Today Is ...

January 16, 2024, at home

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, 2024, 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, 2024, at home

I have had two surgeries in 2023 (2 spine) and three surgeries in 2022 (1 heart; 2 chest), and I wish they could have been done without scapels.

January 16, 2024, 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, 2024, at home

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

January 16, 2024, at home

"Nothing is real." - John Lennon

The day is to celebrate nothing.