”

This was not courageous. It was stupid, borne of the pain of a deteriorating relationship. Then I had REAL physical pain, which I experience to this day.

2. Where did you meet the love of your life?

At church. I was probably chair of the Council of Ministries, and she was the Membership Chair. 

3. What brand/flavor of coffee are you drinking these days?

I don’t drink coffee. As I’ve noted in the past, I don’t make coffee either. When I was assigned to the rotation at work to make coffee, the product was so awful that I was excused thereafter.  

Caribbean

4. What’s the coolest place you’ve ever visited, and how did you get there (car, plane, motorcycle, etc.)?

I wrote about this here. It was Barbados in May 1999 on our honeymoon:

“It was just grand to go to any all-inclusive resort for six nights, especially as a prize for coming in second on JEOPARDY on my second episode… 

“The ocean was gorgeous…  There were three different places to eat dinner, and the food was fabulous. We bought a rum cake to take home; it was extraordinarily delicious. We enjoyed having tea at 4 p.m.

“Everything was interesting to us, from the way the news was far more international to the wall-to-wall coverage of cricket.

“When we returned to the States… Somehow, we were bumped to first class on the five-hour flight home.” 

The eighties

5. What’s the best concert you ever attended?

It’s long been two: The Temptations Reunion tour, where Eddie and David joined Dennis, Otis, Glenn, Richard, and Melvin. “I saw this performance at the Colonie Coliseum in Albany County in 1982. First, they sang together, then in groups of five. They started with the first classic lineup, with Richard replacing the late Paul. Then Dennis went in for David, then Glenn supplanted Eddie. They closed by singing together.” And it was a close-up view with no bad seats in the house.

The other was the  August 1983 performance of Talking Heads at the Saratoga Performance Arts Center on  the Stop Making Sense tour. I finally saw the Jonathan Demme Stop Making Sense movie in 2023. “The first half of the movie transported me back four decades, with the attendant awe, from Byrne’s solo Psycho Killer to the pieces with the full band, including Alex Weir, Bernie Worrell, and Steve Scales. Honestly, I was joyfully exhausted by the band and backup singers Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry’s energy.”

Sunday Stealing is FAB

laundry detergent

For Sunday Stealing: “Since it’s Easter weekend, we’re going to keep this simple. We stole this from a blogger named Idzie, who called this the FAB. (film, audio, book) meme.”

There is such a blurring of the lines between movies and television shows that it’s challenging for me to categorize them. Also, I find it interesting that some people watch TV and films on their phones; I find this utterly unsatisfactory. I don’t wanna be tied to my phone. Adriana Diaz on CBS Mornings talked about watching a horror movie on her phone, occasionally covering her eyes. In my opinion, that’s no way to watch a movie. I want to watch a film on the big screen; failing that, on a television screen. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched many films on my laptop; it was an extraordinary time.

F.A.B.

F. Film: What movie or TV show are you watching? 

Most of the movies I watch, I’ve blogged about on this site. 

I watch CBS Sunday Morning, 60 Minutes, CBS Saturday Morning, Jeopardy, Abbott Elementary, Finding Your Roots, Grey’s Anatomy (been watching since the beginning), and Elsbeth (who was a character on the TV show called The Good Wife, which I used to watch religiously).  I still watch JEOPARDY! and enjoy it when I get a clue that none of the contestants know: MYTHOLOGY $800: Stronger than dirt, this great warrior eventually went mad & killed himself. 

A. Audio: What are you listening to?

Most of what I’m listening to, aside from the Coverville and AmeriNZ podcasts and the Heather Cox Richardson Substack, are YouTube videos, which I watch as well as listen to.

For instance, I watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which is on HBO,  but I don’t watch it on HBO, but on YouTube a day or three later on my laptop.

I always watch Vlogbrothers. Sometimes, I watch The Legal Eagle, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, Trae Crowder Liberal Redneck, and Rick Beato.

I do a lot of grazing. Upstate Uncovered by Chuck D’Imperio. Searching for Solid Ground, a memoir by Reggie Harris. A bunch of reference books.

Ramblin' with Roger
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