This was one of those "it's always something" days. Yeah, it's tax day ... but it wouldn't be, yet, if I still lived in Massachusetts. It's Patriots Day, which means the Boston Marathon ... and the sixth anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing. For a couple of my friends, it's the anniversary of the death of one of their parents ( Read more... )

The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart,
The secret anniversaries of the heart...
(from a poem by Longfellow)

Yesterday I had wanted to feel good, damn it. It was the 30th anniversary of my ending of a miserable relationship -- the day I started Life over again. As I wrote in LJ a decade ago, October 2, 1987, ( Read more... )

The other day I was standing second in line at the credit union. The woman in front of me was maybe in her 40s, probably on her way home from work, definitely more stylishly dressed than I. In front of her, at the teller window, was a young, skinny guy. It definitely did not take a detailed knowledge of male anatomy to deduce that his belt was ( Read more... )

Signal boost: osewalrus's employer is hiring an entry-level web-content and new-media associate. Go check it out.

Interesting concept: a book called "Throw Out Fifty Things." I also really want to get this book, as I suspect it will touch on a lot of things that I find our modern-day culture to be deficit in (and that I find appealing in the SCA). You can ( Read more... )

Starting over with your own business after 55.

Today my mother would have turned 90 years old.

Mom was the fourth of six children (four boys, two girls). She was the good daughter who helped her mother around the house even as a young adult, while her younger sister went out roller-skating and came home with booze on her breath.

Mom was pretty stoic; she didn't even cry when she was run over ( Read more... )

Remember how I wrote a couple of days ago about some of my past birthdays, and how I was pretty teary-eyed on my 30th B'day?

Fast forward to yesterday. maugorn and patches023 asked me if I would sit at their table for Baronial Birthday feast. Of course I said yes. So I got my feast gear basket out of the car and set up my place setting ( Read more... )

Saw that movie yesterday with the boy toy. Of course it was filled with gustatory delight (and no maggots -- they must have been in the book version). But I also saw it as a positive tale about the power of blogging. Julie was a would-be writer who had a soul-sucking lower-rank bureaucratic job, even if it *was* for an ostensibly good "cause" ( ( Read more... )