things i love: convenience stores

i've probably written in the past about the little things in life that i love, but i'm not sure i made it any kind of formal post. figured i'd start a new somewhat recurring series of posts about some of the esoteric things that bring me joy.

i love convenience stores. much of the appeal is derived from my love of road trips, which are always punctuated with frequent stops at gas stations and thus the convenience stores they often have. i love scratch and win lottery tickets (more on that in another "things i love" post), packaged processed food, and coffee- all staples of the convenience store. i love the classless atmosphere of the convenience store- guys in beamers and suits waiting in line for their coffee behind hardened women buying marlboro lights and mexican day laborers buying iced tea by the half gallon. i love the fact that you can see all these things whether it's three in the afternoon or three in the morning.

next time you stop for gas, see if you can appreciate the inner beauty of the quickie mart. it's america in a 600 square foot fluorescent-lit room (that smells like hot dogs).

they're the people that you meet, when you're walkin' down the street...

a story from the holidays that i never got around to posting...

we (the 5 of us) joined fellow stags stacey and irish and their kids in NYC just after christmas to do the holiday city thing. met at 30 rock, saw the tree, walked up 5th to see the windows and made our way to FAO schwartz. cut across 59th from there to columbus circle to make our way back down broadway, walking along the park side of 59th street. (those unfamiliar with NYC- disregard that paragraph, as it adds absolutely nothing to the story other than the setting.)

we were across from the NYAC when a few black suburbans pulled up to the curb right next to us. a few guys get out to stop the westbound traffic on 59th so that someone from the car could get to the NYAC across the street. stacey and erin stood around watching to see who would get out, while irish and i marched forward with the kids. we walked back to ask what they were doing, and erin replied "watching some middle-age woman waiting to cross the street"- right at about the same time that stacey realized that the woman was hillary clinton. stacey clapped and gave a little cheer, and senator clinton came right over to her and erin and engaged them in conversation.

the guys and kids made it back to them in time to have the kids at least say hello and wish the new secretary of state well. i realize that while she wasn't campaigning she's still a politician, but she was nothing but pleasant, genuine and friendly. let's hope her meetings with heads of state are as enjoyable for her as this was for us.

a new beginning

put aside your political ideology- today is a day to identify yourself only as an american. as with any new endeavor, the only way to succeed is to begin with the belief that we will. if you believe in the merits of intercessory prayer, then take a few minutes today to ask for God's grace on our new president and the country as a whole. if you don't believe in prayer, then at least wish president obama well.

then, republican or democrat, god-fearing or godless, pledge to do your part to correct this mess and get this country headed the right way again.

can't wait until he's in a group of his peers

if you happen to check on the official finkipedia blogs, you might notice that delegate steve's blog now redirects to a new site: steve shannon for attorney general. steve's been in the virginia house of delegates for a while now, and is trying to take his platform of support for the police and victim's rights to the office of the attorney general for the commonwealth.

check out the site and support him with your good wishes and even a few sheckels if you so choose. i'd love to be able to blog about steve meeting his colleagues from other states, if for no other reason than to use use one of my all-time favorite pluralizations.

liberal media? you decide.

as you know if you've been reading along, i voted for barack obama, and truly believe that he can make a difference. but i'll be the first to admit that in a broad sense, the media treated him with kid gloves and gave the mccain/palin ticket a much shorter leash on most issues. this of course won't stop now that the election is over- i'm sure we'll find that issues that arise during this presidency will be presented in an entirely different light than during the last.

case and point: just read that obama's nominee for treasury secretary, timothy geithner, has been found to have made some tax mistakes and had some issues with an immigrant housekeeper. nominees have been railroaded for both these issues in the past, yet the articles from wsj.com and washingtonpost.com both seem already to give geithner the benefit of the doubt. it may very well be true that these were honest mistakes, but both the journal and the post (especially the post in this blog post here) seem ready to sweep this under the rug so as not to disrupt the coronation next week.

only XXVII days to go!

christmas and new year's festivites are over with, which can only mean one thing: time to get started planning finkbowl. creeping up fast- less than 4 weeks away, if you can believe it. preparations include: scouring the cookbooks for fun new recipes, paying for everything in large bills and asking for singles as change, and brainstorming for this year's saturday night contest (think i've got a good one this time).

and here's the official announcement of something i leaked to some of you over the past few months- super sunday this year will include the inaugural finkbowl 5K, to be run on sunday morning at 10AM. there'll be a 1 mi fun run and a full 5K, with prizes to the winners. i'm planning on designing some t-shirts too, hopefully will have them available for purchase at cafepress soon.

may be a bit ambitious for the morning after a finkbowl eve celebration, but i think it will be a fun way to bring a little fitness (not to mention yet another competitive event) to a great gathering. now get out there, get in shape, and show us what you've got.

happy new year

winding down the christmas break. all the decorations are down, house is back to "normal" (whatever that term means), and the christmas music is gone from finkipedia.

should get back to a more normal schedule of posting here over the next week or two. some great stories from the break that, as erin likes to say, are "blog-able". hope to get the time to jot them down here.

welcome!

to those of you dropping by after seeing the shameless plug in the annual finkmas letter, welcome aboard. take a bit to troll thru the archives- amongst the aimless opining on politics, music and baseball, you might actually find some updates from finkdom. hopefully you'll bookmark the site and drop by from time to time to check in on us.

open posting here, so feel free to drop a comment or two and make your presence known. we promise not to put you on our spam list.

(by the way- the background music is just a temporary holiday theme. if "rudolph" has left you with a lifelong fear of burl ives, please don't let that keep you from visiting here after the holidays.)

please enjoy the music while your party is reached

in the beginning there was muxtape, and it was good. then the gods of the internet said "let there be a way for individuals to search for songs already on the internet, then map them to a playlist that they would create. let the html code for this playlist be made available to them, so the user may post this playlist on their own website." so the gods of the internet created playlist.com, and it was good.

you'll see the new feature on the right- the new home for the soundtrack of finkipedia. hope you're enjoying the holiday tunes- i was able to find only 3 of my top 5 christmas songs, as posted last year, so i filled in two other worthy stand-ins. this station will be all christmas music all the time until after new year's day, when we'll switch over to a whole new format.

blue (and orange) ribbon day

nothing better to brighten a miserably rainy winter day than a dose or two of baseball sunshine. got a call from erin this AM while i was at work that "the seats" had finally arrived. they were packaged with wooden planks to be mounted on for stability, which need a coat of stain and varnish before i attach them. and while there's some appeal to the character that 40 years of back sweat, stale bud light and gulden's mustard give the seats, a good scrubbing with a magic eraser is in order before they're ready for public viewing and seating.

a few hours after getting the call about the seats, i read this about a huge deal omar had just worked out adding even more reinforcements to the bullpen. it means we give up endy, which just kills me, but overall i think this deal and the signing of k-rod put the mets in striking distance of a pennant.

until i can move my seats in front of the TV to watch the now-anticipated new season, i'll just leave them where they are here in front of the computer, so i can watch this over and over, toasting endy and wishing him well.

still here

thanks for checking back. having a hard time finding even a few minutes to spend jotting down my thoughts of the day here, much less a few hours penning the ol' christmas missive. not looking much better for the rest of the week either- christmas shopping tonight, then school christmas concert tomorrow, then on call for the weekend.

gets much easier after that- no big plans for the weekend before christmas, talking about possible trips to NYC or DC to catch some big city christmas cheer. updates and reports here, i promise.

'tis the season

transitioning from one holiday to another this week. had a fantastic thanksgiving at the kentagon in DC, complete with a short swing by the lincoln memorial just for fun. brought grandma D and big buddy home with us to DE and enjoyed a few days just hanging around with them.

picked up our tree on saturday and decorated it with the kids sunday. have most of the household tchotchkes appropriately scattered and the christmas tunes on constant shuffle. next project? christmas letter. anxiously awaiting the arrival of my muse so i can bang out another summary of a year in 500 words or less. maybe this weekend- the egg nog is chilled and waiting.

what i'm thankful for, 2008

time to update the thankful list for this year- just a few of the things that come to mind for this year...

• wood burning fireplaces
• my new laptop
• the running bug
• edamame (get it in big packs from costco- totally addictive)
• guitar hero for wii
• blue moon belgian wheat ale
• snow (thankful for it, just haven't seen too much of it around here in a few years)
• the onion (check out the recent articles about the blue angels tryouts and GM- hilarious)

take a minute to think of yours.

are you ready for some 3D football?

saw this article yesterday, which immediately conjured images of the last 3D experience the NFL offered us- the craptacular halftime extravaganza "bebop bamboozled". amazingly, i couldn't find video of this masterpiece online, so the only reference i can direct you to is a snippet in the wikipedia article about super bowl XXIII.

remember it well, because superbowl XXIII was the first time anything like a finkbowl occurred- had a bunch of high school friends over to the old fink estate on LI for the game, and we all shared in the pageantry of "bebop bamboozled" together. for some strange reason, i kept the official coca-cola 3D glasses from the event until just a year or two and as recently as last year saw them lying around somewhere. maybe the NFL will give me some kind of credit on new glasses if i can produce the old ones.

is that a buckle on your hat, or are you just happy to find religious freedom?

stumbled across a random trivia question on another website last week. the question was, "in what year did the pilgrims sign the mayflower compact?". 4 choices: 1590, 1600, 1610, and 1620. made my choice, then upon redirect to the answer page, discovered that only 27% of respondents (about 750 to that point) answered correctly- no statistically significant difference from random chance.

the question i pose to you is not whether or not you know the answer, but whether you think you, me and everyone else should know the answer. does this date belong in the group of important dates that all americans should know?

the "longfellow" jokes must be just around the corner

hilarious discussion at dinner tonight. just me and the 3 finklings, rehashing our day over a fine repast of leftover enchiladas.

from nowhere, brendan asks, "hey dad, what's that long word that starts with 'A' and means 'waves' or 'bubbles' or something?" complete blank.

"and it has a 'Z' in it". even more confused. a few blind stabs with "accessorize", "analyze", even "azimuth", all incorrect.

"it's a really long word, and it means, like, doing something or making something". still not entirely sure where he's going with this, but somehow i come up with "you mean onomatopoeia?"

"YEAH! onomatopoeia!" apparently, the word came up in his language arts class today. the lack of an accurate definition or even approximate spelling wasn't surprising, because those meant nothing to him. at the recitation of the word alone, he burst into laughter, repeated it a few times, and then he and owen moved swiftly into a chorus of "i-don't-wanna-pee-ya".

i tried settling them by getting all didactic, and giving them good examples of onomatopoeia, like "buzz" and "cluck" and "bang", and it worked for a second, until brendan came up with "toot", and the poetry lesson was flushed away again by toilet humor.

my 3 songs, veterans' day edition

yes, i realize vets day here in the US was initially called armistice day and celebrated the end of WW1, and this post may have been more appropriate on V-E day, but vets means all conflicts now, right?

• van halen, "everbody wants some"
• split enz, "i got you"
• oasis, "wonderwall"

ooh, that smell

rediscovered one of my favorite smells of childhood- the smell of the halloween candy bag. not the halloween night, fresh-from-the-hunt smell, but rather the week-after, three-pounds-of-candy-sitting-in-the-plastic-bag smell. it's totally different than the smell that you'd get when you opened a bag of snack-size kit kats, or sniffed your own yet-doled-out halloween candy bowl. the week-old candy bag smell has the perfect dilutions of peanut butter and chocolate and twizzler and plastic wrap all mixed together, giving it its own aromatic uniqueness. it is a scent that is so tantalizingly pleasing, one could argue that the scent itself is what drives confusion into the minds of the candy chooser.

like any good thing, however, it can be overdone. after about 3 reese's cups and a mini 100 grand bar, the tantalization begins to morph into nausea. but as long as you keep the temptation of the milky way midnights from pushing you over the edge, the smell of that bag is pure olfactory bliss.

moving on

now that the election is behind us, let's get back to the important stuff, like linguistics!

saw this great article today, and while it's not exactly grammar-related, it touches on more of my language pet peeves. i think this list is great- i'd of course add "literally" to their list, likely near the top, but can't argue with any of their choices.

anything you'd like to add to the list?

election night live

finally have a laptop with functional wireless, so i figured i'd give some live blogging a try. just about everyone reading this will be catching it later, but this is my test run for a finkipedia live event for my absolute favorite TV day just 5 months from now, the opening day of the NCAA hoops tourney.

9:30pm- NBC just called ohio for obama, which probably seals the deal for him, but i like most am waiting to see what happens in florida and NC.

10:20pm- still no word on VA, NC, FL. i do like that map on the 30 rock skating rink. nice touch.

12:30am- been official for 90 minutes. speeches are done, talking heads are not. off to bed.