Month: May 2025

  • A Manic Laundry Monday

    A Manic Laundry Monday

    In case anyone has forgotten, I am a stay at home dad. Though hard to believe, blogging don’t pay the bills, and as such, I take my responsibility as the primary caregiver of my family very serious. Well… Serious enough. I’m not great at this stuff, but I do get the job done.

    And the one jobs I do on the regular is my families laundry. I do lots of laundry, and as the kid keeps getting older and bigger, I am doing more and more laundry. I have started to fear and dread the teenage years, and the amount of clothing that will be coming my way.

    Now, I have only been the stay at home dad for the past five years, but my mastery of all things laundry has been ongoing for eleven. Even before the kid was born, I took care of out clothes. Sometimes I would drop it off at a wash and fold service, sometimes I would get up early on a Sunday morning and take care of it. But for whatever reason, be it through decision or frustration, I became the laundry guy.

    And full honesty, it is my least favorite chore. Cooking, cleaning, doing the finances, going to the school meetings, dropping the kid off/picking her up – all of that I am fine with. Just not the laundry. It’s a thankless task, and no one likes it, and it eats up so much of my time. I try to get it all done on Monday, as no one likes Monday, and I have found that at my local laundromat, Monday is the least busy day.

    But I have started to wonder of late, that I can’t keep this up forever. I have to carry the laundry to the mat, and as I pointed out, each year, more and more clothing gets added to the task. I fear that at some point, the laundry chore will become so big that I will either have to split it up over two days, or I am going to have to beg my landlord to allow us to have a washer/dryer hook up. Not that we have a place for it in this tiny apartment. Surely, I don’t want to be that old man carrying a sack of dirty clothes, or worse yet, have to use a granny cart…

  • ODDS and ENDS: Quantum Renaissance, Stupid Tottenham, and Mother’s Day

    ODDS and ENDS: Quantum Renaissance, Stupid Tottenham, and Mother’s Day

    (Bust with the whippets…)

    In the evening, it’s hard t find a tv show that me, the wife, and the kid can agree on. The stuff me and my wife watch is way too adult for the kid, and the kid thinks she adult enough for it, which she isn’t. But, the wife came up with an idea, which was to watch old TV shows on Roku TV and Tubi. (This is not a plug for either service.) As of late, the show we are all enjoying is Quantum Leap, which still hold up very well. (Though Sam does seem to fall in love with the ladies rather easily…) The most surprising aspect of watching this show is how latched on and invested my daughter is. Like, it’s what she wants to watch, and has even gone a little into a few fan theories about the show; how much Sam is influenced by the person he leaps into, and so forth. No real surprise here as dramatically, each episode is different from the last, which keeps you engaged as to see what happens next. But the kid totally got wrapped up in the show when Sam leaped into a DJ from the late 50’s, and it dawned on my daughter that the “teenagers” in the show would have been her grandparents. (MIND BLOWN!) It never dawned on the kid that her grandparents were once young and rowdy!

    Looks like Tottenham went on won their second match against Glimt in Norway, and now they are in the Europa League final against Man United. Damn It! Just when I had completely given up hope, and written off the whole Spurs season, that stupid team has gone on to position themselves with the opportunity of winning a trophy, and qualifying for the Champions League next season. Damn it, man! Now I have hope, and excitement again! That’s the last thing I wanted at this point in the season.

    Mother’s Day is Sunday. Call your mom. Sure wish I could.

  • Earworm Thursday: I Love The Cars

    I love The Cars, and love the hell outta this song. Also, I put the live version of this song up, as there is something so cool about The Cars as a band performing live.

  • Short Story Review: “Slow Leak” by Lavina Blossom

    (The piece “Slow Leak” by Lavina Blossom was first published in Okay Donkey on March 7th, 2025.)

    I had an acting professor in college tell me that the easiest way to learn about a character was through their simplest actions. Such as, how does your character pick up a glass of water? How do they read the newspaper? How would they answer the phone? This was an idea toward character development that always stuck with me, because mundane ordinary actions can give valuable insight on the disposition of the character. This idea bounced around my head as I read Lavina Blossom’s piece “Slow Leak,” published by Okay Donkey.

    The ordinary action of this story is an older woman, possible elderly or at least getting near it, who is trying to leave and lock her car without forgetting anything. Though the prose is not stream of consciousness, it has an adjacent feel to that form, as the unnamed protagonist floats between obstacle and resolution, which allows her thoughts to drift to related topics in her life. What this creates is a feeling of fluidity of motion, both physical and mental, in the protagonist, which keeps the story moving forward. She looks for her phone, contemplates adding phone numbers to the device, wonders about a slow leak in her tire that her son told her about, and plays with the car key fob, locking and unlocking the doors.

    Then hovering just above the action, thematically, is the feeling of sadness and aging. She has a new phone that her grandson had to show her how to use, friends are passing away, her husband is in a nursing home and doesn’t full recognize her anymore. Her independence is being threatened, and dependence on others, even if it is family, is not an appealing solution for her. Though she doesn’t have to make a decision in this story about her future, she is aware that the day will come and things will have to change.

    Which takes me back to the locking and unlocking of the car doors, a narrative device that Blossom uses again at the end of the story. The protagonist pushes the fob in the darkness, registering the sound the car makes, but unsure which sound means locked or unlocked – reinforcing the idea of indecision. It’s a nice button to the piece, because with these small actions we have come to understand the essence of this character.

  • Need to Get Outta Here

    Need to Get Outta Here

    I have been feeling a little stir-crazy in the apartment of late. Spring has arrived, we even had two days of Summer, and with the windows open, warmer weather, and everything turning green, being in the City all the time has started to feel like a drag. It’s time to do some travelling and see something new. Well… newish would also work.

    We are fortunate enough to have a car, and during the Pandemic, it was a lifeline as it allowed us to get out of New York, and see green spaces, or spaces that had no people so we could spread out. We even went through, what we can now define as, our hiking phase which took us all over the Tri-State area. But the wife has a back injury, so hiking has taking a backburner role in our life, at least until the wife gets her full mobility back. Yet, with the car, we can travel in the realm of day trips.

    That’s where I am at right now. I’m a bit anxious to get in the car and just drive up along the Hudson, and look at antiques. Maybe even a charming café would be nice. I won’t say no to a craft brewery, as I am a man of that age, and the wife can drive home.

    But what I really want is to just go. To move, get action, sully on to someplace. To be in motion and not feel static.