An end to 2018

2018 sucked in many ways for me. I'd like to say I'm glad to see it go, but I know that, outside of some technical and legal points, the changing of the calendar doesn't mean anything much. Time will continue to grind by, burn away, and things will keep on happening, with or without our permission.

A few years ago, at one of the first "Kick Out the Bottom" open mics, someone (I forget who) read a poem that opened with a litany of warnings against seeking answers in the words of others. "Neil Gaiman doesn't have all the answers," she said, drawing an audible gasp from the crowded room. (Someone might have reflexively hissed "The devil you say.") Neil Gaiman's New Year's wishes have long been a favorite, little blessings full of wisdom and insight and kindness. He hasn't written one in a while, so he put together a post today collecting all of his past wishes, and explaining what a year 2018 has been, and how busy he has been, and how the is the first New Year's in many that he is away from his wife and child, and...

...and then he went ahead and wrote a new wish for the coming year.

Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.

And with those words, Neil Gaiman has spun me around. Maybe I'll try not to be so pessimistic about the coming year. Maybe I'll make better use of my time. Make my time matter.

Neil Gaiman doesn't have all the answers. But this is something I'll take to heart.

Neil Gaiman's Journal: That Was The 2018 That Was (December 31, 2018)

Neil Gaiman's Journal: My New Year Wish (December 31, 2011

Neil Gaiman's Journal: As I Was Saying (December 31, 2007)

Bustle.com: 16 New Year's Wishes From Neil Gaiman (December 29, 2017)

2018: Almost over

Yeah. Another year in the books.

2018 was horrible in a lot of new and special ways. In May I told my supervisor during one of our periodic how's-it-going meetings that, after six years in the travel business, I was finally feeling happy, finally feeling like I was hitting my stride, finally making good money. So, naturally, within a week or so we were all called into a meeting and told that the company would be closing at the end of September. Our final client valued our work so highly that they invited the employees to apply for work-from-home positions - something that was simply not a practical possibility for me. So when September 30 came along, I found myself once again unemployed.

In late Spring a friend lost herself in an abrupt medical incident. I spent my final week of vacation visiting her in a hospital, hoping to aid in her recovery. Just when things were looking hopeful, her situation went from bad to worse to even worse. And that's where the year is ending with her.

As all this was happening things went sideways over at NEPA Blogs. We had been a part of WBRE's PA Live since the show's first week in September 2011. We had the odd skipped week and even the occasional multi-week hiatus. We also experienced several co-host changes, which meant that pre-recorded episodes with that co-host would have to be scrapped. I recorded my last session for PA Live! in late May, twenty episodes, enough to carry us through at least until September or so. But just a few weeks later, we were advised that the co-host I had recorded with would be leaving the show, very soon, meaning that we would be off the show until we recorded more. Unfortunately, this news came through as my friend was in the worst of her issues, and as I was losing myself in working as much overtime as humanly possible. We agreed that we wouldn't even try to record new episodes until a replacement host was chosen, something that didn't happen until early September. By then I was in the final weeks of my old job. And then, once the job ended, I plunged right into job search mode. I finally had a new job secured in early November, and reached out to the host and producer of PA Live! to let him know I was available to record with his new co-host - only to have him tell me that he was about to be leaving the station to accept a new job elsewhere, and resumption of the segment would be at the discretion of the new host.

As all this was happening, I was staying away from NEPA Blogs. I have not posted to it or updated it since - well, I'm not sure how long. But NEPA Blogs isn't just a site, it's a network of blogs and bloggers linking to each other and interacting with each other, joined by the bonds that run though Northeastern Pennsylvania. It was designed to get along fine without me. Still, I intend to resume work on NEPA Blogs in the new year, and to reach out to the new host of PA Live! sometime soon.

2018 is almost over. It sucked in its own special ways. I'd like to say I'm looking forward to 2019, but in truth, I expect it to be every bit as uniquely horrible.

Calendars acquired

I ventured into the Wyoming Valley Mall today. It's a shadow of what it once was, with two of its anchor stores (Sears and the Bon-Ton) closed, no bookstore, no music store, and no movie theater. Many of the temporary kiosks that went up for the Christmas shopping season are packing up. Fortunately, the calendar kiosk is still there, and selling its calendars for half price. I was able to pick up two space calendars there, a full-sized one featuring photos from the Hubble Space Telescope and a miniature Astronomy one for my station at work.

After the mall I went to Target and picked up some LED Christmas lights at 70% off. Gertrude Hawk's didn't have any peanut butter smidgens on sale. I wound my way to the Barnes & Noble pop-up store and located the 2019 edition of Francesco Marciuliano's "I Could Pee on This" calendar, also half price.

So now I'm all calendared up for 2019!

Christmas purge

For the fourth day of Christmas, I went out into the world of retail and found...very little Christmas.

It's Friday, December 28. Christmas was this past Tuesday. Today was my first opportunity to go shopping. I was kind of hoping to find that Christmas would linger until at least this weekend. But already Walmart has purged itself of most of the trappings of Christmas, with just a few fugitive ornaments left in the clearance section. Sam's Club has a good supply of boxed imported Christmas cookies and pastries available at half-price, but not much else to indicate the holiday that just passed, or the holiday season that has just begun. The local supermarket had nothing except a single clearance rack with half-price cookie cutters and polyresin houses, and a few half-priced boxes of Christmas cookies.

I suppose Target might have a more extensive clearance section. I haven't stopped in there yet, nor at Kmart. And I never made it to the Wyoming Valley Mall, so I don't even know if there are any calendar kiosks selling 2019 calendars at half price.

Tomorrow I need to stop at the vet's for more medicine for Thor, and at Pet Supplies Plus for cat treats, food, and litter. Maybe I'll make a few side trips during my outing.

Time for bed

A postponed garbage night got me. Plus I'm still sick. No time or energy left to write. Need to go to bed.

I was hoping to get out to a poetry reading tomorrow night, but that's not going to happen. Too much to do.

On the Second Day of Christmas

December 26. Boxing Day. The day after Christmas. Calendar Day. Today goes by a lot of names.

For some people - for many of those most fanatical about ramming Christmas down everyone else's throat, and insisting that "Merry Christmas!" is the only acceptable greeting that can be used from the day after Thanksgiving on, December 26 is a day to look at all the Christmas decorations lying about, say "What the...?, and begin to furiously box everything up and put it away, lest someone else notice that they have tackily left signs of Christmas up after the holiday.

By the official reckoning of the Catholic Church (and presumably, the other, younger Christian denominations) December 25 is the start of the Christmas season, not the end of it. Christmas is not considered to officially end until - well, later. The Feast of the Three Kings, or Epiphany, is January 6 and is traditionally considered the end of the season, and takes place twelve days after Christmas - hence the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas," which many people misinterpret as a countdown to Christmas. Other reckonings for the end of the season include the Feast of the Baptism of Jesus, observed one week after Epiphany on January 13 (although this baptism took place when Jesus was an adult), and the Feast of the Presentation in the Temple, or Candlemas Day, which is February 2, forty days after Christmas.

Then there is, of course, "Russian Christmas," now referred to "Christmas as observed by followers of the Julian calendar." This is January 7, the day after Epiphany. It's traditional in some communities to leave decorations up but lights off from shortly after Christmas, and then turn all the lights on again for Russian Christmas - after which all decorations can be removed.

So don't be in a hurry to undecorate. Enjoy that eggnog, keep looking at the lights, and enjoy the rest of the Christmas season.

Merry Christmas 2018!

For the second year in a row, I'm carrying on with my tradition of being sick for Christmas. I was feeling run-down yesterday, and felt pretty lousy by the time Mass was over at 11:00 PM. I was coughing all night and woke up with a sore throat. I had some Throat Coat tea in the morning and nursed a second glass of it throughout the day. I will be taking a box of it with me to work tomorrow.

This was a low-key, fairly disaster-free Christmas. I hope yours was disaster-free, as well.

There'll be scary ghost stories

There's been some talk online of bringing back the old English tradition of ghost stories at Christmas. Outside of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and the reference in the song "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," I was unaware of this tradition. But there's a lot of information about the history of it online.

The discussion tonight before our family's Christmas Eve Vigil Supper began innocently enough, talking about a newly-purchased century-old house on the edge of a cemetery. But soon we found ourselves swapping what my grandmother used to refer to as "creepy stories." Footsteps heard in the space above a girls' dorm at a local college (which turned out to belong to a vagrant squatting in the attic); something that someone - a middle-aged male professional someone - saw in a funeral home-turned-radio station that caused him to insist that the next DJ on duty call in someone to keep her company after he left for the night; my own ghost sighting that left me with the mysterious discovery of a document of sudden relevance; a ghost sighting in my house early one Christmas morning, many years ago, after my family came back from Midnight Mass; a story of a phantom extra figure that showed up in someone's family photos. It was enough to creep us all out, and we finally broke for dinner.

But that wasn't the end of things.

After dinner, after dessert, after the dishes had been cleared, about half the people gathered around the table heard...something. I didn't, but I was told that it was a low rumbling noise, like a piece of furniture being dragged across the floor. I have pretty acute hearing, and I immediately began listening for trouble sounds: running water, the scrabbling of an animal that has snuck into a house and is trying to get out, the sound of a bear dragging stuff around outside. Nothing. A quick search of the house revealed nothing amiss.

So what was it? The sound of someone digesting their meal? Vibrations caused by someone with a nervous tic in their leg? Someone inadvertently moving their chair and causing the sound of dragging furniture? A skyquake or other strange acoustic phenomenon?

No idea. But maybe the creepy stories had best be left for Halloween.

Merry Christmas, in advance

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I am working, and am starting a new phase of the job - a temporary transition from training to actually taking calls. It's supposed to snow, lightly, overnight. So I'm going to dress for our Christmas Eve Vigil Supper, pack my camera in the car (along with the pies I just made and the sparkling cider I bought a few weeks ago, all of which are already in the car), head to work early, and then either dash home right after work to pick up my mom and sister to head to my brother's, -or- head straight to my brother's house if my mom and my sister decide to leave early on their own. After dinner we will head straight to 10:00 Christmas Eve mass, which is going to be held at the "secondary site" for our parish according to two out of three published schedules.

Since I may not get a chance to blog tomorrow, I wanted to take this opportunity to wish all my friends all around the world a Merry Christmas! And here's wishing all of us a better New Year.

Tales of holiday sadness: McDonald's eggnog shakes

Today, after shipping a last-minute package and making a brief pilgrimage to Main Hardware's Christmasland in Wilkes-Barre, I decided to partake of my sporadic Christmas tradition of getting an eggnog shake at McDonald's. I first did this a decade or more ago, when their "large" shakes were huge and thick and came with straws nearly half an inch in diameter. Eventually they switched their shakes to a single, smaller size, topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. Not the same, but marginally adequate.

I went to the McDonald's nearest my house. I pulled up to the ordering thing and realized it would be best to ask first if they had eggnog shakes before I ordered anything else. They said no. Fair enough. There are lots of McDonald's in the area, so I tried another one in the West Side Mall. Nope. I was heading for another one near the Wyoming Valley Mall. As I approached the River Street exit to take me to route 309, I realized that I was passing another McDonald's. I pulled in and surveyed the situation: no ads for eggnog shakes or anything else seasonal. I asked if they had eggnog shakes, and they said no. After having gone to three locations, I finally thought to ask: have eggnog shakes been discontinued? I was told yes, yes they have, they are no longer offered. I didn't bother to check any more McDonald's, and headed home.

I checked online for information. The results were decidedly mixed.

Per McDonald's Twitter account, the eggnog shake is available in "select markets."

...although that tweet is from last year. But the responses are current, from people all over the country, wondering where the eggnog shakes are. Apparently, they're not available anywhere.

The McDonald's Twitter account stated that menu items like this are offered at the discretion of the location, and people interested in getting an eggnog shake should make their wishes known to their local McDonald's. (Probably as of June, since it would probably take that long to get everything in position.)

There are about a dozen McDonald's within ten miles of me. I checked the three closest, but decided I had better things to do with my time than go from location to location. McDonald's, of course, could easily post a list of which locations have chosen to carry this item, but they don't have anything like that. I suppose McDonald's has made a business decision that they don't need the business of fans of their eggnog shake. Oh, well. I think we'll survive without it.

Winter Solstice Moon

Taken in standard mode, exposure compensation adjusted, December 21, 2018,10:13 PM EST

High shutter speed, December 21, 2018, 10:14 PM EST

The Moon isn't technically "Full" yet. The current level of illumination is 99.5%, according to NASA's Dial-A-Moon. It will be another thirteen hours before the Moon is at 100% illumination, but that will be seen on the other side of the world. That will be about eighteen hours after the Winter Solstice, which took place at 5:23 PM Eastern Standard Time today.

*     *     *     *     *

The Christmas party at work went quite well. The eggnog pie was a minor hit, but there was so much other food available. I think the recipient of my Secret Santa gift really appreciated it. I hope she liked my mom's ribbons and bows. (I received a rechargeable high-brightness LED flashlight, which will come in handy when it's time to locate the cats to take them to the vet's.)

We also took our first calls today, which went...as well as could be expected.

Ready or not, here comes Christmas

The eggnog pie with the gluten-free "graham cracker"-style crust is made. A wide assortment of cookies, both gluten-free and glutinous, have been acquired. A replacement candle has been purchased for the Secret Santa gift. After much searching, I realized that a Christmas-themed shoe box/photo box that I purchased but never used (or even took out of the cellophane) several years ago would be the perfect size to hold the candles. I wrapped each candle carefully, padded the inside of the box to minimize rattle, then wrapped the box itself. (The box becomes a bonus present.) Then my mom, whose first job was making bows at Woolworth's for a few cents an hour in the late 1940s, carefully tied a ribbon around the box, created a bow, and tricked it out with filigreed bits of curled ribbon. It will probably take a solid five to ten minutes to get through all the layers to the actual presents inside. I hope the recipient likes them!

Secret Santa fail

We're doing a Secret Santa thing in my training class. The person I drew requested candles, animal print things, or gift cards to T.J. Maxx, Ulta, or...someplace else, I forget where. Anyway, a while back I ventured into T.J. Maxx and carefully selected two candles - then put them back, selected two others, put them back, and repeated this again and again. Finally I was satisfied with two candles, made my way to the register, and checked out. I put the two candles, carefully wrapped from the store, in a drawer where they would be safe until it was time to wrap them.

Tonight I took them out of the drawer and promptly dropped one of them, still wrapped in several layers of paper, about three inches onto a carpeted floor. The glass jar holding the candle cracked like an eggshell. So I guess tomorrow night I'll be going out to buy a replacement.

The Moon one week before Christmas

Tonight is the first night I have seen the Moon in over a week. I decided to grab some photos. While the sky initially looked clear, I quickly realized the Moon was behind a thin cloud, obscuring it somewhat.

The Moon from Nanticoke at 11:28 PM on December 18, 2018

Moon visualization from NASA's Dial-A-Moon for December 19, 2018 at 0500 UTC
(December 18, 2018 at 11:00 PM EST)

Our Town: Nanticoke

WVIA-TV is our local PBS affiliate, and for several years they have been running a series called "Our Town" that profiles communities throughout Northeastern Pennsylvania. They are currently planning to do an episode that features Nanticoke. I may just put my name on the list of potential interviewees, particularly with a thought to my Stained Glass Project.

Exhausting weekend

My co-workers used to laugh whenever I would come in to work at the start of my work week - Monday or whatever day that happened to be - completely exhausted and drained and looking forward to a nice, relaxing week of work. But it's true. Perhaps I should say my "job," since a poet friend once reminded me that my "work" is something completely different from the thing I do for money. Work is almost an abstraction, a series of algorithms with consequences affecting processes and people external to me and my life - and ultimately me, in the form of a paycheck and continued employment. It's generally predictable, even in something as frequently chaotic as customer service.

But real life, life outside of the confines of work, is totally different. The randomness, the demands, the expectations, and even the grind of routine things-that-must-be-done all require so much energy that I look forward to being inside a cubicle somewhere and paid for it.

Time for bed.

Pulling up the stakes

"Pulling up the stakes" is a euphemism for moving, especially changing one's location. I'm not doing that. Today I pulled up the stakes in a much more literal way, finally removing the tomato stakes from my garden and putting them away until next planting season.

Objects tell me stories. When I touch or sometimes just see or even think about an object that is associated with a traumatic or otherwise significant event in my life, I can recall that event in vivid detail.

The tomato stakes I pulled up today were all newly purchased this Spring. This was a hell of a Spring, and Summer too. I had carefully positioned a week of vacation in early June during what, based on my records of the previous few years, would be the last week before tropical weather settled in with unrelenting heat and rain.* I wanted to get a long-postponed home project done, which would optimally involve three rain-free days with temperatures in the mid-70s. Instead I found myself dropping everything to make a daily visit to the hospital where a friend was being kept after a series of unfortunate incidents. Seeing her in that place, it was all I could do to hang on to my own sanity. Each day, every day of my vacation, I would stop there at the designated time for the allotted hour (or was it a half-hour?) for visits. Every day after leaving, I would try to find something fun to do, to remind myself how sweet freedom truly is and, for a few minutes, to take my mind off the friend who had lost hers due to some malfunctioning brain chemistry. On one of those days I stopped at a nearby home center and picked up some stakes for my tomato plants, both wooden and plastic-coated steel.

Those were the stakes I pulled up today.

My friend is still not completely recovered, and may never be. Unfortunate incidents tend to spawn additional unfortunate incidents, and when those are complicated by some really bad decisions, things get worse very quickly. I don't even know if I will ever see her again.

But next Spring, when I pull out the stakes for next year's tomatoes, I will be sure to remember her, and everything that happened with her in 2018.


*My weather forecasting was pretty on the mark: this would be the last really nice week of the "Summer," despite taking place in Spring and having a destructive tornado touch down in the middle of it.

First paycheck

It's nice to be drawing a paycheck again. This first one was a paper check, mailed to my house. Future ones will be deposited directly into my checking account.

I "double-jacked" with an experienced agent at the end of the day. She has been with the company for twelve years. There are many employees there who have been with the company that long or even longer. At my last employer, I was one of the "old timers" for having been with that company for six and a half years. The work environment is very different from my last employer. But so is the product. We'll see how this goes.

Updates

Another late one. Going to bed soon.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of my grandmother's death. I tried to stop at the cemetery after work today, but it was already far too dark to go in. The cemetery officially closes at sunset, which was at 4:36 PM locally. I didn't get there until after 5:00. By then the darkness was nearly full, and traffic was unusually heavy on Middle Road. I drove past the cemetery and saw the gate was still open. Our family plot (which I decorated for Christmas this past Sunday, incorporating real holly and holly berries along with the plastic greenery) is just inside the gate. Surely no one would object to me slipping in there for just a minute or two? But I was going too fast and could not safely make the turn into the entrance. I pulled into a housing development a hundred feet or so down the road, and waited a good five minutes until traffic allowed me to pull out. But I just drove past the entrance again, since it was clearly too late and too dark to safely enter or attempt to exit the cemetery. I silently said a prayer and promised to visit this weekend.

Third week of training is nearly over. We do an exercise each Friday at the start of class - an icebreaker / team-building / getting-to-know-you exercise. Each member of the class submits a song and artist to our instructor, who plays the first thirty seconds or so for the class. We then try to figure out the song, the artist, and - most importantly - who chose the song. In this way we get a sense of the diversity of tastes in the group, and also start to get a better understanding of each member of the class. So far my picks have been "Christmas at the Zoo" by Flaming Lips and "Just Like Heaven" by The Cure. For tomorrow I have three different choices in mind. We'll see which one I pick.

Thor is still maintaining. He's eating lots, but I don't know how much he's absorbing. We'll see if he's put on any weight when I take him to the vet Saturday morning. I'll be giving him his second hydration tomorrow night.

Woolgathering

When I get tired, my mind starts to wander down strange paths. I will often arrive at a thought and wonder "How did I get here?" and realize that it is nearly impossible to backsolve the steps that brought me to this point. I would love to harness the creative energy that leads to such weird places, concepts, and characters, but it seems the best I can do is jot down what I can remember.

It's happening again. Time for bed.