When I was in college, I worked for Payless ShoeSource. Payless wasn’t my first job — that was a comic book shop — and as jobs went, it was fine. I had just moved to Lynchburg, Virginia. I was at the mall one day, saw Payless was having a job fair because they were opening … Continue reading Adventures in the Shoe Trade
Category: Life
I left work early this evening. It was snowing heavily, I had finished with a project, and it was a good time to go. There were light flurries in the morning when I left for work. Nothing that amounted to much. At lunchtime, even though it was forty degrees, the snow was heavier. Mainly, though, … Continue reading Wheels Down
Today, being a nice day before the polar vortex arrives midweek (or not), I went down to Baltimore for some cemetery exploring. On Monday, I found a reference to my great-grandfather Allyn Gardner in a defunct Baltimore daily German language newspaper. According to a one-line note, he was the witness to a marriage license issued … Continue reading Gathering Evidence on a Genealogical Puzzle
It’s a bit chilly. I’d like to stay under the covers all day .. Yeah, definitely a day to spend under the covers hibernating. Bears have the right idea.
Yesterday, Shamrock Fest announced their 2019 line-up. For me, it didn’t really matter; I’d already decided against attending this year. I was already leaning against attending — Carbon Leaf announced last month part of their 2019 touring schedule, and they had already booked a show on March 23rd that was not at RFK Stadium — … Continue reading Bailing on Shamrock Fest
Throughout 2019, I plan on making use of Life Captured‘s journaling prompts to supplement my blogging. I’d learned of them through a Lifehacker article over the summer, I found them interesting, and I kept the idea in the back of my mind. I may not keep up with them every day, or I may have … Continue reading Three Holiday Moments
Most every year I do this — go back through my blog archives and post a link to the first post I made each month. The results are random, to say the least; there’s no consistency. But about six of these are worthwhile. Which six? That’s for you to find out. January: Winter Misanthropy: It … Continue reading 2018: The Year in Review
Earlier last week I took a short trip to Baltimore’s Loudon Park Cemetery, where my great-grandparents, three of my great-grandfather’s siblings, and his mother are buried. The Baltimore area received about three and a half inches of rain over the weekend (from mid-day Friday to Sunday evening), and, since the cemetery floods, I wanted to … Continue reading A Christmastime Visit to the Cemetery
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
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.