Tag: Life

  • Leap Year

    Today is the Leap Year Day. My kid is very excited about it, and I think her school is doing something to “celebrate” the occasion. I get the excitement, as I remember when a kid was, at this odd occurrence that happens once every four years. You know, like the Olympics or a Presidential Election.

    When I was her age, we debated over and over again about people who were born on the Leap Year Day, how they would get robbed and only have a birthday once every four years. Or how they couldn’t buy beer for at least eighty-four years. I’m sure if we knew somebody who was born on the Leap Year Day, then we could get all of our questions answered. But being that we didn’t, these questions were left up to a continuous debate that only raged quadrennially.

    Even right now, I could Google it and get an answer. Honestly, why would I do that? Why would I kill all the fun?

    A big part of childhood is being confronted with these conundrums of life, and then trying to puzzle your way out of them. Most of the time they were solved by asking an adult, but first there was always the debate on the playground, or on the bus, or at the lunch table. There was always a kid who had a cousin who was born on a Leap Year who had to lie about their age to get a drivers’ license, and if the cops found out that they had lied, they’d go to jail. Or if you stay up three days straight, your heart will explode and die. This one kid’s dad was in the navy, and that why there are three shifts on a ship, so everyone gets a chance to sleep and no one will die.

    My daughter was telling me some rather strange and far out explanation about people and their birthdays when it falls on Leap Year Day.

    Good to know that kids are still kids, even in this day and age.

  • SNOW DAY!

    For real! No Fooling! An honest to God snow day has befallen the City!

    Sadly, most kids have to “remote in” to school today, so they aren’t off.

    But not my kid!

    Nope, her school closed, and she gets the joy of having a bonus day! She got to sleep in, and when she did wake up, she got a super sugary cereal for breakfast. There was an art project of making her own trading cards. Then we went out in the snow and walked the dog. That took it out of us, so we had hot chocolate and she curled up in her bed to read the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events. Then she finished her homework, and is watching TV next to me on the couch as I work.

    Looking out the window, huge fat and chunky wet snowflakes are blowing sideways. For me, a kid who grew up in Texas, snow has never stopped being amazing and magical. I also remember that on those completely rare occasions when it would snow in North Texas, as we’re talking a total of 2 inches was like a blizzard there, there was this running clock in my head that I had to get out there and play in it before it went away, because it would go away. My parents grew up in Illinois, so snow was nothing new to them, and I know there were highly amused at my excitement for that least amount of snow.

    My kid has a much more chill attitude toward snow, clearly due to being born in a blizzard and having grown up in NYC. Though we haven’t had a major snow event in almost two years, we do get one good storm a season. The kid owns her own sled after all.

    But the day feels lazy and relaxing. The running clock in my head doesn’t tick anymore, and we’ll hit up the local sledding hill after lunch.

  • 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.

  • Starting Things Off Right

    You know, the first thing I have to do when I start writing at the beginning of the year is create a new folder to save my documents in. Hello file, 2024.

    This is also my last day of Winter Vacation. The kid goes back to school tomorrow, and though the wife started back at work today, we didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn, so it felt like we got to sleep in a little. Wednesday, we will all hit the road running; Making breakfast for the family, making the kid’s lunch, getting everyone dressed and out the door. Back to the grind.

    Speaking of grind; I gotta figure out what I want to do for this year. I have the standard stuff like cutting down on alcohol, working out more, more sleep, more reading, getting published in two journals this year. I do have some around the home projects that I need to take care of, and I would like to get better at the family budget and get our collective ass out of the final bit of our debt. (HA! We’ll never be out of debt…)

    I can say that I need to work on taking more time for the things I want to accomplish. I got a bit frustrated in the last three months of the year as I stopped working on my stuff. My writing production fell off sharply, and I know that I was to blame for it. But, I’m starting a new year, and it’s a new chance to correct old problems.

    Optimism can be a nice thing to have around.

  • Pretty Much My Last Blog Post of 2023

    I think that will be true. We are getting down to crunch time for the Holidays; the kid will be off from school, and soon the wife will be taking her Christmas vacation from work. Then we do have some traditions around the City we like to take part in, so the time to blog is growing short. And as such, this might be the last one I write for the year.

    Not that anyone is asking for this, and I am talking to the couple of you who stop by this blog, but I’ll post a Best of 2023, as well as some Holiday videos for Christmas and New Year’s. Once the kid and wife are back in school, I will resume the normal blogging schedule.

    As for 2023, it wasn’t a bad year…

    On the writing front, I submitted to 50+ magazines, and got accepted in one. I had planned on sending out to 100, and only then did I hope that maybe I’d get a bite. So, I’ll chalk that up as a win. I have three stories out there that I am waiting to hear on, so I guess there is still hope. The blog readership grew this year, which was unexpected to say the least. Most days, I feel like I am talking to myself in the dark, and lets be honest, that’s a rather true description. Yet, I averaged 5 readers a day in 2022, and in 2023 that grew to 20. I’m sure there are some Russian bots in those numbers, but some of you are real. Also, looking at the numbers, if you stop by this blog, you’re reading the Short Story Reviews, and not many of the other things I write about. (I don’t get any likes for my Tottenham posts, but I’m still going to write about my club.) I will say this about the reviews, which is that I have read more short stories this year than any other year of my life. I have discovered many new online lit journals which are great, and most importantly, I have read so many great new writers. I could do a better job about promoting these journals and writers, and perhaps that should be a goal for myself in 2024. I was hesitant in 2023 as I was writing and submitting myself, and I had this idea that it could be considered a conflict of interest. Then I reminded myself that no one knows who I am, no one cares, so I should just relax.

    On the other personal fronts; my wife is good, the kid is healthy and doing well in school, and life in the City isn’t too bad. There will always be things that I need to work on so I can be a better husband and father, and friend, and son, and brother. I’ll still be pulling for the Dallas Cowboys to win the Super Bowl this year, and I would be happy with Tottenham just qualifying for the Champions League. Cubs are the Cubs, so I’ll be happy with a winning season. It would be good if I got back to sketching more, and maybe I should complete a book or some art project in 2024. Who knows…

    But, in the end, I would like to say thank you to the 20 of you, if you are real, who look at this thing each day. You do validate my existence, and that’s a pretty nice thing to do for someone. Especially when it’s a middle-aged guy still trying to figure things out and expressing… opinions about stuff. Anyway, I appreciate it.

    Have a good Holidays and I’ll talk to you soon.