All posts filed under: Life

Always so surprising.

Wretched Chores Made Less Crappy: Weed Pulling Cocktails

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The weeds in the driveway now hit the undercarriage of the WideEyedRides. I can hear them smacking the bumper and the bigger sticky-er ones make tiny scraping noises as I putt-putt up the drive. Brush fires are a concern when I park the hot engines over the verdant crack weeds. I can’t turn my face away any longer. It is time to weed the driveway. Years ago the Spouse and I developed a system for undertaking this wretched chore – which, you may note comes about ONLY during the smoking hottest sizzling portion of the summer. Our system does not include herbicide. Have a look at that image over there on the right. If I blasted those tall, healthy, nearly blooming weeds with herbicide what would I get? Tall, dead, yellow weeds, even more likely to catch on fire, that’s what. And I don’t want to hear anything about maybe taking care of this before it becomes a problem, prophylactic herbicide application, whatever. This happens every year and has in every house we’ve ever owned. …

Who cleans up the ick?

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Maybe it is because I am from New Jersey. Maybe it’s because I read too many books of questionable topics.  But when I was standing in the sandwich shop on Niagara Falls Boulevard and saw the Eraser (www.erase-it.org) business card, I thought, Oh yeah, I need to put that card in my wallet. Because you just never really know. Discreet and professional biohazard remediation is EXACTLY what a person wants to have on speed dial. When you need it, you need it.. As I stood at the long counter of the sandwich shop waiting for my Philly cheesesteak (Buffalo interpretation) hoagy (Buffalo spelling. Inexplicable.), I thought of many reasons to call the Eraser: Vampire extermination. Ash and anciently rotting bio-ooze are left behind every time. Disgusting. Borg attack. Watch StarTrek Voyager on Netflix for a while. They just look smelly. Really, really smelly. Ghoul nesting. Ghouls drool. They prefer carrion. Even if you don’t mind them around, someone’s got to clean up sometimes. They’ll rot a house out otherwise. October 22nd Incidents. Ask the WideEyedDad …

Nice to see you. What books did you bring?

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Wide Eyed Funks visit one another every now and again, even though leaving the comforts and libraries of home is difficult for us. We are happy to see each other even if the joy of the family visit is tempered by the knowledge that a certain amount of reading time is going to be sacrificed for actual human interaction. It is, at best, bittersweet. We have developed a solution to the problem. And what I can’t decide is this: is our solution – mutually enacted, endlessly repeated –  conscious or unconscious? When a visit to or from a Funk household is impending, the book stack begins. What might the visitor like to read, what might be passed on to the host from the far-flung family collections? Once the visit begins, the discussions about “what have you been reading” are far more interesting than accomplishments, work activities, household life events, yah yah yah. That stuff comes and goes. The books, they linger. And, the best part, since everyone has new books to read, no one is left …

Twenty things I could have bought with the $20 I lost yesterday.

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1. 2,000 pieces of penny candy. Two thousand. 2. 20 minutes of satellite phone time to talk to the Spouse from the remote fieldwork location. 3. 2 dozen Paula’s Donuts. That’s 24 items of pure deliciousness. 4. Two tickets to a Buffalo Bisons game. 5. 20 Mega Millions lottery tickets. 6. A shovel. 7. 6 bags of Family Size potato chips. 8. Gas for a scenic drive to Olcott and back, with a stop at Reids Hot Dogs. 9. A really big bale of toilet paper. 10. Contact lens solution, pickles, potato chips and fair-trade coffee at Target: the intended purpose. 11. A dog chair. 12. A dog license renewal. 13. A marriage license (17 years ago). 14. 180 dukie bags for dog walks. 15. 2 completely drinkable bottles of wine, or one wine-in-a-box (Equivalent of 4 bottles – stays fresh for a month. Just saying.). 16. 2 6-packs of quality beer. 17. Almost 3 months of Netflix. 18. Approximately 60 showers, 8 dishwasher runs, 5-10 loads of hot water laundry (whites and dog beds) …

Peanuts, Beer, and Minor League Baseball on a Spring Evening

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The Buffalo Bisons beat the Columbus Clippers in a dramatic bottom of the 10th inning run from third as the Clipper’s catcher scrambled for a mis-pitched ball. The 1000 or so Buffalonians in the stadium hooted and whooped as they filed out of Coca-Cola Field into the gloaming twilight. We were at the game last night because the Spouse won the department lottery for the company’s baseball tickets. We fed the poochies, locked down the household, and set off to the Metro station. We walked past permanent Santa who watched us from above, and we descended level after level into the bowels of the creepily uncrowded Metro tunnel. I emptied my pockets for the $8 round trip ride for the both of us. Parking downtown was $5. But then, where’s the adventure in parking a car?  I do that every day one place or another. The Buffalo Bisons mascot Buster and his son Chip wandered the stands – the Spouse high fived Chip. The Boy Robin tromped up and down the stadium stairs yelling “Snow …

Street level synchronicity

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The spouse was driving us to Gramma Mora’s for carnitas and margaritas because sometimes life is just right. Ok, almost just right, because we were aiming for Suzy Q’s BBQ Shack but she decided not to open on Tuesday. Anyway, we hit a red light. I guess even on good days that can happen. The walking man on the traffic light post at Hertel and North Park tick, tick, ticked away the seconds of waiting. The spouse reached over and turned on the radio and music came on that had the same beat as the walking man. (Go on out to youtube in another browser window and start Basement Jaxx, Raindrops and it’ll be like you were there too, maybe in the back seat thinking your own thoughts…) I tapped my foot on the floor mat and watched an out of shape new mom dressed in yoga wear jiggle her way across the crosswalk – the smiling baby’s head visible in the carriage bobbed to the beat along with her mom’s footsteps. Weird, I thought, …

You have all that gray hair, but your face looks so young.

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Once again I was minding my own business in a public place – brain elsewhere because I had just delivered a research paper while feeling ever-so-queasy from a little too much wine and a few too many Elvis sightings the evening before. I was in a city far from home – not Vegas but the other Elvis city. I am never completely aimless or preoccupied when I’m in a strange city, because that’s just not good business, but I was sort of slumping along in my smarty-pants suit heading back to the conference center after a respite from the noise and hot air of too many brains talking too much. A youngish man, 31 years old as it turns out, swooped in beside me, his pencil behind his ear, notebook at his side. He matched his pace to mine and looked at me. Since I wanted to be able to describe him to the police after he ran off with my purse, I looked back at him. I’m a naturally friendly person, and maybe nefarious people …

Dental hygiene at what cost?

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The husband contributes a guest essay while the WideEyed…Wife travels for work. I am the husband of the beautiful and talented author of the wideeyedfunk blog you are slowly falling in love with one week at a time.  I am your guest author this week as the wifey is off doing her big-brained, intellectual work in another one of the 50 States. When I am not absent mindedly looking for the ketchup or awesomely rewiring our light fixtures in a drunken stupor I am allowed to go outside and play with the public at large. You can see some stuff out there if you open your eyes and look around. Sometimes you see good things and sometimes you see things you wished you hadn’t, but there is always something. Here’s an example of the latter: This past weekend I was sitting in the car waiting for the spouse to come out of a store.  I was passing the time with my iPhone watching a movie on Netflix and marveling, as I often do, at the wonders of modern …

Santa Lives in Buffalo, Strapped to a Railing

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Last March Santa looked forlorn strapped to the fifth floor balcony of an apartment building near the Canisius College Metro station. His cherry red suit was faded to a soft tea rose pink. His pink cheeks had bleached to vampire whiteness. Traffic soot embedded into his beard, hair, and the rim of fluffy white on his hat gave them an ultra-real dimensionality that shouldn’t be possible on his round plastic body.  Now a year later, Santa still rigidly dangles that hundred or more feet off  the ground. But between last March and today he had his weeks of glory, and the true brilliance of the apartment owner shined into the December nights.  We assumed that Balcony Santa was collateral damage in someone’s busy life. You know what I mean – wreaths that were perky in December but flap forlornly in February’s gusts, the spindly Christmas tree carcass that appears on the curb in April, and one of my favorites – Rudolph standing in an unkempt front garden with late summer purple coneflowers bobbing around him. …

Why Can’t My Husband Find the Ketchup?

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Men and women see the world differently. This isn’t my opinion; it’s a strongly supported scientific hypothesis. Men and women perceive space and the items in it differently. I wrote an article about it. I think about it all the time for my work. But for some reason I never applied my ivory tower notions to my household.  Why does my husband have to lean into the refrigerator hunting the ketchup? It’s been on the same door shelf position in all 11 of our households over the years. It isn’t rocket science. The man memorizes the URLs of hundreds of routers and switches and techie stuff for his work. But he can’t reliably find the ketchup.  It just isn’t his fault. Evolutionary psychology tells us that men learn large territories and routes through them, while women learn smaller areas in greater detail. Back in the day, men were hunting the big game over days of effort. Women were taking care of every other detail of life, including feeding themselves and their families using their detailed …