Last weekend I discovered coquito, also known as “Puerto Rican egg nog,” even though it contains no eggs and is really nothing like egg nog. A friend of mine, of Puerto Rican descent, posted a photograph to Facebook of a Starbucks sign for a coquito frappuccino. Now, I’ve not been in a Starbucks in a … Continue reading Some Christmas Cultural Appropriation
Category: Life
In mid-September it dawned on me that November 11, 2018 would mark the 100th-anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. Intellectually, as an historian, I knew this. I knew it in the same way that I know that water freezes at 32 degrees and objects fall to the earth at 32 feet per … Continue reading My Armistice 100 Adventure
Three hours. It took three hours to get home from work tonight. Diamond announced that they were closing at 4 o’clock today due to the inclement weather. I was close to wrapping a project at 4, and at 4:15 I dropped the text for a catalog section for January’s catalog on a desk in Purchasing. … Continue reading The First Snow of the Season
So, there I was, driving to work, listening to an old UB40 CD, as one does, when suddenly, apropos of nothing, I exclaimed loudly and with vehemence, to no one at all, “Goddamn it, Christopher Lee is dead!” My brain works in weird ways.
This afternoon I went to Big Lots. I needed a fan for my apartment; the motor for my fan had seized up and burned out. I pulled into a parking space, and I saw a man of an indeterminate age, dressed mainly in brown, shuffling through the parking lot toward my Beetle, shuffling as though … Continue reading An Encounter at Big Lots
Today is my coworker Lance’s birthday. Had I known, I’d have picked him up a cake on my way into the office. Though we don’t have a “birthday club” in Marketing, no one would say no to a birthday cake. And when I told Lance that he should have told me that today was his … Continue reading A Mandela Moment
Friday I took a vacation day. Though long planned, for about five months, I needed the day badly; work has been mentally exhausting and physically draining this year, and with the never-ending publishing cycle of writing and deadlines I have always struggled to even take the minimum required five vacation days each year, and it’s … Continue reading Leaving Flowers
It took two hours to get home last night. One of my coworkers insisted I should leave early, at five, since it was a Friday and a three-day weekend, but I was in the middle of a project I wanted to finish, which I did, and I left at 5:30. The trip home was pleasant… … Continue reading Adventures in a Mudslide
Something happened on Saturday at Harrisburg Senators game that I’ve been thinking about for the last few days. Not an intensive thinking. A background thinking. I arrived about when the gates opened, and I wandered around the ballpark. I was on the concourse, looking at the food options, when a woman, early twenties, working behind … Continue reading A Random Encounter
Rain began falling in the bottom of the 9th. The Senators were down 5-1. They hadn’t been able to muster any offense to speak of all game; indeed, their only run came on a wild pitch. I had no expectation that with three outs remaining, then two, and finally one, that the Senators would find … Continue reading Rainfall at Night
Over the weekend, I went down to Virginia to visit my parents, whom I’d not seen since the Carbon Leaf show back in March. On the way down, I decided, I would to visit a cemetery in Leesburg, Virginia; according to Find-a-Grave, my great-grandfather’s brother James is buried there. I’d been skeptical of Find-a-Grave’s information, … Continue reading Exploring Cemeteries in Leesburg
I received a spam email this morning. While this one came from important@williehowell.com, which is an address completely unfamiliar to me, the message itself was not unfamiliar at all. I’ve received a half-dozen of these in the past two weeks. It’s a sextortion scam. Read on. It appears that, [REDACTED], is your password. May very … Continue reading An Attempt At Scamming