J.P.

The Best Friend Connection.

It’s a lucky man that gets to wake up next to his best friend every morning. This morning I got to do just that and then the inevitable happened; I fell in love again. It happens every morning, I see the bear in bed with me and I fall in love. People think I’m crazy when I say I still see fireworks after all these years, but I do. I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic.

Sixteen years ago today, Earl and I celebrated our commitment with a ceremony on Penn’s Landing in Philadelphia. Witnessed by Rick and Helen (brother and sister-in-law), Earl and I exchanged vows and rings. While New York State granted us the right to make it all legal in 2011, Earl and I consider ourselves married as of 12/26/96. It was nice of the state to catch up to fact.

Many said it wouldn’t last, but you can’t interrupt fate, especially when you marry your bestest friend. I’m a lucky guy. I’m a happy guy.

The Storm Anticipation.

The National Weather Service in Binghamton has issued a winter storm warning for our area. The warning interval is from 2:00 p.m. tomorrow afternoon until Thursday morning. When all is said and done, we should have 12-18 inches of snow on the ground, with peak snowfall around 2 inches of snow per hour.

It’s about time!

While I have seen Mother Nature do much worse and give us much more snow in the same amount of time, I have to admit that I’m rather excited about this predicted snow event and I am looking forward to it feeling “really like winter” tomorrow.

The Jeep and Earl’s car are ready with an extra hat and mittens in each. Shovels are primed and ready to go and we have plenty of Christmas cookies to last us the duration.

Eat, drink and be merry!

The Holiday Weekend Documentation.

So, like most people in the United States, Earl and I have been very busy during this holiday season. In fact, this somewhat frenetic pace has kept me from blogging on a regular basis for the past three days. This runs contrary to one of my goals for 2013, where I hope to be blogging more. Let’s see if I can reverse this trend.

Saturday we took our annual mall road trip and found ourselves in Danbury, Connecticut. This decision was influenced by wanting to meet a fellow blogger/tweeter/Facebooker and his husband, and we had a lovely lunch with Kevin (FearTheDrumMajor/drummajorkev) and Brian. Having lunch with them was liking have lunch with old friends. We are looking forward to seeing them again in 2013. Online friends that become new friends are a beautiful thing (and quite frankly, they are two very handsome men)!

 

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After lunch and milling about Danbury Fair (where I officially completed my shopping chores), we completely lost our mind and headed downstate a bit to the Palisades Center, where the accent was thick (and somewhat grating on my nerves), parking was at a premium and so we had to scale a wall, climb over a fence and around a guide rail to get to the last available spot.

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This activity earned me this…

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… which was Phin and Matt’s Extraordinary Ale from the Southern Tier Brewing Company in my own stomping grounds of Lakewood, New York. Having tried some wines and such during our vacation at the beginning of the month, I’m more of a beer drinker if I’m going to drink alcohol at all and quite frankly I like a good beer. I’m developing an interest in craft beer and this beer, which was enjoyed at the Yard House in the chaos of the Palisades Center. This particular Yard House had 180 beers on tap, but I only had one. We did have a long drive home, after all.

Sunday was wrapping and cookie creation day!

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Jamie and Earl did the baking, I did the inspection and taste testing. After getting through the stress of wrapping presents (which I am very bad at), it was good to relax with a cookie treat or two.

I worked yesterday. I think I was the only one working yesterday, but I was able to get things done from my home office, which is always a good thing.

Last night we had my mom, sister and nephew over for a Christmas Eve gathering. Mom and I snapped a photo with my iPhone while sitting on the couch reminiscing about Christmases of the past and present.

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This morning Earl, Jamie and I woke up and did the traditional family Christmas morning thing.  It looks like Santa Bear and his Cub Elves were very busy about The Manor last night. Today we are trying on clothes, playing with some new gadgets (I am an Apple boy through and through, though sometimes I won’t admit it) and checking out our presents.

Oh! Last night Mom told us that she gave me the one gift that I really wanted and she made a donation to the Ali Forney Center. She’s a cool mom and even more so for doing that.

Family. New friends. Old Friends. All in the spirit of the holiday. It is a great way to spend Christmas. Life is good.

The Family Connection.

There are families we are all born into. If all goes well, and for the most part in my case it did, the biological bonds of our family are replaced by a bond that exceeds that biological connection. That’s what I think defines a family. But I fully believe that a family can include those that, while they don’t have that biological connection to you, they do have certainly have that stronger bond that most of us experience in a family. And it is without any hesitation or doubt that I am a lucky man to a couple of people in my life that I call family.

Last night, Earl and I, along with our friend Jeff, watched a family member graduate from college. That’s right, Jamie (or as we call him, Cub), walked across the stage as he received his Associate’s degree from Mohawk Valley Community College. Last night was the result of a lot of hard work, hard knocks, dedication, worry, stress, joy and just plain ol’ learnin’. 

After the ceremony the four of us went out for dinner and celebrated the way family and friends do.

Earl and I are very, very proud of him and are looking forward to watching our family member continue on his journey as he enters this next phase of his life. He has a plan and I have no doubt that he will fulfill his dreams. If any man defines the phrase “reach for the stars”, it’s Cub.

 

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Jamie shows his Straight Edge pride. He was one of three that augmented his mortarboard, as shown by the “X” seen in the front row of the class, third from right.

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The Psychic Connection.

Since this week seems to be about metaphysical stuff in some ways, I thought I would share with the class an adventure that I shared with my sister yesterday.

Our father passed on a little over a year ago when his home-built airplane (the second plane he built from scratch) crashed into a wooded area near the airport he was testing the plane at. This occurred during the second flight of the plane. Earlier this year I came to terms with the loss of my father. I had had a couple of dreams about him including one very vivid dream in particular where he told me what had happened and that everything was okay. While I will always feel sad that I can’t call him up and tell him the latest road trip adventure that Earl and I have gone on or reminisce with him about something, I know that I’m beyond the grief and pain. I have accepted and I have continued with life, the way I know that he would want it to be.

My sister wanted to see a psychic. I didn’t really feel the need to see a psychic, because of the dreams and the way I was feeling, but I agreed to go along with her for moral support. I had been to a psychic before. This first psychic told me that I was a “bright star that would burn out quickly” and when he tried to cleanse me chakra he felt compelled to hit me upside the head a couple of times. This all took place in the back of a hair salon, so I should have known something was fishy about this guy.

I’m digressing.

The psychic we went to see is pretty well known. She has been doing her thing for a long time. My aunt is her virtual assistant and my aunt assured us that she knew nothing about the people she was going to meet. I met my sister at her office in a hilltop business park.

When we stepped into the entrance of her professional suite it was pitch black. There were no lights on anywhere in the room and there were no windows to let in any natural light. I figured that this must be significant so we propped the door open a little bit so we could see each other with light from the hallway, but otherwise it was completely dark. There was a little sign on the conference room table urging us to just wait and she would be with us in a bit. Sounds of a reading came from an adjacent room. The mood was interesting with the pitch darkness of the room. Come to find out, the building was experiencing electrical problems, there was no other significance to sitting in the dark.

When we met with the medium, she asked us to naturally say our full name and our birth dates. She didn’t bolt out of the room to Google someone, she didn’t speak into a hidden microphone and I scouted the room out for signs of wi-fi. None of this was present. She simply sat in the chair across from us and explained that she would go into a trance-like state and she asked we not bounce our legs from nervousness or fidget in our chairs as that would make her nauseated and she could potential throw up.

Ok, then.

After saying a silent prayer her whole demeanor changed and her face lit up in a very beautiful way. Gazing upwards about two feet above our heads, she smiled and said hello to several souls that had come to visit.

That’s when Dad arrived.

I’m not going to get into the details of the reading because, well, it’s kind of personal, but some things that she did get completely right:

“He says he fell from the sky. What does that mean?”

“There was nothing he did wrong, it was the engine. ‘The bastards rebuilt it wrong.’ There was no way he could recover.”  (Interestingly, my dream journal of that dream says, “There was no way I could recover.”)

“If he had to go, this was the best way to do it because he was doing what he loved. He thinks that everyone should go this way.”

“He was there in the dream that you about him. He was really there. He knows you already know what happened.”

The medium accurately conveyed things about Dad and our family that she couldn’t possibly know. No Googling or anything would give the details of some of the things she mentioned. His personality came through what she was telling us. His sense of values was accurately portrayed. Names were said without coaching or input. Long story short, I fully believe that we talked to our Dad yesterday. I feel more comfort than I did after my own grieving process. 

As the medium went into the trance I felt goosebumps and a radiance in my body that I have felt only two other times in my life and it was absolutely amazing. I may have gone into the room a skeptic (as learned from that other experience from the psychic that wanted to beat on me), but I left yesterday knowing that Dad was with the other family members that have passed on and that he was doing just fine. He was a little startled from having arrived there so abruptly, but he was just fine.

There’s a lot of people that don’t believe in life after this life or that folks have the ability to see the other side. Dionne Warwick, Ms. Cleo and their ilk have kind of turned everyone sour and cynical when it comes to psychic phenomena, but I feel that what we experienced yesterday was real.

If you feel the need to visit a medium, please send me an email and I will share her contact information with you.

Thanks for the visit, Dad.

The Mundane Life.

So yesterday I was monitoring Twitter and the like and a tweet went by on my stream that said:

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At first I took offense at it, because I had just written a blog entry entitled “The Mayan Prophecy“.  In fact, not only had I written a blog entry with this blasphemous title, I had also just tweeted this only a few moments before:

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Now, my tweet relating Instagram and the Mayan Prophecy together was my attempt to be humorous. Apparently others found a chuckle in that little tweet because it was retweeted several times. Honestly, I don’t know if the tweet was directed at me and quite frankly, I don’t care if it was or not.

The person that sent out the first tweet has mentioned the end of the world and all of that in some recent blog entries as well and obviously the mention of things such as the Mayan myth and all that are making him cranky. Everyone has their own spin on their existence in this world and I think that’s great. The fact that we’re all unique is what makes the world go ’round. Truth be known, I’m kind of hoping something conscious shifting happens soon in our country but honestly, I doubt it will have anything to do with the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar. I also don’t think the end of the world is coming. It’s kind of fun to read these websites that talk about polar shifts and a second planet coming into orbit around the moon and the sun blowing up, but in reality, I think we are going to be on this planet for a while still so I’m not expecting anything, well, Earth Shattering, on this Winter Solstice.

That being said, I don’t know if my blog entry and my tweet had anything to do with inspiring the other person’s tweet and mundane lives and all that. I don’t know if this person still reads my blog. Many of the bloggers I have followed have all but given up on the craft, which is a shame, because in the long run I believe that a life, however mundane, deserves more than 140 character blasts of nonsense in a stream of lots of other nonsense. Taking the opportunity to sit down and write thought out entries, with complicated sentence structure and all the frivolity that comes with it, is good for my mind.

Do I think that reading about and then entertaining the thought of the end of the world makes my life mundane? No. I think that those that have a mundane life have a mundane life because they choose to have a mundane life, not because the stars wished it upon them or the moons fell out of alignment or the galactic equator happens to be running up their butt at the moment. Personally, I think that writing about fantasy or reality in whatever outlet they have available to them (including a mundane blog such as this!) is their way of breaking out of the mundane.

I am me. I am proud of being me. I am happy that I’m me and I wouldn’t want to be anyone else.

As mundane as that sounds.

The Duck Face.

Earl and I were somewhere along Interstate 10 between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, during our vacation a few weeks ago, when we stopped at a McDonalds so we could use the bathroom. It was a relatively lonely place in rural Louisiana and the McDonalds had only a few people in the restaurant. Earl and I zipped to the back of the store to do our business.

Always feeling somewhat obligated to make a purchase when we use the bathroom at a place like McDonalds, I told Earl I would pick us up a couple of unsweet teas (vs the ‘unsweetened iced tea’ found in the northeast) and then we could continue our drive. 

During our visit to the restroom, four school buses apparently descended upon this relatively lonely place in rural Louisiana and emptied their entire contents into this little McDonalds. The place was mobbed.

While Earl and I waited for the cashier to ring up the sale, get the unsweet tea and process what was happening with the crowd, I noticed that numerous members of this visiting high school party had started snapping self-photos with their smartphones. There were single self-shots, self-shots of pairs and self-shots of four or five people. All of the subjects of the photos tended to be women except for one guy that was running around. He was a little breathless.

In every single photo, each participant of the shot made “the duck face”. Even the breathless guy did it.

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Random Duck Face person.

This was the first time that I had noticed The Duck Face in action and apparently it is in full force as The Thing To Do.

Can someone please explain to me what the purpose of this Duck Face pose it? It isn’t particularly attractive. It doesn’t convey any sort of frivolity, happiness or overall pleasantry. In my personal opinion, it looks kind of stupid, but I suppose some could say the same about me and my idiosyncracies. 

I just don’t get it.  I must be falling out of touch with all that’s hip. Maybe that’s a good thing.

Update: I thought it would be appropriate to show another example as to why The Duck Face can ruin an otherwise moderately enjoyable photo.
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The Mayan Prophecy.

So for years and years and years we’ve been hearing that something exciting/awful/exhilarating/enlightening is going to happen on December 21, 2012. Legend says that this is the date that the Mayan Long Count Calendar comes to an end. Apparently, it is also the date that the Sun, the Earth and the center of the Milky Way Galaxy are in perfect alignment.

Now, of course this whole Mayan Prophecy thing isn’t based on the fact that it’s 12/21/12. Numbers, or rather, the value that we assign to a specific point in time, have nothing to do with it. The fact of the matter is, for some reason, the Mayan Long Count Calendar ends with this particular Winter Solstice. That’s why the Mayans didn’t mention anything about Time Zones or clock positions or the International Date Line.

Okay, then.

The truth of the matter is, I hope that something does happen this Friday during the Winter Solstice. I hope that people start finding the good instead of the bad. I hope that people start finding common sense again and I hope that people start thinking along the lines of the Greater Good instead of just concentrating on the Richer Self.

Do I think there’s going to be some sort of cosmic or galactic shift? I hope there will be, a shift in perception and a shift in attitude.

I know that I’m not going to wait for the New Year to try to better myself with a bunch of resolutions. I’m going to start the next Mayan Long Calendar with an open heart and an open mind. Maybe the Galactic Alignment will help others do the same.

Shopping.

So I just got back from Christmas shopping by myself. Earl is in the red state of Tennessee until tomorrow and Jamie is on his way home from Indiana. With these moments of solitude, I decided that it would be a great time to go do some shopping at the local mall.

I’m not a fan of Sangertown Square, but it works in a pinch. Built in 1980, it was one of the many malls in the area where folklore dictated that it would sink into the swamp land it was built on by 1985. That didn’t happen. Sangertown Square has the basic anchor stores: Sears, JC Penney, Macy’s and Target. There’s really nothing to set it apart from any other mall in the northeast and if you were to walk into the Hampshire Mall in Hadley, Mass. or the Ithaca Mall in Ithaca, you would see the EXACT same mall with the same decorations inside and out. It’s kind of weird.

When I went to the mall this evening I had no idea that it was open until midnight. Apparently that’s the thing to do during the holiday season these days, so I didn’t feel the pressure of purchasing a bunch of crap for my loved ones. I took the time to pick out what I thought they would like and then stroll around the mall with the hope of seeing other happy shoppers.

The place was damn near empty. And that’s okay in my book.

I have just one or two more things on my list and I will have my shopping complete for the year, or at least until Earl and I shop after the holidays.

Talking to Earl this evening we decided that we didn’t find our shopping trip to Destiny USA last Saturday to be as holiday-fulfilling as usual. I think it was because the mall was too close to us. So we decided to spin the “big wheel o’ roadtrips to malls” (think of that big wheel on the Price As Right but without the outdated “boop” sound) and we found our target mall for an all-day road trip on Saturday: Danbury Fair in Danbury, Connecticut. At only four hours away from our house, it’ll be different than what we’re used to and it’ll feel like we went somewhere else to do our shopping. It’s been years since we’ve been to the Greater Danbury Area and we both had the feeling that Connecticut could use some holiday smiles and happy shoppers these days, so that’s what we’re going to do.

I’ll have to look on the Danbury Fair site to see if they are open until midnight. How I love looking forward to a road trippin’ adventure.