Refrigerator Door: My Niece Mails Me a Masterpiece

My niece is a consummate artist, and her talents extend far beyond hand-turkeys. She mailed me a drawing that arrived today, and it's a masterpiece!

As I am not myself an artist nor even an art critic, I don't know what it all means. Still... look at that composition! Those confident lines! That bold use of color palette! I'm telling you, the kid is the next Picasso.

Thoughtful child that she is, she also sent a note along with her artwork that undoubtedly would explain to me what it's all about. If only I were smart enough to understand...



That, I'm sure, makes it all crystal-clear.

On most days, I regret retrieving the mail. Aside from the occasional DVD from Netflix, mail is never good news. I live on email, so whatever comes in the post is either a bill or junk. It's a nice surprise to get something like this in that otherwise bleak box!

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Refrigerator Door: Cow-Pig-Hand Turkey with Two Tongues

My niece drew this the morning after Thanksgiving and decided that it was the one that I should have out of the many hand-turkeys she drew. She also had me and another relative drawing these, because it's no fun to draw hand-turkeys all by oneself. It's a group effort.

This particular turkey has two tongues. Why two tongues? Because she said so. It's also a cow-pig-turkey which, naturally, would have more than one tongue.

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A Few Irreligious Thoughts to Ponder

You've probably heard by now about a certain presumptuous jackass of a columnist named Jim Griffith who writes for the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald. Griffith has achieved 15 minutes of Internet infamy by penning a column entitled "A few religious thoughts to ponder." In it, he explains how terrible Thanksgiving is for atheists:

Thanksgiving must be a terrible time for atheists. They have no God to thank.

They do not have the privilege of gathering with family and friends to express gratitude by saying: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." An atheist on his deathbed faces serious uncertainties. Gazing upward, he pleads: "Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul -- if I have one."

The column was found out and replied to by a series of atheists objecting to such nonsense and, after less than two days, the newspaper saw fit to close the comments so that no more respondents could rake Griffith over the coals for being, as I said, a presumptuous jackass. I've checked other items in the newspaper, including other columns by Griffith, and none of them have had their comments closed after many days or weeks. Just this one. Apparently, the Newnan Times-Herald didn't want too many atheists to have the chance to debunk Griffith's garbage by mentioning how they celebrate Thanksgiving — at least not in a forum that locals were likely to see. It just won't do for a newspaper to report inadvertently that atheists celebrate the holiday in much the same way that non-atheists do and that the atheists are, after all, human beings with families, affections and gratitude. At least, it won't do for the small-time newspaper to reveal these truths to the residents of Newnan, GA.

As a result, those of us who didn't have the chance to respond to Jim Griffith's "few thoughts," which I suspect are a very few, at the paper's website during the 36 hours in which the opportunity to do so was available will have to do it elsewhere. I'll do it here.

I have a lot of things for which to be thankful this year, and not a single iota of it requires or has anything to do with any deities whatsoever.

Like many people across America, regardless of their beliefs, I will be joining my family to celebrate the holiday. LL and I will be leaving within the next couple of hours to head to north central Pennsylvania, just as we did last year. You may not see it readily, but there's a lot of gratitude embodied in that last sentence.

First off, I'm thankful for having gotten through another year during which a blindly religious president mismanaged the country in which I live into numerous hardships. I survived that year despite the existence of religious radicals in other countries who would like to see people like me dead... and when I say "people like me," I mean Americans. They want to inflict pain upon us because their religious fundamentalism calls for violence against people with whom they disagree. I'm thankful that this faith-stuffed anti-intellectual will soon be a former president and that his replacement might actually turn out to be a person of intelligence and ability who could wind up improving things, even if only a little. 2008 hasn't been a very good year for my country and I'm glad it's almost over. I'm thankful to the 7,000,000 people, too, who may well have changed the course of history during the last election. We shall see what really happens in the months and years ahead, but I'm thankful for at least having the hope that it won't be the same as what's gone before.

I'm thankful that I'm getting to spend another Thanksgiving with my sister, niece and brother-in-law. My sister and I had no contact at all for more than a decade, and this was in no small part due to religious belief. My parents found much to hate about the world and about differences of opinion and about people who are different from them thanks to their faith, you see, and they disowned first me in part because of that faith. They told my sister that I was a drug addict, that I was in jail and probably dead, to make as sure as they could that she wouldn't try to find me. When I finally tracked her down, I learned that she had been similarly disowned for the grievous sin of falling in love with someone of a different faith than that of our parents — even though neither my sister nor he practiced any religion at all. When they got married, nobody from my family came to the wedding other than myself. I gave the bride away. Tomorrow, we'll celebrate Thanksgiving together, along with my rather precocious niece and the rest of our non-traditional clan, none of whom are particularly religious and several of whom are outright non-believers. How could I not be grateful for this? The only involvement of a deity here, at least the imagining of one, was to drive people apart.

LL is coming with me, of course. This year, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary together. LL comes from a country in which religious differences led to a generation-long civil war in which members of her family and friends of her family died in terrible and inhumane ways. Her cousin, for example, was detained by a Syrian-backed militia, hauled away to Syria, and tortured for years. She spent long stretches of time huddled with her family in an underground parking garage hoping to avoid being shot or blown up by Syrians and Israelis and their proxies — all on the basis of ancient religious divisions. Survive it she did, though, and this year she became a US citizen and voted in an election for the first time in her entire life. I am thankful that LL is here with me, relatively safe and about to enjoy the holiday. I'm thankful that she survived a long and terrible war, that she made it to the US, and that she's stuck by me all these years, through the best of times and the not-so-good.

I'm thankful to the university I attend and to the people there who give of their time and knowledge as I grind away at earning a graduate degree. There was a time in my life, not so long ago, during which I never thought that I could get this far. I worked hard and here I am, but the opportunity had to be offered by others, too. I have that opportunity and am grateful for it.

I'm thankful that Tycho, a lizard who has practically been family, has survived another year, despite last year's unwarranted death sentence. He's sitting near my shoulder as I write this, probably wondering when breakfast is coming. Alas, the weather is too cold for Tycho to make the trip to Pennsylvania with us this year. He's going to be rather bored with no humans to entertain him for the four days we'll be gone. Tycho has worked out a lot of things in his long lizard lifetime, but how to work the TV remote isn't one of them. I expect that he'll spend much of his time asleep. In any case, he's exceeded the average lifetime of a member of his species in captivity by nearly a third now and is still in good health. Thank you, Tycho, for sticking around for so long. There will be lobster roaches and macaroni and cheese when we return. I suppose someone could argue that some deity is allowing Tycho to go on living. You know, Lizard-Jesus or HerpAllah or something. That would be a very childish person, but I'm sure someone who will read this will have the thought cross their mind.

Which brings me to another bunch for which I'm thankful, and that is the many people who have fought and are still fighting to reverse the ever-threatening flood of irrationality that might otherwise engulf us all and snuff out the light of the Enlightenment. They keep us progressing, sometimes at great cost. They're the ones who hope to remove the motivations for these religious wars and faith-based familial decay, who object to and dissect and defeat all the magical thinking that is only a hair's breadth away from complete ascendancy at times. I'm grateful to the teachers, the scientists, the historians, the living human memory-banks who remember the past and dedicate themselves to our not repeating it.

There is more — much more — but I have to get ready now to hit the road. It's a long drive from here to there. All things considered, I'm thankful to be making that six hour schlep today.

And you know what, Jim Griffith of the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald? I'm even grateful to you today. You've given me one more reminder of how low we humans can sink if we decide to measure the worth of others with yardsticks designed and built of our own narrow views. You're a good cautionary example of just how wrong we can be, and thus how wrong whole societies can go, when our eyes get so full of our own self-esteem that we place ourselves in judgment of the rest of the world based on nothing but the desire to be thankful to anything other than that little fraction of humanity it is our privilege, and sometimes our burden, to actually know.

Like the majority of Americans, I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with a ridiculously large meal on Thursday evening. Like those millions of other Americans, there's something else I'll be doing early on Friday morning. It's then that I will be thinking most of Mr. Griffith.

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Natural Curiosity: An Inordinate Fondness for Fungi

My sister and her family are visiting this weekend. She and and my brother-in-law are both psychologists and my niece, Alex, is a rambunctious and extremely bright four year old with tremendous curiosity about nature. I don't know whether that's nature or nurture at work. They live in a rural area in the Hudson River Valley. Their home is the kind of place where deer wandering across the lawn is a daily occurrence and it's not too unusual to have a bear raid the garbage every so often. Nonetheless, as I've mentioned before, Alex seems to have been born with a particular interest in fungi. It's not something that anyone taught her about, though it's certainly been encouraged. I can't think of why...

We met up at Elm Park yesterday to let Alex blow off some steam at the playground. The plan was that the adults could check out Art in the Park at the same time, but there wasn't much art to see despite the banner proclaiming that the event runs through October. Practically the first thing that happened is that I was handed the note you see to the left. It was important that I see this right away!

When we started getting hungry, we left for Binh Duong, which still ranks as LL and my favorite Vietnamese restaurant in Worcester. I asked Alex if she'd like to see the lab where I work on the way and she was very interested in doing so.

It being Saturday night, nobody else was around. We did a quick tour of the clean lab; it's very hard to explain to a four year old what we do in there. She did want to wear the cool purple nitrile gloves, though. Alex was much more interested in the dirty lab. She wanted to see the mushrooms, of course, and she got to check out a whole preserved Bondarzewia berkeleyi and giant specimens of Ganoderma applanatum as well. She also went through some of the Russula specimens I've collected and she thought the big green ones were pretty impressive. I noticed that she was eying the microscopes, so I asked her if she wanted to look at a beetle and that was a cool idea. I dug out a big staphylinid from my bug box and set it up under a dissecting scope for her. Woah! Giant beetles... the kid was psyched.

I asked Alex if she'd like to look even closer and see what a beetle's foot looks like. Big surprise; let's do that! I dissected off a tarsus and described what I was doing. At each step, Alex replied with a "yeah" and implicit, "and then what," the pitch of her voice increasing a little each time. I showed her how to make a wet mount and each step brought a higher-pitched "yeah" dripping with curiosity. When I had the slide set up on the microscope, Alex climbed into my lap to look at the foot at 100X magnification and her eyes were bugging out enough that she could probably have seen it from a foot away. By the time she'd had her fill of those tarsomeres and tarsal claws, she was ready to do it again. "Let's do another one!"

It was time for dinner, though, so I let Alex use a pair of watchmaker's forceps to put the beetle back in its vial. I didn't tell her how to do it, and it struck me that she knew enough to be very delicate about the task. She started off trying to barely exert any pressure at all, dropping the insect a couple of times before she squeezed just hard enough to get the thing from the hack to the vial without crushing it in the slightest. The kid is a natural!

Our plan for today was to go up to Wachusett so that she could see the giant green mushrooms and whatever other kinds might be out. Alex wants to find beetles, too, so I let her pack a few vials of EtOH in my kit last night for use today. Unfortunately, we're having a wicked electrical storm at the moment and the forecast is calling for rain throughout the day, so I'm not sure whether we'll be able to follow through on the plans. We may need to come up with some kind of indoor alternative. I think I'd be as disappointed as Alex would about that. Most, if not all, kids are born with a curiosity about nature, I suppose. If the four year old keeps that same level of curiosity past adolescence, they become science geeks. When they keep it past the age of forty they become... well... me, I suppose. Doesn't every kid need a weird scientist uncle?

I hope the rain stops so I can go find mushrooms and bugs today! Am I a four year old dreaming that I'm a graduate student, or am I a graduate student in the company of a four year old?

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Birthday Weekend in New York

I'm back from a wonderful weekend in New York City courtesy of LL. This birthday turned out to be perhaps the best ever, though I've had enough of them now that it's beginning to get hard to remember them all. Still, returning to the city of my birth and places I (mis)spent my youth for the first time in so long was the best anyone could ask for. I made it a point not to spend any time online, so those who left comments will understand the delay in getting them posted and regular readers will forgive the lack of updates since Friday. This one entry will make up for all of that, though.

I'll break it all down by day for ease of writing, because there's a lot to cover.

Friday, Feb. 29
We arrived at our hotel, the Diplomat Motor Inn in Rockville Centre, at about 1:30 PM. After checking in and dropping off our stuff, we headed straight back out the door and drove to All American Burger in Massapequa. Back in my days as a teenage burnout on Long Island, I spent a lot of inebriated hours hanging out in the parking lot of this place scarfing down ridiculous numbers of their so-bad-they're-amazing hamburgers. My poison-of-choice was the double-double, which is what a double cheeseburger is called by the locals, contrary to the menu on the website. LL and I each got one and they were exactly as I remembered. LL was somewhat less than impressed, and I guess it's an acquired taste. Imagine an oversized White Castle burger and you've got the idea. For me, anyhow, this was an absolutely necessary bit of nostalgia. For LL, it was an experience akin to a root canal, I think.

When we were done eating, we headed to the neighborhood in which I lived. First, we headed over to the high school from which I graduated. It hasn't changed much, at least not from the outside. The kids still look the same, right down to a sprinkling of those who seem reluctant to let go of the heavy metal look I remember from the 80's. Yes, the big hair is still there. We next cruised past my parents' house which is now covered by bright yellow aluminum siding and entirely devoid of trees. A large silver SUV was parked in the driveway; I've no idea who lives there now. Our last stop in Massapequa was Pine Street Park, where I was once knocked unconscious with a beer bottle to the back of my head by a well-meaning friend who was trying to help me meet a girl we who was hanging out with us in the park that night. The knocking-out part worked fine, but I never did get a date with her. Ah, memories and the blank bits between them.

We took a drive around town past the former homes of people I used to know and then were done with Massapequa. On the way out of town, we stopped off at the Sunrise Mall (now Westfield Sunrise) to pick up a few things we needed, including a new hat for me. The mall no longer contains a movie theater, though there is a full-sized Wal-Mart there. Wal-Mart is everywhere.

A side trip to Amityville was necessary, too, so that LL could say she's seen the house upon which The Amityville Horror is based. People still live there (without any voices telling them to get out, I might add), and they've had a lot of trouble with trespassers taking photos of the place in the past, so I didn't do it myself. We just drove by. The address of the house has been changed and the distinctive Dutch windows removed to help discourage tourists such as myself, but being a local I still know which house it is. No, I'm not going to tell.

A little more driving around ensued and then we headed back to the hotel to get ready for dinner. LL tried to find someplace using her laptop, but we discovered that our room didn't have a wireless connection. The only rooms that have wireless at the Diplomat, it turns out, are those right next to the lobby, so management offered us a deluxe room with a jacuzzi and we decided to take it. It was right above the lobby and came with a complimentary bottle of Sambuca di Amore and two shotglasses. How could we say no? We were completely exhausted by this point, so we decided to have dinner at the TGI Friday next to the hotel. I had a large and potent scotch and soda while we waited for our table. Needless to say I was ready for bed by the time we'd finished, and that was it for Friday night.

Saturday, March 1
We set out early for Brooklyn. The plan was to take the Long Island Railroad from Baldwin to Jamaica, then change to the subway and get to Flatbush and DeKalb for breakfast at Junior's. That didn't work; someone had either jumped or been pushed in front of a train at Jamaica. Either way, the train we needed wasn't going to be running for hours to come. We turned around and got the car and drove to Junior's instead. It was 11:30 by the time we got there, having been lucky enough to not only survive driving on the Belt Parkway but to find a parking spot right within a few yards of the door as well. If you've ever tried to find a parking spot near Junior's on a Saturday morning, you know how close to miraculous this was.

The last time I had breakfast at Junior's, I was with my long-deceased grandfather. I haven't been back since he died, but I still remember the place vividly. It was a tradition; whenever I was at my grandparents' place on a Saturday, we had breakfast a Junior's. It hasn't changed a bit, even though the place caught fire in 1991. I ordered Scotch kippers with eggs and onions and LL had corned beef hash with poached eggs. Someone told me a couple of years ago that breakfast no longer came with an assortment of mini-danishes and rolls. They were wrong; that still happens. I bit into a Junior's prune danish for the first time in a generation and it was every bit as good as I remembered it. That taste brought back so many memories of my grandfather that it was all I could do not to start crying right there in the middle of a busy restaurant. Who would have thought that a prune danish could do that? It did, though. All of breakfast was that good and that memory-laden. Junior's was also the last place, and still the only place, I'd ever had kippers.

I needed to pick up some mints after breakfast; few things make for horrible breath moreso than kippers and onions. I crossed the street to one of those literal hole-in-the-wall newsstands that dot New York while LL picked out souvenirs (I got a Junior's t-shirt and a sweatshirt, too!) It brings up a point; everyone knows the myth that New Yorkers aren't friendly, but it isn't true. I wound up in a conversation with the guy in line in front of me and then in a second one with the leathery-looking Korean woman who runs the stand. See, it isn't New Yorkers who aren't friendly... it's the people who commute into the city from Nassau County. It was true back when I lived in Brooklyn and then in Nassau County and it's still true now; New Yorkers have a tendency to be outgoing. They live with crowds and often in close quarters. Folks from Long Island bedroom communities, on the other hand, never have to develop the interpersonal skill set that makes life in the Big City not only possible but enjoyable. That's a generalization, of course, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb.

After Junior's, we drove out to Coney Island. This was one of the two big stops for me on this trip. I hadn't set foot in Coney Island for many years and I was dying to see the place again. They say that Coney Islanders get sand in their shoes and never get it out again, and that's true. Sooner or later, we all have to go back there and see what's become of the place. The Boardwalk (and let's face it, folks, there's only one true Boardwalk and lots of imitators) is our Mecca to which we must make a reverential pilgrimage at least once in our lives should we ever leave it. More than a few of us go through some life-changing experience on the Boardwalk. We might have our first funnel cake our ride our first roller coaster or even lose our virginity there (ahem), but there's always something that anchors us to that place, and so we're like spawning salmon that swim upstream to get back to the place of our birth.

Of course, when we get there we have to complain at least a little bit about how it's changed and how much it's decayed since we last saw it and why hasn't anyone fixed the place and saved our favorite landmark of youth. For me, that mostly came as the result of a trip to the "Original" Nathan's. Those quote marks are intentional, because the hot dogs served at the site where the real Nathan's once stood are now the same ones you can buy at any supermarket or food court. They're cooked in the same way they're cooked anywhere else; gone is the open grill where they once singed perfectly over fire. That grill is where the cash registers are lined up now. I got a hot dog there and you know what? It sucked. I could barely digest the thing and was sick that night because of it. There's not much point to going back there again for me, aside from maybe taking a picture of the outside of the place. It's just a fast food chain store now, no better than a McDonald's. Sad to say, Nathan's finally betrayed Coney Island.

Still, the Boardwalk itself was much as I remembered it, though Astroland has now closed down and is never to reopen. Soon, it will vanish and a casino will rise in its place. I'm of two minds about that. On the one hand, I wish that Coney Island could be what it used to be — amusement park, beach, low-brow grunge, burlesque shows, the Coney Island that started out sometime early last century and was still clinging to life when my parents lived there, and which was still at least on life support when I grew up there. On the other hand, maybe a casino is just a natural evolution. There's no way a Coney Island amusement park could ever hope to compete with a Six Flags, and would that be any better, anyhow? Who knows; maybe a casino can revitalize whatever else is left on the Boardwalk. As it stands right now, we could only find one gift shop there — and it didn't even have postcards.

Because it's still winter, everything was closed. It was still amazing to be back, though, and I took lots of photos:

1-3: Shots along the boardwalk showing LL and I and the parachute jump. I could see the jump from my bedroom window when I was a kid in Coney; it's in much better shape now than it was back then. The parachute jump is to Coney Island, and maybe to New York, what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

4-6: Some close-up shots of the parachute jump. The last one is taken from the base of the jump toward Astroland and the Wonder Wheel.

7-9: The Wonder Wheel itself; shot #9 is in the same park as the Wonder Wheel, Deno's Wonder Wheel Park (warning: the web page is kind of a pain in the neck). I don't know if it's going to stay open when the new casino comes in or not.

10-12: A shot from the Boardwalk toward the "Original" Nathan's, the Cyclone from the New York Aquarium parking lot, and another Boardwalk shot.

13-15: Three shots of the ruins of the old public bath. I think. I'm actually not sure what this old building is. It's a beautiful bit of decay there on the Boardwalk, though, and if anyone can tell me what it used to be with certainty I'd appreciate the info.

16-18: Two shots of a very friendly walrus and a not-so-friendly electric eel at the New York Aquarium. The aquarium is almost certainly the most successful thing still standing on the Boardwalk. I used to go there a lot as a kid; I think that electric eel might be the same one I remember from when I was about 10.

There are a few more Coney Island pictures in this album if you still haven't had enough.

After our visit to the Boardwalk, I took a shot at seeing the house I lived in as a kid in Seagate, just a bit more than a mile from the Boardwalk. Back when I lived there, the "gate" consisted of a security guard in a sort of toll booth. Now it's a major piece of wrought iron with razor wire at the top and high fences going all the way around the community. There was no way even to walk in, let alone drive, so I didn't get to see the old house. Considering what an armed compound the place looks like now, I probably never will, as much as I'd like to.

After a day in Brooklyn, we headed back to Long Island and got a bit of rest back at the hotel. We ventured out again for dinner at a Thai restaurant in Valley Stream called Seeda. I was in the mood for Thai and there aren't too many Thai places in Nassau, which is probably good for Seeda. The food was adequate and the service was bad — slow, curt and inattentive. The place was crowded and noisy and even though it was small, getting the attention of the wait staff was nearly impossible. I wouldn't bother with it again. Seeda bills itself as the best Thai food on Long Island, but I have a hunch that's as meaningful a title as being the smartest person at a Bush family reunion.

Sunday, March 2
At 9:25 AM, the precise time at which I turned 42, I was standing on a platform at Penn Station and waiting for the uptown A train to take LL and I to the American Museum of Natural History. The Museum is a pivotal place in my life; it's probably the single entity most responsible for getting me interested in science, particularly in biology. I wonder how many kids it has had that effect upon over the years. I couldn't wait to get back there again after all these years.

We met up with my sister and her family there; my niece even made me a birthday card on purple construction paper:

In case you find that writing hard to read, it says:

Moo Poop Moo Poop
Moo Poop Moo Poop
Moo Poop Moo
Poop Moo Poop
Moo Poop Moo!

I mean, you'd think a 15 year old could do better than that. Then again, she's only 4 now, and in fouryearoldese I'm pretty sure that means "Happy birthday." Either that or she thought the whole thing was a bunch of bullshit. Could be either one...

We didn't get to spend much time with my sister's family, though. My niece got overtired and overstimulated and completely crashed, so they had to take her to one of the quiet parts of the museum while LL and I forged on. The displays have changed a lot since I was a kid and the whole place has largely been modernized, but it's still that same old wonderfully dusty old museum I'll always love. We stuck mainly to the biology-oriented sections, but we'll do more of the anthropology-related parts next time we go which, now that we're within easy travel distance, certainly won't take another twenty years.

Again, there are lots of photos in this album. Here are some highlights. Readers can figure out for themselves what's being shown here or ask. It's pretty self-explanatory, really.

We spent the whole glorious day in the museum, almost from opening until closing. After that, we bid our goodbyes to my sister and family and headed back out to Long Island for dinner at the Nautilus Cafe in Freeport.

The Nautilus was terrific. The food was just excellent; we started with raw oysters on the half shell and Asian calamari. The latter was perfect; spicy and sweet and enough to make me want to dive face-first onto the plate which, come to think of it, I practically did. We both got seafood combination plates with lobster tails, scallops and shrimp stuffed with crab meat for an entrée and split an order of asparagus hollandaise for a side. For dessert, I had key lime dream and LL had an almond "cake" which, as far as I could tell, contained nothing like flour and was pure, sweet amaretto with almond frosting and several other almond-flavored things. The service was flawless and friendly. The wine list wasn't bad, either. I had a couple of glasses of Italian Pinot Grigio with dinner and LL had a tawny port with dessert. Everything was solid from start to finish, and Nautilus Café turned out to be the perfect place for my birthday dinner. I really couldn't have asked for more.

We lingered there until about 10:00, then headed back to the hotel to collapse into a very, very deep sleep.

Monday, March 3
Breakfast at Bagel Cafe III at the corner of Atlantic and Ocean in Freeport was OK; they have real bagels there. We didn't want to get caught in rush hour traffic, so we passed a couple of hours at Three Streams Preserve (officially, it's called the Massapequa Preserve, but nobody called it that when I lived in the area). There's not much to say about the place, really. It has always been a popular place for teenagers to drink beer and do other things of which their parents do not approve, so parts of it are littered with old beer cans and bottles and other places are in good shape. I know I did my share of partying in the place when I was a disaffected 16 year old, and the tradition continues.

We got on the road at about 10:30 AM and took our time getting back, so we didn't get home until about 3:30 PM, when we discovered that our cable and internet services had been accidentally disconnected when our upstairs neighbor moved out while we were away. It took until this afternoon to get that fixed, and now here I am writing the longest single blog update I will probably ever write.

Our most excellent weekend has ended now. LL is fighting a cold she probably contracted while riding the subway and my fingers are falling off. Tomorrow, it's back to the grind.

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Thanksgiving 2007

LL and I spent Thanksgiving with my family. We started out with Thanksgiving dinner in upstate New York and then moved on to another Thanksgiving in central Pennsylvania at the Nittany Mountain KOA camp, which is owned by my sister-in-law and her partner. Yes, two Thanksgiving dinners. I don't remember the last time I ate so much. My family is rather non-traditional; aside from my sister and brother-in-law, nobody is married to one another, so we're all partners, but still family. I'm not sure what that means, if anything, but I think we've all sort of come to the same conclusions about the institution of marriage in general. It's an unusually diverse group of people, too, in terms of ethnicity and education and everything else. We're certainly not the typical 2.2-kids middle class model. We can certainly eat, though.

LL and I stayed in the cabin shown above. One of the first people we met at the camp was a nearby camper who goes by the name of Snooky. Snooky is obsessed with blowing leaves. He spends whole days, from sunrise to sunset, with his leaf blower. Things could be worse, I suppose... he could be obsessed with an axe. To say the guy is eccentric is probably an understatement. Meeting him made me wonder if Stephen King has ever written a story about a leaf blowing maniac.

Of course, there were other things to do beside blowing leaves. My niece, for instance, prefers playing miniature golf to just about anything else. She has her own rules for the game, the first of which is "I win!" When she got tired, she had the good fortune of free and unlimited access to the camp store, so she could always "sugar up" on candy and hot cocoa when she started getting tired. I've sat through hurricanes that packed less energy than that kid. For her, the long weekend consisted of miniature golf, Spongebob and sugar. Oh, and telling all the adults how to play whatever game she made up at the moment. It's too bad none of us had nearly the same energy she does.

There's a petting zoo at the camp. LL made friends with a couple of goats. My niece, for whatever reasons, wasn't generally too interested in the animals. Not all of the animals present were from the petting zoo; my brother-in-law's mother (my aunt-in-law? I still don't know the proper kinship term) brought along her pug, Zeus. Also present was a ridiculously friendly three-legged cat; he lost the fourth leg in a jaw trap some years ago and makes do with the remaining limbs as best he can. There was also a very hyperactive Maltese named CD and a few other critters lurking about.

What family gathering would be complete without at least one faux pas? Ours took the form of a social misstep by my sister-in-law's partner's daughter's boyfriend (I dare anyone to give me the kinship term for that relationship!) delivering a line about how mean Arabs are while LL was sitting at the table. This was made a bit funnier by the fact that the guy is half Italian and half Jamaican himself and was meeting the family for the first time. It was all taken in stride with good humor and a quick comeback from LL resulting in a blush and an embarrassed "Oh, are you Arab?" from Alfredo, the boyfriend in question. I don't think anyone will be letting him live that one down anytime soon.

We stayed at the camp and ate ridiculously well through Saturday night, then left early on Sunday morning to begin the trip home. I decided to take a detour through Binghamton on the way to check out a few places that were part of my life about 20 years ago when I lived up there. The first stop was at 160 Conklin Avenue, a house that I lived in during my first stint at university. I lived there with five other students, including one girlfriend, in a sort of commune that resulted in the place being called Helter Shelter. There were a lot of drugs and craziness. The place is essentially the spot where my life absolutely went to pieces and I felt a need to revisit the site of the most traumatic time in my existence. It hasn't changed at all. In fact, it looks as if it hasn't seen so much as a coat of paint since I left in 1988. To me, it seems a dark, brooding, decaying place, perhaps a bit Lovecraftian in its presence. It's like a combination of fossil and historic landmark in my life. Standing there at the corner of Conklin and John was surreal; I felt as if I were dreaming, especially because LL was there with me. My room in the house was the one with the windows just above the door in this photo. The door itself was the spot where, in 1987, a guy named Jimmy Puccio drank a votive candle full of hot wax thinking it was a shot of tequila and then passed out. He's probably long forgotten about the incident, wherever he is now. If there were such a thing as ghosts, this house would certainly be haunted by the spirits of many acid trips, not to mention some devastating heartbreaks. I wouldn't want to be the poor slobs living in it now in that case. In my mind, at least, this is a place with much mojo.

After my pilgrimage to Helter Shelter, I headed to the SUNY Binghamton campus. Everything was closed and parking was no problem. We visited College-in-the-Woods, dorms I'd been tossed out of years ago after my roommate and I accidentally set a fire in Oneida Hall that got the place evacuated at 4 AM in the middle of a winter night. You see, we wanted to find out whether Bacardi 151 was really flammable, so we filled the cap of a peanut butter jar with the stuff and lit it. It ignited, of course... and then my roommate jerked his hand away and knocked over the entire bottle onto my desk. That set off the alarms and destroyed a couple of my textbooks and all of my notebooks, too. The next day, we were told that we could no longer live on campus. We wound up finding a place in Johnson City, right on Main Street. That's what's shown in the image to the right; our apartment was the top floor of the building to the right of the one with the "1892" decoration on the top. I lived there for about a year with my roommate, Duncan, as well as the son of the Fijian ambassador to the United States. After that year, I took some time off from school. By the time I got back, Duncan had graduated and I wound up living at Helter Shelter. The store with the blue awning, now a clothing store, used to be a sub shop called The Pig Out. It had the best spiedies in all of Broome County, and I'd been hoping to take LL there, but it's gone. Actually, most of the storefronts on Main Street are empty these days. Downtown Johnson City is a very sad, desolate place. Even Fat Cat Books, an institution for Triple Cities comic book and RPG fans, moved out of downtown. The building it once occupied, just across the street from my old apartment, now sits empty.

We spent some time poking around the area and then got back on the road home. Along the way, we got hungry and stopped for lunch in Cobleskill. Not wanting to hit the usual fast food places, LL chose our lunch spot, a diner on route 9 attached to the Colonial Motel — the Diner Motel. Not the Motel Diner, mind you, but the Diner Motel. Seeing that they'd gotten the name wrong on the sign, we probably should have known better than to eat there... but we went ahead and did it anyhow. I ordered grilled chicken on a pita, expecting something like a gyro. What I got was a piece of grilled chicken on a pita and nothing else. This was easily the most literal lunch I've ever eaten. It was exactly one piece of chicken breast on half of a pita with no lettuce, no tomato, no onions, no nothing. LL ordered a proper gyro, but that was bland and useless, too. After lunch, we agreed that the best thing about the food we'd just had was that it probably wouldn't make us sick.

Because our own GPS unit is in the shop for repairs, we were traveling with a loaner. Quick qord of advice here; avoid the Mio GPS like the plague. We told the thing to avoid toll roads and, as if to punish us, it took us on the most backwards, time-wasting route home possible. At one point we even wound up on a dirt road (Tory Hill Road) somewhere near Central Brunswick, NY. We were trying to avoid taking the Mass Pike, but we finally gave in and took it and paid for that mistake by getting stuck in a traffic jam that easily added close to hours to our trip. We finally got off 90 and picked up 20... but that was backed up, too. The final insult came when we got off 20 and onto Stafford Road, just a couple of miles from home. I was pulled over by a cop because I had a license plate frame. No kidding; license plate frames are technically illegal in Massachusetts, and this particular cop decided to stop me because of it. Luckily, he gave me a warning instead of a ticket. By that time, though, we'd been on the road for more than twelve hours. Ugh. We left New Columbia, PA at 6:00 AM. By the time we got back to Worcester, it was 8:30 PM. It was an awful trip. Next year, we'll do things differently. I don't know how, but I'm not doing that haul on a holiday weekend ever again.

The weekend was great, the road trip sucked, and I'm now functioning on 3.5 hours of sleep, having awakened at 1:30 this morning for no good reason I can fathom. I have to teach lab until 9:00 tonight, too. It's going to be a looooooooooooong day.

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