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Mundane Moments to End a NOT Mundane Year
Jan. 1st, 2024 06:19 pmSeventeen hours or so into 2024, and nothing crazy has happened yet. That we know of. Plenty of well-wishing and hopes and dreams, and, as Eleanor discovered going for a swim today at the Y, expired memberships. At least I don't have to deal with the annual health insurance Wellness Card BS anymore toward a couple months of my gym cost, because my new health insurance plan don't do dat. What they DO do is let you sign up with a gym, including one you already use if it's covered (mine is), for virtually the same monthly cost, but they then give you up to $400 a year in rewards for actually GOING to classes at the place. It's a different kind of paperwork BS, but it will be much more worth it in the long run.
With work essentially ended for the year as of late Friday morning, we spent the long weekend almost entirely in the house, ribs and pizza from favorite takeouts on Friday and Saturday nights and Eleanor making a shrimp and pasta dish last night (tonight's just heated-up lentils and naan bread), assorted films and streaming shows on the evening telly and a way-too-close Bills win yesterday afternoon, and about the most mundane of household repairs.
First, on Saturday, Eleanor fixed the toilet. It wasn't plugged or anything like that, but in the not quite two years since the new throne went in there, it had developed a combination of loud and spooky sounds while refilling. For months, the fill had always ended with a distinctive BANG! that was enough to wake the non-flushing person in the middle of the night. Then, and this may have been a function of removing the unrelated water line in the cellar that messed with pressures all over, the BANG! would often be replaced by a HISSSSSS! noise that lasted almost the entire flush cycle. We joked about Gertrude our mostly friendly ghost from our last Rochester house doing her Moaning Myrtle imitation. It finally got to the point of wanting to get it fixed, and despite our long history of disasters on government holidays, Eleanor picked up a bunch of parts at Lowes- the supply line and shutoff valve, both original to the house and not the replacement terlet, were the likely suspects.
Neither turned out to be the culprit, and fortunately, through ingenuity and some Youtube videos, she figured that out BEFORE uninstalling either. No, it was the float mechanism within the tank, probably less than five years old that came with the new tank. Our best guess is that American Standard lowered its standards sometime during, or even before, the pandemic and shipped it with a lower-quality mechanism than the one that lasted 50-plus years in the original porcelain altar. One more Lowes trip, a bit of tricky unscrewing, and within half an hour the new float was in and both the BANG! and the HISSSSSSS! were, and remain, GONE!
----
Sunday brought an unexpected household and online chore to follow that success. Eleanor takes a flaxseed oil supplement in liquid form, about the size and shape of a barbecue sauce bottle. Wegmans used to carry it, but they've been cutting back their supplement selections. Other local health food specialty retailers had it until they didn't, and the only recent alternative was to Amazon the stuff. Even that often came with a supply-chain delay in shipping, and she came close to running out a few times. So when she last asked me to order a bottle last week, I said, Why not two?
Sunday morning, we found out why not. A cardboard box was on the doorstep, but it was in a plastic bag, and the bag was wet on the inside. Wet and oily. The cardboard, soaked. One of the two bottles had exploded in transit, leaving glass shards and goop all over. The other bottle was fine, once wiped off. It took a good hour to get through the armor of Amazon customer service, but they wound up refunding the whole order, via a gift card usable for anything there. We will go back to trying to find local retailers who can carry, or special order, even if it means getting as much as a six-month supply at a time, since that's the shelf life of the good bottle that made it here yesterday.
----
After we did that cleanup, and before the Bills made their Sunday afternoon mess, we returned to the gaming table for some hilariaty. I've mentioned this game before, but there are two particular plays from this round that broke us both up:
See these cards from that new game we got a while back and have played, just the two of us, a few times since. It’s fun all the time, but these two cards have tales to tell.
You need to know how to play. These words so far tell you how. It’s fun but hard. I stop the show of how now.
It’s like charades, but instead of gestures to make the other player guess it, you DO use words and you CAN'T use gestures. But no word can have more than one syllable. Hence, the “Neanderthal” part. (The Offishul Ruulz do not specify whether one-syllable contractions are allowed. We’ve decided they are. It’s tough enough as it is.)
Each card has one word to guess for one point. The player can then take the one point or go on to the bottom of the card, a short phrase the first word is in, for three points, risking the one earned point if you run out of time (90 seconds per turn) or the reader makes a mistake like use big word in clue. You will talk like this for a week. Trust me.
It’s designed for teams of multiple players, but two can play just by reading to each other and keeping score. It’s probably even more fun, if with lower scores, if you’re drunk or stoned. We’ll never know.
These were the two funniest ones from when we played. I had to guess the one on the left, Eleanor the one on the right.
She was laughing so hard as soon she saw what was on the card, she could barely get a word out. She somehow got me to "crack" the first word, but after more laughing, finally burst out the word “Norge.” I instantly knew what she meant, but I was laughing, too. It’s from an early Saturday Night sketch where Dan Aykroyd is playing a repairman fixing that brand of old fridge.
So “Norge” got us three points once we could breathe again.
The other one, starting with "roll," didn’t work as well. I tried some generic clues but then recalled a moment we both were connected to. It was at the wedding reception in 1986 of my law school friends Mary and George, but they won’t remember it, because it happened at the "children’s table" of recent law grads we were assigned to.
It had been a long day, the priest was giving speeches from the dais probably drunk out of his mind, we were probably a little wasted as well, and one of the other guys at our table got a little bored. He grabbed one of the dinner rolls from the basket, poked it with his forefinger, pulled it off, held it up and called to a waiter, “There’s a hole in my roll!” I’m pretty sure that within moments, ten of us were also calling over with the identical problem. Okay, you had to be there, but WE were.
So, faced with time running out yesterday, I tried as a clue, “THERE’S A HOLE IN MY….”
Nothing. I don’t remember what she guessed, or if she just looked at me with a blank stare. No points for YOU!
Memory’s a weird thing, that we could remember so vividly something from a 1970s TV show but not connect on a 1980s wedding moment.
It still was great fun. You go try.
----
And 2023 ended, as years will do, with the birthday of one of my friends from the Mets blogging community. Greg and I grew up a little over three years and about 20 miles apart, him in the South Shore city of Long Beach that most famously brought the world the recent Kennedy Center Honor recipient Billy Crystal. (Donna just told me about attending his- Billy's, not Greg's- Long Beach High School prom the year after she graduated from East Meadow.)
Greg still blogs regularly and specifically about the Mets, and his entry from yesterday afternoon- sometime between the Bills' second and third defensive takeaway- contained a shared experience for him and me. Except neither of us really shared it at all, and we certainly didn't in the same place and time.
In his piece, Greg posted some of his best memories of Mets games from years not remembered for best memories. One was one he didn't attend- because nobody did.
His last entry in his first countdown of these semi-Happy Recaps was about the late 2020 season, when the stands were empty due to the pandemic. He wrote of wanting to take the LIRR to Woodside, change for the Willets Point-Mets stop, and just Be There, or at least Near There, for a game. So close, and yet so far.
I got that. Because that same month, I did the same thing.
He didn't mention a specific September 2020 day for this errand, but it was not 9/11. That's because the Mets were here in Buffalo that day. For the silver lining in the N95 mask, for us deprived Buffalonians, was that we finally got Major League Baseball here after the failed attempts in my lifetime of 1960 (thanks, Shea!), 1969 (thanks, Warren Giles!) and 1994 (thanks, Bud!). Toronto, evicted from their home and native land, converted their AAA affiliate into their temporary residence for the resumed 2020 season and a longer stay in 2021.
In the later year, fans were let in, and I saw Mariners and Red Sox on Sahlen's Field playing real games against the Jays. But the Mets were not on Toronto's "home" interleague rotation when we could actually go see them. That visit came in September 2020, when we couldn't go. Cardboard cutouts, including one of Geddy Lee, were the only ones in the stands.
I did not take that picture. I wasn't going to Rush in to get anywhere near those cutouts.
Still, I had to try. I'd done recon in August when America's Hat first rebranded the ballpark, but the gates were closed and the outfield fences tarped from above on the outside to keep the looky-loos away. But. Behind the right field party deck, there's a connected parking ramp. Like the knot holes in the outfield fences of yore, the concrete of the ramp's exterior had slats between them you could stick an eyeball and a camera through.
Which is how, for about 10 brief shining seconds on a Friday afternoon, I saw actual Mets on an actual field. It was just early warmups, and a mall cop would quickly find and shoo me from my perch, but I did what Greg wanted to do.
By the end of the game, the Mets, behind some guy named deGrom, in an NYPD cap that MLB somehow allowed, kicked the back bacon out of the "home" team by a score of 18-1. You could look it up.
----
And with that, a new work year and workout year and working-through year get under way. All hopes are that will be looking up, as well.
With work essentially ended for the year as of late Friday morning, we spent the long weekend almost entirely in the house, ribs and pizza from favorite takeouts on Friday and Saturday nights and Eleanor making a shrimp and pasta dish last night (tonight's just heated-up lentils and naan bread), assorted films and streaming shows on the evening telly and a way-too-close Bills win yesterday afternoon, and about the most mundane of household repairs.
First, on Saturday, Eleanor fixed the toilet. It wasn't plugged or anything like that, but in the not quite two years since the new throne went in there, it had developed a combination of loud and spooky sounds while refilling. For months, the fill had always ended with a distinctive BANG! that was enough to wake the non-flushing person in the middle of the night. Then, and this may have been a function of removing the unrelated water line in the cellar that messed with pressures all over, the BANG! would often be replaced by a HISSSSSS! noise that lasted almost the entire flush cycle. We joked about Gertrude our mostly friendly ghost from our last Rochester house doing her Moaning Myrtle imitation. It finally got to the point of wanting to get it fixed, and despite our long history of disasters on government holidays, Eleanor picked up a bunch of parts at Lowes- the supply line and shutoff valve, both original to the house and not the replacement terlet, were the likely suspects.
Neither turned out to be the culprit, and fortunately, through ingenuity and some Youtube videos, she figured that out BEFORE uninstalling either. No, it was the float mechanism within the tank, probably less than five years old that came with the new tank. Our best guess is that American Standard lowered its standards sometime during, or even before, the pandemic and shipped it with a lower-quality mechanism than the one that lasted 50-plus years in the original porcelain altar. One more Lowes trip, a bit of tricky unscrewing, and within half an hour the new float was in and both the BANG! and the HISSSSSSS! were, and remain, GONE!
----
Sunday brought an unexpected household and online chore to follow that success. Eleanor takes a flaxseed oil supplement in liquid form, about the size and shape of a barbecue sauce bottle. Wegmans used to carry it, but they've been cutting back their supplement selections. Other local health food specialty retailers had it until they didn't, and the only recent alternative was to Amazon the stuff. Even that often came with a supply-chain delay in shipping, and she came close to running out a few times. So when she last asked me to order a bottle last week, I said, Why not two?
Sunday morning, we found out why not. A cardboard box was on the doorstep, but it was in a plastic bag, and the bag was wet on the inside. Wet and oily. The cardboard, soaked. One of the two bottles had exploded in transit, leaving glass shards and goop all over. The other bottle was fine, once wiped off. It took a good hour to get through the armor of Amazon customer service, but they wound up refunding the whole order, via a gift card usable for anything there. We will go back to trying to find local retailers who can carry, or special order, even if it means getting as much as a six-month supply at a time, since that's the shelf life of the good bottle that made it here yesterday.
----
After we did that cleanup, and before the Bills made their Sunday afternoon mess, we returned to the gaming table for some hilariaty. I've mentioned this game before, but there are two particular plays from this round that broke us both up:
See these cards from that new game we got a while back and have played, just the two of us, a few times since. It’s fun all the time, but these two cards have tales to tell.
You need to know how to play. These words so far tell you how. It’s fun but hard. I stop the show of how now.
It’s like charades, but instead of gestures to make the other player guess it, you DO use words and you CAN'T use gestures. But no word can have more than one syllable. Hence, the “Neanderthal” part. (The Offishul Ruulz do not specify whether one-syllable contractions are allowed. We’ve decided they are. It’s tough enough as it is.)
Each card has one word to guess for one point. The player can then take the one point or go on to the bottom of the card, a short phrase the first word is in, for three points, risking the one earned point if you run out of time (90 seconds per turn) or the reader makes a mistake like use big word in clue. You will talk like this for a week. Trust me.
It’s designed for teams of multiple players, but two can play just by reading to each other and keeping score. It’s probably even more fun, if with lower scores, if you’re drunk or stoned. We’ll never know.
These were the two funniest ones from when we played. I had to guess the one on the left, Eleanor the one on the right.
She was laughing so hard as soon she saw what was on the card, she could barely get a word out. She somehow got me to "crack" the first word, but after more laughing, finally burst out the word “Norge.” I instantly knew what she meant, but I was laughing, too. It’s from an early Saturday Night sketch where Dan Aykroyd is playing a repairman fixing that brand of old fridge.
So “Norge” got us three points once we could breathe again.
The other one, starting with "roll," didn’t work as well. I tried some generic clues but then recalled a moment we both were connected to. It was at the wedding reception in 1986 of my law school friends Mary and George, but they won’t remember it, because it happened at the "children’s table" of recent law grads we were assigned to.
It had been a long day, the priest was giving speeches from the dais probably drunk out of his mind, we were probably a little wasted as well, and one of the other guys at our table got a little bored. He grabbed one of the dinner rolls from the basket, poked it with his forefinger, pulled it off, held it up and called to a waiter, “There’s a hole in my roll!” I’m pretty sure that within moments, ten of us were also calling over with the identical problem. Okay, you had to be there, but WE were.
So, faced with time running out yesterday, I tried as a clue, “THERE’S A HOLE IN MY….”
Nothing. I don’t remember what she guessed, or if she just looked at me with a blank stare. No points for YOU!
Memory’s a weird thing, that we could remember so vividly something from a 1970s TV show but not connect on a 1980s wedding moment.
It still was great fun. You go try.
----
And 2023 ended, as years will do, with the birthday of one of my friends from the Mets blogging community. Greg and I grew up a little over three years and about 20 miles apart, him in the South Shore city of Long Beach that most famously brought the world the recent Kennedy Center Honor recipient Billy Crystal. (Donna just told me about attending his- Billy's, not Greg's- Long Beach High School prom the year after she graduated from East Meadow.)
Greg still blogs regularly and specifically about the Mets, and his entry from yesterday afternoon- sometime between the Bills' second and third defensive takeaway- contained a shared experience for him and me. Except neither of us really shared it at all, and we certainly didn't in the same place and time.
In his piece, Greg posted some of his best memories of Mets games from years not remembered for best memories. One was one he didn't attend- because nobody did.
His last entry in his first countdown of these semi-Happy Recaps was about the late 2020 season, when the stands were empty due to the pandemic. He wrote of wanting to take the LIRR to Woodside, change for the Willets Point-Mets stop, and just Be There, or at least Near There, for a game. So close, and yet so far.
I got that. Because that same month, I did the same thing.
He didn't mention a specific September 2020 day for this errand, but it was not 9/11. That's because the Mets were here in Buffalo that day. For the silver lining in the N95 mask, for us deprived Buffalonians, was that we finally got Major League Baseball here after the failed attempts in my lifetime of 1960 (thanks, Shea!), 1969 (thanks, Warren Giles!) and 1994 (thanks, Bud!). Toronto, evicted from their home and native land, converted their AAA affiliate into their temporary residence for the resumed 2020 season and a longer stay in 2021.
In the later year, fans were let in, and I saw Mariners and Red Sox on Sahlen's Field playing real games against the Jays. But the Mets were not on Toronto's "home" interleague rotation when we could actually go see them. That visit came in September 2020, when we couldn't go. Cardboard cutouts, including one of Geddy Lee, were the only ones in the stands.
I did not take that picture. I wasn't going to Rush in to get anywhere near those cutouts.
Still, I had to try. I'd done recon in August when America's Hat first rebranded the ballpark, but the gates were closed and the outfield fences tarped from above on the outside to keep the looky-loos away. But. Behind the right field party deck, there's a connected parking ramp. Like the knot holes in the outfield fences of yore, the concrete of the ramp's exterior had slats between them you could stick an eyeball and a camera through.
Which is how, for about 10 brief shining seconds on a Friday afternoon, I saw actual Mets on an actual field. It was just early warmups, and a mall cop would quickly find and shoo me from my perch, but I did what Greg wanted to do.
By the end of the game, the Mets, behind some guy named deGrom, in an NYPD cap that MLB somehow allowed, kicked the back bacon out of the "home" team by a score of 18-1. You could look it up.
----
And with that, a new work year and workout year and working-through year get under way. All hopes are that will be looking up, as well.