Today Is ...

January 17, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

While my taste has mellowed over the years, I still enjoy spicy dishes, specially Indian, Thai, and Mexican. I still occasionally sprinkle red pepper flakes on my Italian dishes.

January 16, 2025, at home

I am (still) in the preliminary stages of compiling 75 of my more than 300 self-penned poems for self-publication as a soft-cover book. Also, I am (still) in the process of writing an autobiographical novel loosely based on my four years (1992 - 1996) as a reporter, writer, editor, and researcher for an international weekly magazine on the financial and technical aspects of the chemical industry (based in the financial district of New York City). I am including and elaborating on, and partially exaggerating various aspects of my entire life so far. I hope to have it self-published. (I was a journalist from September 1982 to April 2017.)

January 16, 2025, at home

I have had three surgeries in 2022 (1 heart; 2 chest); two surgeries in 2023 (2 spine); and one surgery in 2024 (right ankle). I wish they could have been done without scalpels.

January 16, 2025, at home

I do like figs, especially from my maternal grandfather's fig tree when I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, but I have never been all that fond of Fig Newtons.

January 16, 2025, at home

My Initial Religion: Roman Catholicism
My Current Religion: Gaudiya Vaishnavism (Hare Krishna), a sect of Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism)

January 16, 2025, at home

"Nothing is real." - John Lennon

The day is to celebrate nothing.

January 16, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I used to wear a Fedora in the 1980s with bright argyle socks and two-toned brown bucks (shoes). I still like to wear argyle socks, but these days with subdued colors.

I purchased a Stetson hat in the late 1980s from a haberdasher in Fayette, Missouri; I wrote a story about him for a newspaper in mid-Missouri.

I also had two Alpine hats that I purchased in Salzburg, Austria, and an Australian Outback hat that I purchased in southeastern Florida, all of which I lost en route from New Jersey to Florida in May 1998 when I later moved to southeastern Florida. I put them on the roof of my car at a gas station and just drove off.

I now sometimes wear my brown hat partially made of hemp from a Roots store in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I also have various baseball-style caps, specifically New York Islanders, New York Yankees, and New York Mets.

I had a "funny" hat custom-made in a shopping mall in northeastern New Jersey in the mid-1990s, when I was a fledgling Men's Rights Activist. It was a white baseball cap with the words "Practicing Misogynist" embroidered in large, red letters on the front. I didn't wear it much.

My favorite baseball cap is light beige with Pepé Le Pew, my favorite cartoon character, on the front.

Oh, yeah. When I was a kid in the 1960s, a Greek friend gave me a medium blue-colored, velvet hat with a long yellow tassel. Also, around that time, I had a sombrero that my parents purchased for me on one of our many family trips to Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s.

January 15, 2025, at home

I prefer sesame seed bagels. Actually, I prefer bialys to bagels. (This morning, I ate a bagel breakfast sandwich from McDonald's.)

January 15, 2025, at home

I quite dislike strawberries, so strawberry ice cream is quite low on my list of favorite ice creams.

January 15, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I prefer corned beef to pastrami, especially in a Reuben sandwich.

January 14, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I used to like Peach Melba when I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, but I lost my taste for it. I haven't eaten it in many decades.

January 13, 2025, at home

Beef Stew

My wonderful wife made this beef stew this afternoon.

January 12, 2025, at home

Aileen Santos

Today Is ...

Chocolate-covered marzipan is one of my all-time favorite candy confections.

January 12, 2025, at home

I do like curried chicken, as well as an array of Indian foods.

January 12, 2025, at home

I surely do take lots of prescription medications: pills, nasal, inhaled, belly injections.

January 12, 2025, at home

Fasching Begins

At 11:11 (11:11 a.m.) today (November 11, 2025, annually), the festive Fasching Season began in Austria, Germany, and other German-speaking regions of Europe. (Sometimes in Austria, Fasching Season begins on January 1 every year.)

Fasching continues until Karneval (Carnival), also known as Shrove Tuesday, Fastnacht, Fasnacht, Fasnet, Fasching, Fastabend, Fastelovend, Fasteleer, and Fünfte Jahreszeit (Fifth Season), and Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday in French), ending at the stroke of midnight when Ash Wednesday arrives on March 5, 2025. Let the months-long celebration begin. Aschermittwoch (Ash Wednesday in German) marks the beginning of Lent which ends on Easter (April 20, 2025).

On February 15, 1983, when I was almost 22 years old, I celebrated Fasching (Mardi Gras) at a gathering of about 150 people while on a vacation of skiing and visiting my many Austrian cousins in the westernmost province of Vorarlberg, Austria. That's me in the yellow, pink, and white clown suit. The woman to my right, wearing the red hat, is my dear friend Cathy from upstate New York, who accompanied me on the trip. The man in the red-and-white striped shirt and short pants on the left is my Austrian cousin Guntram. The woman dressed in black next to him is his wife Lisa. The woman in the white wig on the right is Guntram's sister Ulrike (also my cousin). The other people are friends of the family that I met for the first time that night. Incidentally, that night, I danced the polka for the first time.

January 11, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I typically only use almond milk for cereal and vanilla almond-milk creamer for coffee. I try to avoid soy because of its high estrogen levels.

January 11, 2025, at home

Trivia: Worldwide, there are more female human traffickers than male human traffickers.

January 11, 2025, at home

Italian Food

My wonderful wife made baked ziti (yesterday) with ziti, tomato sauce, a little vegetable oil, roasted eggplant, roasted onions, hot (spicy) Italian sausages, dried basil, ground black pepper, garlic powder, and cheeses (ricotta, mozzarella, provolone, romano, asiago, and parmesan).

January 10, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I prefer bittersweet chocolate.

January 10, 2025, at home

I have never eaten Oysters Rockefeller (nor raw oysters). I have eaten homemade oyster stew once, which I liked. In the early 1980s, while attending Villanova University, I rented a room from a British couple who lived near the campus. They would occasionally invite me to dinner, so, one evening, we had oyster stew.

January 10, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I love Austrian apricot confiture and Austrian apricot schnaps.

January 9, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

 I do like chocolate-covered toffee, especially the Skor candy bar. When I often went Alpine skiing in my younger days, I always carried a Skor bar in the pocket of my ski jacket.

January 8, 2025, at home

My typing teacher in high school in the late 1970s (Mr. Cresson) was good friends with my father, so Dad told him to be especially rough on me. I don't know if he was purposely rough on me or if he was just a good teacher. I'm glad he was because I eventually became a journalist. I was a journalist from 1982 to 2017, so typing has served me well, especially with one particular job in the mid-1990s: I was writing 13 to 16 articles every day in the New York City bureau of an international financial wire service about commodities trading that was broadcast to subscribers in 93 countries. I covered the coffee, sugar, cocoa, cotton, and orange juice markets in real-time trading ... and sometimes whole milk trading. At this job, I also covered weekly money supply meetings at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

January 8, 2025, at home

I have liked to wear argyle socks since the mid-1980s.

January 8, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I somewhat like tempura.

January 7, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I prefer black beans. Of course, I also like baked beans.

January 6, 2025, at home

I somewhat like shortbread, but it's typically too plain for me.

January 6, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I don't particularly like whipped cream.

January 5, 2025, at home

My favorite bird for decades has been the puffin. When I was very young, my paternal grandfather introduced me in the front yard of his house to what he called the "chippy," which is the chipping sparrow. The chippy looks somewhat similar to the birds in the photo below.

January 5, 2025, at home

I have yet to try Keto.

January 5, 2025, at home

Today Is ...

I graduated with a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia in May 1988. The upper right photo in the picture below shows the campus in Columbia. During my three years of study there, I also worked as a scooper and manager of an ice cream shop that my father opened near the campus.

January 4, 2025, at home

I grew up eating linguine, which is somewhat similar to spaghetti, but flatter. Actually, these days, I prefer bucatini.

January 4, 2025, at home

I love fruitcake: the usual kind; panettone; and stollen.

January 4, 2025, at home