VALENTINE'S SENTIMENT

Valentine's Day -- The day when singles like me get reminded how great it is to control the TV remote, choose what we want to eat for dinner, eat as much ice cream as we can stomach, and save money on over-priced cards, gifts, and flowers. 

I did receive a couple of unexpected gifts: a co-worker gave me a small nylon bag full of chocolate, and one of my last-class students gave me an expensive chocolate bar. The best surprise, though, came from a student who is not even mine but has a locker right outside of my room. Oh, sure, he gave out chocolate and candy to a lot of people, but I'm not even his teacher, so it was a really sweet gesture.

I will also admit that the Valentine  attached to the small chocolate bar is probably the best, most heartfelt, most honest sentiment I've ever received. This kid totally "gets" it. If only more adults could figure this out, then we might have some sanity in this world.

SHOPPING FOR MORSELS

I have been careless with my grocery shopping.

To be honest, I despise shopping of any kind. I once went to the mall with a girl who loved shopping. Me? I know what I want and can be in and out of a store in mere seconds. This ex-friend of mine? Painfully slow and meticulous and flighty to the point that a forty-five minute shopping excursion turned into four hours. Four. Painful. Agonizing. Hours. I passed the time imagining ways to dispose of her body on the trip home. 

But, I digress. Grocery shopping is painful because it's annoying (follow the list, check the dates, get irritated if the items aren't in stock, etc.), and there are people -- always people -- blocking aisles or jockeying for a check-out line or ramming their carts into my body parts. I avoid grocery shopping as much as I can when, to be smart, I should go every couple of days and just buy the few things I need and go through the express line.

But, no. Denial always leaves me with a four-to-six grocery bag extravaganza.

The problem with me is that I don't always pay attention to what I'm buying. I have often come home with one-ply toilet paper (is there even a point to this idiocy?) or diet something-or-other or fat-free feta cheese or some other product that has zero business being in my home.

The other day, I purchased semi-sweet chocolate morsels. Yes, they're for baking, but I also just snack on them by the handful. I know I should've gotten the Nestle brand, but they're kind of soft-ish and creamy (great for baking, but a little weird for snacking), so I purchased the store brand. Usually, that's all right by me. Except . . . 

Except I didn't read beyond the "semi-sweet morsels" part of the package. I did not see the word "mini" in small, cursive script. Mini, as in miniscule. These things are smaller than baby boogers.

I tried snacking on them, but I have to shoot about a dozen at a time, and the darn things often escape, making them nearly impossible to find on the floor, the table, down the sleeve or front of my shirt, or they just vanish. Poof! Like magic, they disappear everywhere but into my stomach.

I have a snow day from school, so I decide to make pumpkin muffins. I mean, why not, right? As I'm about to put them into the oven, I think, "You know what these muffins need? Miniature chocolate chips!" I grab the bag out of the cabinet and drop handfuls of mini-morsels into six of the twelve muffins. I use a fork to stir them, churning some morsels into the bottom of the batter.

Twenty minutes later, I take the muffins out of the oven and notice that it is easy to tell the chipped muffins from the pure ones because the morsels all floated to the top of the batter as soon as I put the tin in to bake. Seriously, like art deco or pop art designs, the six chocolate-laden muffins have speckled patterns on them.

Dagnabbit! The mini-morsels are so miniature that they migrate to the top like soda bubbles in tonic.

Oh, of course I'll eat those muffins. I'm not a purist. However, I certainly will be much more careful shopping from now on. Hahahahahaha. Who am I kidding? I'll screw something up again. Just watch me. But I doubt it will be the semi-sweet chocolates for baking. 

I've learned my lesson on that one. Deliciously; but learned it, just as well.

IT'S QUIET OUT THERE; TOO QUIET

It's very quiet outside. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that makes a person tense and nervous. Why? Because we barely had any snow around here last winter, negligible amounts actually, and the calm of this winter so far lulls us all into a false state of safety.

Ten years ago this very week (January 26, 2015), after a quiet and innocuous start to winter, we were hit with a storm that ushered in a series of storm after storm. I was outside shoveling the driveway every other day. Six inches of snow one day, more two days later, and the pattern kept on until we accumulated 110 inches of snow. We had so much snow that we had nowhere left to put it. By the time April arrived, we pretty much just sat around and cried. Our biceps were toned and muscular, but we cried, just the same.

Forty-seven years ago this week was the Blizzard of '78. We all know you young'uns are tired of hearing about it, like it was some catastrophic milestone of a storm . . . because . . . it was. It snowed anywhere from one to four inches of snow an hour for just over two days straight. It snowed sideways. It snowed through winds over eighty miles per hour. It snowed through thunder-snow. (Yes, I was outside for that, and, unlike Jim Cantore, I did not muchly enjoy the experience.) The ocean rose fifteen feet along the coast. More than seventy people in Massachusetts died. It snowed so suddenly and freakishly that highways shut down, thousands of vehicles were abandoned, and strangers wandered from house to house begging for mercy. Another 39,000 sought out shelters. Transportation was cancelled, and we were in an emergency shut-down for at least a week.

Those of us who lived here during both the Blizzard of '78 and that endless snowy winter of 2015 have earned the right to brag. But, along with glory comes the paranoia of previous trauma. 

We know what's out there.

The longer it stays calm and quiet, the more we hold our breath and wring our hands and overstock with milk, bread, eggs, and toilet paper. We know it's going to happen. After all, last winter lulled us into complacency, and that can only lead to disaster. When it does, because it will, do not ask, even in song, "Do you want to build a snowman?" Well, don't ask that until May. It has only snowed a few times out here in May. We can tolerate it by then.

I'M LIFE'S "THROWING DUMMY"

The hits keep coming.

My life isn't so much a war. It's not a battle. It's not even a boxing match with bells. It's more like a continuous sparring match, and I am Life's throwing dummy.

In addition to (all in the last few weeks) being sick, blowing up my car engine twice, and nearly setting my apartment on fire when my computer malfunctions, I am one of two units in the entire complex that has a random and nearly catastrophic gas leak.

This is Gas Leak Number Three for me, all in recent years, two of them within this complex. This bit of trivia prompts the plumbers to tell me, "Please stop moving." I hope they're kidding, but it's pitch-dark outside, it's sub-zero wind chill, and their faces are deadly serious.

So, for the numerous time in my life (on top of several broken furnaces and hot water heaters over the years), I am warming my living space with electric heaters, and boiling water for baths using electric teapots. Since I don't totally trust the heaters (they tend to melt wall outlets), I lean toward wearing multiple layers of clothing and outerwear inside of my own home. Three days later, I'm back in business and can take a hot shower again. 

Whoo hoo! Maybe this will be the end of my recent run of foul and expensive luck! Perhaps I will go an entire twenty-four hours without another clusterfuck.

That's when I get my second surprise work observation during my rowdiest and my most colorfully and eclectically and academically mixed class. I mean, I just had an observation six weeks ago. Am I on someone's radar? Does admin know that I've been running the possible financial scenarios of just cutting and running at any given moment? Did somebody spill that I have an appointment with a retirement consultant in a few weeks? Might this be payback for a recent favor I did that maybe wasn't as slick and cleanly performed as someone higher above me had hoped? FBI watch list? Witness protection gone wrong? Was I caught stealing a pencil as I left the building?

Or, is it just the usual thing: The damn giant target pasted on my back.

At this point, I suppose that I should be prepared for anything. Stay tuned! Next week's blog might very well come to you from a bus station outside of East Bumfrick, where I've been stranded after an errant field trip or some other bizarre and completely "it could only happen to me" random location and circumstance.

JUST PAINT A HAPPY LITTLE TOASTER RIGHT HERE

My youngest brother and I share a running joke exchange over Bob Ross.

Yes, that Bob Ross. The one who paints. Well, the one who painted because Bob Ross died in 1995 (on my birthday, as a matter of fact). 

Randomly throughout the year, Bob Ross themed trinkets will suddenly be sent or received between the two of us. This Christmas, while mired in a series of personal scheduling conflicts, fun family stuff, and unexpected disasters (illness, blown up car, blown up computer, babysitting, extended commuting, new car, etc.), I end up epic failing at gift giving. So, I never get to the stage where Bob Ross is in play.

From my end, anyway.

As Christmas packages arrive for me at home, I merely have time to throw them under the small tree and hope for sanity as the holiday bears down. On Christmas Day, I run out of the house to the rented SUV, spend the day several towns away, and arrive home after dark. It isn't until mid-evening that I even look at the presents under the tree.

I open gifts from students and from coworkers, from my Secret Santa, from friends. Finally, I get to my little brother's box of whatever it may be. He's not my Secret Santa this year, so he shouldn't be sending anything, but we all (there are four of us remaining) tend to send stocking gifts and occasional joke gifts or inspirational gifts to each other. 

I carefully undo the mailing box to reveal something else inside. Another box. There is another box in here that is way too big to fit into my stocking. Knowing my brother, it could be anything. Literally. Anything.

I unwrap the paper and am delighted to see that Bob Ross has struck again.

I will say this: Not only did Bob Ross paint lovely, happy trees and some magnificent landscapes, but he makes a heck of an impression on my toast.

Cheers!

MISSING JOSEPH: A POST-CHRISTMAS NON-HALLMARK MOMENT

It has been a crazy few weeks. Nothing major. No surgical intervention or close calls; just a whole lot of picking and prodding at my sanity. A thousand paper cuts, as the case may be. But, it is annoying enough to make me jump into ending the Christmas season early.

This isn't really a tragedy because I started the season early. However, I don't even wait for Epiphany to roll around this year. Three days after Christmas, I decide to flip my living room. With that decision comes the necessity of putting Christmas away lest I am forced to redecorate it into the new living space.

Every year I try to weed out more and more stuff that I don't need as I set up and put away the holiday. This year, mini tabletop trees will be migrating to school. If I continue teaching (questionable), I'll put them out next season. Several decorations and toys make their way into the trash and the donation pile. I even separate myself from some of the worn-out ornaments.

That being said, though, I do cling to some of the childhood ornaments way too long. There is one in particular that my siblings and I always fought over who got to place it on the tree. It's a gaudy little plastic thing, shaped like an A-frame cabin, a manger scene with a hole at the top of it so that a bulb from the string of tree lights can be forced through the back, creating a "star" over the birth of Christ. Not that we were a particularly religious family growing up. My father nearly lost his mind when, at age thirteen, I attached myself to the local church youth group and announced that I would be attending church (the first in the immediate family to do so as my parents were atheist and agnostic).

Unfortunately for this particular ornament, Joseph has long-since been missing. For many years, Mary has been a single-parent on the Christmas tree. This year, I finally decide that the old ornament, despite its sentimentality, must go. I feel guilty walking it to the trash. One of my brothers had recently visited, and he was fascinated by the ornaments I still have that used to spin when trees had the old-school large bulbs that would heat up and cause the metal spinners to go around of their own volition. (Nowadays, we have to blow on the ornaments' metal decorations to make them spin.) Based on my brother's reaction to some of the family leftovers, I am tempted to package up the Joseph-less plastic manger and send it to his home in New York.

Alas, I do not. Mary and Jesus, along with a couple of lambs, are now in the dumpster. Actually, they have probably already been mashed and obliterated. It is sad to see them go, but it feels anti-Hallmark waiting all these years for some new guy to show up and replace the missing man in the manger. I suppose I could have ordered a ho-scale figurine and glued him in, complete with a conductor hat and train whistle, but, even now after the fact, it feels more sacrilegious than Joseph's inexplicable disappearance.

If terrible things happen this year, I suppose I'm to blame, plastic Joseph-less Mary and Jesus notwithstanding. The ornament had a good run, though. It's just one less thing I'll be unpacking and packing back up next year. 

TAKE IT DOWN A NOTCH

Good riddance, 2024.

The year ended with a series of unfortunate events, among them having the engine blow in my old car not once but twice in a 24-hour period. (I know, right? That takes a particular kind of talent.) I had my car towed three times - one time on each of the coldest days that we have had so far. Once to the mechanic after it broke down on 495 north, second time back to my home so I could clean it out (yup - time to go) after it broke down on 495 south, and a third time back to the mechanic to give the car its death certificate and make it so that I could limp the car to the dealership down the street.

Then, I came home on Christmas day, turned on my desktop computer, and was met with a screeching warning sound that, when Googled on my phone, indicated that a fire was near. So, I unplugged that bad boy from the power strip and signed its death warrant myself. Much like Apple iPhones, this one died after trying to sell me some extra HP bull crap. When I didn't bite, the computer seized. Guess what? Jokes on the computer because I had pretty much zero not saved to the Cloud or to thumb drives, so, see ya later, rutabaga. All I need to do is remove the hard drive and I'm over it. I'll never buy another desktop ever. Not ever.

All this on the heels of being sick with some bizarre laryngitis cold thing (not covid) for seven weeks. That crap is still hanging on, too. 

Oh, sure, it was a fabulous year, too. Definitely moments of greatness, but also some really, really low moments. Not one of my banner years, that's for sure. Remember: it all started with me rapidly moving into a new apartment because last Christmas a flying squirrel came in through the fireplace, and, since the damn things are protected in my state, the maintenance crew refused to even trap it, so I had three days of mayhem before . . . "disposing" of the creature myself.

All in all, though, I stayed relatively healthy, as did friends and family. This makes 2024 a most-excellent year in some ways, I suppose. I should feel, and do feel, very lucky, for the most part. My troubles really are more like annoying inconveniences, and, for that, I do thank 2024. I mean, not with a giant hug or anything, but a quick parting handshake would do.

Yeah, 2024, you can kiss my naked butt-cheek at this point. And, 2025, if you have any idea what's good for you, you'll behave your damn self, keep your fool head down, and be a polite little shit. I know I still have 11.75 more months with you (if I'm super lucky), but let's just try and take it down a notch from last year, shall we?