Category: Life

  • Hey! Snow! Which Doesn’t Happen Anymore!

    Up where I live in Harlem, we got little over an inch of snow overnight and this morning. Besides the fact that snow is fun, the other big story with the snow is that this storm snapped the 701-day streak of New York City not receiving at least an inch of snow. Seriously, we have nearly gone two years without any real snow in New York. You know, because the climate is changing.

    It’s funny how in my twenty years in New York, I have witnessed the climate of this place turned on it’s head. Maybe not “funny,” but like “ironic-sad?” No, that’s not correct either. More like, “Depressing-Tears-of-a-Clown” kind’a funny. There we go; that’s accurate.

    When I moved up here, there was snow in November. That first winter, it sleeted on Valentine’s Day, and was so cold that the sleet froze and iced the City for five days. We’d get snow like rain showers, and added on top of that, at least two blizzards a season. And it would be cold enough that snow/ice wouldn’t melt for weeks. That feels like a million years ago, and fairy tale of Winters-Gone-By.

    It’s also true when it comes to Spring and Fall. May used to be an amazing month in the City. It would only get up to 70 at the warmest, nothing below the 50’s at night, and each day of the month it would incrementally get warmer. Everything would start blooming, grass came back to life, and the skies would be just the bluest. September was equally amazing; just like May but in reverse. A slow slide into Fall – You would start the month in shorts and end in a sweater. Now, May and September are bi-polar, raging between too hot and too cold. The gradualness of these months are gone.

    Sure, you could dismiss me as the old guy yelling at a cloud, but the weather facts back me up. It’s warmer and the inclement weather is more erratic. The world is changing, and I at least have enough faith that humanity will be able to adapt, but I’m not so sure on solving this problem. I fear we may never go back to the way it was.

    Ung…

    This went a little darker than I wanted.

    Look I wanted to end with the idea that most likely, I’m going to go sledding with the kid after school, because snow is still fun. Especially to kids and middle-aged men who grew up in Texas and never had any winter weather to play in.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Gym, Dallas Cowboys, and Being a Bad Drummer

    (In case you haven’t heard… Joe Walsh is my Spirit Animal.)

    Made it to the gym today. That would be my first gym visit for 2024. I know that I wanted to go, like, on January 1st, but I am rather lazy. So, making it in the joint by the 12th is like a win. I didn’t do anything crazy, just ran on the treadmill for thirty minutes. Also, I went later in the day, and not at the crack of dawn, as I wanted to miss the “Getting Back in Shape for the New Year” crowd. Yeah… most of these people will be gone by March. I’m not perfect either, but I do at least hang in there until June. I’m back in the gym by September, and then when it’s November, I’m done for the year. So, I really only work out seven months, and skip five. Now this year, I plan on being in the gym for eight months, and out for four.

    Hey! The Dallas Cowboys play on Sunday, against the Green Bay Packers. It’s the first round of the playoffs, and I am ready with hopes to be dashed! Dallas plays great at home, so it is conceivable that they will win this game and the next. Then for the NFC Championship, odds are that could be in San Francisco, which is just trouble. But it is the Cowboys, so there could be a meltdown, and dreams crashed before that. In the end, I picked the wrong month to quit drinking.

    I don’t think about this often, but today was a day when I had the overwhelming feeling of missing being a bad drummer in a not so great band. I don’t think we ever thought that we were going to be a huge rich and famous band, but we did like being loud and obnoxious. I did have trouble keeping in time, and I never mastered a stutter-step on the bass drum, but smashing the hell out of a kit was therapeutic. Lot of aggression got worked out. Another wonderful side effect of being in a not so great band was that we did listen to so much music; different artist, forms, styles, genres, ages, everything… I don’t listen to as much music as I used to. It was worth being in a garage band.

  • A Project Manager for My Family

    I know we are on the second week of the new year, but is it too early to feel overwhelmed with everything that me and my family want to accomplish in 2024?

    Yes, it is too early to feel overwhelmed in this new year. I would say the start of February is an acceptable time to feel overwhelmed with 2024.

    “Overwhelmed” might be me overreacting a tad.

    There is a lot we need to do, and starting around November, I said that we’d tackle it at the start of the year…

    Yeah…

    I mean, I gotta finish sound damping our bedroom wall, patch some holes, paint the living room, find a new dentist for the kid, make summer travel plans, get new glasses… honestly, I could go on forever. Oh! I gotta find a new storage space for us that’s closer to the apartment and less expensive.

    And then I started thinking that I should use a project management software, or platform, to help me organize everything. Help me find a faster way to work, use my time better, follow up on tasks. That would help, right?

    I did some searching, and I found out two things. One, if you are looking to project manage your family, you could use any PM platform and even use Google Calendar and Tasks. And two, there aren’t many people who do this with their family.

    I actually found that rather odd.

    I would have thought more apps would be out there to help you organize all the tasks and goals a family has. Our little family has so many balls up in the air with playdates and birthday parties, school events, and teacher conferences… Then then there is the stuff I also mentioned above. Seems like there is a goldmine waiting to be explored and exploited by making people feel like their families are disorganized, and that the PM app is what will solve all their problems.

    The trick is that you have to follow through on completing the tasks. You know, if you don’t at work, you get fired. In a family, you just get made fun of because you disappointed everyone, but you get to hold on to your job.

    Huh?

    Still – I need help organizing all of this stuff.

  • Moving Stuff Around

    After Thanksgiving, like the day after, is when we put up our Christmas decorations. And to be honest, we never had a good place to put our tree. The curse of a small NYC apartment: There is a never a good place for anything.

    But this year, the wife came up with a good idea, which was to move our lounge-sofa away from our windows, and place the tree there. The tree looked nice in that location, and with all the other decoration we put up, it looked very festive, but cluttered – a Christmas explosion.

    Anyway, I mentioned before that we take everything down after New Year’s, but with the holiday on a Monday, and everyone back to life on Tuesday, we didn’t get around to cleaning up until this weekend. It took all day Saturday, but we got it done. Life had returned to normal, but we decided not to move the sofa back. We were tired, and ready to relax.

    And something amazing happened.

    The new placement of the sofa has changed the whole mood and flow of our apartment. You could logically assume that we were just reacting to something being “new” and in time it will wear off. But I have to admit, for the past two days our home has felt different, more home like, peaceful, calmer even.

    Is it possible that the placement of the sofa was holding us back? Does anyone remember Feng Shui? That was a pop-culture thing, right? Was that real or something made up to sell sofas?

    The funny thing is that I remember being a kid and my parents would do something like this very randomly, like every few years; that they would get a bug in their ear and just start rearranging the furniture in the home, and then talk about how much better everything felt.

    So, I have discovered another way that I am slowly becoming my parents. Not that I mind.

    No… Maybe the better way to think about this is that I am coming to a better understanding of who my parents were.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Christmas Has to Go, Can You Believe It, Must Win, and Serious

    (It’s a trip… it’s got a FUNKY beat. And I can bug out to it!)

    This is the weekend that we are taking the Christmas decorations down. Normally, we do this on January 1st, as a sort of cleaning the house for the New Year. And I think you can read between the lines there and see that the wife and I have passed the days of staying up late and waking with a hangover. But this year, we didn’t get around to it. We put it off. Not that we had a good reason to do that, other than we wanted to lay around and not doing anything on New Year’s Day. The end result was that we got an extra week of Christmas, which has left me feeling like the holiday has over stayed its welcome. I like Christmas, but I really like it when it lives tightly between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

     Sometimes I find it hard to believe that we live in a world where the movies Cocktail and Road House exist.

    And I need the Cowboys and Tottenham to win this weekend. Simple as that. If it doesn’t happen I will be heartbroken and disconnected from the universe.

    Some evenings, late at night, when I am alone on the couch while my family sleeps, I start to believe that the core of me is a very serious person. Alone and in the dark, I am confident in this pronouncement. And I say these things to myself when I am normally watching a terrible ninja movie, or something awful by Bert I. Gordon. That is when I know that I am a contradiction at all times. A silly one at that. I like walking funny and talking in goofy voices. I make up songs about doing mundane tasks. And I’d rather laugh than cry. I’d rather make you laugh; Try to make you happy through humor. I still attempt to rob an honest melancholy tear from people… but… I have never felt sure that’s what I’m best at. Yet, honestly, I have never felt sure about anything. And if I think too hard about that, I might start to wonder, worry, and then cry. Which is why I’d rather laugh. Hold it off, at bay, for a little while longer.